Volume 3, Chapter 18, Wilkes and Liberty, 1763-1764.
In June 1762, John Wilkes, a country squire who was High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire and
a member of Parliament, set up his weekly newspaper, The North Britain, in opposition
to the Tory-Bute regime in Great Britain.
The British took the Newcastle Whig line in opposition to the harshly expansionist peace
terms the British were exacting from the French, especially their insistence on ousting the
French completely from the North American continent.
At the end of December, the North Britain denounced the purge of the Newcastle Whigs
from the administration and called for a determined popular opposition to Tory rule.
Out of power for the first time in two generations, the disoriented Whigs polarized. The more
conservative moved to make their peace with the Tory administration. The younger and more
radical members, led by the young Marquis of Rockingham, formed an opposition club with
the tentative and worried blessing of Newcastle. On April 11, 1763, Lord Bute was driven from
From Office by the Revolt in Parliament Against the Tax on Cider, a revolt joined by Whigs
and West Country Tory gentlemen. With his old enemy Bute, ousted from office, John Wilkes
felt that his task was done, and he suspended publication of his radically liberal North
Britain. But the Tory regime continued virtually unchanged, and the King's speech at the opening
The Crown decided to take the opportunity to crack down on the annoying Wilkes as a
libeler of the King, and issued a general warrant for the arrest of everyone connected
with the publication of the seditious and treasonable North Britain. In doing so, the
Crown also hoped to discredit the opposition by associating them with a notorious rake in
libertine like Wilkes. Wilkes was summarily arrested, along with forty-eight others connected
with the publication of his journal, and sent to the Tower. Those most closely implicated
in the Crown's Decision, aside from Grenville and the King, were the powerful Secretaries
of State, Lords Egremont and Halifax, Charles Jenkinson the Secretary of Treasury, Jenkinson's
Council, Philip Cotterette Webb, and the Crown's Law Officers, Sir Fletcher Norton and the
Renegade Whig Attorney General, Charles York.
The Whigs were now placed squarely on the spot by the summary arrest of Wilkes in the suppression
of his paper. Wilkes's mentor and patron, Earl Temple, did not hesitate to rush to the
aid of his beleaguered friend. But what would Newcastle do? The aging Whig leader was beset
by conflicting advice on where he, and hence his party, should go. For on his position
in the Wilkes Affair rested the choice of whether the Whigs would subsist in moderate
and respectable dissent from the administration, or whether they would become a party in radical
opposition to the status quo in behalf of liberty.
The Whigs were again being polarized by the larger polarization occurring in England as
as a whole, between the aggressive Tory imperialist in power and the rising agitation of the people,
as expressed in the rebellion against the cider tax, for liberty, property, and no excise.
The younger and more ardent Whigs pressured Newcastle to declare for Wilkes. These liberals
These were led by Lord Hardwick, the father of York, who bitterly denounced Wilkes's audacious libel as not only unjustifiable, but indiscriminate.
Hardwick carefully concealed the secret role that he himself had played in the affair when
he had advised the Crown to proceed with the stamping out of its most ardent opposition.
Pitt, of course, remained cool to the Wilkes' cause. Newcastle finally was persuaded by
Wilkes undaunted fought on brilliantly, his first success being to win a writ of habeas corpus and a release from the tower. Wilkes carried on his fight on two levels, the legal level, aided by his counsel, Sergeant John Glynn, and the political level, aided by his own appeal at the London trial.
At his trial in early May, a cross-section of Londoners—gentlemen, shopkeepers, craftsmen—packed
the courtroom and first raised the thunderous shout, Liberty! Liberty! Wilkes! Forever!
The Wilkite cause had been swiftly adopted by the people of London. In his argument at
the trial, Wilkes made sure that his London followers got the point. The liberty of all
peers and gentlemen, and what touches me more sensibly, that of the middling and inferior
set of people, who stand most in need of protection, is in my case, this day, to be finally decided.
Great Justice Charles Pratt ruled general warrants to be legal, but freed Wilkes on his privilege
as a member of parliament. The crowd, which included George Onslow, on hearing the verdict,
burst into loud cheers, and Wilkes was borne home by many thousands of Londoners shouting
John Wilkes followed up his victory by a direct challenge to the Crown. After his arrest,
his house had been ransacked for evidence, and Wilkes now boldly and heroically called
upon Lords Egremont in Halifax to return his stolen papers. Receiving the expected angry
In his reply, Wilkes now magnificently brought suit against Halifax, Egremont, and Undersecretary of State Robert Wood for theft, and against Webb for perjury.
With widespread support in the press, and numerous bonfires and rejoicings among the people at every Wilkite victory, Wilkes and the printers associated with the North Britain won numerous damaged suits against Wood and other government officials
In the remainder of 1763, the sympathetic juries took care to award heavy damages to the Wilkes forces.
But the big question to be decided was the legality of general warrants.
The Crown case rested on precedent.
For nearly a hundred years it had issued similar general warrants
against persons suspected of seditious libel against the government.
Until Wilkes, their validity had not been challenged.
Hardwick and Newcastle regarded such warrants as perfectly legal, but Chief Justice Pratt
was now increasingly taking the position that both general and specific warrants for seditious
libel were illegal.
The Whig-oriented City Councils of London, Dublin and Exeter voted their gratitude to
Pratt for his new stand.
In the end, Wilkes won his point and a significant victory for individual liberty.
By 1765, Pratt was able to win over the bench and to rule such general warrants null and
void.
As Wilkes piled up victories in the courts during 1763, he became the idol of the London
populace. He was mobbed by cheering throngs, and the merchants and financiers of the city
expressed ardent support for his cause. From the city of London to Surrey County and to
English sailors at port, Wilkes and liberty was the common cry.
In a short time, John Wilkes had sparked a libertarian mass movement in England. The possibilities
for the movement and for Wilkes himself were limitless. But Wilkes, besides a leader, was
a man of personal irresponsibility, of the kind fatal to the leadership of a great cause.
And this flightiness was to lay him low, for as he prepared to bind and reprint the North
Britain, he also blithely and frivolously decided to print for private circulation an
obscene parody of Pope's Essay on Man, which had been written a decade before.
While Wilkes in the autumn of 1763 was lightheartedly visiting in Paris, Philip C. Webb bribed Wilkes's
printer and fellow victim of the General Warrant, Michael Currie, to turn over to him the proofs
of the obscene Essay on Woman.
The Crown now eagerly prepared to proceed against Wilkes for obscenity and blasphemy,
and at the same time to split and neutralize the Wilkite forces, especially the respectables
who were sure to place aesthetics and propriety above the great principles of liberty.
Ironically, the leading role in the prosecution was played by the Earl of Sandwich, successor
to the deceased Egremont, who until recently had participated with Wilkes in the frequent
orgies of a notorious and exclusive club, the Monks of St. Francis. In mid-November, Sandwich,
with enthusiasm, read the essay on woman aloud to the scandalized House of Lords. All the
shocked respectables seized the opportunity to abandon a cause which their devotion was
was at best questionable and took turns in denouncing the harried Wilkes. Pitt's denunciation
was typical. The North Britain series was unmanly and detestable, and Wilkes did not
deserve to be ranked among the human species. Wilkes, in short, was the blasphemer of his
god and the libeler of his king. As the Crown had hoped, the irrelevant essay on woman was
was used to turn opinion against and to condemn number 45 of the North Britain and to vanquish
the Wilkite movement.
Frederick Lord North of the Treasury led the attack for the government in the House of
Lords, charging the North Britain with being false, seditious, insulting to royalty and
intending to excite the people to insurrection against the government.
The Wigs objected only to the charge of falsehood. 35 noble lords managed to hold their ground
to vote for him. They included Temple and the Whigs, Devonshire, Grafton and Portland.
Pitts man, Lord Shelburne, naturally voted to condemn John Wilkes. The House of Commons
condemned No. 45 as false, scandalous and seditious libel by a vote of 273 to 111, and
Parliament ordered it burnt by the common hangman. The middle and lower class supporters
of Wilkes, however, were not as easily swayed from principle by irrelevant aesthetics. At
In the appointed time of the burning on December 3, a large crowd of over 500 Londoners gathered,
pelted the sheriffs with wood, attacked their coaches, wounding the high sheriff, and rescued
the North Britain from the bonfire.
Instead, the mob burned a boot and a petticoat in the bonfire, items symbolizing the hated
Lord Boot and the King's Mother, who had been a long-time friend of Boot.
The Common Council of the City of London demonstrated its solidarity with Wilkes by pointedly refusing
to thank the sheriffs for their part in the proceedings, and when the King went to the
theatre, instead of the customary applause, there arose a general shout of Wilkes and
It was in the same month that Wilkes was awarded one thousand pounds damages from the Crown
by a London jury to the cheers of great London crowds and shouts of Wilkes and Liberty. Probably
Wilkes could still have remained and forged a successful libertarian mass movement, but
wounded in a political duel deliberately provoked by an enemy in Parliament and knowing that
Parliament was about to expel him, Wilkes at the end of December again showed his irresponsibility
by departing the country for France. With Wilkes gone, his enemies could now proceed
at will. In January he was expelled from Parliament. In February he was found guilty of blasphemy
and seditious libel by a grand jury in printing the essay and reprinting the North Britain.
And on November 1, 1764, while still in France, he was declared an outlaw.
And with Wilkes gone, the great Wilkite movement in England necessarily collapsed, at least
for the time being.
Many Wilkites were dismissed from public office, including the Whigs Colonel Isaac Barre and
General Henry Conway.
But Wilkes and his cause still remained high in the hearts of the people.
When the liberal Whig Edmund Burke was elected to parliament two years later, the people
toasted Burke and Wilkes, and Wilkes and liberty.
And though Wilkes himself was gone, the people could and did take revenge on his tormentors.
Sandwich was generally derided.
The informer Michael Curry was scorned as a renegade and blacklisted by all the master
printers and Philip Webb lost his post at the Treasury in mid-1765 as a direct result
of his ill fame in the persecution of John Wilkes.
The sudden flowering of the Wilkite movement had a profound influence on the accumulating
There were many reasons for this. For one thing, the bursting forth of the liberty and property agitation against the cider tax, merging into the Wilkes and Liberty movement, articulated the grievances of the colonies against taxation and against invasions of liberty. In short, the Whig ideals of liberty and property were under attack for citizens.
In brief, the Tory oligarchy was busy aggrandizing the royal prerogative against the liberty
and Property of the People, at Home and Abroad. In these circumstances, it is not surprising
that the Americans should eagerly follow and be inspired by the Whigs and Radicals of England.
Second, the theorists most cherished by the Americans, Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard,
Thomas Gordon, The Commonwealth Men were precisely the patron saints of radical wig-ism and had
been for a century.
Third, the radical wigs reciprocated American interest and staunchly championed American
liberties in English politics.
And fourth, the particular tactics, especially the spirited mob actions by the English of
of London and of West Country, also provided inspiration to Americans of what direct mass
action could accomplish, above and beyond mere legalistic petitioning of Parliament
or the Crown.
Fuse these current examples of revolutionary mass action in England with those of the great
colonial revolutions against English tyranny in the middle and late 17th century, and an
An Explosive Mixture was at hand. In short, what the Marxists called the objective conditions
and the subjective conditions for any American Revolution were now virtually imminent. The
objective conditions were a crescendo of despotic actions by Great Britain, striking hammer
The subjective conditions were nurtured by their own revolutionary traditions, by the
libertarian ideals common to the English Whigs and themselves, by the inspiring example of
the libertarian Whig rebellion in the home country, and by an increasing willingness
of the American People to Embark on Mass Civil Disobedience and on even more violent forms
of revolutionary overthrow of tyrannical British rule.