It appeared from this mock scene that an outlawry cannot be set aside but by a process to show there is a flaw in it. Accordingly the profession who love to accumulate absurdities[100] rather than to correct a ridiculous maxim, always take care to prepare a flaw in an outlawry. Wilkes had demanded from the Attorney-General a writ of error, and he had promised it, but was dissuaded on the 19th by the Master of the Rolls, and on the 20th the Attorney came into court without it. He would have taken it out then, but by some other rule it was then too late, or Wilkes should have surrendered to the sheriff. It was on these informalities that Lord Mansfield had argued that Wilkes was not before the court, for, being an outlaw, the law knew no such person; yet this nonentity his Lordship had suffered to revile him to his face on the seat of magistracy.
In the mean time the Parliament was chosen to the content of the Court, though by the inactivity of the Duke of Grafton, and the unpopularity of their chief friends, the majority was not greater than in the last assembly. Sir James Lowther, the Favourite’s son-in-law, was beaten at Carlisle and in the counties of Westmoreland and Cumberland, though he was returned (I think) for the latter against a majority of thirty-four. The Duke of Portland ravished those provinces from him in which he had been paramount, at the expense of forty thousand pounds and to the great damage of his fortune; nor were Sir James’s disbursements less considerable, to which the odious act of ravishing the Duke’s estate from him for an election purpose added signal disrepute. The county of York thanked Sir George Saville for having introduced the bill against _nullum tempus_, and the Duke of Portland published his case. It displayed the partial and unhandsome conduct of the Treasury, though the Duke could not prove that the lands wrenched from him had not been encroachments of his family. Lord Spencer had not been less profuse in a contest for the town of Nottingham.[101] The immense wealth that had flowed into the country from the war and the East Indies, bore down all barriers of economy, and introduced a luxury of expense unknown to empires of vaster extent. At the same time the incapacity of the Court, which had first provoked the nation by arbitrary attempts, had now sunk the government to a state of contempt; and Wilkes’s triumph having manifested the pusillanimity and want of vigour both in Ministers and magistrates, almost every class of the lower orders thought it a moment for setting up new pretensions in defiance of authority.