The candour of Wilbraham and Philipps on the preceding day had satisfied their consciences, and they both now spoke, and voted with the majority. The House dividing at one in the morning, 258 voted for relinquishing their privilege; only 133 for maintaining it. Lord North then moved to communicate their resolutions to the Lords, which was agreed to.
A conference being accordingly demanded, and held next day, the Lords, though in a very thin House, and though no important business is agitated there without summoning the Peers [a respect their Lordships have often paid even to a turnpike-bill], were precipitately proceeding to pass the like votes with the Commons; but the Duke of Richmond, though acting with the Court, was struck with the indecency, and on stating it, the House did agree to summon the Lords for the 29th. Decency thus satisfied, their Lordships on the 29th, in happy harmony with the other House, made a parallel compliment of their privilege to the Crown. One hundred and fourteen were thus loyal: the Duke of Cumberland and thirty-four more were the minority. The Duke of Newcastle defended the warrant of the Secretaries, but voted against the resolutions. The Chancellor[397] was very warm; said he did not wish to see the House unanimous; unanimity had cost the nation sixty millions.[398] Lord Temple disculpated himself from encouraging the general satire in the North Britons, and said he had always condemned the attack on the Scotch and on the Tories in that paper. He brought a protest, drawn, as was supposed, by Lord Chief Justice Pratt, and the longest on record, and signed it with fifteen other Lords.
At this very period that Court and Parliament were raging so hotly against libels, a new paper, called the Moderator, appeared. It was so scurrilous against the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, that his Court took up the printer. The man owned directly that it was written by Carteret Webbe, Solicitor of the Treasury, and by Dr. Shebbeare, who, having been committed to Newgate by the King’s Bench in the late reign for abusing King William and the House of Hanover, had been gratified by a pension of 200_l._ a year by Lord Bute; and was a proper champion of measures so dissonant from those of King William, and from those to which the House of Hanover owed the Crown.
