The main features of this ill-advised attack, which, it was believed, was intended to put an end to the election should the polling prove adverse to the party in whose pay the hired mob acted, are given in the _Oxford Magazine_:-- “Thursday, Dec. 8, 1768. This day being appointed for the Middlesex election, the candidates appeared on the hustings at ten minutes before nine. Notwithstanding this, the opening of the poll was delayed till near eleven. One of the narrow avenues leading to Brentford butts was occupied very early by a hired mob, with bludgeons, bearing favours in their hats, inscribed, ‘Proctor and Liberty.’ A much larger, but very compact body, armed as the former, and with the same distinctions, were placed near the hustings, on an eminence, and in a disposition which was evidently the arrangement of an experienced sergeant. The rest of these banditti were stationed in different quarters of the town, to strike a general terror into the honest part of the freeholders; there was besides a ‘corps de reserve’ which was to sally forth on a signal given. “When these dispositions were secured, a chosen party of butchers, in the same interest, traversed the town, and insulted the hustings with marrow-bones and cleavers. When Sir William Beauchamp Proctor’s numbers were nearly exhausted, and the course of the Poll declared decisively for Mr. Serjeant Glynn, who had still great multitudes unpolled, the signal was given. An instantaneous and furious, but regular attack, was made on the hustings. The sheriffs, the candidates (Glynn declares himself as having been the last to depart), the clerks, and the poll-books, all vanished in a moment. “The whole town was presently a scene of blood. It was not enough to knock down an unhappy man; the blow was followed till he was utterly disabled. Those who have been exposed to riots declare they never saw such cruelty. All doors and windows were barricaded. There was no shelter, nothing was safe; nor can anything equal the consternation of the frightened people but the abhorrence and execration with which every tongue repeats the name of Proctor.