BIOGRAPHY

R ICHARD B OSTON

A LIBERTINE & LIBERTY

J OHN W ILKES : T HE S CANDALOUS F ATHER OF C IVIL L IBERTY

★By Arthur H Cash (Yale University Press 448pp £20)

I N N EWCASTLEONE day in 1768 forty-five gentlemen sat down at forty-five minutes past one with forty-five gills of wine and forty-five new-laid eggs. At forty-five minutes past two they began a meal of five courses, each of which had nine dishes, making forty-five. The sirloin of beef weighed forty-five pounds… and so on. At the same time in markets throughout the country the number forty-five appeared on such objects for sale as buttons, buckles, brooches, snuff-boxes and mugs. The cause of all this excitement was No 45 of the North Briton, the editor and author of which, John Wilkes MP, had been sent to the Tower. As celebrated as the number forty-five was the figure of Wilkes himself. According to his son-in-law, ‘In china, in bronze, or in marble, he stood upon the chimney-piece of half the houses of the metropolis’. It was just as well that in those days there were no tee-shirts for his likeness to be printed on, for John Wilkes was not a pretty sight. He was dreadfully cross-eyed, and his lower jaw projected to the point of deformity. His teeth dropped out before he reached middle age, so that the tips of chin and nose almost met. His lisp became so pronounced (if that’s the word) that listeners found difficulty in following what he was saying. This made him a poor performer in the House of Commons in an era that included orators of the stature of Pitt, Burke and Sheridan. Wilkes got round this by having his speeches printed and distributed outside Parliament. He was almost proud of his ugliness. Boswell (a close friend) found that Italian newspapers called Wilkes Il Bruto Inglese, which he interpreted as the English Brutus. Wilkes corrected him: it meant ‘the ugly Englishman’. Wilkes boasted that he needed only twenty minutes ‘to talk away my face’ (sometimes he reduced the claim to ten minutes). What he lacked in looks he made up for abundantly with sheer charm. He was always cheerful, and he was witty and had impeccable manners –a powerful combination. Boswell engineered a meeting between Wilkes and Dr Johnson, who was a political antagonist. After a sticky start, Wilkes (in well under his self-allotted twenty minutes) had Johnson literally eating out of his hand. Boswell records that Mr Wilkes placed himself next to Dr Johnson, and behaved to him with so much attention and politeness,

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 BIOGRAPHY

that he gained upon him sensibly … Mr Wilkes was very assiduous in helping him to some fine veal. ‘Pray give me leave, Sir: –It is better here –A little of the brown –Some fat, Sir –A little of the stuffing – Some gravy – Let me have the pleasure of giving you some of the butter –Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange; –or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest.’ On a later occasion Boswell comes across the two old adversaries reclined upon their chairs, with their heads leaning almost close to each other, and talking earnestly, in a kind of confidential whisper, of the personal quarrel between George the Second and the King of Prussia. Such a scene of perfect sociality between two such opponents in the war of political controversy, as that which I now beheld, would have been an excellent subject for a picture. It presented to my mind the happy days which are foretold in Scripture, when the lion shall lie down with the kid. Wilkes made an early marriage to a much older woman, who was wealthy but otherwise quite unsuitable. He soon got through the cash and they separated, but not before they had a daughter, whom Wilkes adored. He also had at least two other children out of wedlock. His looks did not prevent innumerable amorous conquests, but for the most part his vigorous sex life relied less on his seductive skills than on payment to prostitutes, mistresses, paramours, courtesans and domestic servants. One of his many lady friends was called, remarkably, Fanny Perfect. Wilkes was a member of the Hell-Fire Club, which met at Medmenham in Buckinghamshire for orgies and Black Masses. Another member was Lord Sandwich, the man who was famously so reluctant to leave the gaming table that he would order his food to be served between two slices of bread. When Lord Auckland wrote him a critical letter, Sandwich replied: ‘Sir, Your letter is before me, and it will presently be behind me. I remain, sir, your most humble servant.’ Not bad, but Wilkes was better. When Sandwich told Wilkes he would die either of the pox or on the gallows, Wilkes slammed back: ‘That depends, my lord, whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.’ Having been Wilkes’s friend, Sandwich became his persecutor. Wilkes’s North Briton opened by declaring that a free press is ‘the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country’. He vigorously attacked the ministry of Lord Bute (another former Hell-Fire raiser), who, he suggested, was having an affair with George III’s mother. This did not please the King, who was further enraged by the famous No 45 of the North Briton. This furiously

WIlkes: hell-raiser

attacked the King’s speech to Parliament, which, it said quite rightly, was not written by the King but by his ministers. A general warrant (a warrant that didn’t name names) was issued and forty-eight people were arrested, including Wilkes. After Wilkes had spent a week in the Tower, Lord Chief Justice Pratt released him on the grounds that his arrest (since he was an MP) was a breach of parliamentary privilege. Wilkes and others then prosecuted secretary of state Halifax, won damages and established that general warrants were not legal. This was a real blow to the arrogance of the state. An astonished Frenchman

asked Wilkes just what limits there were to press freedom in England. Wilkes replied that he didn’t know, but was trying to find out. From being Wilkes the libertine he had made his name synonymous with liberty. ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ was the slogan of the day. Sandwich, now secretary of state, clandestinely acquired copies of an obscene parody of Pope’s Essay on Manwhich Wilkes and a friend had written for the Hell-Fire Club years before. The Essay on Womanwas indeed extremely obscene. When Sandwich, himself a notorious rake, read it out and denounced it to the House of Lords, one of them commented: ‘Never before heard the devil preach a sermon against sin.’ The Lords voted it to be a libel, while the Commons voted No 45 a seditious libel. Wilkes had just been seriously wounded (by a bullet in the stomach) in a governmentengineered duel. Under the circumstances he found it prudent to move to Paris, where he spent huge sums of money that he didn’t have. His debts became so great that after four years he decided that England was a safer option, even though he had been outlawed in his absence. He returned, was elected for Middlesex, waived his privileges, and was fined and imprisoned. And so it went on, with Wilkes being repeatedly expelled from Parliament, imprisoned, released to the acclaim of vast crowds, re-elected. Eventually he transferred his activities to the City of London, of which eventually he became Lord Mayor. This book is always readable, but really too long. It is repetitive and so overburdened with detail that you can’t always see the wood for the trees. Wilkes becomes more vividly alive in the few lines of Boswell quoted above than in the whole of the rest of the book put together, but it is unfair to compare any other biographer with Boswell. This hefty tome is full of incident and colourful characters, but what makes it especially welcome is its sheer timeliness. Under Prime Minister Blair and his Home Secretaries Blunkett and Clarke our civil liberties and freedom of expression have been, and are being,

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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