The outlaw they couldn’t keep out
Francis Wheen
JOHN WILKES by Arthur H. Cash Yale, £20, pp. 482, ISBN 0300108710 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 John Wilkes was an unlikely icon cross-eyed from birth and lumbered with a grotesquely prognathous chin that exposed his lower teeth when he spoke, though by middle age he had precious few teeth left anyway. Children, on meeting him, would take one look and burst into tears. Italian newspapers referred to him as Il Brute Inglese, which James Boswell interpreted as ‘the English Brutus’. Wilkes was quick to correct him: it meant ‘the ugly Englishman’.
Despite its ugliness, however, this was an infectiously cheerful countenance to which people soon grew accustomed. According to his son-in-law, Sir William Rough, ‘In china, in bronze, or in marble, he stood upon the chimney piece of half the houses in the metropolis; he swung upon the sign-posts of every village, of every great road throughout the country.’ His image could be found on tobacco papers, halfpenny ballads, punchbowls and teapots. ‘There was,’ Arthur Cash records, ‘hardly a working man who did not believe that Wilkes was the only man who would stand up for him; dissenters almost to a man were ready to serve him; small businessmen, farmers, lawyers, virtually all the middle classes found hope in his audacious challenges to authority.’ Audacity, no less than liberty, seemed to be his middle name. His famous boast that he needed only 20 minutes ‘to talk away my face’ was amply confirmed by the procession of devoted mistresses — all the more remarkable given that he spoke with a severe lisp which blunted the edge of his seductive patter. His wit could keep pace with even the smartest conversationalists of the age, including Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne. ‘Wilkes, you will die either by hanging or the pox,’ Lord Sandwich declared. To which came the instant rejoinder, ‘That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your lordship’s principles or your mistress.’ Declining an invitation to a Parisian card party, he explained to the hostess, ‘I cannot tell the difference between a king and a knave.’ No wonder George III dubbed him ‘that devil Wilkes’ and urged ministers to rid him of this turbulent priest of liberty. ‘Had the king had a bad character and Wilkes a good one,’ Benjamin Franklin wrote, ‘the latter might have turned the former out of his kingdom.’ Actually Wilkes had an excellent character — generous, high-spirited, unrancorous even towards his enemies, many of whom later became friends. But he was also, indisputably, a naughty boy, who roistered and revelled with the Hell-Fire Club and published one of the most flabbergastingly obscene works in the English language, ‘An Essay on Woman’. In later years he lived openly with a mistress and acknowledged paternity of their illegitimate daughter by giving her the surname Wilkes.
Yet this hideous, inarticulate, debt-laden libertine was regularly returned to parliament, despite the House’s fierce endeavours to keep him out, and became a popular and effective Lord Mayor of London. He was simply irresistible. Why?
Fearlessness had much to do with it, as Cash suggests. Wilkes never ducked a duel, and invariably emerged with his reputation enhanced. (Lord Talbot, his opponent in a pistol-fight on Baghsot Heath in 1762, praised him afterwards as ‘the noblest fellow God had ever made’.) His newspaper, the North Briton, was so recklessly incendiary that he must have known it would land him in jail, as it duly did. Caution never stayed his hand, and even respectable grandees couldn’t help admiring the man’s suicidal boldness. When Wilkes was confined to the Tower of London for publishing the notorious issue 45 of the North Briton, the prison was picketed by what Cash calls ‘the most classy protest march in history’ — a parade led by the Dukes of Newcastle, Grafton and Bolton, the Earls Temple and Cornwallis, and the Viscounts Middleton and Villiers.
Less exalted citizens shared their enthusiasm. Travelling along the Great West Road from London to Oxford on an election morning in 1768, Boswell observed that ‘all the road was roaring with “Wilkes and Liberty”, which, with “No 45”, was chalked on every coach and chaise.’ The very number acquired a mystical significance. When he was jailed again a few weeks later, admirers in Newcastle held a feast in his honour:
The company consisted of 45 gentlemen. At 45 minutes past one, there were drank 45 gills of wine, with 45 new laid eggs in them. Precisely at 45 minutes past two a very genteel dinner was served up.
The epic bunfight concluded at precisely 45 minutes past three the following morning.
Wilkes’s essay in the North Briton No 45, published on 23 April 1763, began by exploding the myth that the king’s speech to parliament consisted of his own words rather than those of his ministers. He then unleashed a fusillade of sarcastic invective against politicians who had corrupted the spirit of the English constitution, and concluded with a salvo against their use of the ‘royal prerogative’ as a justification for infringements of liberty. (Now that the Conservative party is reassessing the royal prerogative a mere two and a half centuries later, perhaps David Cameron should look it up.) This passionate polemic, as the historian George Nobbe has written, ‘stimulated the imaginations of men all over the world’, especially in America, where to this day his name endures in Wilkes County, North Carolina, and Wilkes University, Pennsylvania. He corresponded with Samuel Adams, John Hancock and other founding fathers, championing their cause in parliament. The Commons House of South Carolina sent him £1,500 and closed down the provincial government rather than obey the royal governor’s order that they rescind the gift.
Though he was a friend of Enlightenment giants such as Hume, Voltaire and d’Holbach, Wilkes himself was not so much a philosopher as an activist. Yet the particular causes he espoused had a wide resonance. He was the first MP to propose universal (male) suffrage. He broke the taboo on reporting proceedings in parliament. Many principles enshrined in the American constitution — a free press, the right to privacy, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, the prohibition of general arrest warrants — were inspired by his English agitations. In the 1760s, while technically an outlaw, Wilkes was elected to parliament to represent the county of Middlesex — and then re-elected, thrice, when the House of Commons refused to let him take his seat. Two hundred years later, in a 1969 US supreme court judgment backing Adam Clayton Powell’s suit against the House of Representatives, which had evicted him, Chief Justice Earl Warren credited Wilkes with having exposed the danger of allowing the legislature unlimited rights to exclude an elected member.
Arthur Cash’s biography is a good introduction to John Wilkes’s life and times, even if it lacks the brio of Raymond Postgate’s That Devil Wilkes. But Cash is an American academic, and it shows. He mis-spells English place-names and surnames. He doesn’t realise that British candidates still have election agents, or that parliament’s response to the monarch’s speech is still called the loyal address. He also thinks that Blackheath and Greenwich are somewhere near Winchester. No matter: Wilkes himself would surely be the first to forgive a few lisping eccentricities and squint-eyed misapprehensions.
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