[BURKE, Edmund, and others.]

TRIAL OF AN ACTION FOR THIRTY SEVEN THOUSAND POUNDS, brought by Paul Benfield, esq; against Samuel Petrie, esq; upon a charge of bribery. Tried at Salisbury, the 12th of March 1782 ... Taken in short-hand by W. Williamson ... To which is added A Letter from Mr. Petrie, to the Committee of the House of Commons, who tried and determined the merits of his petition, against the last return for the borough of Cricklade.

      London: printed for J. Stockdale, opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly. 1782. 8vo, pp. [ii], 110;title a little dusty; else a very good copy; disbound. First printing of an extraordinary bribery trial, with which Edmund Burke was intimately connected. Paul Benfield and John Macpherson, phenomenally successful businessmen who had amassed huge fortunes in India, had contested Cricklade at the general election but had been unseated at the petition of Samuel Petrie, who alleged that they had bribed the notoriously corrupt electorate. In this counter-action, Benfield charged that Petrie himself had bribed the electors, and he sued him for £500 on each of 74 counts. As Petrie defence team noted, this was clearly an action designed solely to bankrupt the defendant. Petrie was a close associate of Edmund Burke, whose brother Richard led the defence: no doubt they collaborated on the case, and indeed Todd states that the long letter to the Commons Select Committee at the end (pp. 93-110) is largely written by the two brothers. The connexions between Burke and Petrie are outlined in Dixon Wecter’s article - Petrie was an Anglo-American businessman partly resident in Paris, and he is known to have reported Benjamin Franklin’s opinions to Burke: in effect, he acted as a sort of spy on Burke’s behalf. The junior barrister is identified here only as ‘the Hon. Mr. Pitt’, but this must be William Pitt the younger, then only 22. Only the son of a peer could be so described, and of Pitt’s two brothers the elder (John) had already succeeded his father as Earl of Chatham, and the younger (James Charles) was a naval captain who had died the previous year. (There was also a George Pitt, son of Lord Rivers, who might have been so named, but I doubt if this is the man.) Pitt was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1780, and had entered Parliament in a by-election in June 1781. He too was an associate of Burke: his first speeches were in support of Burke’s policies. Pitt was to become Chancellor of the Exchequer a few months after this case, and Prime Minister the following year. This must be one of the very few cases which he fought in his very short career at the bar - and, perhaps, the only one published. Really, with a defence team such as this, it is hard to imagine how the plaintiff could possibly have won; and indeed Burke and Pitt were wholly successful, the Judge concluding that ‘the Evidence is so weak on every one of the counts, that you should find your Verdict for the Defendant’. Richard Burke’s long speech for the defence (pp. 25-57) must have been completely convincing, reinforced as it was by the skilful examination and cross-examination by Pitt. Rare: ESTC online lists just seven copies - L, C, E, Lse; CaOHM, MoU, MH. Todd, Burke, p. 269; see also Dixon Wecter in Huntington Library Quarterly 3 (1940), pp. 315-38, especially p. 333 n. 71. (NB: Todd wrongly states that the article is in Harvard Library Bulletin, a very irritating error.)