North Briton No. 45
Hogarth sketch of Wilkes at trial, 1763.
Hogarth was a very controversial and individual character. Driven by a sense for justice, he missed no chance to get into a quarrel with his contemporaries. His most hated enemy was the British politician John Wilkes, whom he had ridiculed in one of his engravings. William Hogarth died on October 26, 1764.
John Wilkes, offended at the anti-middle-class bias of Hogarth's The Times, Plate I, attacked the artist's character and his work, particularly his history of painting and his Analysis, in the North Briton No. 17. Shortly afterward, Wilkes criticized George III's defense of the Peace of Paris in the North Briton No. 45 (suggesting numerically the last Stuart uprising). For disrespect to the king, Wilkes was unjustly arrested and jailed, but, in a decision that reaffirmed fundamental liberties, he was acquitted. At the trial, according to Wilkes' comrade, Charles Churchill,
Lurking, most ruffian-like, behind a screenSignificantly, Hogarth classes this work with his popular genre of criminal portraits. Wilkes sits on a chair holding the Cap of Liberty on the Staff of Maintenance; beside him are a table with his writing stand and his attacks on Hogarth and the king, both apparently of equal and unrelated significance. Leaning forward in an ingratiating, intimate manner, Wilkes wears a leer on his face. His mouth is twisted in mockery, and the pupils of his eyes are disturbingly crossed. His wig is fashioned to suggest that he wears fiendish or demonic horns. Wilkes emerges in the portrait as a man of treacherous, unprincipled character, shifty, cynical, and derisive.
So plac'd all things to see, himself unseen
Virtue, with due contempt, saw Hogarth stand
The murd'rous pencil in his palsied hand.
Colonial Punchbowl at Williamsburg
-------------------------------------------------------
John Wilkes - 1725-1797
John Montagu - 1718-1792
Fanny Murray - 1729-1782
John Wilkes - Wiki
Wilkes, Liberty & No. 45 - Colonial Williamsburg
John Montagu - Wiki
Fanny Murray - Wiki
Essay on Woman - published 1763
Hellfire Clubs - Wiki
1746 - 1763: The Hellfire Club
Sir Francis Dashwood and the Earl of Sandwich are alleged to have been members of a Hellfire Club that met at the George and Vulture Inn throughout the 1730s. Dashwood founded the Order of the Knights of St Francis in 1746, originally meeting at the George & Vulture. The club motto was Fais ce que tu voudras (Do what thou wilt). . . . .
Francis Dashwood . . . Of the original twelve, some are regularly identified: Dashwood, Robert Vansittart, Thomas Potter, Francis Duffield, Edward Thompson, Paul Whitehead and John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. The list of supposed members is immense; among the more probable candidates are Benjamin Bates II, George Bubb Dodington, a fabulously corpulent man in his 60s; . . . and John Wilkes, though much later, under the pseudonym John of Aylesbury.[28] Benjamin Franklin is known to have occasionally attended the club's meetings during 1758 as a non-member during his time in England. However, some authors and historians would argue Benjamin Franklin was in fact a spy. As there are no records left (having been burned in 1774[29]), many of these members are just assumed or linked by letters sent to each other.[30]
Sir Francis's club was never originally known as a Hellfire Club; it was given this namuch later in fact used a number of other names, such as the Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe,[31] Order of Knights of West Wycombe, The Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe[26] and later, after moving their meetings to Medmenham Abbey, they became the Monks or Friars of Medmenham. . . . Underneath the Abbey, Dashwood had a series of caves carved out from an existing one. It was decorated again with mythological themes, phallic symbols and other items of a sexual nature.
According to Horace Walpole, the members' "practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighborhood of the complexion of those hermits." Dashwood's garden at West Wycombe contained numerous statues and shrines to different gods; Daphne and Flora, Priapus and the previously mentioned Venus and Dionysus.[34]
Meetings occurred twice a month, with an AGM lasting a week or more in June or September.[35] The members addressed each other as "Brothers" and the leader, which changed regularly, as "Abbot". During meetings members supposedly wore ritual clothing: white trousers, jacket and cap, while the "Abbot" wore a red ensemble of the same style.[36] Legends of Black Massesand Satan or demon worship have subsequently become attached to the club, beginning in the late Nineteenth Century. Rumours saw female "guests" (a euphemism for prostitutes) referred to as "Nuns". Dashwood's Club meetings often included mock rituals, items of a pornographic nature, much drinking, wenching and banqueting.
The downfall of Dashwood's Club was more drawn-out and complicated. In 1762 the Earl of Bute appointed Dashwood his Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite Dashwood being widely held to be incapable of understanding "a bar bill of five figures". (Dashwood resigned the post the next year, having raised a tax on cider which caused near-riots). Dashwood now sat in the House of Lords after taking up the title of Baron Le Despencer after the previous holder died. Then there was the attempted arrest of John Wilkes for seditious libel against the King in the notorious issue No. 45 of his The North Briton in early 1763. During a search authorised by a General warrant (possibly set up by Sandwich, who wanted to get rid of Wilkes), a version of The Essay on Woman was discovered set up on the press of a printer whom Wilkes had almost certainly used. The work was almost certainly principally written by Thomas Potter, and from internal evidence can be dated to around 1755. It was scurrilous, blasphemous, libellous, and bawdy, though not pornographic- still unquestionably illegal under the laws of the time, and the Government subsequently used it to drive Wilkes into exile. Between 1760 and 1765 Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea by Charles Johnstone was published. It contained stories easily identified with Medmenham, one in which Lord Sandwich was ridiculed as having mistaken a monkey for the Devil. This book sparked the association between the Medmenham Monks and the Hellfire Club. By this time, many of the Friars were either dead or too far away for the Club to continue as it did before. Medmenham was finished by 1766. . . . .
The West Wycombe Caves in which the Friars met are now a tourist site known as the "Hell Fire Caves"
--------------------------------
1746 -- Fanny Murray was the most famous and sought after prostitute in Britain. At just 17, she was famous and widely desired; one diary from the day records that "it was a vice not to be acquainted with Fanny; it was a crime not to toast her at every meal." She is even mentioned in the diaries of Giacomo Casanova as the guest of honour at a party held by the British Ambassador to Venice, John Murray (no relation) at his casino, and it has been suggested that she is at least in part an inspiration for Fanny Hill, which was published in 1749 at the height of her fame. She became mistress to a string of leading British politicians and celebrities, while her fashion sense — in particular, the broad-brimmed "Fanny Murray cap", supposedly invented to hide the imperfections of her "handsome though somewhat awry" face — became all the rage on the London scene. Her influence on the fashion of the era went so far that one essayist complained:
"If Fanny Murray chuses to vary the fashion of her apparel, immediately every Lucretia in town takes notice of the change, and modestlycopies the chaste original. If Fanny shews the coral centre of her snowy orbs—miss, to outstrip her, orders the stays to be cut an inch or two lower; and kindly displays the whole lovely circumference"
1750 (circa) -- The EoS takes on Fanny Murry as his Mistress. He has her painted nude and has the painting hung in his apartment. He also makes her the center of his many orgies, some with the Hellfire Club, the other with the Divan Club.
1753 (circa) -- Thomas Potter and John Wilkes, both Hellfire Club members, compose a poem about Fanny Murray, "Essay on Woman," as a ribald parody of Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man." It was apparently written only to be shown to other Hellfire Club members. Wilkes put it in his desk where it remained for a decade.
1757 -- Fanny Murray marries and becomes respectable for the second half of her life.
1758 (circa) -- A practical joke by Wilkes at one of the "Hellfire club" meetings greatly embarresses the EoS, resulting in a rift between the two.
1761 -- Wilkes, a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, was a follower of William Pitt, the Commoner.
1762 -- When the Scottish John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, came to head the government in 1762, Wilkes started a radical weekly publication, The North Briton, to attack him, using an anti-Scots tone. Typical of Wilkes, the title made satirical reference to the pro-government newspaper, The Briton, with "North Briton" referring to Scotland. Every issue of The North Briton was crowded with scandalous rumors and insults. Lord Egremont was "a weak, passionate, and insolent secretary of state," and Secretary of the Treasury Samuel Martin was "the most treacherous, base, selfish, mean, abject, low-lived and dirty fellow, that ever wriggled himself into a secretaryship."
Bute, Wilkes's favorite target, was supposed to be Jacobite and involved in an affair with the king's mother. The North Briton No. 5 tells the story of Roger de Mortimer, the manipulative regent during Edward III's minority, who was the lover of the Queen Mother Isabella. No one could miss the parallels with Bute. Wilkes so enjoyed the story that he published an edition of an old play, The Fall of Mortimer, with a satirical dedication to his lordship: "History does not furnish a more striking contrast than there is between the two ministers in the reigns of Edward the Third and George the Third." He went on to offer ironic praise of Bute's talent as an actor, particularly in "the scene in Hamlet where you pour fatal poison into the ear of a good, unsuspecting King." Each week more abuse spewed forth. Despite, or perhaps because of, the recklessly down-and-dirty tone, The North Briton sold 2,000 copies a week—nearly ten times the circulation of The Briton. As Wilkes's biographer Charles Chevenix Trench notes, "Wilkes made Bute the most hated Minister the country had known."
1763 April 23 -- Wilkes became particularly incensed by what he regarded as Bute's betrayal in agreeing to overly generous peace terms with France to end the war. George III issues a speech endorsing the Paris Peace Treaty of 1763 at the opening of Parliament. Wilkes attacked the speech, written by Bute, in issue 45 of The North Briton. Wilkes was highly critical of both Bute and, crossing a line, the King. The issue number in which Wilkes published his critical editorial was appropriate because the number 45 was synonymous with the Jacobite Rising of 1745, commonly known as "The '45". Popular perception associated Bute – Scottish, and politically controversial as an adviser to the King – with Jacobitism, a perception which Wilkes played on.
The North Briton No. 45 appeared April 23, 1763. To modern eyes, it doesn't appear especially incendiary—no more rough-and-tumble than most political pamphlets of the day. But Wilkes had crossed a line. It was a strict rule that the king was above reproach, and that only his ministers could be criticized. In No. 45 Wilkes began by playing this game, insisting, "The King's Speech has always been considered . . . as the Speech of the Minister." But with passages like this, Wilkes left little doubt that the king himself was the target:
A despotic minister will always endeavour to dazzle the prince with high flown ideas of the prerogative and honour of the crown. I wish as much any man in the kingdom to see the honour of the crown maintained in a manner truly becoming Royalty. I lament to see it sunk even to prostitution.Such sentiments were in keeping with one of his antimonarchical witticisms. When asked to join in a game of cards, he said, "Dear lady, do not ask me. I am so ignorant that I cannot tell a King from a knave"—an astonishingly daring wisecrack in an era when the mildest criticism of the monarch could mean a charge of treason.
George III was furious, and ordered the arrest of the author of No. 45. The attorney general and the solicitor general were asked whether the paper warranted prosecution. April 27 they announced their opinion—it was seditious libel, designed to turn public opinion against the king—and drew up a warrant for his arrest.
1763 April 30 -- Wilkes is charged with seditious libel. The King felt personally insulted and ordered the issuing of general warrants for the arrest of Wilkes and the publishers on 30 April 1763. Forty-nine people, most innocent, are arrested and their homes, etc. searched, including Wilkes, were arrested, but general warrants were unpopular and Wilkes gained considerable popular support as he asserted their unconstitutionality. At his court hearing he claimed that parliamentary privilege protected him, as an MP, from arrest on a charge of libel. The Lord Chief Justice ruled that parliamentary privilege did indeed protect him and he was soon restored to his seat. Wilkes sued his arresters for trespass. As a result of this episode, people were chanting, "Wilkes, Liberty and Number 45", referring to the newspaper. Parliament swiftly voted in a measure that removed protection of MPs from arrest for the writing and publishing of seditious libel.
The prosecution, though, made procedural blunders that Wilkes used to his advantage. First, they issued a general warrant, which named "the authors, printers, and publishers, of a seditious and treasonable paper intitled 'the North Briton, number xlv,'" but gave no names. General warrants were of dubious legality, since they authorized the king's officers to seize anyone they suspected. Forty-nine people, most of them innocent, were arrested. More troublesome for the government, Wilkes claimed parliamentary privilege: as a member of the House of Commons, he was immune from arrest for anything short of treason or breach of the peace.
A series of trials began to consider the legal and procedural questions. Wilkes adored the limelight. Before a large crowd in the Court of Common Pleas, he said his case would "teach ministers of arbitrary principles, that the liberty of an English subject is not to be sported away with impunity, in this cruel and despotic manner." His trial, he said, would "determine at once whether English liberty be a reality or a shadow." Wilkes prevailed: the court ruled that he was exempt from prosecution and that the general warrant was invalid. The precedent is still cited in American courts.
Energized by Wilkes's victory, the others scooped up by the general warrant sued the government—an unprecedented action—and won, precipitating what scholar Arthur Cash calls "a momentous shift in the locus of power in government" from the privileged to the masses. Soon cries of "Wilkes and Liberty!" were heard across London, and the author of No. 45 embodied a movement of revolt against the government. The number 45 became a symbol of radical politics: one liberty-loving parson delivered a sermon on the forty-fifth verse of Psalm 119, "I will walk in Liberty, for I keep thy precepts."
______________________
June 1763 - Wilkes' Case (Wilkes v. Wood, 98 Eng. Rep. 489 (C.B. 1763))
. . . Serjeant Glynn, then enlarged fully, on the particular circumstances of the case, but remarked that the case extended far beyond Mr. Wilkes personally, that it touched the liberty of every subject of this country, and if found to be legal, would shake that most precious inheritance of Englishmen. In vain has our house been declared, by the law, our asylum and defence, if it is capable of being entered, upon any frivolous or no pretence at all, by a Secretary of State. Mr. Wilkes, unconvicted of any offence, has undergone the punishment. That of all offences that of a seizure of papers was the least capable of reparation; that, for other offences, an acknowledgement might make amends; but that for the promulgation of our most private concerns, affairs of the most secret personal nature, no reparation whatsoever could be made.
. . . Serjeant Glynn, then enlarged fully, on the particular circumstances of the case, but remarked that the case extended far beyond Mr. Wilkes personally, that it touched the liberty of every subject of this country, and if found to be legal, would shake that most precious inheritance of Englishmen. In vain has our house been declared, by the law, our asylum and defence, if it is capable of being entered, upon any frivolous or no pretence at all, by a Secretary of State. Mr. Wilkes, unconvicted of any offence, has undergone the punishment. That of all offences that of a seizure of papers was the least capable of reparation; that, for other offences, an acknowledgement might make amends; but that for the promulgation of our most private concerns, affairs of the most secret personal nature, no reparation whatsoever could be made.
That the law never admits of a general search-warrant. That in France, or Spain, even in the Inquisition itself, they never delegate all infinite power to search, and that no magistrate is capable of delegating any such power.
That some papers, quite innocent in themselves, might, by the slightest alteration, be converted to criminal action. Mr. Wilkes, as a member of Parliament, demanded the more caution to be used, with regard to the seizure of his papers, as it might have been naturally supposed, that one of the legislative body might have papers of a national concern, not proper to be exposed to every eye. When we consider the persons concerned in this affair, it ceases to be an outrage to Mr. Wilkes personally, it is an outrage to the constitution itself. That Mr. Wood had talked highly of the power of a Secretary of State; but he hoped by the verdict he would he brought to think more meanly of it. That if the warrants were once found to be legal, it would fling our liberties into a very unequal ballance. That the constitution of our country had been so fatally wounded, [3] that it called aloud for the redress of a jury of Englishmen. That their resentment against such proceedings was to be expressed by large and exemplary damages; that trifling damages would put no stop at all to such proceedings: which would plainly appear, when they would consider the persons concerned in the present prosecution, persons, who by their duty and office should have been the protectors of the constitution, instead of the violators of it.
Mr. Eyre, the Recorder of Loudon, then stood up: he apologized to the Bench for appearing in the present cause, considering the office be bore, but that he thought it was a cause which affected the liberty of every individual.
The Lord Chief Justice desired he would make no apology. He then observed, that the present cause chiefly turned upon the general question, whether a Secretary of State has. a power to force persons houses, break open their locks, seize their papers, &c. upon a bare suspicion of a libel by a general warrant, without name of the person charged, A strange question, to be agitated in these days, when the constitution is so well fixed, when we have a prince upon the throne, whose virtues are so great and amiable, and whose regard for the subject is such, that he must frown at every incroachment upon their liberty. Nothing can be more unjust in itself, than that the proof of a man's guilt shall be extracted from his own bosom. No legal authority, in the present case, to justify the action. No precedents, no legal determinations, not an Act of Parliament itself, is sufficient to warrant any proceeding contrary to the spirit of the constitution. . . .
----
Mr. Eyre, the Recorder of Loudon, then stood up: he apologized to the Bench for appearing in the present cause, considering the office be bore, but that he thought it was a cause which affected the liberty of every individual.
The Lord Chief Justice desired he would make no apology. He then observed, that the present cause chiefly turned upon the general question, whether a Secretary of State has. a power to force persons houses, break open their locks, seize their papers, &c. upon a bare suspicion of a libel by a general warrant, without name of the person charged, A strange question, to be agitated in these days, when the constitution is so well fixed, when we have a prince upon the throne, whose virtues are so great and amiable, and whose regard for the subject is such, that he must frown at every incroachment upon their liberty. Nothing can be more unjust in itself, than that the proof of a man's guilt shall be extracted from his own bosom. No legal authority, in the present case, to justify the action. No precedents, no legal determinations, not an Act of Parliament itself, is sufficient to warrant any proceeding contrary to the spirit of the constitution. . . .
----
The jury found for Wilkes and ordered 1,000 pounds in damages.
One of the dragon’s teethJust the same, Wilkes deserves his place in the pantheon of those British writers (such as Thomas Paine, William Cobbett and Richard Carlile) who risked much to declare freedom of expression a human right. He was a worthy successor to the poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1606-74) who had penned the most famous argument in English for the liberty of speech and publication. In his Areopagitica (1664), Milton wrote of books and their significance in words that have resonated down the centuries:
I know they are lively, and vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost to kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.
Wilkes and the generation of editors and writers who followed him took Milton's words as their creed. The issue which Milton raised, which Wilkes and others fought for, is of course as alive in the 21st century as it was then: censorship is in the air we breath. Governments are as scared of exposure as ever.
After Leveson, we are witness to the freedom of the British press being placed under the interdict of a royal charter, a move not greeted by street protests but with public complacency, yet a blow to liberty of expression that would have had Wilkes roaring his protest, not sparing his tabloid vitriol, and railing at privilege, secrecy and a raft of censorial legislation; but not, readers, censorship by royal charter.
--------------------------------
15 Nov. 1763 -- Obscenity and Blasphemy Charges:
In 1752, Wilkes had met Thomas Potter, the fashionable and debauched son of the Archbishop of Canterbury who is chiefly remembered for a an act of bestiality. Although Wilkes was never the vulgarian rake that Potter certainly was, he briefly became Wilkes’ political mentor as the second MP for Aylesbury. More fatefully, apart from politics, Potter’s other hobby was the young wife of a Dr William Warburton, who owned the rights to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man.
A combination of beer and loathing inspired Potter to begin an obscene parody, An Essay on Woman, including mock footnotes to satirise Warburton’s pompous annotations to the original. It has been called the dirtiest poem in the English language,[1] and when Wilkes inherited the manuscript on Potter’s death in 1759, he modified and completed it.
It appears that Wilkes conceived the idea of a private print-run for the amusement of like-minded friends while with the militia in Wiltshire in 1762. Certainly he got as far as designing a particularly eye-watering image for the frontispiece and coming up with the fictional name Borewell for the author – not only for the double entendre but also to mock Welbore Ellis, the other MP for Aylesbury and a follower of Lord Bute. At the time, however, he could not find a printer willing to take on the job.
A year later, following famous the raid on his house on April 30th 1763 after the publication of Number 45, the manuscript was taken by the King’s Messengers, Carterett-Webb and Stanhope. Fearing that they would publish it and reveal him as the author in order to put him on the wrong side of the law, Wilkes lighted on one of those ideas whose chutzpah amounting almost to genius so characterised the man and which will always endear him to us despite all his manifest faults – he put this notice in the Public Advertiser:
“Speedily will be published by Philip Carterett Webb and Lovel Stanhope, Esqrs, An Essay on Woman.”
Nobody alive would have dared publish the Essay while their names were linked to it in the public domain, and indeed the manuscript was returned to him along with his other effects – but without the title page or a series of letters referring to it.
It was at this point that he made “the mistake of his life”:[2] as the printers for the North Briton were hanging around with nothing to do in the aftermath of the Number 45, he instructed them to run up twelve or thirteen printed versions of the Essay for his friends in the Medmenham Hellfire Club. Rather like Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library or the Clay Sanskrit Library, Pope’s original was to be printed on one side and the parody on the other, so that they could be compared line by line.
The work was never entirely completed, so only fragments remain – which is probably just as well – although one completed section certainly included a libellous if remarkably well-turned couplet about Lord Bute’s anatomy. Nevertheless, through a serpentine and bizarre series of events, including being used to wrap somebody’s lunch, part of the print-run made its way into the possession of an anti-Wilkite publisher called McFaden and thence to the Secretaries of State. Once again turning to Carterett-Webb, they set about to prosecute Wilkes for blasphemy and libel: because it was now printed, and not merely the manuscript which Carterett-Webb had seen before, he now sought to make the case that Wilkes had ‘published’ the work, transforming it from a perfectly legal private document into an libellous public one.
The state, meanwhile, reached for those charming tools with which, in the modern world, we are once again familiar. Not content with merely using the Essay as “the basis of a character assassination of Wilkes for attacking the King’s government”,[3] it bribed, bullied and intimidated a printer called Michael Curry into handing over the proofs and testifying against Wilkes, and Lord Sandwich, now Secretary of State, tried to use the issue to blackmail Wilkes into giving up his civil rights litigation against the government, offering to drop any actions over the Essay if he desisted, which Wilkes immediately refused.
Going still further, Carterett-Webb inserted a forged line into the final stanza of a particularly obscene section – the subtle addition of a reference to the Holy Trinity transformed the piece from merely smutty into blasphemous. To complete the picture of paranoid overreaction by a frightened government, the ministry caused Faden to print two more copies of the Essay to give a false impression of wider publication.
The minister devised a two-pronged attack: Wilkes would be tried in the House of Commons for libelling the King in Number 45, and in the House of Lords for libelling Warburton, now sitting in that rarefied chamber as Bishop of Gloucester. On November 15th 1763, therefore, Sandwich proceeded to read out the poem in the House of Lords, causing a sensation in which one peer nearly fainted.
The sight of Lord Sandwich, one of the most prominent whoremongers and vulgarians of the period, abusing the poem for obscenity was so absurd that Lord Le Despenser, no longer a friend to Wilkes by this time, noted that he “never before heard the devil preach a sermon against sin”. Sandwich, in fact, had his own agenda: “Apart from the obvious political motives of pleasing his sovereign and winning his ministerial spurs, there was the personal incentive of the discovery among the Wilkes papers…of a ribald lampoon on himself”,[4] thus following in the great tradition of impartial parliamentary statesmanship.
Still, as this was the eighteenth century and therefore excellent, many noble lords cried for the poetry recital to continue, and nearly drowned out the squeaking Warburton with laughter, not least because they knew very well that the poem had been started by Potter to amuse himself in between bouts with the bishop’s wife.
In spite of this absurdity and the turpitude of the ministry’s methods, the motions against Wilkes carried in both Houses. Not that it did them any good in the country – as Horace Walpole noted:
“The plot so hopefully laid to blow up Wilkes was so gross and scandalous, so revengeful and so totally unconnected with the political conduct of Wilkes, and the instruments so despicable, odious, or in whom any pretentions to decency, sanctimony or faith were so presposterous that, losing all sight of the scandal contained in the poem, the whole world almost united in crying out against the informers.”
Indeed, it was at this point that the London mob famously prevented the public hangman from ceremonially burning Number 45, instead burning effigies of the Prime Minister.
-----------------------------------
Wilkes' plea for liberty was for all, not just the privileged and the educated:
My lords, the liberty of all peers and gentlemen and, what touches me more sensibly, that of all the middling and inferior set of people, who stand in most need of protection, is in my case this day to be finally decided upon a question of such importance as to determine at once whether English Liberty shall be a reality or a shadow.
At the first court hearing in Westminster Hall a huge audience composed of supporters from the City cheered Wilkes to the rafters when he announced that the liberty of an Englishman 'should not be sported away with impunity'. As he left the court, the air rang with the call, 'Liberty, Liberty, Wilkes for ever!'
A public burningThe government shifted its ground. A proof copy of part of an Essay on Women by Wilkes was obtained and judged by the House of Lords a 'most scandalous, obscene and impious libel'. Wilkes was in the dock now for two publications. Following a Commons vote of 273 to 111, No.45 was condemned to be publicly burnt by the official hangman at Royal Exchange.
It was a bitter December day, just right for a bonfire of 'false, scandalous and seditious libel'. As the sheriffs arrived at Cornhill a vast crowd of the 'middling and inferior' blocked the way. The fire party turned on its heels and the crowd – so the story goes – rescued the North Briton from destruction by urinating on the flames.
Such were the attempts by government to destroy Wilkes that he went into exile. The Annual Register wrote of the 'ruin of that unfortunate man'; a little prematurely because Wilkes returned to London in 1768 and was hero of the capital. He was returned as MP for Middlesex.
Light you your windowsThere followed two days of joyous celebration which included the chalking of 'No.45' on every door from Temple Bar to Hyde Park Corner and a demand for those who supported Wilkes and his cause to light up their windows at night in celebration. The Austrian ambassador was dragged from his coach and had 'No.45' chalked on the soles of his boots.
Heady days! There was, of course, much smashing of windows. In terror at what was happening when a huge assembly waited to greet Wilkes in St. George's Fields, the government ordered the presence of troops. Several volleys were fired, leaving eleven dead.
The story of Wilkes suggests a more complicated popular response than merely that of calling for Liberty. Wilkes himself was prone to journalistic exaggeration. 'English liberties' were as much in his head – he was from a wealthy and privileged family – as identifiable in the real world, and much of the tenor of his support was characterised by a harsh, chauvinist nationalism: after all, No.45 was attacking a peace initiative rather than urging peace not war.
A public burningThe government shifted its ground. A proof copy of part of an Essay on Women by Wilkes was obtained and judged by the House of Lords a 'most scandalous, obscene and impious libel'. Wilkes was in the dock now for two publications. Following a Commons vote of 273 to 111, No.45 was condemned to be publicly burnt by the official hangman at Royal Exchange.
It was a bitter December day, just right for a bonfire of 'false, scandalous and seditious libel'. As the sheriffs arrived at Cornhill a vast crowd of the 'middling and inferior' blocked the way. The fire party turned on its heels and the crowd – so the story goes – rescued the North Briton from destruction by urinating on the flames.
Such were the attempts by government to destroy Wilkes that he went into exile. The Annual Register wrote of the 'ruin of that unfortunate man'; a little prematurely because Wilkes returned to London in 1768 and was hero of the capital. He was returned as MP for Middlesex.
Light you your windowsThere followed two days of joyous celebration which included the chalking of 'No.45' on every door from Temple Bar to Hyde Park Corner and a demand for those who supported Wilkes and his cause to light up their windows at night in celebration. The Austrian ambassador was dragged from his coach and had 'No.45' chalked on the soles of his boots.
Heady days! There was, of course, much smashing of windows. In terror at what was happening when a huge assembly waited to greet Wilkes in St. George's Fields, the government ordered the presence of troops. Several volleys were fired, leaving eleven dead.
The story of Wilkes suggests a more complicated popular response than merely that of calling for Liberty. Wilkes himself was prone to journalistic exaggeration. 'English liberties' were as much in his head – he was from a wealthy and privileged family – as identifiable in the real world, and much of the tenor of his support was characterised by a harsh, chauvinist nationalism: after all, No.45 was attacking a peace initiative rather than urging peace not war.
One of the dragon’s teethJust the same, Wilkes deserves his place in the pantheon of those British writers (such as Thomas Paine, William Cobbett and Richard Carlile) who risked much to declare freedom of expression a human right. He was a worthy successor to the poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1606-74) who had penned the most famous argument in English for the liberty of speech and publication. In his Areopagitica (1664), Milton wrote of books and their significance in words that have resonated down the centuries:
I know they are lively, and vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost to kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.
Wilkes and the generation of editors and writers who followed him took Milton's words as their creed. The issue which Milton raised, which Wilkes and others fought for, is of course as alive in the 21st century as it was then: censorship is in the air we breath. Governments are as scared of exposure as ever.
After Leveson, we are witness to the freedom of the British press being placed under the interdict of a royal charter, a move not greeted by street protests but with public complacency, yet a blow to liberty of expression that would have had Wilkes roaring his protest, not sparing his tabloid vitriol, and railing at privilege, secrecy and a raft of censorial legislation; but not, readers, censorship by royal charter.
--------------------------------
1765 - The simultaneous law suits in the aftermath of Number 45 – most famously Entick v Carrington (analysis here) – had put an end to general warrants and arbitrary arrests,
Parliament contrived in this way, by circumventing the courts and the jury system, to cause Wilkes to flee to France on December 23rd 1763, where he would remain in exile for five years until his triumphant return in 1768 to set the establishment on its head again in the Middlesex election controversy.
Shortly before his twenty-two-month prison term ended, Wilkes was made a City of London alderman. In 1771 he became sheriff of London and Middlesex, and in 1774 Lord Mayor of London. Three weeks later he was elected once again to Parliament for Middlesex, and finally—on his fifth election to the seat—he was allowed to serve. He remained in the House of Commons sixteen years.
Wilkes's fame spread far beyond London: his bitterest wrangles with the government were in the 1760s and 1770s, just as British subjects in America were engaged in their own disputes with the king's government. Like Wilkes, the colonists resented the general warrants used against them, and they demanded the right to name their representatives. They saw in him a champion of the powerless against the privileged. As historian Pauline Maier has written, "In the years between 1768 and 1770 no English political figure evoked more enthusiasm in America than the radical John Wilkes."
Colonial newspapers buzzed with information about the persecuted friend of liberty. American support was not universal—Benjamin Franklin said Wilkes was "an outlaw . . . of bad personal character, not worth a farthing"—but in many liberty-loving circles he was a hero.
Shortly before his twenty-two-month prison term ended, Wilkes was made a City of London alderman. In 1771 he became sheriff of London and Middlesex, and in 1774 Lord Mayor of London. Three weeks later he was elected once again to Parliament for Middlesex, and finally—on his fifth election to the seat—he was allowed to serve. He remained in the House of Commons sixteen years.
Wilkes's fame spread far beyond London: his bitterest wrangles with the government were in the 1760s and 1770s, just as British subjects in America were engaged in their own disputes with the king's government. Like Wilkes, the colonists resented the general warrants used against them, and they demanded the right to name their representatives. They saw in him a champion of the powerless against the privileged. As historian Pauline Maier has written, "In the years between 1768 and 1770 no English political figure evoked more enthusiasm in America than the radical John Wilkes."
Colonial newspapers buzzed with information about the persecuted friend of liberty. American support was not universal—Benjamin Franklin said Wilkes was "an outlaw . . . of bad personal character, not worth a farthing"—but in many liberty-loving circles he was a hero.
Petitions and letters in his favor were signed by James Otis, John Adams, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock. Arthur Lee, a Virginian and a law student living in London, visited Wilkes in prison in 1768 and became an ardent supporter.
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Wilkesboro, North Carolina, took their names from the author of No. 45. Citizens of Virginia and Maryland resolved to send Wilkes forty-five hogsheads of tobacco, and forty-five women in Lexington, Massachusetts, joined to spin American linen to protest British policies.
When news of Wilkes's release from prison reached Charleston, Club Forty-Five met at 7:45, drank forty-five toasts, and adjourned at 12:45. Sometimes the adulation was almost religious. Britannia's Intercession for the Deliverance of John Wilkes, Esq., from Persecution and Banishment included an imitation of the Apostle's Creed:
Late in life his radical reputation began to fade: perhaps inevitably, the young firebrand became something of an establishment figure. When a woman cried "Wilkes and Liberty!" to the elder statesman, he said, "That's all over long ago." And by the 1780s, Americans had their own national concerns; all things British—even British radicals—declined in importance. Some have suggested that his principles were never sincere, that he was a corrupt and snobbish attention grabber who bought his way into Parliament and cynically manipulated the public for his own ends.
His legacy was important and lasting. He showed by example that the traditional relationship between governors and the governed could be more equitable. He taught people on both sides of the Atlantic about their rights, and showed them how to use the courts and public opinion to redress grievances. His electoral battles influenced the framers of the United States Constitution, who wrote articles explicitly spelling out the qualifications for election to offices. Whether he remained committed to the cause, whether his rhetoric was ever entirely heartfelt, his eloquent defense of the people's right to direct their own affairs rang true for a new radical generation.Whatever his motivation, he seems to have been a genuine convert to populist democracy. His record in Parliament is among the most progressive of his age. He introduced a bill to bring about "just and equal representation of the people of England in parliament," doing away with the rotten boroughs and the limitation of the franchise to property owners—a reform that had to wait more than half a century. He defended religious liberty, prisoners' rights, and freedom of the press. Mindful of his supporters across the Atlantic, he denounced the Declaratory and Townshend Acts and never stopped criticizing the war on America as "unjust, felonious and murderous." His arguments rarely carried the day in Parliament, but his failures may have been as important for America as his successes. Historians have argued that Wilkes's thwarted attempt to represent Middlesex was a turning point in American dealings with Britain. The government's behavior persuaded the colonists that the system was damaged beyond repair, that liberty meant nothing to the king, and that a solution would be found only in their own nation.
--------------------------------------------------
John Wilkes: the Truth, the Filth, and the Birth of the Fourth Estate
Wilkes inhabited a world where the reporting of parliament had long been forbidden. In the 16th century Commons rules stipulated that all its proceedings should remain secret – but it was not the public MPs were wary of then, it was the monarch. Parliament simply could not debate freely under the gaze of the crowned head they were so often at odds with. The privacy of parliament was thus accepted and largely respected. But by the early 18th century, too much had changed for this principle to remain unchallenged.
This was the age of Enlightenment and independent thinking was in the ascendant, particularly in Britain where the divine right of monarchs had been dispensed with. Authority was under attack from the savage pen of Swift and the vicious pencil of Hogarth; Alexander Pope took pride in being ‘indebted to no prince or peer alive’; while Voltaire, exiled from absolutist France, claimed to ‘think and write like a free Englishman.’ There were economic changes too. A new class of prosperous merchants and tradesmen, the ‘middling sort’, had interests that clashed with those of the landed gentry which dominated parliament. And there was already some press freedom: the abandonment of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that anyone was free to publish pamphlets and newspapers. These were read in coffeehouses – often out loud for the benefit of the illiterate – and all the issues of the day were vigorously discussed and disputed. Yet the reporting of parliament remained forbidden.
MPs had little to fear from their tame new Hanoverian monarchy, but they were very concerned now about a new beast – the ‘public opinion’. Horace Walpole’s administration was founded on palm-greasing and nepotism and would not have stood up very well to public scrutiny. But hard as parliament tried to prevent it, their activities were being reported in the plethora of unlicensed publications eager to cater to a news-hungry audience. There was nothing to stop a reporter entering the Strangers’ Gallery in the Commons, and if he heard anything worth writing up, his paper might well be inclined to take the risk of publishing it, often thinly disguised as fiction. Walpole responded by buying out a good number of newspapers, but he found that it was impossible to keep a lid on things. MPs tried a legal crackdown in 1738, with a resolution to proceed ‘with the utmost severity against offenders’. During the Commons debate on the motion, it was noted by William Pulteney that: ‘To print or publish the speeches of gentlemen in this House looks very like making them accountable without doors for what they say within.’ The irony was that his words were widely reported, to the righteous indignation of the public, and the impotent fury of MPs. A confrontation seemed inevitable, and the man who lit the tinder was John Wilkes.
Wilkes was a member of the infamous Hellfire Club, which held its meetings in a complex of man-made underground caves in High Wycombe. It was a gentlemen’s club in which the gentlemen would dress as monks and engage in occult orgies with prostitutes dressed as nuns. Wilkes, on one occasion, was said to have introduced a baboon into the proceedings. He had his own printing press which he would use to run off radical journalism and pornographic literature. Known for being the ugliest man in England, and for his ability to charm birds from trees, ‘man of the people’ Wilkes was also a Whig MP with a large popular power base.
Wilkes’s newspaper was called the North Briton and its first edition, published in 1762, staked out its position very clearly:
The liberty of the press is the birthright of a Briton, and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of this country. It has been the terror of all bad ministers; for their dark and dangerous designs, or their weakness, inability and duplicity, have thus been detected and shewn to the public...
Events would prove this statement to be a milestone in the journey of British democracy. It is commonly held now that our legislators’ business is our business too, and that it ought to be monitored and held to account. But in Wilkes’s day such ideas were new and radical. This was, in fact, fighting talk.
The North Briton was hated and feared by MPs, but it must be said that this was not only because Wilkes endeavoured to wield the sword of truth against them. He also used his paper to pursue personal vendettas, and his weapons were often innuendo, invective and a devil-may-care attitude towards facts. He once told Adam Smith: ‘Give me a grain of truth and I will mix it up with a great mass of falsehood so that no chemist will ever be able to separate them.’ Wilkes’s free press manifesto might have been full of ringing high principle, but his own journalism was very well acquainted with the gutter, and he made no bones about it.
It was in 1763 that the North Briton provoked a major confrontation. Issue No 45 contained an attack on a speech made by King George III, and Wilkes was accused of seditious libel. He was arrested, along with fifty of his associates, and locked up in the Tower. No 45 was ordered to be burned in public by the common hangman, but a large crowd shouting the slogan ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ descended on the ceremony, breaking it up riotously and snatching the papers from the flames. Wilkes was soon released from the Tower having claimed parliamentary privilege, but this did not render him immune from affairs of honour. He was called out by a loyal supporter of the King and shot, though not fatally, in the ensuing duel. Meanwhile the Earl of Sandwich, one of Wilkes’s bitterest enemies, had got his hands on an obscene poem that Wilkes had published privately and read it out in the House of Lords. The scandalised peers moved to expel Wilkes from parliament on the grounds of obscene libel. This would, of course, strip him of his immunity, and he pre-empted their decision by escaping to Paris. Wilkes was tried in absentia and declared an outlaw.
Riot at the burning of No 45
He would be back though, with a vengeance. In 1768 financial pressures compelled his return to England, and over the next few years, he was returned to parliament again, expelled again, imprisoned again, all before being elected as a sheriff of London. Armed with powers of jurisdiction and arrest himself now, Wilkes was prepared for a truly decisive showdown with the forces of censorship. This came in 1771.
18th century parliamentarians were not just averse to having their affairs exposed, they also disliked being personally lampooned. George Onslow MP was frequently referred to as ‘little cocking George’ in the papers, because of his fondness for cock-fighting. Goaded into declaring, ‘I am a cock they will not easily beat,’ he called for the printers of this impertinence to be arrested. Wilkes made his move, arresting the printers himself before parliament could get to them, then declaring them innocent and letting them go. When parliament sent out an officer to try again, Wilkes arrested him too. This led to yet more arrests and the incarceration of two of Wilkes’s associates in the Tower. But parliament had underestimated the burgeoning confidence of a newly political public. 50,000 Wilkes supporters besieged the Commons, setting about the arriving MPs and destroying the carriages they came in. The prime minister himself, Lord North, was dragged from his carriage, roughed up and driven off in tears without his hat. Meanwhile, on Tower Hill, effigies of establishment hate figures were being beheaded and burned in the name of free speech. Discretion proved the better part of valour for Lord North and his fellow MPs: they released Wilkes’s associates and ordered no more arrests of printers. Although the ban on reporting parliament technically remained in place, it was never again enforced. Wilkes had his victory.
The British constitution, such as it is, had traditionally rested on the division of powers between three estates: the Crown, the Lords and the Commons. But two generations after Wilkes, Thomas Macaulay wrote: ‘The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm… a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount to all the rest put together.’ By this measure, our debt to John Wilkes is an immense one. He was a libertine, a blackguard and an outlaw – he positively reveled in all that – but he is also a pivotal figure and a hero of the British press, if there are any. But his name is hardly known today, and it was not until 1988 that a statue was erected to him in London, on Fetter Lane. This was recently incorporated into the Talking Statues project, so visitors can now treat themselves to a caustic Wilkes monologue issuing from the very bronze, and voiced by none other than Jeremy Paxman. It is a welcome memorial to the man, but less than he is due.
I believe in Wilkes, the firm patriot, maker of number 45. Who was born for our good. Suffered under arbitrary power. Was banished and imprisoned. He descended into purgatory, and returned some time after. He ascended here with honour and sitteth amidst the great assembly of the people, where he shall judge both the favourite and his creatures. I believe in the spirit of his abilities, that they will prove to the good of our country. In the resurrection of liberty, and the life of universal freedom forever. Amen.
Late in life his radical reputation began to fade: perhaps inevitably, the young firebrand became something of an establishment figure. When a woman cried "Wilkes and Liberty!" to the elder statesman, he said, "That's all over long ago." And by the 1780s, Americans had their own national concerns; all things British—even British radicals—declined in importance. Some have suggested that his principles were never sincere, that he was a corrupt and snobbish attention grabber who bought his way into Parliament and cynically manipulated the public for his own ends.
His legacy was important and lasting. He showed by example that the traditional relationship between governors and the governed could be more equitable. He taught people on both sides of the Atlantic about their rights, and showed them how to use the courts and public opinion to redress grievances. His electoral battles influenced the framers of the United States Constitution, who wrote articles explicitly spelling out the qualifications for election to offices. Whether he remained committed to the cause, whether his rhetoric was ever entirely heartfelt, his eloquent defense of the people's right to direct their own affairs rang true for a new radical generation.Whatever his motivation, he seems to have been a genuine convert to populist democracy. His record in Parliament is among the most progressive of his age. He introduced a bill to bring about "just and equal representation of the people of England in parliament," doing away with the rotten boroughs and the limitation of the franchise to property owners—a reform that had to wait more than half a century. He defended religious liberty, prisoners' rights, and freedom of the press. Mindful of his supporters across the Atlantic, he denounced the Declaratory and Townshend Acts and never stopped criticizing the war on America as "unjust, felonious and murderous." His arguments rarely carried the day in Parliament, but his failures may have been as important for America as his successes. Historians have argued that Wilkes's thwarted attempt to represent Middlesex was a turning point in American dealings with Britain. The government's behavior persuaded the colonists that the system was damaged beyond repair, that liberty meant nothing to the king, and that a solution would be found only in their own nation.
--------------------------------------------------
John Wilkes: the Truth, the Filth, and the Birth of the Fourth Estate
Wilkes inhabited a world where the reporting of parliament had long been forbidden. In the 16th century Commons rules stipulated that all its proceedings should remain secret – but it was not the public MPs were wary of then, it was the monarch. Parliament simply could not debate freely under the gaze of the crowned head they were so often at odds with. The privacy of parliament was thus accepted and largely respected. But by the early 18th century, too much had changed for this principle to remain unchallenged.
This was the age of Enlightenment and independent thinking was in the ascendant, particularly in Britain where the divine right of monarchs had been dispensed with. Authority was under attack from the savage pen of Swift and the vicious pencil of Hogarth; Alexander Pope took pride in being ‘indebted to no prince or peer alive’; while Voltaire, exiled from absolutist France, claimed to ‘think and write like a free Englishman.’ There were economic changes too. A new class of prosperous merchants and tradesmen, the ‘middling sort’, had interests that clashed with those of the landed gentry which dominated parliament. And there was already some press freedom: the abandonment of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that anyone was free to publish pamphlets and newspapers. These were read in coffeehouses – often out loud for the benefit of the illiterate – and all the issues of the day were vigorously discussed and disputed. Yet the reporting of parliament remained forbidden.
MPs had little to fear from their tame new Hanoverian monarchy, but they were very concerned now about a new beast – the ‘public opinion’. Horace Walpole’s administration was founded on palm-greasing and nepotism and would not have stood up very well to public scrutiny. But hard as parliament tried to prevent it, their activities were being reported in the plethora of unlicensed publications eager to cater to a news-hungry audience. There was nothing to stop a reporter entering the Strangers’ Gallery in the Commons, and if he heard anything worth writing up, his paper might well be inclined to take the risk of publishing it, often thinly disguised as fiction. Walpole responded by buying out a good number of newspapers, but he found that it was impossible to keep a lid on things. MPs tried a legal crackdown in 1738, with a resolution to proceed ‘with the utmost severity against offenders’. During the Commons debate on the motion, it was noted by William Pulteney that: ‘To print or publish the speeches of gentlemen in this House looks very like making them accountable without doors for what they say within.’ The irony was that his words were widely reported, to the righteous indignation of the public, and the impotent fury of MPs. A confrontation seemed inevitable, and the man who lit the tinder was John Wilkes.
Wilkes was a member of the infamous Hellfire Club, which held its meetings in a complex of man-made underground caves in High Wycombe. It was a gentlemen’s club in which the gentlemen would dress as monks and engage in occult orgies with prostitutes dressed as nuns. Wilkes, on one occasion, was said to have introduced a baboon into the proceedings. He had his own printing press which he would use to run off radical journalism and pornographic literature. Known for being the ugliest man in England, and for his ability to charm birds from trees, ‘man of the people’ Wilkes was also a Whig MP with a large popular power base.
Wilkes’s newspaper was called the North Briton and its first edition, published in 1762, staked out its position very clearly:
The liberty of the press is the birthright of a Briton, and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of this country. It has been the terror of all bad ministers; for their dark and dangerous designs, or their weakness, inability and duplicity, have thus been detected and shewn to the public...
Events would prove this statement to be a milestone in the journey of British democracy. It is commonly held now that our legislators’ business is our business too, and that it ought to be monitored and held to account. But in Wilkes’s day such ideas were new and radical. This was, in fact, fighting talk.
The North Briton was hated and feared by MPs, but it must be said that this was not only because Wilkes endeavoured to wield the sword of truth against them. He also used his paper to pursue personal vendettas, and his weapons were often innuendo, invective and a devil-may-care attitude towards facts. He once told Adam Smith: ‘Give me a grain of truth and I will mix it up with a great mass of falsehood so that no chemist will ever be able to separate them.’ Wilkes’s free press manifesto might have been full of ringing high principle, but his own journalism was very well acquainted with the gutter, and he made no bones about it.
It was in 1763 that the North Briton provoked a major confrontation. Issue No 45 contained an attack on a speech made by King George III, and Wilkes was accused of seditious libel. He was arrested, along with fifty of his associates, and locked up in the Tower. No 45 was ordered to be burned in public by the common hangman, but a large crowd shouting the slogan ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ descended on the ceremony, breaking it up riotously and snatching the papers from the flames. Wilkes was soon released from the Tower having claimed parliamentary privilege, but this did not render him immune from affairs of honour. He was called out by a loyal supporter of the King and shot, though not fatally, in the ensuing duel. Meanwhile the Earl of Sandwich, one of Wilkes’s bitterest enemies, had got his hands on an obscene poem that Wilkes had published privately and read it out in the House of Lords. The scandalised peers moved to expel Wilkes from parliament on the grounds of obscene libel. This would, of course, strip him of his immunity, and he pre-empted their decision by escaping to Paris. Wilkes was tried in absentia and declared an outlaw.
Riot at the burning of No 45
He would be back though, with a vengeance. In 1768 financial pressures compelled his return to England, and over the next few years, he was returned to parliament again, expelled again, imprisoned again, all before being elected as a sheriff of London. Armed with powers of jurisdiction and arrest himself now, Wilkes was prepared for a truly decisive showdown with the forces of censorship. This came in 1771.
18th century parliamentarians were not just averse to having their affairs exposed, they also disliked being personally lampooned. George Onslow MP was frequently referred to as ‘little cocking George’ in the papers, because of his fondness for cock-fighting. Goaded into declaring, ‘I am a cock they will not easily beat,’ he called for the printers of this impertinence to be arrested. Wilkes made his move, arresting the printers himself before parliament could get to them, then declaring them innocent and letting them go. When parliament sent out an officer to try again, Wilkes arrested him too. This led to yet more arrests and the incarceration of two of Wilkes’s associates in the Tower. But parliament had underestimated the burgeoning confidence of a newly political public. 50,000 Wilkes supporters besieged the Commons, setting about the arriving MPs and destroying the carriages they came in. The prime minister himself, Lord North, was dragged from his carriage, roughed up and driven off in tears without his hat. Meanwhile, on Tower Hill, effigies of establishment hate figures were being beheaded and burned in the name of free speech. Discretion proved the better part of valour for Lord North and his fellow MPs: they released Wilkes’s associates and ordered no more arrests of printers. Although the ban on reporting parliament technically remained in place, it was never again enforced. Wilkes had his victory.
The British constitution, such as it is, had traditionally rested on the division of powers between three estates: the Crown, the Lords and the Commons. But two generations after Wilkes, Thomas Macaulay wrote: ‘The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm… a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount to all the rest put together.’ By this measure, our debt to John Wilkes is an immense one. He was a libertine, a blackguard and an outlaw – he positively reveled in all that – but he is also a pivotal figure and a hero of the British press, if there are any. But his name is hardly known today, and it was not until 1988 that a statue was erected to him in London, on Fetter Lane. This was recently incorporated into the Talking Statues project, so visitors can now treat themselves to a caustic Wilkes monologue issuing from the very bronze, and voiced by none other than Jeremy Paxman. It is a welcome memorial to the man, but less than he is due.
No comments:
Post a Comment