against him, especially as he had not been able to make good his title
to membership by taking the prescribed oaths and claiming a seat in
the House. He, however--acting as it would seem under the advice of
William Cobbett and other unsafe counsellors--thought otherwise,
and considered that he was only vindicating a high constitutional
principle, against the exercise of despotic power by the Government,
in making his escape from the King's Bench Prison. "I did not quit
these walls," he said in a letter addressed to the electors
of Westminster, on the 12th of April, "to escape from personal
oppression, but, at the hazard of my life, to assert that right to
liberty which, as a member of the community, I have never forfeited,
and that right, which I received from you, to attack in its very den
the corruption which threatens to annihilate the liberties of us all.
I did not quit them to fly from the justice of my country, but to
expose the wickedness, fraud, and hypocrisy of those who elude that
justice by committing their enormities under the colour of its name.
I did not quit them from the childish motive of impatience under
suffering. I stayed long enough to evince that I could endure
restraint as a pain, but not as a penalty. I stayed long enough to be
certain that my persecutors were conscious of their injustice, and to
feel that my submission to their unmerited inflictions was losing the
dignity of resignation, and sinking into the ignominious endurance of
an insult."

The escape was effected on the 6th of March, and by the same means
which had proved successful in Lord Cochrane's retreat from the
gaol at Malta, just four years before. His rooms in the King's Bench
Prison, being on the upper storey of the building known as the
State House, were nearly as high as the wall which formed the prison
boundary, and the windows were only a few feet distant from it.