ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, XIII, 6 August 1820, pp. 497–8. This essay, and the event it records, emerged from the public scandal over Queen Caroline’s alleged adultery (see headnotes above, pp. 231–33, and below, pp. 307–8). By 6 August her trial date was drawing near and the ministerial press had mobilized a series of attacks on her reputation. (See The Courier, 14 July 1820; The Morning Post, 27 July 1820). One of these, in Flyndell’s Western Luminary, precipitated an outburst by Castlereagh against The Examiner in Parliament, which highlighted what Hunt had been emphasizing for years now: the power of the press to sway public opinion and the desperate measures of a reactionary government to wrest that power away from opposition writers. On 25 July 1820, Sir Charles Wetherell (see below, n. 1) brought a motion in Parliament that a scurrilous passage on Queen Caroline recently published in Flyndell’s Western Luminary constituted a breach of House privilege and should provoke government retribution. Lord Castlereagh – England’s Foreign Minister, leader of the House, and head of the prosecution against the Queen – replied that any action against Flyndell’s should be balanced with actions against liberal papers. He then read directly, on the floor of Parliament, from a letter printed in a recent issue of Hunt’s Examiner excoriating parliamentary corruption and demanding an immediate dismissal of the trumped up case against the Queen. ‘This is what a true Commons House would have done; but when that House, for the main part, is composed of venal boroughmongers, grasping placemen, greedy adventurers, and aspiring title-hunters, or the representatives of such worthies, — a body, in short containing a far greater portion of public criminals than public guardians — what can be expected from it, but —— just what we have seen it so readily perform’ (reprinted in the Parliamentary Report of The Examiner of 30 July 1820, p. 486; the passage was originally printed in The Examiner of 23 July 1820, p. 467, as part of a Letter to the Editor from one ‘Ch. Fitzpaine’, actually John Hunt). Castlereagh went on to implicate The Examiner in an alleged conspiratorial ring of radical journals seeking to undermine the government. It must have given Hunt great pleasure to see The Examiner indictment of Parliament read in that House by one of his chief adversaries, Lord Castlereagh, and echoed again the following week (for the third time) in this current issue of The Examiner. Hunt repeats Castlereagh’s complaint and then, sensing his enemy in retreat, launches into a spirited tirade against Castlereagh’s corrupt proceedings and the overall turpitude of the Liverpool administration. Once again Hunt’s assault on government tyranny focuses on the specific issue of the liberty of the press to influence opinion, for it appears clear to him that the Wetherell proposal is merely a false pretext for the government shutdown of opposition voices. Indeed, Hunt was apprehensive of another government prosecution against The Examiner, and the government’s actions against John Hunt in 1821 would validate his qualms (see below, pp. 321–5). Nevertheless, the Hunts had clearly established that after years of government persecution and a period of imprisonment, they were still in the thick of political struggle, rankling top ministers into repeating The Examiner’s furious repudiations of England’s corrupt leadership in the inner halls of Parliament itself.
