The Radical John Wilkes

On 21 March 1776 the popular politician John Wilkes (1725-97) rose in a packed House of Commons to speak in favour of parliamentary reform. The franchise, he argued, was hopelessly out of date, with the state of representation in the country the same as it had been at the time of Charles II’s death in 1685. Too many seats remained in thinly populated counties, while growing cities had no representation. Wilkes advocated abolishing those seats and enfranchising overlooked towns, stating that too many ‘useful’ people of the artisan class were excluded from voting. He asked whether the current parliament could be said truly ‘to be the sense of the nation, as in the time of our forefathers’.

Wilkes’ speech, and subsequent motion for a bill, had been long trailed. At the general election of 1774 he had been returned, along with a handful of other Members, such as John Sawbridge, on a platform for reform. Wilkes and Sawbridge’s was an uneasy alliance, but both had signed up to a programme agreed by the Bill of Rights Society – a subscription society originally established to pay off Wilkes’ debts, but also committed to campaigning for reform. Initially, Wilkes delayed bringing the motion. Other issues intervened. He made a spirited speech in support of Sawbridge’s move for shorter parliaments. He then spoke about the American crisis, and another matter very close to his heart: his ongoing efforts to have the motion expelling him from the House – for libel – expunged from the records. Yet, as the historian Peter Thomas put it in 1996, as the first person to submit a motion for parliamentary reform, Wilkes secured for himself ‘a place in the Pantheon of British Radicalism’.

As both Wilkes and his supporters expected, his motion proved a non-starter. The next day’s Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser reported that he was answered ‘in a jocular, satirical manner’ by the prime minister Lord North. The subject was then quietly shelved. Seven years later, Wilkes supported Pitt the Younger’s attempt to introduce a similar measure, but historians tend to conclude that Wilkes played little role in subsequent reform efforts, having decided there was no progress to be made. He rarely wasted his time on causes that would not benefit him.

This has helped inform his reputation as someone of distinct contradictions. He was the darling of the ‘mob’, who took great pleasure in goading the authorities; he was also an establishment figure – an MP, lord mayor of London, and a convivial hanger-on in aristocratic households. His personal life was no different. The archetypal Georgian libertine, his relations with women were often unsavoury. He also co-authored the notorious Essay on Woman (1763), which turned Pope’s Essay on Man on its head by swapping out the vocabulary of the original with scatological alternatives. But he was also a bibliophile, talented Latinist, and patron of the arts.

Wilkes’ interactions with his support base exhibit the same contradictions. The product of a wealthy merchant family from London, he was educated at Leiden University, where he rubbed shoulders with future politicians. Wilkes came to popular attention as a result of his editorship of the North Briton, dedicated to attacking George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute. The inflammatory tone of issue 45 had brought the full force of the government down on the paper and, in 1763, triggered a series of legal actions which saw Wilkes imprisoned in the Tower of London. Hailed as a champion of liberty on his release, he chose exile, and was later outlawed, becoming a celebrity in the process.

On his return in 1768 Wilkes dedicated himself to securing re-election for Parliament. He found allies within the City of London and a constituency in Middlesex open to returning a demagogue whose political vision was laden with the imagery of the revolution of 1688: liberty and property.

His effort to be returned for London was unsuccessful, but his speech is revealing. Wilkes insisted he stood before them ‘a private man, unconnected with the Great’ and without any party. His only support, he emphasised, was ‘you: I wish no other support’. In Middlesex this played very well with those ‘small freeholders’ – artisans and shopkeepers – who had always found him an appealing figurehead, and resulted in his election at the top of the poll.

Wilkes was supremely competent at reading a crowd, though it can be difficult to reconcile his relations with his supporters and their relationship with him. Until his exile, he had relied on his aristocratic backers but, as John Sainsbury observed, by 1767 he seems to have lost faith in them. Abandoned by ‘the great’, he looked elsewhere. This political persona was on display during his March 1776 speech, at the end of which he argued that ‘all government is instituted for the good of the mass of the people to be governed’ and that ‘they are the original fountain of power’. The line resonated both in Britain and across the Atlantic, where his example was viewed keenly.

This did not prevent Wilkes from viewing his new associates with unease. Edmund Burke famously upbraided Wilkes for being contemptuous of his friends, in particular his backers in the corporation of London, whom Wilkes had been known to lampoon as ‘fat-headed turtle-eating aldermen’. Wilkes was said to have replied: ‘Oh … I never laugh at my friends, but these are only my followers.’ Many of his middling sort supporters may also have felt a disconnect between Wilkes the scandalous, debt-ridden libertine celebrity and Wilkes the champion of revolutionary principles. His status as a figurehead representing British liberty, which was deemed under threat, was enough for them to overlook his discreditable behaviour.

Wilkes’ example can be transposed onto any number of contemporary politicians, eager to present themselves as removed from the establishment. He developed a distinct anti-establishment guise, complaining of the ‘great … whom I hate and despise’. If he chose to play to the crowd, though, it did not mean that he had to live in the crowd.

Robin Eagles is Editor of the House of Lords (1660-1832) at the History of Parliament, and author of Champion of English Freedom: The Life of John Wilkes, MP and Lord Mayor of London (Amberley, 2024).