During this ferment the new Parliament met on May the 10th, and was opened by commission, the King making no speech, as the session was to be so short. A great mob assembled round the Houses clamouring for Wilkes and liberty. Lord Hillsborough complained of this to the Lords, and the Chancellor moved that the constables should be ordered to disperse the people. Lord Sandwich proposed to send and inquire if the riot had ceased. The Duke of Richmond laughed at their fears and said it was nothing. The Duke of Grafton asked with much warmth if it was nothing when the mob joined the name of Wilkes, who had been committed to prison on the addresses of both Houses, with the sacred sound of liberty?--but Grafton’s warmth was burning stubble, that easily blazed and was easily extinguished. The House of Commons elected Sir John Cust, their former speaker. A worse tumult happened the same day at the King’s Bench prison, whence the mob attempted to deliver Wilkes, and carry him to the House of Commons. The riot act being read and the guards sent for, a skirmish ensued, and one Allen, a young man of fair character, who, some said, had been merely a spectator, was pursued and murdered inhumanly by a Scotch soldier as he fled. The tumult was quashed, but Allen’s death only served to exasperate the people. His dead body was borne about the streets with signal lamentation, and interred with parade. Handbills had been previously dispersed among the soldiers, entreating them not to fire on their countrymen, but the third regiment of guards being employed, who were all Scots, the soldiers had carried the handbills to their officers, nor had been seduced by Wilkes’s promise of obtaining for them increase of pay. The circumstance of Scots being employed in this massacre, as it was denominated, greatly increased the discontents; and the officious folly of Lord Barrington, who wrote a letter as Secretary at War, to thank the regiment for their behaviour as if they had gained a victory, shocked even those who were not factious.[105] Gillam, the Justice of Peace who had ordered the soldiers to fire, was tried for murder and acquitted. Whitfield, who had a mind to be tampering in these commotions, prayed for Wilkes before his sermon. Another mob burned a new invented sawing-mill belonging to one Dingley. On the 11th a vast body of sailors attended the Houses,[106] but in a modest manner, and desiring only to have their grievances considered, with promise of acquiescing to the determination of Parliament. They declared their attachment to the King, and meeting Wilkes’s mob attacked and dispersed it. Yet notwithstanding this respectful behaviour, the Privy Council, weighing the damage occasioned to the merchants, issued out a proclamation against the sailors. The same day an account came that the proposed augmentation of the army in Ireland had been rejected by that Parliament.