I do not mean to lead the reader through the maze of vague and barbarous law-proceedings, which sprang out of this transaction. It did but lay open the undefined or unmeaning magazine of terms which the chicanery or contradictions of ages had heaped together, and it proved that the Crown and the subject might be justified in almost any excesses. The right hand of Nonsense armed the King, and her left defended the subject. The lawyers on either side were employed in discovering springes or loop-holes. After a week’s deliberation Wilkes was seized, April 30th, by three messengers, on a _general warrant_, signed by Lord Halifax. They had been ordered to apprehend him at midnight, but abstained till noon of the 30th. Churchill, his friend, then with him, slipped out of the house, either to secure himself or to give the alarm. Mr. Wood,[342] the Under-Secretary, and Philip Carteret Webbe,[343] a most villanous tool and agent in any iniquity, seized his papers, though he had received intimation time enough to convey away the most material. He was conducted to Lord Halifax’s, where he behaved with much firmness and confidence, and grievously wounded the haughty dignity attempted to be assumed by Lord Egremont. They committed him close prisoner to the Tower; a severity rarely, and never fit to be practised but in cases of most dangerous treason. This treatment served but to increase Wilkes’s spirit and wit. He desired to be confined in the same room where Sir William Windham, Lord Egremont’s father, had been kept on a charge of Jacobitism; and said he hoped, if there could be found such a chamber in the Tower, that he might not be lodged where any Scotchman had been prisoner. About the same time, being told of the reasons alleged by the King of Spain[344] for setting aside his eldest son, two of which were, that the Prince squinted, and did not believe the mysteries of our holy religion; then said Wilkes, “I can never be King of Spain, for I squint, and believe none of those mysteries.” The rigour of the commitment gave serious alarm; but, the very day on which it happened, Wilkes’s friends applied to the Court of Common Pleas for his habeas corpus, expecting it from Lord Chief Justice Pratt, and scorning or despairing of it from Lord Mansfield. Lord Temple instantly resorted to the Tower, but was denied admittance to the prisoner; a restraint the ministers found the very next day they must take off. Lord Temple then returned to visit Wilkes, as did the Duke of Grafton and some few others of rank; but, in general, the prisoner’s character was so bad, and his conduct so rash and unguarded, that few who were either decent or cautious cared to be concerned with him.