rial side in the debates on
the Middlesex election had been especial objects of these
misrepresentations; and, at the beginning of 1771, one of that party,
Colonel Onslow, M.P. for Guilford, brought the subject before the House,
complaining that many speeches, and his own among them, had been
misrepresented by two newspapers which he named, and that "the practice
had got to an infamous height, so that it had become absolutely
necessary either to punish the offenders or to revise the standing
orders."[14] And he accordingly moved "that the publication of the
newspapers of which he complained was a contempt of the orders and a
breach of the privileges of the House, and that the printers be ordered
to attend the House at its next sitting." The habitual unfairness of the
reports was admitted 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 Le