According to Lord Temple, this was the greatest majority ever known on the last day of a session.
The purport and significance of these arbitrary proceedings need little interpretation.

The House, according to the authorities, had a constitutional right to expel Wilkes, though the grounds on which even this is defended would probably be questioned if a similar case were to arise in our own day.

But a single branch of the legislature could have no power to pass an incapacitating vote either against Wilkes or anybody else.

An Act of Parliament is the least instrument by which such incapacity could be imposed.

The House might perhaps expel Wilkes, but it could not either legally or with regard to the less definite limits of constitutional morality, decide whom the Middlesex freeholders should not elect, and it could not therefore set aside their representative, who was then free from any disabling quality.
Lord Camden did not much exaggerate, when he declared in a debate on the subject in the House of Lords, that the judgment passed upon the Middlesex election had given the constitution a more dangerous wound than any which were given during the twelve years' absence of Parliament in the reign of Charles I.The House of Commons was usurping another form of that very dispensing power, for pretending to which the last of the Stuart sovereigns had lost his crown.