WILKES REDIVIVUS.
[Sidenote: 1767--The return of Wilkes]
While the King's Government was preparing for itself an infinity of
trouble abroad, it was not destined to find itself idle for want of
trouble at home. Great and grave trouble came upon the King and his
friends suddenly, and out of a quarter from which they least expected
it. If they were confident of anything, they were confident that they
had dealt the final blow to the audacious demagogue who for a time had
fluttered the town with the insolences of the _North Briton_. The
_North Briton_ had ceased to exist. Of the two men whose bitter genius
had been its breath, Churchill was dead, and Wilkes himself, a fugitive
and a beggar, drifting from one European capital to another, seemed as
little to be feared as if he slept by Churchill's side. The visit of
the Commander's statue to Don Juan seemed scarcely more out of the
course of nature to Don Juan's lackey than the reappearance in active
public life of Wilkes appeared to the King's friends, for whom Wilkes
had ceased to exist.
Wilkes had wearied of Continental life. His affection for his own
country was so earnest and so sincere that, in a letter to the Duke of
Grafton, he declared his willingness to bury himself in the obscurity
of private life, if he were permitted to return unmolested to England.
The appeal failed to extract a satisfactory reply. The Ministers would
make no terms with their ruined foeman. Wilkes then resolved to show
that he was not so helpless as his enemies appeared to think him. He
published in 1767, in London, a pamphlet, in which he stated his case
with indignation, but not without dignity. When the pamphlet had
obtained a wide circulation, Wilkes followed {116} it up by appearing
himself in London in the February of 1768, at the moment of the general
election, and announcing himself as a candidate for Parliament for the
City of London. The audacity of this step amazed his enemies and
delighted his friends. If it had been taken a little earlier it might
have won him the seat. So calm and so wise an observer as Franklin, at
least, thought that it would have done so. As it was, though Wilkes
came late into the field, and was placed at the bottom of the poll, he
secured more than twelve hundred votes, and did, in the conventional
phrase too often used to soothe defeat, gain a great moral victory.
The courage of the outlaw had more than revived all the old enthusiasm
for him. We know on the authority of Burke that the acclamations of
joy with which he was welcomed by the populace were inconceivable, and
that the marks of public favor which he received were by no means
confined to the lower order of the people. Several merchants and other
gentlemen of large property and of considerable interest openly
espoused his cause, and a subscription was immediately opened in the
City for the payment of his debts. We know on other authority that in
an age when betting was the mode the extraordinary betting as to
Wilkes's success in his desperate enterprise was actually organized by
a certain number of brokers into stock which was quoted on 'Change.
Burke ascribes the reason for the failure to the open voting. The
electors were obliged, he said, to record their names, and the
consequences of an opposition to great corporate and commercial
connections were too obvious not to be understood.
[Sidenote: 1768--Wilkes as Member for Middlesex]
As soon as Wilkes knew of his defeat in the City, he struck a yet
bolder note for success. He came forward at once as a candidate for
the County of Middlesex in opposition to the established interest of
two gentlemen who had represented it for several years, who were
supported by the whole interest of the Court and who had considerable
fortunes and great connections in it. But Wilkes, too, had powerful
abettors. The Duke of Portland was one of his most prominent
supporters. His old friend Temple {117} supplied the freehold
qualification which was then essential for a Parliamentary candidate.
Horne, the Rector of Brentford, where the election took place, gave all
his great influence and all his gifts to the service of Wilkes with the
same devotion that had formerly animated Churchill. Horne was not
altogether an admirable character, and his enthusiasm for Wilkes had
hitherto awakened no corresponding enthusiasm on Wilkes's part. But
Horne was invaluable at a crisis like the Middlesex election. He had
the eloquence of a sophist; he had the strategy of a tactician; he was
endowed with an unconquerable energy, an indomitable determination. He
was exceedingly popular in his parish; he caught the mood of the
popular party, and he happened to be on the right side. It would be
difficult to exaggerate the importance of the services he rendered to
Wilkes and to the cause of which Wilkes was the figurehead by his work
in the Middlesex election. The zeal of Horne, the friendship of
Temple, the daring of Wilkes carried the day. It was no ordinary
victory. It was an astonishing triumph. As Burke pointed out, the
same causes did not operate upon the freeholders at large which had
prevented the inclinations of the livery of London from taking effect
in Wilkes's favor, and the result of the polling on March 28 was that
Wilkes was returned to Parliament by a prodigious majority. Wilkes
polled 1290 votes. Mr. 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; so had
the house of Lord Egremont, who had signed the warrant for Wilkes's
committal; so had other houses which were either known to belong to the
{118} opponents of the hero or showed themselves to be such by their
darkened windows. All such windows were instantly broken, to the joy
of the glaziers, who declared that a Middlesex election was worth any
number of Indian victories. The mob had it all its own way, for the
strength of the constabulary had been drafted off to Brentford in
expectation of rioting there which never took place. But the mob did
not abuse its triumph. It was in its playful, not its dangerous mood.
It stopped the carriages of the gentry, made the occupants cheer for
Wilkes and Liberty, scrawled the number Forty-five upon the polished
panels, broke the glasses, but in the main let the carriage-owners go
unmolested. The Duke of Northumberland was forced to toast the popular
favorite in a mug of ale. One ludicrous occurrence very nearly became
an international episode. The Austrian Ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt,
famed for his stateliness, for his punctiliousness in ceremonial, fell
a victim to popular misapprehension. The mob that surrounded his coach
took him, unhappily, for a Scotchman, either because of his stiffness
of demeanor or because they could not understand what he was saying.
To be thought Scotch was a bad thing for any man in the hands of a mob
that howled for Wilkes, that howled against Bute. The Austrian
Ambassador was dragged from his carriage and held uplifted in
sufficiently uncomfortable fashion while the magic number Forty-five
was chalked upon the soles of his shoes. He was no further hurt; if he
had been a more prudent man he would have grinned at the mischance and
said no more about it. But he chose to consider his dignity and the
dignity of his empire affronted by the follies of a crowd. He lodged a
formal complaint with the English Government. The English Government
could do nothing more than express regret with such gravity as it could
muster. As for the irreverent rogues who had laid their hands upon the
feet of the representative of a friendly State, it was not in the power
of the Government to punish them. The earth has bubbles as the water
has, and they were of them.
For two days the town was practically at the mercy of {119} the Wilkite
mob. The trainbands were called out by the Mayor, who was an ardent
courtier, but the men of the trainbands were, for the most part, no
less ardent Wilkites. They lent their drums to swell the noise of
Wilkes's triumph; they could not be counted on to lend their muskets to
the suppression of Wilkes's partisans. Even the regular troops were
not, it was thought, to be relied upon in the emergency. It was said
here that certain regimental drummers had beaten their drums for
Wilkes; it was said there that soldiers had been heard to declare that
they would never fire upon the people.
The fury of the Ministry, and especially the fury of the King, flamed
high. The King's heat was increased by a letter which Wilkes had
addressed directly to him on his return to England. In this letter
Wilkes made a not undignified appeal for the King's mercy and clemency,
complained of the wicked and deceitful acts of revenge of the late
Ministry, and assured the sovereign of his zeal and attachment to his
service. To this letter, naturally, no direct reply was made. The
form that the King's answer took was to insist that all the strength of
the Government must be used against Wilkes in order that he should be
driven from that Parliament to which the electors of Middlesex had
dared to return him.
[Sidenote: 1768--Wilkes in prison]
In the mean time the force of the law was slowly exerted against
Wilkes. Wilkes had promised that on the first day of the term
following his arrival in England he would present himself at the Court
of King's Bench. He kept his promise and surrendered himself on April
20. The judges of the King's Bench seem to have been paralyzed by the
position. It took them a whole week to decide that they would refuse
Wilkes bail--a whole week, every day, every hour of which served to
make Wilkes's cause better known and Wilkes himself more popular.
Wilkes went to prison under the most extraordinary circumstances. His
journey from Westminster to Bishopsgate was more like a royal progress
than the passage of a criminal and an outlaw. It was only with the
greatest difficulty that Wilkes was able to detach himself from the
zeal of the populace {120} and get quietly into his prison. The prison
immediately became an object of greater interest than a royal palace.
Every day it was surrounded by a dense crowd that considered itself
rewarded for hours of patient waiting if it could but get a glimpse of
the prisoner's face at a window. All this show of enthusiasm
exasperated the ministers and drove them into the very acts that were
best calculated to keep the enthusiasm alive. On the day of the
opening of Parliament, May 10, the Government, under the pretence of
fearing riot, sent down a detachment of soldiers to guard the King's
Bench Prison, in St. George's Fields. This was in itself a rash step
enough, but every circumstance attending it only served to make it more
rash. As if deliberately to aggravate the popular feeling, the
regiment chosen for this pretence of keeping the peace was a Scotch
regiment. At a moment when everything Scotch was insanely disliked in
London such a choice was not likely to insure good temper either on the
part of the mob or on the part of the military. That good temper was
not intended or desired was made plain by a letter written by Lord
Weymouth, the Secretary of State, to the local magistrate, urging him
to make use of the soldiers in any case of riot.
What followed was only what might have been expected. The crowd,
irritated by the non-appearance of Wilkes, still more irritated by the
presence of the soldiery, threatened, or was thought to threaten, an
attack upon the prison. Angry words were followed by blows; the brawl
between the mob and the military became a serious conflict. A young
man named Allan, who seems to have had nothing to do with the scuffle,
was killed in a private house by some of the soldiers who had forced an
entrance in pursuit of one of their assailants. Then the Riot Act was
read; the troops fired; half a dozen of the rioters were killed,
including one woman, and several others were wounded.
News of this bad business intensified the angry feeling against the
Government. A Scotch soldier, Donald Maclean, was put on his trial for
the murder of Allan. His {121} acquittal caused an indignation which
deepened when the colonel of the regiment presented him with thirty
guineas on behalf of the Government. This was taken as an example of
the determination of the Crown to silence the voice of the people with
the weapons of Scotch mercenaries. Pamphlets, speeches, sermons, all
were employed to stimulate the general agitation and to brand with
atrocity the conduct of the Ministry. The tombstone erected over the
murdered man Allan chronicled his inhuman murder "by Scottish
detachments from the Army," and quoted from Proverbs the words, "Take
away the wicked from before the King."
[Sidenote: 1768--The Ministry on its defence]
The ministers, on their side, were not slow to defend themselves.
Burke, with his usual fairness, has stated their case for them when he
tells how they painted in the strongest colors the licentiousness of
the rabble and that contempt of all government which makes it necessary
to oppose to a violent distemper remedies not less violent. This is,
of course, the excuse of every overbearing authority, which, having
aroused irritation by its own mismanagement, can conceive of no better
way of allaying that irritation than the bayonet and the bullet. The
Ministry and the advocates of the Ministry maintained that the unhappy
disposition of the people was such that juries under the influence of
the general infatuation could hardly be got to do justice to soldiers
under prosecution, unless Government interposed in the most effectual
manner for the protection of those who had acted under their orders.
They further urged that, in view of the danger of the insolence of the
populace becoming contagious with the very soldiery, it was necessary
for them to keep those servants firm to their duty by new and unusual
rewards. "Whatever weight," says Burke, dryly, "might have been in
these reasons, they were but little prevalent, and the Ministry became
by this affair and its concomitant circumstances still more unpopular
than by almost any other event." But it must in fairness be admitted
that, foolish, stubborn, and even brutal as the King's ministers showed
themselves to be, their position was a very difficult one.
{122}
It was well open to the Government to urge, and to urge with truth, the
peculiar lawlessness of the hour. It is an effective example of the
ineffectiveness of a mere policy of coercion that, at a time when the
penal laws of Great Britain were ferocious to a degree that would have
disgraced Dahomey, the laws were so frequently defied, and defied with
impunity. The laws might be merciless, even murderous, but the
Executive had not always the power to compel respect or to enforce
obedience. Among the lower classes in the great city, and not merely
that portion of the lower classes who are qualified by the appellation
of the dangerous classes, but in strata where at least a moderate
degree of civilization might be hoped for, an amount of savagery, of
lawlessness, and of cruelty prevailed that would have not ill become
the pirates of the Spanish Seas or the most brutal of Calabrian
brigands. The hideous institution of the pillory stimulated and
fostered all the worst instincts of a mob to whose better instincts no
decent system of education sought to appeal. Ignorance, and poverty,
and dirt brooded over the bulk of the poorer population, to breed their
inevitable consequences. Murder was alarmingly common. Riots that
almost reached the proportions of petty civil wars were liable to arise
at any moment between one section of the poorer citizens and another.
The horrors of the Brownrigg case show to what extent lust of cruelty
could go. The large disbandments that are the inevitable consequence
of peace after a long war had thrown out of employment, and thrown upon
the country, no small number of needy, unscrupulous, and desperate men,
only too ready to lend a hand to any disturbance that might afford a
chance of food and drink and plunder.
[Sidenote: 1752--Mob violence in London]
Mob law ruled in London to an extraordinary degree during the whole of
the eighteenth century. It reached a high pitch, but not its highest
pitch, at the time when the watchword was Wilkes and Liberty. London
was to witness bitterer work, bloodier work than anything which
followed upon the Middlesex election and the imprisonment of the
popular hero. But for the time the audacity of the mob seemed to have
gone its farthest. The temper of the {123} mob was insolent, its
insolence was brutal. It hated all foreigners--and among foreigners it
now included Scotchmen--and it manifested its hatred in vituperation,
and when it dared in violence. A white man would hardly be in more
danger in a mid-African village than a foreigner was in the streets of
London. There is a contemporary account written by a French gentleman
who travelled in England, and who published his observations on what he
saw in England, which gives a piteous account of the barbarous
incivility to which he, his friends, and his servants were exposed when
they walked abroad. The mob that jeered and insulted the master very
nearly killed the servant for the single offence of being a Frenchman.
But the brutalities of the mob were not limited to strangers. The
citizens of London fared almost as badly if not quite as badly as any
Frenchman could do. Fielding gives a picture in one of his essays of
the lawless arrogance which was characteristic of the rabble. He gave
to the mob the title of the Fourth Estate in an article in the _Covent
Garden Journal_ for June 13, 1752, and in another article a week later
he painted an ironical picture of the brutal manners and overbearing
demeanor of the mob. "A gentleman," he wrote, "may go a voyage at sea
with little more hazard than he can travel ten miles from the
metropolis." On the river, on the streets, on the highways, according
to Fielding, mob manners prevailed, and brutal language might at any
moment be followed by brutal actions. When the largest allowance is
made for the exaggeration of the satirist, enough remains to show that
the condition of London in the second half of the eighteenth century
was disorderly in the extreme. People who ventured on the Thames were
liable to the foulest insults, and even to be run down by those who
were pleased to regard the stream as their appanage, and who resented
the appearance on it of any who seemed better dressed than themselves.
Women of fashion were liable to be hustled, mobbed, insulted if they
ventured in St. James's Park on a Sunday evening. No one could walk
the streets by day without the probability of being annoyed, or by
night without the risk of {124} being knocked down. After painting his
grim picture in the Hogarth manner, Fielding concluded grimly that he
must observe "that there are two sorts of persons of whom this fourth
estate do yet stand in some awe, and whom, consequently, they have in
great abhorrence: these are a justice of the peace and a soldier. To
these two it is entirely owing that they have not long since rooted all
the other orders out of the commonwealth."
[Sidenote: 1769--Wilkes's expulsion from the Commons]
The Government hoped that the longer Wilkes lay in prison, the more
chance there was that the enthusiasm for him would abate. But in this
hope the Government were disappointed. Even in the ranks of the
ministers the King was not able to find unswerving agreement to his
demands for Wilkes's expulsion from Parliament. Outside Parliament the
agitation was not only undiminished, but was even on the increase.
This was shown conclusively by a fresh event in connection with
Middlesex. Cooke, who was the colleague of Wilkes in the
representation of the county, died. Serjeant Glynn, who had made
himself conspicuous as the champion of Wilkes and the advocate of the
popular cause, came forward to contest the vacant seat, and carried the
constituency in spite of the most determined efforts on the part of the
royal faction to defeat him. There were more riots, more deaths on the
popular side, more trials, more convictions for murder and more pardons
of the condemned men. The agitation which had been burning at a steady
heat blazed up into a flame. Wilkes made every use of the opportunity.
He had succeeded in getting a copy of the letter which Lord Weymouth
had sent to the magistrates, the letter in which Lord Weymouth had
practically urged the magistrates to fire upon the people. Wilkes
immediately sent it to the _St. James's Chronicle_, a tri-weekly
independent Whig journal which had been started in 1760. The _St.
James's Chronicle_ printed the letter, and Wilkes's own letter
accompanying it, in which he accused the Ministry of having planned and
determined upon the "horrid massacre of St. George's Fields." The
letter, said Wilkes, "shows how long a hellish project can be brooded
over by some infernal {125} spirits without one moment's remorse." It
may be admitted that if the language of Wilkes's enemies in the two
Houses was strong even to ruffianism, Wilkes could and did give them as
good as he got in the way of invective and vituperation.
The Government, goaded into fury by this daring provocation, resolved
to make an example of the offender. Lord Barrington brought the letter
formally before the House of Commons. The House of Commons immediately
voted it a libel, and summoned Wilkes from his prison to the bar of the
House. On February 3, 1769, Wilkes appeared before the Commons. With
perfect composure he admitted the authorship of the letter to the _St.
James's Chronicle_, and, with an audacity that exasperated the House,
he proclaimed his regret that he had not expressed himself upon the
subject in stronger terms, and added that he should certainly do so
whenever a similar occasion should present itself. "Whenever," he
said, "a Secretary of State shall dare to write so bloody a scroll, I
will through life dare to write such prefatory remarks, as well as to
make my appeal to the nation on the occasion." Wilkes found champions
in the House of Commons. Burke, Beckford, and many others either
defended Wilkes or urged that the matter was not for the House of
Commons, but for the law courts to deal with. In the division the
Government was triumphant by a majority of 219 against 137, and Wilkes
was formally expelled from the House of Commons on the ground, not
merely of his comments on the letter of Lord Weymouth, but on account
of the Number Forty-five of the _North Briton_ and the "Essay on Woman."
A new writ was issued for the county of Middlesex. The county of
Middlesex promptly re-elected Wilkes without opposition on February 16.
On February 17 the House of Commons again voted the expulsion of
Wilkes. This time the House of Commons exceeded its powers and its
privileges in adding that the expelled man was incapable of sitting in
the existing Parliament. Every blow that the royal party had struck at
Wilkes had only aroused stronger sympathy for him; and this illegal
act, this usurpation {126} by one House of powers that only belonged to
Parliament, caused the liveliest indignation. It was resolved by the
friends of Wilkes, and by all who were the friends of the principles
with which Wilkes had come to be identified, to fight to the utmost in
defence of their constitutional rights, that were now so gravely, so
wantonly jeopardized. On March 16 there was a new polling at
Brentford, and, as before, Wilkes was returned unopposed. There was,
indeed, an effort made by an obscure merchant named Dingley to oppose
him, but he could find no freeholder to second him, and he was chivied
ignominiously from the scene of the election. On March 17 the House of
Commons, for the third time, played what Burke called the tragi-comedy
of declaring the election void. A new writ was again issued, and this
time the Ministry were resolved that, come what come might, Wilkes
should have an opponent. It was not the easiest of tasks to find a man
willing to oppose Wilkes's candidature on the hustings at Brentford.
Dingley, the merchant, had experienced the violence of the mob; it was
confidently assumed that any other antagonist would fare very much
worse. But the Ministry found their champion in a young officer,
Colonel Luttrell, of the Guards, a son of Lord Irnham. Luttrell was a
gallant young soldier, a man of that temper which regards all popular
agitations with supreme disdain, and of that courage that would face
any danger, not merely with composure, but with pleasure. His friends
were so apprehensive that he was going to his death that his life was
insured, and the gentlemen of the clubs, who were always willing to bet
upon any imaginable contingency, betted freely on his chances of
surviving his adventure. Wilkes's friends, however, were resolved to
disappoint the expectations of their enemies. Thanks to their energy
and patience, the election went off with perfect order. Wilkes was, of
course, returned at the top of the poll by an enormous majority.
Luttrell came next with less than a quarter of his votes, and an absurd
attorney, who had thrust himself into the election at the last moment,
came last with a ludicrous poll of five votes.
{127}
[Sidenote: 1769--Lord North and the Wilkes case]
On Thursday, April 13, Wilkes was elected. London was again
illuminated, and a great demonstration outside the King's Bench Prison
congratulated the hero of the hour on his third triumph. On the
following day the House of Commons prepared again to reject Wilkes.
The debate lasted over the Saturday--a rare event in those days--and in
the early dawning of Sunday morning Colonel Luttrell was declared to be
duly elected as the member for Middlesex. The ministerial victory was
not a very great victory. They had only a majority of 197 votes to
143. It served their turn at a pinch, but it was not a big enough
majority to inspire Lord North with the courage to resist a proposal
that a fortnight should be allowed to the electors of Middlesex in
which, if they wished, to petition against conduct which practically
deprived them of their constitutional rights.
Lord North had many years of public life before him, many years of
slumbering and blundering on the treasury bench, before his death in
1792, as Lord Guildford, in a melancholy, premature old age. In those
years he was privileged to do a vast amount of injury to his country,
uncompensated for by any act to her advantage. Lord North's conduct in
the case of Wilkes was not the most foolish act in a career of folly,
but it certainly served as an illuminating preface to a chronicle of
wasted time. No proofs of the wit that endeared him to his
contemporaries have been preserved; his fame for an unalterable
urbanity is but an empty memory; his record is only rescued from
oblivion by the series of incredible follies which began with the
unjust attempt to annihilate Wilkes.
{128}