John Wilkes

English politician and social reformer

• Born: October 17, 1725
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: December 26, 1797
• Place of death: London, England

The most famous British radical of the second half of the eighteenth century, Wilkes became the era’s preeminent symbol of liberty. His influence was felt in struggles to extend the freedom of the press, in the Wilkite movement that agitated for parliamentary reform, and in the strengthening of American opposition to British policy in the decade preceding the Revolutionary War.

Early Life

John Wilkes was born to a prosperous distiller. He was given a classical education and eventually attended the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. In 1747, he returned home to marry an heiress, Mary Mead. The marriage ended in separation, but it did bring Wilkes an income and a house in Buckinghamshire. During the 1750’s, Wilkes lived on the fringes of literary London. Associating with a circle of hard-living young gentlemen, he soon acquired what would be a lifelong reputation as a rake. His Buckinghamshire connections brought him to the attention of Richard Grenville, Earl Temple, the brother-in-law of William Pitt the Elder. With the support of the Grenville family, Wilkes was named sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1754, and three years later, he was elected to Parliament from the borough of Aylesbury. Wilkes also became an officer in the county militia. By the beginning of George III’s reign in 1760, Wilkes had entered politics, though as yet he was a follower rather than a leader.

Contemporaries already found Wilkes a remarkable figure. Flamboyant in dress and slightly taller than average, Wilkes had rather angular features capped by a permanent squint. The opposite sex nevertheless found him attractive, and all agreed that he was a man of great wit and charm. Many commented that Wilkes regarded life as a game played for his own amusement. Even those, such as Edward Gibbon and Samuel Johnson, who were repelled by Wilkes’s reputation for immorality found his company enjoyable.

Life’s Work

John Wilkes first became important as part of the outburst of political journalism that characterized the early 1760’s. The accession of George III had brought to prominence the young king’s favorite, the Scottish earl of Bute. Both the king and Bute favored winding down the Seven Years’ War, and their views eventually clashed with those of Pitt and Temple over the need to launch a preemptive strike against Spain. After Pitt and Temple resigned in 1761, criticism of Bute and the government—much of it violently anti-Scottish—began to mount. Wilkes found a considerable talent as a propagandist and became a willing and effective participant in the journalistic wars, on the side of Pitt. In June, 1762, Wilkes founded the North Briton. The title was intended as an ironic reference to the alleged pro-Scottish inclination of Bute’s government and as a reply to Tobias Smollett’s progovernment Briton. Wilkes proved to be a daring journalist, often exceeding the bounds of good taste and apparently intent on keeping a boast that he would seek the limits of freedom of the press in Great Britain. He found them in April, 1763, when the forty-fifth issue of the North Briton, in effect, accused the king of lying in recommending the Treaty of Paris to Parliament as an honorable peace settlement. The king, who came to nourish a deep hatred for Wilkes, and the government were outraged. Wilkes was apprehended and charged with seditious libel, though he protested that his arrest was illegal because it was under a general warrant (one that did not name him personally but was issued against those who wrote, printed, and published the North Briton). He was soon released on the grounds of parliamentary privilege and proceeded to file countersuits against several of the ministers. By this time, Wilkes had become a popular hero to the shopkeepers and tradesmen of London, who saw him standing up not only for the freedom of the press but also against the threat of arbitrary arrests as represented by the use of general warrants. (Two years later, both the courts and Parliament declared general warrants illegal.) Upon his release, the cry of “Wilkes and liberty” was heard for the first time.

Having gained the limelight, Wilkes was unwilling to let matters rest. He reprinted the past numbers of the North Briton and published a forty-sixth. The government gathered evidence and launched a two-pronged attack against Wilkes in the fall of 1763. In the House of Commons, the North Briton, number 45, was attacked as seditious libel, and a resolution was passed declaring that parliamentary privilege did not extend to such cases. In the House of Lords, the earl of Sandwich, an associate of Wilkes in some of his past adventures, named Wilkes the author and printer of an obscene poem, Essay on Woman, which had been falsely attributed to William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester. (The poem was an indecent parody of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, the bishop having been a friend and editor of Pope. Wilkes was probably not the author of the poem, but he had printed it for private circulation.) With his character now blackened as that of a pornographer, Wilkes was also open to prosecution by both Parliament and the courts. He was, however, wounded in a duel and unable to appear before either. In early 1764, Wilkes fled to France. He was subsequently expelled from Parliament by a majority vote of the House of Commons and declared an outlaw by the Court of King’s Bench.

Wilkes eventually grew restive in exile, in which he was also plagued by growing debts. In 1768, he gambled that he could retrieve both his personal position and his political prominence by returning to Great Britain. Initially ignored by the authorities, Wilkes soon presented himself to the Court of King’s Bench and was duly imprisoned, though not before a crowd of his supporters had clashed violently with a detachment of soldiers. Wilkes’s outlawry was reversed on a technicality, but he was sentenced to twenty-two months’ imprisonment on his original convictions for the North Briton and Essay on Woman. While unsuccessfully appealing his sentence, Wilkes remained in relatively comfortable confinement. He continued a variety of journalistic activities, strengthening his image as a champion of liberty, and stood for Parliament. Defeated as a candidate for London, he topped the poll as candidate for the large, metropolitan county of Middlesex.

Wilkes’s election for Middlesex set the stage for the most important episode in his political life, one that did much to bring forth the era’s most significant outbreak of popular radicalism. The Commons refused to accept Wilkes’s election and ordered him expelled in February, 1769. Wilkes refused to leave matters alone and quickly won reelection. Once again the Commons expelled him, resolving in addition that he was incapable of sitting in Parliament. Two more times, Wilkes was elected and expelled before the Commons finally declared his opponent elected. By this time, the Middlesex election had provoked a reaction that shook the government. The House of Commons was attacked by Wilkes’s supporters for trampling on the rights of the electors of Middlesex, and the cry of “Wilkes and liberty” once more brought Londoners into the streets. Supporters organized the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights. This group raised money to pay Wilkes’s debts, agitated for parliamentary reform, and launched a campaign that elicited petitions in support of Wilkes from eighteen counties. Despite this sizable outpouring of popular feeling and sporadic outbreaks of violence, the government rode out the crisis, and Wilkes remained out of Parliament.

While still in prison, Wilkes became active in London politics. In 1769, he was elected an alderman, and in 1771, he was chosen as sheriff. In these capacities, he was soon involved in another important conflict with Parliament, this time over the publication of its proceedings. When the Commons resisted attempts by several newspapers to publish accounts of its debates, officials of the City of London defended the printers by denying the jurisdiction of Parliament’s officers inside the city, and Wilkes placed the emissaries of the Commons under arrest. Though some London magistrates were briefly imprisoned, the Commons eventually backed down and press coverage of its debates began. Four years later, by which time Wilkes was lord mayor of London, a similar dispute arose with the House of Lords. It, too, gave in and tacitly conceded press coverage of its debates.

By this time, Wilkes was back in Parliament. Standing for Middlesex in 1774, he was easily elected. With a crisis with the American colonies looming, the government decided to forgo a repetition of the turmoil of 1769 and 1770, and Wilkes quietly took his seat. In Parliament, Wilkes opposed the war with the American colonies, favored schemes for reforming Parliament and government administration, and advocated increased religious toleration. His greatest concern, however, was for personal vindication. He was especially eager to have the resolution declaring his incapacity to sit in the Commons erased from the house’s journals. Wilkes offered annual motions to this effect, and in May, 1782, he finally succeeded in expunging the resolution.

As time passed, Wilkes became less flamboyant and more moderate in his politics. He supported William Pitt the Younger and eventually was reconciled to the king, to whom Wilkes is said to have remarked that he himself had never been a Wilkite. During the Gordon Riots of 1780, Wilkes took a prominent role in restoring order. His popularity declined with his radicalism, and he retired from Parliament in 1790 rather than face defeat. Wilkes died seven years later at his house in Grosvenor Square, one of London’s most fashionable addresses.

Significance

John Wilkes was a hero to many middle-class and wage-earning Englishmen and to many colonial Americans. His ironic, even cynical approach to life, his general flamboyance, and his concern for his own advancement have caused many historians to doubt both his commitment to the reformist causes he espoused and his interest in the problems of his more humble followers. He may have been a genial rogue with a flair for self-dramatization, but Wilkes imbued his followers with a sense of purpose, and his career left a lasting impression on the English-speaking world.

In the 1760’s and early 1770’s, Wilkes’s difficulties provided a focus for the grievances of others, especially of the “middling sort,” and sparked an interest in politics and political debate among segments of society that were normally considered to be outside the traditional political structure dominated by the landed classes. The Wilkite movement did not originate popular radicalism, but it did much to mobilize it and to make the political elite more conscious of it. The most important focus of the Wilkites came to be their efforts to reform the House of Commons. The Middlesex election affair convinced them that the preferences and interests of the electorate had been callously ignored by an imperious Parliament more interested in maintaining its corporate privilege: Parliament had been corrupted and had forgotten its representative purpose. Their solution was to reform the House of Commons, through such devices as shorter Parliaments and the limitation of government patronage, to make it more responsible to the electorate and less easy for the ministers to manipulate. The Wilkites thus played an important role in launching the movement for parliamentary reform that would be carried forward by other groups in later years.

Another important legacy of Wilkes’s career was its impact in America. Wilkes himself opposed the various measures that provoked resistance in the colonies, as well as the British government’s eventual resort to force. More important was the way that Wilkes came to be seen by many Americans as a man who was persecuted for his devotion to the cause of liberty. His expulsions after repeated elections for Middlesex gave credence to the idea that Parliament had been corrupted by the government and could not be depended upon to defend the rights of the people on either side of the Atlantic. Wilkes became to many American patriots a martyr to liberty, his sufferings proof of the evil intentions of the British government. A measure of his popularity in America is still present in the number of counties, cities, and towns in the original thirteen states that bear his name.

Wilkes’s career also had other concrete results. The North Briton affair was largely responsible for raising the question of the legality of general warrants, and Wilkes was instrumental in opening the debates of Parliament to newspaper coverage. The depth of his devotion to the causes he came to symbolize may be suspect, but his actions raised important issues and brought a new level of popular involvement in British politics. In the final analysis, he lived up to the epitaph he wrote for himself: “a friend to liberty.”

Bibliography

Brewer, John. Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. A major work on the politics of the 1760’s that emphasizes the vitality of political debate among the nonaristocratic segments of society. Shows that Wilkes and the Wilkites were central to the development of what the author terms an “alternative structure of politics.”

Christie, Ian R. “Radicals and Reformers in the Age of Wilkes and Wyvill.” In British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt, 1742-1789, edited by Jeremy Black. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Wilkes, Wyvill, and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760-1785. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962. Two studies of the parliamentary reform movement that developed during the late eighteenth century and the role of Wilkes and other radicals in that movement. Very useful for putting the role played by Wilkes and his followers into context.

Kronenberger, Louis. The Extraordinary Mr. Wilkes. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974. Though flawed by simplistic treatment of Wilkes’s adversaries, especially George III, this biography is valuable for its sensitive handling of the different and at times conflicting components of Wilkes’s character.

Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. Important for showing Wilkes’s impact on American perceptions and in strengthening the belief that Great Britain’s American policy was part of an overall conspiracy against liberty. Useful in putting Wilkes’s career into transatlantic perspective.

Nobbe, George. The “North Briton”: A Study in Political Propaganda. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939. A through study of Wilkes’s famous paper. Useful for understanding his approach to political journalism and the journalistic context of the early 1760’s.

Postgate, Raymond. That Devil Wilkes. New York: Vanguard Press, 1929. A solid biography of Wilkes that provides a well-rounded view of his personality and career. The title is taken from George III’s characterization of Wilkes.

Rea, Robert R. The English Press in Politics, 1760-1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963. A good general study of the involvement of the newspaper and periodical press in politics during the most crucial periods of Wilkes’s career. Valuable for placing Wilkes’s journalistic activities and connections into perspective.

Rudé, George. Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1962. Not a biography of Wilkes, but an important study of the Wilkite movement in its prime. Shows that Wilkes’s followers were largely drawn from the middling segments of society and were far from being its dregs.

Thomas, Peter D. G. John Wilkes, a Friend to Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Comprehensive biography of Wilkes, providing information on his role in British politics and his political achievements. Thomas argues that Wilkes was appreciated by his contemporaries but has been underestimated by succeeding generations.