NUMBER FORTY-FIVE.
[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes's criticism of the King's speech]
When Bute disappeared from the public leadership of his party, Wilkes,
from professedly patriotic motives, delayed the publication of the
current number of the _North Briton_, to see if the policy which Bute
had inspired still guided the actions of the gentle shepherd, George
Grenville. Wilkes wished to know if the influence of the Scottish
minister was at an end, or if he still governed through those wretched
tools who had supported the most odious of his measures, the
ignominious peace, and the wicked extension of the arbitrary mode of
excise. He declared himself that if Bute only intended to retire into
that situation which he held before he took the seals, a situation in
which he dictated to every part of the King's administration, Wilkes
was as ready to combat the new Administration as he had been steady in
his opposition to a single, insolent, incapable, despotic minister.
Any hope that Wilkes may have entertained of a reformation of the
Ministry was dispelled by a talk which he had with Temple and Pitt at
Temple's house, where Temple showed him an early copy of the King's
speech. Wilkes, Pitt, and Temple were entirely in agreement as to the
fatal defects of the speech, and Wilkes went promptly home and wrote
the article which made the forty-fifth number of the _North Briton_
famous.
In itself the number forty-five was no stronger in its utterances than
many of the preceding numbers. If its tone be compared with the tone
of journalistic criticism of ministers or their sovereign less than a
generation later, it seems sober and even mild. Wilkes's article
started with a citation from Cicero: "Genus orationis atrox et {58}
vehemena, cui opponitur genus illud alterum lenitatis et
mansuetudinis." Then came Wilkes's comment on the speech. He was
careful not to criticize directly the King. With a prudence that was
perhaps more ironical than any direct stroke at the sovereign, he
attacked the minister who misled and misrepresented the monarch. "The
King's speech has always been considered by the legislature and by the
public at large as the speech of the minister."
Starting from this understanding, Wilkes went on to stigmatize the
Address as "the most abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery ever
attempted to be imposed upon mankind," and he doubted whether "the
imposition is greater upon the sovereign or on the nation." "Every
friend of his country," the writer declared, "must lament that a prince
of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can
be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious
measures and to the most unjustifiable public declarations from a
throne ever renowned for truth, honor, and unsullied virtue."
The article was not intemperate and it certainly was not unjust. But
when it appeared the King was still new flushed with his idea of his
own personal authority in the State, and the slightest censure of his
policy goaded him into a kind of frenzy. Had Wilkes endeavored with
his own hand to kill the King in his palace of St. James's he could
hardly have made the monarch more furious. He had long hated and his
ministers had long dreaded the outspoken journalist. King and
ministers now felt that the time had arrived when they could strike,
and strike effectively. The King commanded the law officers of the
Crown to read the article and give their opinion upon it. The law
officers did the work that they knew the King expected from them. They
found that the paper was an infamous and seditious libel tending to
incite the people to insurrection. They declared that the offence was
one punishable in due course of law as a misdemeanor. Upon this hint
the ministers acted, rapidly and rashly. A general warrant was issued
for the apprehension of the authors, printers, and publishers of the
_North Briton_. The printer {59} and the publisher were arrested and
brought before Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont, to whom they gave up the
names of John Wilkes and Charles Churchill as the authors of the _North
Briton_. The next step was to arrest Wilkes himself.
[Sidenote: 1763--Arrest of Wilkes]
The King's messengers came upon Wilkes in his house in Great George
Street, Westminster. It is honorably characteristic of the man that in
the moment of his own danger he felt more concern for the danger of
another. While he was arguing with the officials that they had no
power to arrest him, as he was a member of Parliament and therefore
privileged against arrest, Churchill came into the room on a visit to
Wilkes. Churchill, Wilkes knew, was as certain to be arrested as he
was. Churchill could plead no privilege. It was probable that the
messengers were unfamiliar with Churchill's face. Wilkes, with happy
good-nature and happy audacity, immediately hailed Churchill as Mr.
Thompson, clasped his hand and inquired affectionately how Mrs.
Thompson did and if she was going to dine in the country. If Wilkes
was clever in his suggestion Churchill was no less clever in taking the
hint. He thanked Wilkes, declared that Mrs. Thompson was at that
moment waiting for him, and that he had merely called in to inquire
after the health of Wilkes. Saying which, Churchill swiftly bowed
himself out, hurried home, secured all his papers, and disappeared into
the country. The King's messengers, who were promptly at his lodgings,
were never able to discover his whereabouts.
The flight to which Wilkes so ingeniously assisted him is not the
brightest part of Churchill's career. He carried with him into his
retreat a young girl, a Miss Carr, the daughter of a Westminster
stonecutter, whom the charms of Churchill's manners had induced to
leave her father's house. He could not marry the girl, as he was
married already, and, to do him justice, he appears soon to have
repented the wrong he had done her. But after an unsuccessful attempt
on the girl's part to live again with her own people she returned to
her lover, and she lived with her lover to the end. Churchill seems to
have been sincerely {60} attached to her. If he had been a free man,
if his life had not been blighted by his early unhappy marriage, their
union might have been a very happy one. At his death he left annuities
to both women, to the woman he had married and the woman he had loved,
the wife's annuity being the larger of the two.
While Churchill was making his way as quickly as possible out of a town
that his services to his friend had rendered too hot to hold him,
Wilkes was immediately hurried before Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont at
Whitehall. He carried himself very composedly in the presence of his
enemies. He persistently asserted his privilege, as a member of
Parliament, against arrest. He refused to answer any questions or to
acknowledge the authorship of No. 45 of the _North Briton_. 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.
Wilkes, through his friends, immediately applied to the Court of Common
Pleas for a writ of _habeas corpus_. This was at once obtained, and
was served upon the messengers of the Secretary of State. But Wilkes
was no longer in their custody, and Wilkes was detained in the Tower
for a whole week, part of the time, as he declared, in solitary
confinement, before he was brought into court. Judge Pratt immediately
ordered his discharge on the ground of his claim to immunity from
arrest as a member of Parliament, without prejudice to any later action
against him.
[Sidenote: 1763--Hogarth's caricature of Wilkes]
It was while Wilkes was before Pratt at Westminster that, if we may
accept the authority of Churchill, one of Wilkes's keenest enemies
seized an opportunity for a cruel {61} revenge. Hogarth hated both
Wilkes and Churchill. He had begun the quarrel by attacking the _North
Briton_ and the _Monitor_ in his cartoon "The Times," executed for the
greater glorification of the painter's patron, Lord Bute. The _North
Briton_ replied to this attack with a vigor which infuriated Hogarth,
who had his full share of the irritable vanity which the world always
attributes to the artist. In Wilkes's difficulty Hogarth saw his
opportunity. Lurking behind a screen in the Court of Common Pleas, the
painter sought and found an opportunity for making a sketch of Wilkes.
While Justice Pratt, with what Wilkes called "the eloquence and courage
of old Rome," was laying down the law upon the prisoner's plea
preparatory to setting him at liberty, Hogarth's busy pencil was
engaged upon the first sketch for that caricature which has helped to
make Wilkes's features famous and infamous throughout the world. The
print was promptly published at a shilling, and commanded an enormous
sale. Nearly four thousand copies, it is said, were sold within a few
weeks. 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. "I know," he wrote
later, "but one short apology to be made 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 Shakespeare calls it) only so far as to
keep it clean and in health. I never once heard that he hung over the
glassy stream, like another Narcissus, admiring the image in it, nor
that he ever stole an amorous look at his counterfeit in a side mirror.
His form, such as it is, ought to give him no pain while it is capable
of giving so much pleasure to others. I believe he finds himself
tolerably happy in the clay {62} cottage to which he is a tenant for
life, because he has learned to keep it in pretty good order; while the
share of health and animal spirits which Heaven has given him shall
hold out, I can scarcely imagine he will be one moment peevish about
the outside of so precarious, so temporary a habitation, or will ever
be brought to own 'Ingenium Galbae male habitat:' 'Monsieur est mal
logé.'" Good-humored at the time, his good-humor persevered, and in
later life he was wont to say jestingly that he found he was growing
more and more like his famous portrait every day. But if it was
becoming of Wilkes to bear the attack in so serene and even so jocular
a spirit, it was not unbecoming, as it was not ungenerous, of his
friends to fail to imitate the coolness of their leader. It is not
quite easy to understand why, in an age of caricature, an age when all
men of any notoriety were caricatured, the friends of Wilkes were so
sensitive to the satire of Hogarth. Public men, and the friends of
public men, have grown less sensitive. However, Wilkes's friends were,
and showed themselves to be, as angry as Wilkes was, or showed himself
to be, indifferent, and the hottest and angriest of them all was
Churchill. Churchill could retaliate, and Churchill did retaliate with
a ferocity that equalled and more than equalled Hogarth's.
[Sidenote: 1763--Churchill's denunciation of Hogarth]
With a rage that was prompted by friendship, yet with a coolness that
the importance of the cause he championed called for, Churchill aimed
blow after blow upon the offending painter. The skill of a practised
executioner directed every stroke to a fresh spot, and with every
stroke brought blood. The satirist called upon Hogarth by his name, to
stand forth and be tried "in that great court where conscience must
preside," bade him review his life from his earliest youth, and say if
he could recall a single instance in which
Thou with an equal eye didst genius view
And give to merit what was merit's duet
Genius and merit are a sure offence,
And thy soul sickens at the name of sense.
The poet goes on to say that "when Wilkes our countryman, {63} our
common friend arose, his King, his country to defend," Malice
Had killed thee, tottering on life's utmost verge,
Had Wilkes and Liberty escaped thy scourge.
And then, in some two hundred lines of strenuous rage, Churchill
denounced Hogarth with a denunciation that was the more effective
because it was accompanied by a frank and full recognition of Hogarth's
great gifts and deserved title to fame. Hogarth retaliated by his
famous caricature of Churchill as a canonical bear with a pot of porter
in one paw and a huge cudgel in the other, the knots on the cudgel
being numbered as Lie 1, Lie 2, and so forth. Instantly the great
caricaturist was attacked by others eager to strike at one who had
struck so hard in his day. The hatred of Bute was extended to the
painter who condescended to accept Bute's patronage, and who labored to
please his patron. Hogarth was derided as "The Butyfier," in mockery
of his "Analysis of Beauty." It would have been as lucky for Hogarth
as it would have been lucky for Bute to let Wilkes alone.
If Wilkes's release filled his supporters throughout the country with
delight, it only spurred on his enemies to fresh attempts and fresh
blunders. Had they left the matter where it stood, even though it
stood at a defeat to them, they would have spared themselves much
ignominy. But the fury of the King inspired a fiercer fury in the
ministers and those who followed the ministers. Every weapon at their
command was immediately levelled at Wilkes, even, it may not be
unfairly asserted, the assassin's weapon. Wilkes carried himself
gallantly, defiantly, even insolently. His attitude was not one to
tempt angry opponents to forbearance. His letters from the Tower and
after his release to Lord Halifax were couched in the most contemptuous
language. He brought an action against Lord Halifax. He brought an
action against Mr. Wood, the Under-Secretary of State, and was awarded
1,000 pounds damages. 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.
[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes and his accusers]
Every man who wished to curry favor with the King and the King's
ministers was ready to strike his blow at Wilkes. There was not a
bully among the hangers-on of the King and ministers who was not eager
to cross swords with Wilkes or level pistol at him. Insult after
insult, injury after injury, were offered to the obnoxious politician.
The King dismissed him from the colonelcy of the Buckinghamshire
Militia. Lord Temple was the Lord-Lieutenant of the county of
Buckinghamshire, and as Lord-Lieutenant it was his duty to convey to
Wilkes the news of his disgrace. Never was such news so conveyed.
Temple told Wilkes of his dismissal in a letter of warm enthusiasm, of
warm personal praise. The King immediately retaliated by removing
Temple from the Lord-Lieutenancy and striking his name off the list of
privy councillors. The enmity was not confined to the King and to the
parasites who sought to please the King. Dr. Johnson declared that if
he were the monarch he would have sent half a dozen footmen to duck
Wilkes for daring to censure his royal master or his royal master's
ministers. In the House of Commons the hostility was at its height.
When Parliament met Wilkes sought to call the attention of the House to
his case, but was anticipated by Grenville, who read a royal message
directed at Wilkes, the result of which was that the House voted that
the number Forty-five of the _North Briton_ was a seditious libel, and
ordered it to be burned by the common hangman.
The basest part of the attack upon Wilkes was the use that his enemies
made of his private papers, the way in which they associated his
political conduct with an offence that was wholly unpolitical. It had
amused Wilkes to set up a private printing-press at his own house. At
this {65} press certain productions were printed which were no doubt
indecent, which were no doubt blasphemous, but which were furthermore
so foolish as to make both their indecency and their blasphemy of very
little effect. One was the "Essay on Woman," written as a parody of
Pope's "Essay on Man;" the other was an imitation of the "Veni
Creator." Neither of these pieces of gross buffoonery bore any
author's name. Very few copies of them had been printed, and these few
solely for circulation among private friends with a taste for foul
literature. No offence had been committed, no offence had been
intended, against public morality. It is certain, as far as any
literary puzzle can be regarded as certain, that Wilkes's share in the
dirty business was chiefly, if not entirely, limited to the printing of
the pages. The "Essay on Woman," as those who have had the misfortune
to read it know, is a dreary writer's piece of schoolboy obscenity, if
entirely disgusting, no less entirely dull. The text of the "Essay"
was composed in great part, if not altogether, by Potter, the unworthy
son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and worthy member of the Medmenham
brotherhood. When Wilkes's papers were seized, or by some other means,
the Government got possession of the proof sheets of the "Essay on
Woman." They immediately resolved, in defiance of public decency, of
political morality, to use it as a weapon against their enemy. It
shows the shallowness of their pretence at justification that they put
the weapon into the hands of the worst and basest of Wilkes's former
friends and allies in profligacy, into the hands of Lord Sandwich. On
the first night of the session Lord Sandwich rose in the House of
Lords, and proceeded to denounce Wilkes and the "Essay on Woman" with a
vehemence of false austerity that impressed the assembly and infinitely
delighted Lord Le Despencer, who had been the common friend, the
brother sinner of accuser and accused, and who now expressed much
entertainment at hearing the devil preach. The spurious virtue of
Sandwich was followed by the spurious indignation of Warburton. The
"Essay on Woman" contained certain notes written in parody of
Warburton's notes {66} to the "Essay on Man," just as the verses
themselves were a parody on Pope's poem. Warburton chose to regard
this as a broach of privilege, and he assailed Wilkes with even greater
fury than Sandwich had done, winding up by apologizing to the devil for
even comparing Wilkes to him. An admiring House immediately voted the
poems obscene, libellous, and a breach of privilege. Two days
afterwards an address from the Lords called upon the King to prosecute
Wilkes for blasphemy.
[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes as a champion of popular liberty]
Wilkes was unable to face this new attack. He had already fallen a
victim to an attack of another and no less malignant nature. While the
creatures of the Government in the Upper House were trying to destroy
his character, one of their creatures in the Lower House was doing his
best to take Wilkes's life. This was a man named Martin, who had been
attacked in the _North Briton_ some eight months earlier. Martin
seemed to have resolved upon revenge, and to have set about obtaining
it after the fashion not of the gentleman, but of the bravo. Day by
day, week by week, month by month he practised himself in pistol
shooting, until he considered that his skill was sufficient to enable
him to take the dastard's hazard in a duel. He seized the opportunity
of the debate on November 15th to describe the writer in the _North
Briton_ as a "coward and a malignant scoundrel." When Wilkes, on the
following day, avowed the authorship of the paper, Martin sent him a
challenge. The challenge was in all respects a strange one. It was
treacherous, because it came at the heels of deliberate preparation.
It was peremptory, for it called upon Wilkes to meet his enemy in Hyde
Park within an hour. It contravened the laws of the duello, because
Martin, who was the challenger, himself insisted on the use of the
weapons with which he had made himself so murderously skilful. 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.
While Wilkes was lying on what threatened to be his death-bed the
feeling on both sides only increased in intensity. The Ministry were
indifferent to the helplessness of their enemy. Wilkes was expelled
from the House of Commons. He was expelled from the Militia. The
common hangman was ordered publicly to burn the _North Briton_, but the
hangman was not suffered to obey the order. An angry mob set upon him
and upon the sheriffs who were assisting at the ceremony, rescued the
_North Briton_ from its persecutors, and in rude retaliation burned
instead the joint emblems of the popular disdain--a boot and a
petticoat. The people's blood was up; the symptoms were significant
enough for any save such a King and such ministers to understand.
While the Ministry, with a refinement of cruelty, were sending daily
the King's surgeons to watch Wilkes's health and proclaim the moment
when he might again be attacked, the Corporation of Dublin was setting
an example that was soon followed by the Corporation of London and by
other corporations in presenting him with the freedom of its city.
While Wilkes was slowly journeying towards Paris, where his daughter
was, and passing, as he wrote, "the most unhappy days he had known," an
angry mob gibbeted the effigy of Bute at one of the gates of Exeter,
and kept the image swinging there in derision for a fortnight in
defiance of the authorities. While Wilkes was languishing in foreign
exile to save his liberty and his very life from the malignity of his
enemies, his portrait, painted by Reynolds, was placed in the Guildhall
with an inscription in honor of the jealous assertor of English liberty
by law.
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." As he did not appear to receive his sentence, he was promptly
outlawed for contumacy. Thus a Ministry wise in their own conceit
believed that they had got rid of Wilkes for good and all. They did
not note, or if they noted did not heed, that the favorite sign of
ale-houses throughout the country was the head of Wilkes. They were
indifferent to the fact that Wilkes had come to be regarded in all
directions as the champion of popular liberty. All they knew, all that
they cared to know, was that Wilkes was in exile, and was like enough
to die in exile. Even the success of "The Beggar's Opera" taught them
nothing, and yet the success of "The Beggar's Opera" was a significant
lesson. "The Beggar's Opera" was revived at Covent Garden while the
excitement about Wilkes was at its height, and its audiences were as
ready to read in political allusions between the lines as they had been
at the time of its first production. The line "That Jemmy Twitcher
should peach on me I own rather surprises me" was converted at once
into an innuendo at the expense of Lord Sandwich, to whom the name
Jemmy Twitcher was immediately applied by the public at large, almost
to the disuse, so Horace Walpole tells us, of his own title.
[Sidenote: 1764--Death of Hogarth and Churchill]
But the Ministry had so far triumphed that for four years Wilkes
remained away from England, drifting from one foreign capital to
another, making friends and winning admirers everywhere, and employing
his enforced leisure in attempting great feats of literary enterprise.
A scheme for a Constitutional History of England was succeeded by a no
less difficult and, as it proved, no less impracticable scheme. During
Wilkes's exile he lost the most famous of his enemies and the most
famous of his friends. On October 26, 1764, Hogarth died. It was
commonly said, and generally credited, that he died of a broken heart
{69} in consequence of the furious attacks which had followed upon his
unhappy quarrel with Wilkes. It was a pity that the closing hours of
Hogarth's life should have been occupied with so petty and so
regrettable a squabble. Hogarth was entirely in the wrong. Hogarth
began the quarrel; and if Hogarth was eager to give hard knocks he
should have been ready to take hard knocks in return. But the world at
large may very well be glad that Hogarth did lurk in the court by
Justice Pratt and did make his memorable sketch of Wilkes. The sketch
serves to show us if not what Wilkes exactly was, at least what Wilkes
seemed to be to a great many of his countrymen. The caricaturist is a
priceless commentator. If Hogarth indeed indirectly shortened his life
by his portrait of Wilkes, he gave, as if by transfusion of blood, an
increased and abiding vitality to certain of the most interesting pages
of history.
Within a few days of Hogarth, Churchill died. His devotion to Wilkes
prompted him to join him in his Continental banishment. He got as far
as Boulogne, where Wilkes met him, and at Boulogne he died of a fever,
after formally naming Wilkes as his literary executor. Wilkes, who was
always prompted by generous impulses, immediately resolved that he
would edit a collected edition of Churchill's works, and for a time he
buried himself in seclusion in Naples with the firm intention of
carrying out this purpose. But the task was too great both for the man
and for the conditions under which he was compelled to work. In the
first place, annotations of such poems as Churchill's required constant
reference to and minute acquaintance with home affairs, such as it was
well-nigh impossible for an exile to command. In the second place, it
was not an easy task for a man even with a very high opinion of himself
to play the part of editor and annotator of poems a great part of which
had him for hero. In a very short time the work was abandoned, and
Wilkes emerged from his literary retreat.
Wilkes has been very bitterly and, as it would appear, very unjustly
upbraided for his seeming neglect of his dead friend's wishes, of his
dead defender's fame. In spite of {70} those whose zeal for the memory
of Churchill drives them into antagonism with the memory of Wilkes, it
may be believed that the task was not one "for which Wilkes could, with
the greatest ease, have procured all the necessary materials; and to
which he was called not by the sacred duties of friendship only, but by
the plainest considerations of even the commonest gratitude." Even if
Wilkes had been, which Wilkes was not, the kind of a man to make a good
editor, a good annotator, the difficulties that lay in the way of the
execution of his task were too many. The fact that the poems were so
largely about himself gave a sufficient if not an almost imperative
reason why he should leave the task alone. But in any case he must
have felt conscious of what events proved, that there was other work
for him to do in the world than the editing of other men's satires.
Not, indeed, that the genius of Churchill needed any tribute that
Wilkes or any one else could bestow. His monument is in his own
verses, in the story of his life. If indeed the lines from "The
Candidate" which are inscribed on Churchill's tombstone tell the truth,
if indeed his life was "to the last enjoyed," part of that enjoyment
may well have come from the certainty that the revolutions of time
would never quite efface his name or obscure his memory. The
immortality of the satirist must almost inevitably be an immortality
rather historical than artistic; it is rather what he says than how he
says it which is accounted unto him for good. As there are passages of
great poetic beauty in the satires of Juvenal, so there are passages of
poetic beauty in the satires of Churchill. But they are both
remembered, the great Roman and the great Englishman, less for what
beauty their work permitted than for the themes on which they exercised
their wit. The study of Churchill is as essential to a knowledge of
the eighteenth century in London as the study of Juvenal is essential
to a knowledge of the Rome of his time. That fame Churchill had
secured for himself; to that fame nothing that Wilkes or any one else
might do could add.
{71}