Nothing could be more just than the satire, nothing more bold than the unmeasured liberty with which it was uttered.[341] The Prussian monarch must have read with scorn, and Europe with laughter, so absurd a boast as our vaunting to have saved an ally whom we had betrayed and abandoned. Ridicule might have handled this vain-glorious falsehood with full severity and full security, without passing the bounds which law allows. But when Parliament had connived at the treachery, could it be supposed that it would suffer a private hand to wield the bolt which had slept in the custody of so many corrupt representatives? The lie given in print to the Crown, by an obscure man, was an unparalleled license. If the King had a particle of power left, or his servants, or his magistrates, of spirit, such an insult could not be passed over. The rashness of his servants contrived to involve the Crown and themselves in inextricable difficulties, and to make the unwarrantable behaviour of Wilkes appear innocent, when compared with the excesses they committed themselves.
I do not mean to lead the reader through the maze of vague and barbarous law-proceedings, which sprang out of this transaction. It did but lay open the undefined or unmeaning magazine of terms which the chicanery or contradictions of ages had heaped together, and it proved that the Crown and the subject might be justified in almost any excesses. The right hand of Nonsense armed the King, and her left defended the subject. The lawyers on either side were employed in discovering springes or loop-holes.
After a week’s deliberation Wilkes was seized, April 30th, by three messengers, on a _general warrant_, signed by Lord Halifax. They had been ordered to apprehend him at midnight, but abstained till noon of the 30th. Churchill, his friend, then with him, slipped out of the house, either to secure himself or to give the alarm. Mr. Wood,[342] the Under-Secretary, and Philip Carteret Webbe,[343] a most villanous tool and agent in any iniquity, seized his papers, though he had received intimation time enough to convey away the most material. He was conducted to Lord Halifax’s, where he behaved with much firmness and confidence, and grievously wounded the haughty dignity attempted to be assumed by Lord Egremont. They committed him close prisoner to the Tower; a severity rarely, and never fit to be practised but in cases of most dangerous treason. This treatment served but to increase Wilkes’s spirit and wit. He desired to be confined in the same room where Sir William Windham, Lord Egremont’s father, had been kept on a charge of Jacobitism; and said he hoped, if there could be found such a chamber in the Tower, that he might not be lodged where any Scotchman had been prisoner.