The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 614 pages of information about The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860.

The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 614 pages of information about The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860.
by the Opposition; but the publishers complained of evidently felt assured of their sympathy (which, indeed, was sufficiently, and not very decorously, shown by its leaders inflicting on the House no fewer than twenty-three divisions in a single night), and, relying on their countenance, they paid no attention to the order of the House.  A fresh order for their arrest having been issued, the Sergeant-at-arms reported that he had been unable to execute it, by reason of their absence from their homes; on which the House, not disposed to allow itself to be thus trifled with, now addressed his Majesty with a request that he would issue his royal proclamation for their apprehension.  And Colonel Onslow made a fresh motion, with a similar complaint of the publishers of six more newspapers—­“three brace,” as he described them in language more sportsman like than parliamentary.  Similar orders for their appearance and, when these were disregarded, for their apprehension, were issued.  And at last one of those who had been mentioned in the royal proclamation, Mr. Wheble, printer of the Middlesex Journal, was apprehended by an officer named Carpenter, and carried before the sitting magistrate at Guildhall, who, by a somewhat whimsical coincidence, happened to be Alderman Wilkes.  Wilkes not only discharged him, on the ground that there was “no legal cause of complaint against him,” but when Wheble, in retaliation, made a formal complaint of the assault committed on him by Carpenter in arresting him, bound Wheble over to prosecute, and Carpenter to answer the complaint, at the next quarter sessions, and then reported what he had done in an official Letter to the Secretary of State.  Thomson, another printer, was in like manner arrested; and, when brought before Mr. Oliver, another alderman, was discharged by him.  And when, a day or two afterward, a third (Mr. Miller) was apprehended by Whetham, a messenger of the House of Commons, Mr. Brass Crosby, the Lord Mayor, and the two Aldermen, signed a warrant committing Whetham to prison for assaulting Miller.  Whetham was bailed by the Sergeant-at-arms, who reported what had occurred to the House; and the House, as the Lord Mayor and Alderman Oliver were members of it, as representatives for London and Honiton, ordered that they should attend the House in their places, to explain their conduct, and that Mr. Wilkes should attend at the bar of the House.  Wilkes, declining to recognize the validity of the resolutions which had seated Colonel Luttrell for Middlesex, refused compliance with such an order, writing a letter to the Speaker, in which he “observed that no notice was taken of him as a member of the House; and that the Speaker’s order did not require him to attend in his place.”  And he “demanded his seat in Parliament, and promised, when he had been admitted to his seat, to give the House a most exact detail of his conduct.”  But the Lord Mayor pleaded the charters of the City as a justification of his act in releasing a citizen
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The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.