Political Career
The excitement created by the actions of John Wilkes led Horne into politics, and in 1765 he brought out a scathing pamphlet on Bute and Mansfield, entitled "The Petition of an Englishman".
In the autumn of 1765 he escorted another rich young man to Italy. In Paris he met Wilkes, and from Montpellier, in January 1766, addressed a letter to him which began the quarrel between them. In the summer of 1767 Horne returned, and in 1768 secured the return of Wilkes to parliament for Middlesex. With inexhaustible energy he promoted the legal proceedings over the riot in St George's Fields, when a youth named Allen was killed, and exposed the irregularity in the judge's order for the execution of two Spitalfields weavers. His dispute with George Onslow, MP for Surrey, who at first supported and then threw over Wilkes for place, culminated in a civil action, ultimately decided, after the reversal of a verdict which had been obtained through the charge of Lord Mansfield, in Horne's favour, and in the loss by his opponent of his seat in parliament. An influential association, called "The Society for Supporting the Bill of Rights," was founded, mainly through the exertions of Horne, in 1769, but the members were soon divided into two opposite camps, and in 1771 Horne and Wilkes, their respective leaders, broke out into open dispute.
On 1 July 1771 Horne obtained at Cambridge, though not without some opposition from members of both the political parties, his degree of M.A. Earlier in that year he claimed for the public the right of printing an account of parliamentary debates, and after a long struggle, the right was definitely established. In the same year (1771), Horne argued with Junius, and ended in disarming his masked antagonist.
Read more about this topic: John Horne Tooke
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or career:
“The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)