William Wilkes

“ After several failures better fortune attended his efforts in another direction, for on the 3rd of May 1782 all the declarations and orders against him for his elections in Middlesex were ordered to be expunged from the journals of the House. In 1779 Wilkes was elected chamberlain of the city by a large majority, and the office became his freehold for life. He died at his house in Grosvenor Square, London, on the 26th of December 1797. ”

“ WILKES, JOHN (1727-1797) , English politician, descended from a family long connected with Leighton-Buzzard in Bedfordshire, was born at Clerkenwell, London, on the 17th of October 1727, being the second son of Israel Wilkes, a rich distiller, and the owner, through his wife Sarah, daughter of John Heaton of Hoxton, of considerable house property in its north-eastern suburbs. After some training under private tuition John Wilkes was sent to the university of Leyden, matriculating there on the 8th of September 1744. ”

“ Wilkes immediately started for Bath to avoid a demonstration in London; but London was illuminated in his honor, and in a great number of provincial towns his release was celebrated with all the signs of a national holiday. If he had been a hero in prison, he was no less a hero out of it. He moved from triumph to triumph. While alderman he won a victory over the Court and the Commons which did much to establish the liberty of the press in England. The House of Commons, in a foolish attempt to suppress reports of the debates in Parliament, tried to arrest certain printers. ”

“ He was not apt to express outwardly any thing like chagrin or mortification, but he certainly took his disappointment at Brentford, the last time that he offered himself as candidate for Middlesex, very heavily to heart. “I should much have liked,” he would say, “to have died in my geers.” Upon a similar occasion he exclaimed, “I can only compare myself to an exhausted volcano.”
Among other peculiarities and contradictions which marked Wilkes’s character, was a passion he had for collecting bibles, of which he had certainly obtained a great number of curious editions. ”

“ Wilkes was well advised in keeping out of England. He had done his part. The decisions of Pratt in the Court of Common Pleas, the decisions in the Guildhall, had conferred a permanent benefit upon the English citizen. But {68} Wilkes was not bound to put himself into the power of his enemies in order to establish the authorship of the "Essay on Woman." His enemies took as much advantage as they could of his absence. He was found guilty by the Court of King's Bench of having reprinted the number Forty-five and of having written the "Essay on Woman." ”

“ He was returned for Middlesex by a large majority. The mob which had passed out from London to Brentford, the polling-place, came back in triumph, forced people to illuminate their houses, and smashed many windows. If on Wilkes's return to England George had granted him a free pardon, the demagogue would probably have subsided into a peaceable member of parliament. Unfortunately he could not overlook Wilkes's insults to himself and to his mother. Grafton came to London as seldom as possible, but George found a willing instrument in Weymouth. ”

“ The envenomed skill of Hogarth has made the appearance of Wilkes almost as familiar to us as to the men of his own time. The sneering, satyr face, the sinister squint, the thrust-out chin and protruding lower jaw belong to a face severely visited by Nature, even when liberal allowance is made for the animosity that prompted the hand of the caricaturist. The caricature was a savage stroke; to Wilkes's friends it seemed to be a traitor's stroke. Wilkes appears to have taken it, as he took most things, with composure. ”

“ Wilkes accepted the duel with characteristic courage, with characteristic rashness. He met Martin in Hyde Park, and the amateur bravo shot Wilkes through the body. It is a further characteristic of the many elements of good that went to Wilkes's strange composition that, as he lay on the grass bleeding fast and {67} apparently mortally wounded, his first care was not for himself and his hurt, but for the safety of his adversary, of an adversary who deserved chivalrous treatment as little as if he had taken Wilkes unawares and shot him in the back. ”

“ One of the most immediate results of the Wilkes controversy in the House of Commons was to draw attention to a young man who had entered Parliament at the General Election of 1768 while he was still considerably under age. The young member for Midhurst made himself conspicuous as the most impassioned opponent of Wilkes. A strenuous supporter of Luttrell outside the walls of Westminster, inside those walls the boy who represented the fictitious constituency of Midhurst distinguished himself by the easy insolence with which he assailed Wilkes and the popular cause which Wilkes represented. ”

“ He has been accused of having taken up politics only as a resource when his fortunes were ruined and his character lost; but niceness of morality and purity of political motives were not universal in the public men of the time, and Wilkes, at all events, sought to serve not the class who were dispensers of wealth and honours, but that great body of the people who were too frequently regarded by placemen and party managers as machines to be used and property to be disposed of. ”

“ The print of Mr. Wilkes was soon after published, drawn from the life by William Hogarth. It must be allowed to be an excellent compound caricatura, or a caricatura of what nature had already caricatured. I know but one short apology can be made for this gentleman, or, to speak more properly, for the person of Mr. Wilkes. It is, that he did not make himself, and that he never was solicitous about the case of his soul, as Shakspeare calls it, only so far as to keep it clean and in health. ”

“ His first entrance into life was as a common bricklayer. At one of the Old Bailey dinners, his lordship, after a sumptuous repast on turbot and venison, was eating an immense quantity of butter with his cheese—“Why brother,” said Wilkes, “you lay it on with a trowel.”
There is a singular anecdote of this same Lord Mayor, demonstrative of the parsimonious principles, by the exercise of which he doubtless rose to opulence. His only son was brought up in the same mean profession, and one day fell from a scaffold, and was killed by the fall. ”

“ One child, a daughter, was born to them (5th of August 1750) , and then Wilkes left his wife and removed to Westminster, where he kept open house for many young men about town possessing more wit than morals. ”

“ George's Fields, and required the Westminster justices to show firmness in using the military. In 1769 he followed a similar course as regards Wilkes. On 22 March, after Wilkes had been declared incapable of sitting in the ‘present parliament,’ while the king was talking with his ministers in St. James's Palace, a mob beset the gates, and a hearse was driven into the courtyard decorated with insulting emblems, and having on the roof a man dressed as an executioner, masked, and with an axe in his hand. ”

“ Junius admitted that the Duke of Grafton might have had some excuse in his opposition to Wilkes on account of Wilkes's character, and might have earned the approval of men who, looking no further than to the object before them, were not dissatisfied with seeing Mr. Wilkes excluded from Parliament. But, Junius went on to argue, "you have now taken care to shift the question; or, rather, you have created a new one, in which Mr. Wilkes is no more concerned than any other English gentleman. ”

“ Hogarth, that Mr. Wilkes should never believe it worth his while to take notice of any reflections on himself; but if his friends were attacked, he should then think he was wounded in the most sensible part, and would, as well as he was able, revenge their cause; adding, that if he thought the North Briton would insert what he sent, he would make an appeal to the public on the very Saturday following the publication of the print. The Times soon after appeared, and on the Saturday following [Sept. 25, 1762,] N° 17, of the North Briton, which is a direct attack on the king's serjeant-painter. ”

“ It was perhaps impossible that Wilkes could long remain content with the companionship of men like Dashwood and Sandwich; it was certainly impossible that men {50} like Dashwood and like Sandwich could for long feel comfortable in the companionship of a man so infinitely their superior in wit, intelligence, and taste. ”

“ Captain Walsingham, Martin the banker, and Sir William Meredith, were proofs on different sides that conscientious men condemned the excesses of their own parties. Though the Court relaxed nothing of its animosity to Wilkes, yet it had received too many mortifications not to be cautious how it ventured on any farther strides of power. Still, I would not make my court by trying to influence Mr. Conway to countenance their plans; nor, though I began to fear the consequences of Wilkes’s unprincipled rashness and despair, would I suffer any interested motive to fix the balance of my opinions. ”

“ Returning he became prominent as a radical politician, and espoused the cause of Wilkes, with whom, however, he afterwards quarrelled. He also supported the revolted American colonists, and was fined and imprisoned for endeavouring to raise a subscription for them. ”

“ When Lord Egremont died, in the August of 1763, Wilkes declared that he had "been gathered {64} to the dull of ancient days." He republished the numbers of the North Briton in a single volume with notes, to prove that the King's speech could constitutionally be only regarded as the utterance of the King's ministers. There must have been a splendid stubbornness in the man which enabled him to face so daringly, so aggressively, the desperate odds against him. ”

“ Willenhall’s most illustrous son was Dr. Richard Wilkes, Antiquary, whose house still stands on the Walsall Road. He came of good family of county rank, and his personal character raised him to the eminence of a notability in Staffordshire. His portrait appears in Shaw’s history of this county of which his (Wilkes’) valuable and voluminous MSS. formed the nucleus. Though settled in this locality, adding to their little patrimony from time to time for 300 or 400 years, the family came originally from Hertfordshire. ”

“ On 17 March, however, he considered it necessary for the commons to commit the Lord-mayor Crosby and Alderman Oliver, but was glad that the ministers were content to leave alone so dangerous an antagonist as Wilkes (Letters to North, i. 64, 67) . He also took an active interest in the opposition to Savile's ‘Nullum Tempus’ Bill, which was designed to protect the subject against the dormant claims of the crown, such as that revived to the prejudice of the popular whig magnate the Duke of Portland. Family troubles crowded on the king. ”

“ Alice Wilkes was three times married : (1) to Henry Robinson, a member of the Brewers' Company, by whom she had six sons and five daughters ; (2) to William Elkin, an alderman of London, by whom she had one daughter, Ursula, married to Sir Roger Owen of Condover, Shropshire ”

“ The new ministry was soon involved in difficulty. Wilkes came to London, and on 1 Nov. 1766 addressed to Grafton a letter in which he professed loyalty and implored pardon, but on the advice of Chatham no notice was taken of the communication, and Wilkes thereupon repaired to Paris and sent a second communication on 12 Dec. The state of the East India Company presented even greater dangers to the new administration. The views of Conway and Charles Townshend were antagonistic to those of Chatham, and but for the latter's illness, Townshend would have been dismissed from office. ”

“ George Cooke, the Tory candidate, who had been the representative for eighteen years, only scored 827, and Sir W. Beauchamp Procter, the Whig candidate, only got 807 votes.
There was great excitement in London when the result of the election was known. It pleased the popular voice to insist that every window should be illuminated in honor of Wilkes's triumph, and all windows that were not lit up were unhesitatingly broken. Those persons who were known to be Wilkes's principal opponents received the special attentions of the mob. Lord Bute's house had to stand a siege ”

“ He professed with equal enthusiasm his loyalty to the King and his loathing of the King's advisers, and he announced his intention of bringing the matter before Parliament the moment that the session began. Egremont and Halifax retaliated by sending Wilkes to the Tower and causing his house to be searched and all his papers to be seized. The high-handed folly of the King's friends had for their chief effect the conversion of men who had little sympathy for Wilkes into, if not his advocates, at least his allies against the illegal methods which were employed to crush him. ”

“ Nothing could exceed the singularity of this satire, but the impossibility of discovering the author. Three men were especially suspected, Wilkes, Edmund Burke, and William Gerard Hamilton. The desperate hardiness of the author in attacking men so great, so powerful, and some so brave, was reconcileable only to the situation of Wilkes; but the masterly talents that appeared in those writings were deemed superior to his abilities: yet in many of Junius’s letters an inequality was observed ”