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