John Wilkes and George Cooke were elected for Middlesex in March 1768. After Cooke's death later that year, a by-election was held in December, at which John Glynn, a supporter of Wilkes, defeated William Beauchamp-Proctor. Proctor had been supported both by the new Prime Minister, the Earl of Grafton, and by Lord Halifax, the Northamptonshire cricketer. Lord Halifax was determined that Proctor should succeed, so he employed his boxing friend, the famous Jack Broughton, to engage two-dozen pugilistic roughs at two-guineas a week each. Supplied with two-inch thick wooden batons, these fistic roughs did their best to prevent Glynn's supporters from voting. Bodies were shouldered out of the way and heads were battered. Amongst these mercenary conscripts were two Irish boxers and sedan-chair carriers, Lawrence Balf and Edward McQuirk, who mistook their batons for shillelaghs; they battered the Glynn-supportersâ heads too furiously, and George Clarke, a lawyer from Kings Sutton in Northamptonshire, was concussed and died six days later. A physician pronounced Mr. Clarke's head wound to be the cause of death, which led to Balf and McQuirk being arrested, tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to be hanged. A large number of prosecution witnesses made the case against the two chair-men too strong to easily secure a Royal Pardon. However, Lord Halifax arranged for ten famous surgeons to enquire into the case. Although they had never seen the body, these ten surgical savants decided that Mr. Clarke's skull had been too thick for a bludgeon blow to have caused his death. He must have died of a fever. âÂÂNatural Causes!â they expertly pronounced, so Balf and McQuirk received their Royal Pardons.