He had an opportunity of gaining experience as a politician, but in the House of Commons he learned nothing, and succeeded only in tarnishing his legal reputation. He entered it in 1762, and sat first for the rotten borough of Hindon, and afterwards for Westbury till 1770. For the first six years his name scarcely ever occurs in the debates. The only fact, indeed, known of this part of his political life, is a proposal which he made when the repeal of the Stamp Act was carried, that “it should not be of force in any colony where any votes, resolves, or acts had passed derogatory to the honor or authority of Parliament, until such votes, etc., were erased or taken off the records,” The second stage of the Wilkes case, after the elections of 1768, raised him to an unfortunate notoriety. Every circumstance combined to make Blackstone the most bitter of Wilkes’s opponents. He had committed himself to strong opinions on the absolute supremacy of Parliament; he was solicitor-general to the Queen; he was shocked at Wilkes’s blasphemy; and Lord Mansfield had been maligned. He had only one moment of merely formal hesitation. When De Grey, the Attorney-General moved that the comments on Lord Weymouth’s letter were an insolent, scandalous, and seditious libel, Blackstone argued that the courts were open, and that the House of Commons was not the place to try the question. The other acts of the persecution had his complete approval. He himself took the lead in moving that the charge against Lord Mansfield was “an audacious aspersion on the said Chief Justice;” he advocated the expulsion of Wilkes; he supported the motion which declared that Wilkes being expelled was incapable of sitting in the existing Parliament; and he delivered an able speech, in which he put forth all his strength, in favor of the validity of Colonel Luttrell’s election. He was rash enough in that speech to give it as his firm and unbiassed opinion that the law and custom of Parliament on a matter of privilege is part of the common law, that the House had acted according to that law and custom, and that Wilkes was therefore disqualified by common law from sitting as a member of Parliament. He paid heavily for his “firm and unbiassed opinion.” In the _Commentaries_ he had given what was, no doubt, intended to be a complete list of the causes of disqualification; and none of them applied to Wilkes. Twice during the remainder of the debate, first by Mr. Seymour and afterwards by Grenville, “the gentle shepherd,” was this passage effectively turned against him. “It is well known,” according to Junius, “that there was a pause of some minutes in the House, from a general expectation that the doctor would say something in his own defence; but it seems, his faculties were too much overpowered to think of those subtleties and refinements which have since occurred to him.” A paper war ensued in which Junius, Sir W. Jones, Dr. Johnson, and Blackstone himself took part.