so ingeniously assisted him is not the
brightest part of Churchill's career. He carried with him into his
retreat a young girl, a Miss Carr, the daughter of a Westminster
stonecutter, whom the charms of Churchill's manners had induced to
leave her father's house. He could not marry the girl, as he was
married already, and, to do him justice, he appears soon to have
repented the wrong he had done her. But after an unsuccessful attempt
on the girl's part to live again with her own people she returned to
her lover, and she lived with her lover to the end. Churchill seems to
have been sincerely {60} attached to her. If he had been a free man,
if his life had not been blighted by his early unhappy marriage, their
union might have been a very happy one. At his death he left annuities
to both women, to the woman he had married and the woman he had loved,
the wife's annuity being the larger of the two.

While Churchill was making his way as quickly as possible out of a town
that his services to his friend had rendered too hot to hold him,
Wilkes was immediately hurried before Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont at
Whitehall. He carried himself very composedly in the presence of his
enemies. He persistently asserted his privilege, as a member of
Parliament, against arrest. He refused to answer any questions or to
acknowledge the authorship of No. 45 of the _North Briton_. He
professed with equal enthusiasm his loyalty to the King and his
loathing of the King's advisers, and he announced his intention of
bringing the matter before Parliament the moment that the session
began. Egremont and Halifax retaliated by sending Wilkes to the Tower
and causing his house to be searched and all his papers to be seized.
The high-handed folly of the King's friends had for their chief effect
the conversion of men who had little sympathy for Wilkes into, if not
his advocates, at least his allies against the illegal methods which
were employed to crush him.

Wilkes, through his friends, immediately applied to the Court of Common
Pleas for a writ of _habeas corpus_. This was at once obtained, and
was served upon the messengers of the Secretary of State. But Wilkes
was no longer in their custody, and Wilkes was detained in the Tower
for a whole week, part of the time, as he declared, in solitary
confinement, before he was brought into court. Judge Pratt immediately
ordered his discharge on the ground of his claim to immunity from
arrest a