He had already pledged himself to take the necessary steps to procure the reversal of his outlawry; and, in pursuance of his promise, he surrendered in the Court of King's Bench. But his removal to prison caused a renewal of the tumults with greater violence than before. The mob even rescued him from the officers who had him in custody; and when, having escaped from his deliverers, he, with a parade of obedience to the law, again surrendered himself voluntarily at the gate of the King's Bench Prison, they threatened to attack the jail itself, kindled a fire under its walls, which was not extinguished without some danger, and day after day assembled in such tumultuous and menacing crowds, that at last Lord Weymouth, the Secretary of State, wrote a letter to the Surrey magistrates, enjoining them to abstain from no measures which might seem necessary for the preservation of peace, even if that could only be effected by the employment of the soldiery. The riots grew more and more formidable, till at last the magistrates had no resource but to call out the troops, who, on one occasion, after they had been pelted with large stones, and in many instances severely injured, fired, killing or wounding several of the foremost rioters. So tragical an event seemed to Wilkes to furnish him with exactly such an opportunity as he desired to push himself into farther notoriety. He at once printed Lord Weymouth's letter, and circulated it, with an inflammatory comment, in which he described it as a composition having for its fruit "a horrid massacre, the consummation of a hellish plot deliberately planned." Too angry to be prudent, Lord Weymouth complained to the House of Lords of this publication as a breach of privilege, and the Lords formally represented it to the House of Commons as an insult deliberately offered to them by one of its members. There could be no doubt that such language as Wilkes had used was libellous. In its imputation of designs of deliberate wickedness, it very far exceeded the bitterest passages of _The North Briton_; and Lord Weymouth's colleagues, therefore, thought they might safely follow the precedent set in 1764, of branding the publication as a libel, and again procuring the expulsion of the libeller from the House of Commons. There were circumstances in the present case, such as the difference between the constituencies of Aylesbury and Middlesex, and the enthusiastic fervor in the offender's cause which the populace of the City had displayed, which made it very doubtful whether the precedent of 1764 were quite a safe one to follow; but the ministers not only disregarded every such consideration, but, as if they had wantonly designed to give their measure a bad appearance, and to furnish its opponents with the strongest additional argument against it, they mixed up with their present complaint a reference to former misdeeds of Wilkes with which it had no connection. On receiving the message of the Lords,