Peter Thomas

John Wilkes

He did not indulge in many fashionable pursuits of the age, Wilkes was never a noted gambler, whether at dice, cards, or on horses. After his youth he was abstemious in his consumption of food and drink. Although he enjoyed riding, he did not hunt or shoot, professing a metropolitan disdain for such rural activities, as in this letter of 20 June 1769 to French correspondent Suard: 'A proper vacation must be allowed the English for partridge shooting and all field sports; then they return to the smoke, dirt and politics of London with fresh gout.'

But vices are weighed, not counted, and for contemporaries the wickedness of Wilkes lay in his overt sexual promiscuity, emphasized by bawdy language and lack of shame, an attitude epitomized in his comment that he 'loved all women except his wife'. Two lines of defence have been offered to palliate if not excuse his behaviour. One is that he was not a seducer of innocents, preferring experienced and willing partners. 'A man cannot be wicked if a woman says nay', claimed one biographer. This line of argument is not borne out by the evidence of his life, and it is apparent that his notorious behaviour and ribaldry caused him to be deemed a danger to all women. The other, obvious, explanation of his conduct is that Wilkes, estranged from his wife since 1756 and unable to obtain a divorce, could not have been expected to adopt a celibate way of life. That argument will not stand. Wilkes began his notorious lifestyle when a young man and never changed his ways even when, as with Amelia Arnold, he had a permanent lady friend. Contemporaries judged correctly when they regarded Wilkes as a profligate.

His alleged lack of political principle, supposedly implied by this personal immorality, was seemingly confirmed by both his tongue-in-cheek humour and his instantaneous 1782 conversion from an opponent into a supporter of government. His witty comments, so often directed at himself or his supporters, were common knowledge, as Horace Walpole statedwhen recounting what Wilkes said during his speech of 22 February 1775 on the Middlesex Elections: 'Though he called the resolutions of the last Parliament a violation of Magna Carta, he said, in a whisper to Lord North, he was forced to say so to please the fellows who followed him. This was his constant style; and though certainly conveyed to the mob, they still followed him. More damaging to his popularity, and to his contemporary reputation, was his 1782 decision to support the King's government, for the last fifteen years of his life as it proved to be. It is evidently to that period that the variously attributed story belongs of his rebuke to an elderly woman who had called out 'Wilkes and Liberty' on seeing him in the street: 'Be quiet, you old fool. That's all over long ago.' Political opponents made much of his supposed apostasy from the cause of liberty, the most famous jibe being one attributed to R.B. Sheridan, opposition politician as well as playwright:

Johnny Wilkes, Johnny Wilkes,
Thou greatest of bilks,
How changed are the notes you now sing!
Your famed Forty-Five,
is Prerogative,
And your blasphemy, 'God save the King'.

That final twist in the Wilkes story helps to explain why Whig historians have been reluctant to commend his achievements. But it is irrelevant to an assessment of his political role during the preceding two decades. Wilkes was a political journalist first and foremost, and two of his three major confrontations with government arose from official attempts to curb political activities of the press, criticism of ministers, and Parliamentary reporting. The furore over the North Briton case had the incidental effect of deterring future ministerial prosecutions of what were deemed to be political libels, but Wilkes took little interest in the subsequent legal and political battles on that issue, when he was not personally involved. The issue that he seized on, and that launched his political career, was the theoretical threat to liberty implicit in general warrants, for they exposed unnamed individuals, everyone in theory, to invasion of their homes and seizure of their persons and property. Two centuries later it is apparent that there was no danger that any British ministry would make deliberate and extensive use of general Warrants to arrest political opponents, or stifle press criticism. Nor that any Ministry would embark on systematic disqualification of political opponents from sitting in the House of Commons, the theoretical implication of the Middlesex Elections case. But contemporaries were very sensitive to any abuse of executive power, an attitude Wilkes exploited to the full. His successes over general warrants and the Middlesex Elections episode helped to define practical limits to government control over individuals and Parliament respectively. He was defending the boundaries of a liberty that already existed. To posterity the extension of that boundary to include the freedom to report Parliamentary debates would seem to be an achievement of greater potential significance than the two more famous episodes that engrossed contemporary opinion. And the political significance of Wilkes was greater than the sum of his successes in the cause of liberty.

After Wiikes the Georgian political world was never to be the same again. His career widened the political dimension beyond the closed world of Westminster, Whitehall, and Windsor. George Rude demonstrated a generation ago that the men who gave Wilkes his political importance were not the impoverished working class, but their small-scale employers: merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, craftsmen, and the like. Men of wealth like Beckford, Bull, Crosby and the Olivers might take the lead, and pauper crowds helped to throng the streets and sometimes rioted; but the Wilkite movement reflected the evolution of new social groupings of men whose economic self-sufficiency generated an independence of attitude. The simultaneous growth of the press was the torch that illuminated political matters for them, and Wilkes the spark that lit the torch. In the Wilkite era the politicization of the press was the key to its expansion, symbolized by the rapid spread of Parliamentary reporting, soon deemed essential to secure viable circulations for most newspapers.

Wilkes was swimming with the political tide. and 'the fourth estate' was henceforth a factor in politics; but these circumstances do not explain how one man had so successfully confronted the power of government. Sheer audacity was part of the answer. The legality of general warrants had been a matter of some doubt before 1763; but it took a John Wilkes, backed by the purse of Lord Temple, to challenge their validity. In 1768-9 his persistent and unprecedented refusal to accept the traditional power of the House of Commons to decide disputed elections, one originally established to safeguard Parliament against the Crown, outraged the political establishment of the day. And, for many contemporaries, the most blatant example of his cheek was his 1771 success in pitting the City of London against the House of Commons.

To political courage Wilkes added tactical skill. What a close study of Wilkes reveals is the clever way in which he outwitted government time and again. In both of the crises commenced on his own initiative, those of 1768-9 and 1771, he contrived to manoeuvre administration into untenable positions. In 1763-4 and 1769 the Grenville and Grafton ministries were compelled to alter the rules of the political game to defeat him; and in each case Wilkes later nevertheless won the constitutional point. The Grenville administration adopted dubious and unfair tactics, beginning with the smear campaign based on the irrelevant Essay on Woman. The decision of 23 November 1763 to withdraw the protection of Parliamentary privilege from seditious libel was contrary to previous usage, however logical the argument of criminal offence Grenville and others put forward to justify it. The expulsion of Wilkes from Parliament on 20 January 1764 anticipated the legal conviction that provided the pretext for that decision. What happened in 1769 over the Middlesex election can likewise be analysed into a triple injustice to Wilkes. The decision of the Grafton ministry to expel him was taken first, and then a reason for it sought. The libel on Lord Weymouth was dubious ground in itself, and the composite motion of expulsion on 3 February 1769 manifestly unfair. Worse was to follow. The House of Commons, faced on 17 February with the new problem of an MP who refused to accept expulsion, created a disqualification on the basis of its own authority, and thereby prevented a constituency electing as MP a man not otherwise debarred from sitting in the Commons. When Wilkes forced the issue, the ministry awarded the seat to a minority candidate. Ministers were constantly and consistently wrongfooted by 'that devil Wilkes'.

If for many contemporaries Wilkes did too much, for some historians he did not do enough. The judgement that Wilkite radicalism was limited and conservative, however, is one based on abstract criteria taken out of context. In the early decades of George III's reign advocacy of any change in the much-revered constitution was a daring innovation. John Wilkes should not be judged by the levelling principles of the French Revolution, a development he publicly condemned as soon as it ceased to resemble Britain's Glorious Revolution. Wilkes was no role model for later generations of Radicals. His disdainful attitude to the lower social orders was illustrated by the frequent disparaging remarks about his followers, and exemplified by his treatment of the workers at his private printing press in 1763. Even in his heyday his political opinions were less radical than those of some of his followers, as he himself well knew. Lord Eldon recorded this account by George III of a reply by Wilkes after the King had enquired about his friend Serjeant John Glynn:

'Sir', rejoined Wilkes, 'he was my counsel—one must have a counsel; but he was no friend; he loves sedition and licentiousness, which I never delighted in. In fact, Sir, he was a Wilkite, which I never was.' The King said the confidence and the humour of the man made him forget at the moment his impudence.

The concept Wilkes had of the British constitution embraced the importance of the monarchy, as his comments on the French Revolution demonstrated. He had respect for the institutions of the state, never challenging the powers of the Crown to govern, Parliament to legislate, and the Courts of Law to enforce their decisions. But the defects of the system were his targets and especially could his attempts to establish the responsibility of the House of Commons to the electorate be construed as a restoration of a basic principle of Parliamentary government. Even electoral reform was in that sense a removal of abuses that had crept into the system. Most contemporaries regarded Wilkes, however, merely as a foolish and self-seeking trouble-maker, this opinion of the serious-minded and honourable Edmund Burke in 1768 being typical: 'He is a lively, agreeable man, but of no prudence and no principles.' Yet by then Wilkes had already suffered exile and financial ruin because of his political conduct, and was soon to be imprisoned, disdaining a deal with Prime Minister Grafton for his release later that year. In all the evidence of his political views, whether in correspondence, papers for the press, and public speeches, there is a consistency of argument, attitude, and conviction that only a cynic would disregard. Biographers of Wilkes, familiar with this evidence, have taken a more favourable view of him as a principled politician than historians with more impressionistic opinions. 'Few historical characters have been the victims of more hasty generalisations', wrote Horace Bleackley in 1917. Detailed assessments establish that John Wilkes was a genuine Radical as well as an undoubted rascal.