JOHN WILKES AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT Part 1

Libertarian or libertine? A three part study of the political activist and rake John Wilkes (1725-1797) in the context of his Enlightenment circle of friends.

Cropped detail from John Glynn, John Wilkes and John Horne Tooke. National Portrait Gallery.

INTRODUCTION

‘During the 1760s, parliamentary and popular politics in England became much concerned with the affairs of John Wilkes, a jovial adventurer who did not pretend that his derisive defiance of the ruling class was intended to do much more than win him a place within it.’[i]  

This view is representative of the marginal influence attributed to Wilkes in the development of radical political ideas in the 1760s and 1770s; in part based upon a negative view of his character and motives, but also on the difficulty of situating his political ideas into any of the recognized intellectual frameworks for the period and from the polemical and ephemeral nature of his writings.

            For these reasons, the views of modern historians and those of contemporaries on Wilkes’ significance have diverged: Boulton, for example, limits his analysis to the writings of Burke, Junius, and Johnson on the Wilkite campaigns of 1769 to 1771 on the grounds: ‘Wilkes in 1770 was interested primarily in John Wilkes; it was left to others to debate the issues and principles raised by his earlier activities’.[ii]  Burke’s assessment of Wilkes in 1770 in Thoughts on the Present Discontents was quite different:

When therefore I reflect upon this method pursued by the Cabal in distributing rewards and punishments, I must conclude that Mr. Wilkes is the object of persecution, not on account of what he has done in common with others who are the object of reward, but for that in which he differs from many of them: that he is pursued for the spirited dispositions which are blended with his vices; for his unconquerable firmness, for his resolute, indefatigable, strenuous resistance against oppression.[iii]

             This article aims at narrowing this divergence by exploring aspects of Wilkes’ intellectual background which assist in explaining the contemporary resonance and impact of his political discourse and justify locating his concept of liberty within the mainstream of continental Enlightenment thought. In the first section, the academic literature on Wilkes’ role in the development of radical politics in the 1760s and 1770s is reviewed and assessed by examining the key contribution Wilkes’ collaboration with Charles Churchill made to the development of his political agenda and rhetoric and the diversity of intellectual influences revealed in his Introduction to the uncompleted The History of England. In the second section, Wilkes’ association in exile with leading philosophes is examined through their correspondence and writings on the English political system and civil and political liberties. In the third section, the role of Wilkes’ libertinism in the development of his political ideas and reputation is considered.  In conclusion, Wilkes is situated as a political figure integrated into Enlightenment culture of the 1760s and 1770s whose political campaigns and writings in defence of civil and political liberties were based on principles shared by many of the leading  philosophes of that period.

I - Wilkes, Charles Churchill (1732-1764) and the North Briton

It is generally accepted that whatever the skills Wilkes undoubtedly displayed in the field of political propaganda and agitation his motives were tainted by personal defects of character and opportunism which undermined his contribution to the emergence of radical political ideas in the late 1760s and the 1770s. Robbins in her study of Real Whigs, whom she identified among Wilkes’s contemporaries as including Catherine Macaulay, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and James Burgh, regarded Wilkes as a ‘rake’ and, with Chatham and Charles Fox, as ‘believers in what might be described as high-class rabble rousing’.[iv]   Christie also questions Wilkes’ character and motives at the time of his Middlesex electoral triumph in 1768: ‘A penniless adventurer, of infamous personal character, a criminal facing an as yet undetermined sentence, Wilkes had, through whatever means, achieved what he regarded as a first step to salvation’;[v] and is equally doubtful about the sincerity of Wilkes’ support for representational reform in his speech of 21 March 1776: ‘Wilkes’ motives at the time may well be suspect. Within a few months he had gained in the House a reputation for levity and insincerity. It is probable that he was more concerned for his own popularity than for the cause of reform, and he seems to have taken care that a full, polished version of his speech should be available for publication.’[vi]

            Brewer accords a more central role to Wilkes, arguing that the political issues he raised:  ‘constituted a frontal assault on the politics of oligarchy, and thereby threatened the political status quo’.[vii] He attributes Wilkes’ success not to demagogy, since Wilkes was a poor public speaker, but to his ability as ‘a propagandist whose skills fell little short of genius’[viii] and to the identification in the public mind of his own person with the ‘abstract notion of liberty’.[ix]  However, Brewer also argues ‘it is a not altogether implausible notion to see Wilkes both as a court jester and a lord of misrule’,[x] and he accepts the assessment that Wilkes’ ‘political creed does not seem to have extended far beyond the furtherance of his own immediate political interests’.[xi] 

Colley, indeed, questions Brewer’s view that ‘the debate on America, the parliamentary reform movement, and what one contemporary styled the ‘Wilkomania’ of the 1760s, marked the emergence of focussed radicalism in Britain':[xii]

For the great mass of British people the only novel and emotive focus of the 1760s was John Wilkes himself. But while Wilkes’ publicity style and individual élan were inimitable, his long-term political impact was minimal. Few plebeian Wilkites translated their support for the man into an abstract and durable commitment to political or social change.[xiii]  

            Pocock, while sharing the general view of Wilkes’ character and motives, sees the Wilkite movement as a significant contributor to the debate over parliamentary representation:

It is certain that the rhetoric of virtue and corruption had for some time introduced into British political discourse the notion that the corrupt state of the representation of the ‘people’ or ‘kingdom’ - for which it was as easy to blame ‘the influence of the Crown’ as that of the aristocracy - was at the forefront of the problems of political society. It was an achievement of the Wilkes agitation to re-inject this issue into pamphlet literature and popular meetings;[xiv] 

            Kramnick, in opposition to Pocock, whom he argued placed Wilkes ‘in the tradition of country and civic humanism’,[xv] supports a resurgence of the Lockean  intellectual tradition in the period of the Wilkite campaigns:

‘Lockean ideas made a dramatic and decisive comeback in the 1760s and 1770s. In Locke far more than in Bolingbroke and his ilk, the unenfranchised middle class and especially the Protestant Dissenters found intellectual authority and legitimacy for their radical demands’.[xvi] 

Kramnick argues Wilkes should be located within this tradition, citing as evidence Wilkes’ speech of 21 March 1776 where he adopted the term ‘fair and equal representation’ contained in paragraph 158 of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.[xvii]   However, Kramnick’s thesis that the ‘talented and industrious Protestant Dissenters played the decisive role in transforming England into the first bourgeois civilisation’[xviii] leads him to downplay Wilkes’ importance in the link he establishes between reformers such as Cartwright, Burgh, Price, and Priestley with Lockean thought: ‘This bond becomes evident when the focus is shifted from Wilkes to more respected and learned reformers’.[xix] 

            In order to provide an intellectual context within which these views on the significance of Wilkes’ contribution to the development of radical ideas can be assessed, Wilkes’ collaboration with Charles Churchill (1732-1764) is first examined to show how it radicalised Wilkes’ political vocabulary and popularised his political agenda and then the political ideas underlying Wilkes’ Introduction to his unfinished The History of England from the Revolution to the Accession of the Brunswick Line are analysed.  

            Wilkes’ political career started with his election as MP for Aylesbury in 1757 under the patronage of the Grenville family, and in particular Lord Temple;[xx] but  the split of William Pitt and Lord Temple with George Grenville  in October 1761 over war with Spain prompted Lord Temple, then  in opposition,  to fund Wilkes in establishing the North Briton in June 1762.[xxi] Wilkes enlisted the help of Charles Churchill to produce the paper and Churchill wrote at least six issues,[xxii] and this collaboration, described as ‘one of the major works of political literature to appear between 1760 and 1790’,[xxiii] marked the beginning of the radicalisation of Wilkes’ political ideas. Churchill, a well-educated but impecunious priest who had achieved overnight literary success as a theatre satirist with The Rosciad (1760), was a fellow member of the Hell Fire Club.[xxiv]  Wilkes encouraged[xxv] Churchill to turn to political satire which, principally inspired by Wilkes’ cause and directed against his political enemies,[xxvi] he produced prolifically and successfully until his death in October 1764. This collaboration, marked by a deep and genuine friendship, also revealed an extraordinary identity of political outlook and literary style. Two aspects of their shared political rhetoric  were of particular importance for Wilkes in establishing a distinct and popular political identity and rebutting the attacks of the political establishment: prizing independence against patronage and using invective to attract popular interest and sympathy. 

            On independence as a virtue, Lockwood has pointed out:

‘Churchill willingly portrays himself as a creature of the public, the main distinction for him being the one between those who are attached to the public interest, hence independent, and those who are the slaves of a private interest, such as patronage.’[xxvii] 

In Independence (1764) Churchill asserts the value of his independent status as a poet against the corrupt and unmerited position of nobility:

By Him that made me, I am much more proud, More inly satisfied, to have a croud point at me as I pass, and cry, - that’s He- A poor, but honest Bard, who dares be free Amidst Corruption, than to have a train of flick’ring levee slaves, to make me vain of things I ought to blush for;[xxviii]

            In 1763 Wilkes expressed similar sentiments in a letter to Earl Temple of 1763 relating details of his duel with Lord Talbot:

I was a private English gentleman, perfectly free and independent, which I held to be a character of the highest dignity, that I obeyed with pleasure a gracious sovereign, but would never submit to the arbitrary dictates of a fellow subject, a lord steward of his household, my superior indeed in rank, fortune and abilities, but my equal only in honour, courage, and liberty.[xxix] 

Wilkes’ political propaganda was, together with his association of himself with liberty, principally to be based around this theme of the independent citizen struggling against a corrupt government,[xxx] and together they made a powerful appeal to his electoral supporters among the shopkeepers of Middlesex who would ensure his successes in 1768 and 1769.[xxxi]

            Churchill deployed invective to great effect in the North Briton and in his satirical poems directed against Wilkes’s opponents. In An Epistle to William Hogarth (1763) he combined personal invective with political propaganda for Wilkes:

VIRTUE, with due contempt, saw HOGARTH stand, the murd’rous pencil in his palsied hand. What was the cause of liberty to him, Or what was Honour? Let them sink or swim, So he may gratify without controul The mean resentments of his selfish soul. Let Freedom perish, if, to Freedom true, In the same ruin WILKES may perish too.[xxxii] 

Wilkes employed invective not only to attack political opponents but also to expose hypocrisy; as against his prosecutors in the House of Lords over The Essay on Woman: ‘Besides it is not given to every man to be as pious as Lord Sandwich, or as chaste, yet as potent, in and out of the marriage-bed, in all thought, word, and deed, as the Bishop of Gloucester.’[xxxiii] 

            The development of a common political rhetoric and literary style by Wilkes and Churchill between 1762 and 1764 enriched Wilkes’ political vocabulary and increased its popular resonance and through the North Briton and Churchill’s political satires established his public identity. During his exile he made use of these skills in a series of polemical writings, such as A Letter to the Worthy Electors of the Borough of Aylesbury, in the County of Buckinghamshire of 22 October 1764 and Letter to the  Duke of Grafton of 12 December 1766,  which enabled him to retain public interest[xxxiv] and contributed  to his electoral success at the  Middlesex election on his return in 1768.

            Wilkes’ voluminous political writings have generally been viewed as ‘printed ephemera’[xxxv] rather than presenting an intellectually coherent political philosophy: there is for example no modern edition of Wilkes’ writings. Wilkes failed to complete his most ambitious project, The  History of England from the Revolution to the Accession of the Brunswick Line,  which he had worked on fitfully during his exile, and only published the Introduction in 1768. Otherwise his political writings were limited to issues of the North Briton and multiple editions of his speeches, addresses, correspondence and other political tracts.[xxxvi] However, a study of the Introduction does indicate some of the principal strands and sources of Wilkes’ political thought at the time which, while strongly influenced by the writings of Locke,[xxxvii] also evidence independent views on issues of religious toleration which may have been influenced by the frequent discussions on atheism and deism at the coterie Holbachique.[xxxviii]

            For his intellectual sources on the theory of government, Wilkes enigmatically wrote: ‘The most valuable books we have on the subject of government are posterior by near half a century to the beginning of James I’s reign. Locke and Sidney are still later.’[xxxix]  Since James I acceded to the throne in 1603, Wilkes is probably referring to Hobbes’s works De Cive and Leviathan, both published in London in 1651.  He may also be referring to Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in 1656.[xl]  For foreign works, Wilkes refers to Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (1625), which he praises as ‘the most original, profound and accurate, of all the productions of modern times on the power of the sovereign and the subject’,[xli] and quotes approvingly from book eleven, chapter five of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Loix on the English constitution.[xlii] Politically, Wilkes presents in the Introduction a traditional Whig view of the Revolution of 1688:

The Revolution is the great area of English liberty. From this most auspicious period, freedom has made a regular, uninterrupted abode in our happy island. The rights of the crown and the people were then expressly ascertained, and acknowledged by the three branches of the Legislature. The disputes of prerogative, of privilege and of liberty subsided … ;[xliii]

            On prerogative, he follows Locke’s analysis in The Second Treatise of Government (1689):[xliv]

It began then to be generally remarked among us, that the first idea not only of political institutions, but even of society, was the happiness of the various individuals collected together, and that no further power could be meant to be given to the head, but what was for the good of the whole body politick.[xlv]

 However, Wilkes demonstrates his support for religious toleration by his comments on the 1689 Toleration Act:

It has proved a firm bulwark against the fury of bigots and enthusiasts, though a philosophical mind must object to the unjust shackles, which tyranny has forged, of all subscriptions, creeds, tests and oaths. I except that single oath or affirmation, which no well-meaning citizen can scruple, of a legal obedience to the civil governor ...[xlvi]

            He does not follow Locke’s arguments against religious toleration for papists in An Essay Concerning Toleration (1689)[xlvii] in his criticism of William III:

‘The prejudices he had imbibed against the Roman Catholics and his conduct towards that sect, seem to prove that his principles of toleration, and freedom of thought, did not proceed from a mind deeply tinctured with sound philosophy, or zealous for the primary rights of mankind.’[xlviii]

            The Introduction illustrates the difficulties in locating Wilkes’ political thought within any one of the historical paradigms for the period. Wilkes’s reticence on the Civil War and interregnum[xlix] supports Robbins’s view he was not a Real Whig; while his emphasis on the 1688 Settlement and his view that ‘we may justly regard its continuance as too precarious, its security as ill established’,[l] do not, notwithstanding his reference to ‘the generous principles of our Magna Carta’,[li] easily situate Wilkes within the reform movement identified by Christie as acting ‘within a general conceptual framework - the appeal to the model in the past - which in pattern was essentially medieval’.[lii]  Nor does the Introduction provide evidence Wilkes was operating within the republican tradition of civic virtue derived from the works of Machiavelli and Harrington.[liii]

            However, the Introduction’s evident debt to Lockean ideas and Wilkes’ more liberal views on religious toleration lend support to Kramnick’s view that Wilkes formed part of the  ‘radicalization of Lockean liberalism’.[liv]  Kramnick’s approach provides an appropriate framework for explaining the genesis and popularity of Wilkes’ ideas and propaganda amongst his core electoral supporters - which Rudé has identified in his analysis of voters in the Middlesex elections as constituting the majority of  ‘merchants, tradesmen and manufacturers of every kind’[lv] - since he situates Wilkes’ ideas firmly, but not exclusively, in the firmament of the rising bourgeoisie rather than in nostalgic country ideology.[lvi] It is the argument of the next section, however, that an analysis of Wilkes’ association with the philosophes is also critical in assessing the development of his political thought and his place in the cosmopolitan world of the Enlightenment.

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[i] J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Political Thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790: (i) The imperial crisis’, in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 246-282, at p. 254.

[ii] James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (Westport, Conn., 1963), p. 15.

[iii] Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (2 vols., Oxford, 1981), ii,  p. 298.

[iv] Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 322-323.

[v] Ian. R Christie, Wilkes, Wyvil, and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics 1760-1785 (London, 1962), p. 68.

[vi] Ibid., p. 64.

[vii] J. Brewer, Party ideology and popular politics at the accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), p. 164.

[viii] Ibid., p. 166.

[ix] Ibid., p. 169.

[x] Ibid., p. 190.

[xi] Ibid., p. 197.

[xii] Linda Colley, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 31 (1981), pp. 1-19, at p. 16.

[xiii] Ibid., p. 16.

[xiv] Pocock, ‘Political Thought in the English-speaking Atlantic’, at p. 256.

[xv] Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), p. 170.

[xvi] Ibid., p.172.

[xvii] David Wootton, ed., John Locke, Political Writings (London, 1993), pp. 173-174.

[xviii] Kramnick, Republicanism, p. 43.

[xix] Ibid., p. 174.

[xx] Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes, a friend to liberty (Oxford, 1996), pp. 5-9.

[xxi] Ibid., p.19.

[xxii] Douglas Grant, ed., The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill (Oxford, 1956), p. xv.  

[xxiii] Pocock, ‘Political Thought in the English-speaking Atlantic’, p. 254.

[xxiv] Grant, ed., Poetical Works, p. xiv.

[xxv] Churchill sent Wilkes drafts of many of his poems for comment and Wilkes assisted the poet Robert Lloyd in preparing for posthumous publication the second volume of Churchill’s poems: see Grant, Poetical Works, p. xxii.

[xxvi] Ibid., pp. xvi-xix.

[xxvii] Thomas Lockwood, Post-Augustan satire: Charles Churchill and satirical poetry, 1750-1800 (Washington, 1979), p. 162.

[xxviii] Grant, ed., Poetical Works, pp. 418-419.

[xxix] Letters to and from Mr. Wilkes, Vol. I (1779), pp. 24-25. Only one volume published.

[xxx] Brewer, Party Ideology, pp. 169-170.

[xxxi] Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, eds., The House of Commons 1754-1790: The History of Parliament (3 vols., London, 1964), i, p. 332.

[xxxii] Grant, ed., Poetical Works, p. 224.

[xxxiii] Letters to and from Mr. Wilkes, p. 215.

[xxxiv] Brewer, Party Ideology, p. 167.

[xxxv] Ibid., p. 172.

[xxxvi] Ibid., pp. 171-173.

[xxxvii] At his death, Wilkes’ library contained a nine volume edition of Locke’s works: Seamus Deane, ed., Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. 8, Politicians (London, 1973), pp. 127-177.

[xxxviii] Alan Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, 1976), pp. 41-81. In a letter of 26 May 1767 Wilkes replied to his printer’s concerns he might adopt French Catholicism: ‘I do not think France is a country of much religion … I have no fears for his religion, for I know him and Paris, where he generally resides. No faith remains there, ...’: Letters to and from Mr. Wilkes,  pp. 268-269.

[xxxix] J. Wilkes, The History of England from the Revolution to the Accession of the Brunswick Line (1768), p. 9.

[xl] A 1737 edition of which Wilkes had in his library at his death: Deane, ed., Sale Catalogues.

[xli] Wilkes, The History, p. 31.

[xlii] Ibid., p. 37.

[xliii] Ibid., p. 5.

[xliv] See Wootton, John Locke, pp. 344-345.

[xlv] Wilkes, The History, p. 10.

[xlvi] Ibid., p. 29.

[xlvii] Wooton, John Locke, pp. 202-204.

[xlviii] Wilkes, The History, pp. 27-28.

[xlix] Wilkes only notes that Cromwell ‘gave a temporary calm to the nation’: ibid., p. 13.  He did, however, refer to Milton’s ‘Defence of the People of England and other valuable tracts’: ibid., p. 13.

[l] Ibid., p. 20.

[li] Ibid., pp. 9-10.

[lii] Ian R. Christie, Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth Century British Politics and Other Papers (London, 1970), p. 19.

[liii] For an analysis of this tradition, see Pocock, ‘Political Thought in the English-speaking Atlantic’.

[liv] Kramnick, Republicanism, pp. 43-44.

[lv] George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study (London, 1983), p. 84.

[lvi] Kramnick, Republicanism, p. 172.