Wilkes, John

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Wilkes, John

WILKES, JOHN. (1725–1797). British politician. Wilkes was born in Clerkenwell, London, on 17 October 1725, the second son of a malt distiller. Educated at a Hertford school from 1734, in 1744 he entered the University of Leiden. Here he rebelled against his mother's Presbyterianism with endless bouts of womanizing and drinking. His arranged marriage in 1747 to Mary Mead, puritanical and ten years his senior, had no effect on his behavior. However, her dowry, the manor of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, secured Wilkes's status as a landed gentleman. He joined Sir Francis Dashwood's "Monks of Medmenham," a secret society that met at the ruins of Medmenham Abbey to engage in obscene parodies of Roman Catholic ritual. In 1754 he composed an obscene Essay on Woman, a satire on Alexander Pope's Essay on Man; fatefully, he had thirteen copies printed for private circulation. Meanwhile his life as a witty and generous man about town, combined with his first attempts to enter politics, proved enormously expensive. In 1758 he was permanently separated from his wife, to whom he paid £200 a year in return for possession of the manor.

In 1757, with the support of his neighbors the Grenvilles—Richard Grenville, first Earl Temple, and his brother, George Grenville (who was the brother-in-law of William Pitt)—he was elected member of Parliament for Aylesbury. However, Wilkes was a poor and infrequent speaker and of little use to the ministry. Consequently his ambitious requests to be appointed to the Board of Trade, ambassador to Constantinople, and governor of Quebec fell on deaf ears. Under Temple's patronage, Wilkes spoke up for Pitt after the latter's resignation in October 1761 but made little impression. He had finally to accept that he was no orator and could not hope to make his way in the House of Commons.

Wilkes, funded by Temple, now turned to journalism. The new Lord Bute ministry was negotiating peace on terms unacceptable to Pitt and his allies, and badly needed a pen to counter Bute's journal The Briton, edited by the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett. After writing a few articles for existing journals, on 6 June 1762 Wilkes founded TheNorth Briton, the title being an ironic reference to the Scot Bute's supposed takeover of English politics. Wilkes reminded readers of the ancient FrancoScots alliance against England and falsely hinted that Bute owed his position to a liaison with the king's mother. The claim rightly angered George III, but it went down very well with the London crowds: a gibbet bearing a top boot and a petticoat became a familiar symbol in popular demonstrations. Although this gutter journalism soon alarmed Pitt and Temple, they were not inclined to stop it, and Wilkes cleverly avoided giving grounds for prosecution. Private victims were less restrained: in 1763 the artist William Hogarth published a savage caricature which has ever since perpetuated an image of Wilkes as surpassingly ugly.

Bute, wearied and distressed by such attacks, resigned on 8 April 1763 to be succeeded by George Grenville, who had fallen out with Temple and Pitt in 1761. Grenville ended the parliamentary session with a king's speech praising the peace settlement, and on 23 April Wilkes struck. Number 45 of The North Briton attacked the treaties and suggested that the king had lied on his prime minister's instructions. This was enough to goad ministers into bringing a charge of seditious libel. The problem was that the articles in number 45 were anonymous, and, although everyone knew Wilkes had written them, there was no legal proof of authorship. Lord Halifax, secretary of state for the north, therefore issued a general warrant for the arrest of the unnamed authors, printers, and publishers. Most of those arrested were quickly released, but crucially they provided firm evidence that Wilkes had wielded the offending pen. Halifax could then have issued a warrant naming Wilkes. Instead, he took legal advice as to whether Wilkes could be arrested on the existing general warrant. The reply was that Wilkes's parliamentary privilege protected him from arrest except on charges of treason, felony, or actual breach of the king's peace; number 45 tended to a breach of the peace and for that the general warrant would suffice. Reassured, on 30 April Halifax and his colleagues had Wilkes arrested and his papers seized.

This was a disaster. Although there were plenty of precedents for ministers using general warrants, their legality was uncertain and had already been questioned. Moreover, the view that Wilkes was guilty of a breach of the peace was open to question. Temple at once obtained a writ of habeas corpus, and on 6 May Chief Justice Sir Charles Pratt, a supporter of Pitt, heard the case in the Court of Common Pleas. In his defense Wilkes claimed that he was acting for those who had no political voice-and at least some spectators thought he meant it. When he was freed on grounds of parliamentary privilege the crowd in Westminster Hall, thinking he had been acquitted, raised the cry "Wilkes and liberty!"

Wilkes and his friends now counterattacked, bringing a series of prosecutions for wrongful arrest and seizure against the ministers, their undersecretaries, and king's messengers who had executed the warrant. Their cause was assisted by the now widespread concern about the principle of general warrants, even among those who despised Wilkes as a man. On 3 December Pratt ruled that general warrants could not be used to authorize searches of unspecified buildings and awarded Wilkes £4,000 in damages against the government. In January 1764 the Commons expelled Wilkes without a vote; but on 17 February the government survived a motion condemning general warrants only by begging to await the courts' decisions. On 18 June 1764 and 8 November 1765, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield ruled that general warrants could not be used against persons. Finally, Pratt (now Lord Camden) found that, except in cases of treason, secretaries of state could not issue warrants for even named persons. In this way Wilkes's scurrilous opportunism produced landmark protection for the liberty of the subject, the freedom of the press, and private property. Wilkes, however, was not there to see the fullness of his triumph: by then he was an exiled outlaw in France.

Shortly after the case against Wilkes collapsed, the ministry's agents had obtained one of the printed copies of Essay on Woman, which (the print claimed) had been edited by a bishop. Ribald mirth greeted the earl of Sandwich, secretary of state for the northern department, when he read it to the Lords on 15 November 1763. Nevertheless, the peers promptly declared it blasphemous. On the same day the Commons resolved that number 45 was a seditious libel and that seditious libels were not protected by parliamentary privilege. During this debate Samuel Atkins, the secretary to the treasury, called Wilkes a coward, and in the ensuing pistol duel Wilkes was severely wounded in the stomach. He still had the crowd on his side: when, on 3 December, number 45 was to be ceremonially burned in Cheapside, the crowd attacked the sheriffs, rescued the papers, and burned a top boot in its place. However, it could do him little good. Too ill to attend Parliament or court, and unwilling to face the inevitable prosecutions, Wilkes decamped to France on 25 December 1763. When he repeatedly failed to appear in King's Bench, he was outlawed in November 1764. He remained abroad for four years, writing, traveling in France and Italy, getting robbed by a teenage mistress and by his English agent, and failing to live within his precarious means. In the end his French debts forced him to flee to Leiden, where he enrolled in his old university as a precaution against prosecution.

He returned to Britain in 1768, hoping for a pardon and, lacking a patron, for popular election to a seat in Parliament. Promising to surrender when the court of King's Bench next met, he was triumphantly returned as member for Middlesex, where he had attracted hordes of skilled workers pressed by high prices and lack of work. In spite of almost nightly demonstrations in his favor, Wilkes took care not to use the crowd as a weapon. He surrendered to the court and—his outlawry being quashed on a technicality—accepted two years' imprisonment for seditious libel and blasphemy. Now a political martyr, Wilkes lived comfortably in prison and continued his political activity. On 3 February 1769 the Commons voted to expel him, but at the ensuing Middlesex election he was returned unopposed. Once again he was expelled, the House declaring him incapable of election: and once again he was re-elected without a contest. Yet again he was expelled. This time the ministry put up its own candidate, Colonel Luttrell, who, though defeated by a landslide vote, was nevertheless declared elected. This blatant attack on the principle of representation, even though aimed at an obnoxious individual, united the opposition leaders in January 1770. The prime minister, the duke of Grafton, was forced to resign. But Wilkes and the opposition had not triumphed: Lord North's new ministry declined to unseat Luttrell in favor of Wilkes.

Wilkes now turned to building up a power base in the City of London, where he had been elected alderman in January 1769. In 1771 he orchestrated a successful City challenge to the ban on parliamentary reporting, advocated annual parliamentary elections, and was elected sheriff. In 1774 he became lord mayor, and Middlesex re-elected him to Parliament. In the House he advocated the parliamentary reform and full civil rights for Dissenters and Catholics.

From the beginning of the colonial troubles, Wilkes was opposed to American independence. In 1765 he thought the Stamp Act riots little short of rebellion. However, public adulation in America, he was persuaded, sincerely or otherwise, to exploit the idea of a trans-Atlantic plot to subvert English liberties. By 1767 he was praising the resistance to the Townshend duties, and in 1768 he denounced the deployment of troops against civilians in Boston. From then until 1774 Wilkes had little use for American issues as his Middlesex election and City politics provided plentiful antigovernment ammunition. Although he organized petitions against the Coercive Acts and denounced parliamentary taxation of the colonies, he did not oppose parliamentary supremacy until October 1775. By 1777 he was arguing that the war was bloody and futile and recommended conciliation. On 10 December, after news of Saratoga, he moved for the repeal of the Declaratory Act only as a last-ditch means of persuading the rebels to forgo independence. Not until the failure of the 1778 Carlisle Peace Commission was Wilkes induced to speak for independence, and then only as an expedient to end an unwinnable war. Even this position was so unpopular that his radical power base in City politics wasted away. It was further weakened by his part in suppressing the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in 1780. By the end of the war the once terrible Wilkes had become respectable, and in1790 he abandoned his Middlesex seat without a contest. He died in London on 26 December 1797.

Whatever popular legend might say, his espousal of American causes was at best lukewarm and always subservient to his domestic and personal agenda. However, at first for his own ends, later also from reasons of principle, Wilkes had campaigned for traditional liberties for over two decades. His career had seen the demise of general warrants, the establishment of the supremacy of electors over parliamentary privilege, and vindication of the right to report debates. Politics was no longer a closed world, and the way was paved for reform, which followed in the nineteenth century. Above all he had shown how an unsavory personality might be a powerful vehicle for lofty causes.