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 Letter to the Secretary of State. Thomson,
another printer, was in like manner arrested; and, when brought before
Mr. Oliver, another alderman, was discharged by him. And when, a day or
two afterward, a third (Mr. Miller) was apprehended by Whetham, a
messenger of the House of Commons, Mr. Brass Crosby, the Lord Mayor, and
the two Aldermen, signed a warrant committing Whetham to prison for
assaulting Miller. Whetham was bailed by the Sergeant-at-arms, who
reported what had occurred to the House; and the House, as the Lord
Mayor and Alderman Oliver were members of it, as representatives for
London and Honiton, ordered that they should attend the House in their
places, to explain their conduct, and that Mr. Wilkes should attend at
the bar of the House. Wilkes, declining to recognize the validity of the
resolutions which had seated Colonel Luttrell for Middlesex, refused
compliance with such an order, writing a letter to the Speaker, in which
he "observed that no notice was taken of him as a member of the House;
and that the Speaker's order did not require him to attend in his
place." And he "demanded his seat in Parliament, and promised, when he
had been admitted to his seat, to give the House a most exact detail of
his conduct." But the Lord Mayor pleaded the charters of the City as a
justification of his act in releasing a citizen of London who had been