THE SPIRIT OP JUNIUS.
[Sidenote: 1769--The Letters of Junius]
While all this was going on a new force suddenly made itself felt in
English political life. The King and his ministers found themselves
attacked by a mysterious and dangerous opponent. On March 21, 1769, a
letter was addressed to the _Public Advertiser_, signed "Junius," which
marked the beginning of a new era in political literature. At that
time the _Public Advertiser_ was the most important paper in London.
It had first appeared under that name in 1752, but it was the direct
descendant, through a series of changes of name, of the _Daily Post_,
which Defoe had helped to start in 1719. It had its rivals in the
_Daily Advertiser_, which was founded in 1724, and the _Gazetteer_ and
_New Daily Advertiser_, which was started in 1728. In the course of
time both these journals had sunk to be little more than advertising
sheets. They gave hardly any news, and they had no political
influence. The _Public Advertiser_ was a much more important paper.
It gave abundance of foreign and domestic intelligence, it had original
contributions in prose and verse, and its columns were always open to
letters from correspondents of all kinds on all manner of subjects.
It was not until the first letter signed with the signature of Junius
appeared that the paper assumed a serious political importance. The
writer, whoever he was, who chose that signature had written before in
the columns of the _Public Advertiser_. In 1767 Woodfall, the
publisher, received the first letter from the correspondent who was to
become so famous, and from time to time other letters came signed by
various names taken from classical nomenclature, such as Mnemon,
Atticus, Lucius, Brutus, {129} Domitian, Vindex, and, perhaps,
Poplicola. But it was with the adoption of the name of Junius that the
real importance of the letters began. They came at a crisis; they
spoke for the popular side; they spoke with a bitterness and a ferocity
that had hitherto not been attempted in political journalism. The
great French writer Taine has said that the letters of Junius, at a
time of national irritation and anxiety, fell one by one like drops of
fire on the fevered limbs of the body politic. He goes on to say that
if Junius made his phrases concise, and selected his epithets, it was
not from a love of style, but in order the better to stamp his insult.
Oratorical artifices in his hand became instruments of torture, and
when he filed his periods it was to drive the knife deeper and surer,
with an audacity of denunciation and sternness of animosity, with a
corrosive and burning irony applied to the most secret corners of
private life, with an inexorable persistence of calculated and
meditated persecution.
The first few letters of Junius were devoted to an altercation with Sir
William Draper over the character in the first place of Lord Granby and
in the second place of Lord Granby's defender, Sir William Draper. Sir
William, though he fought stoutly for his friend and stoutly for
himself, did neither himself nor his friend much good by engaging in
the controversy. He was no match for the weapons of Junius. He had
neither the wit nor the venom of his antagonist. But the great
interest of the letters began when Junius, taking up the cause of
Wilkes, struck at higher game than Sir William Draper or Lord Granby.
His first letter to the Duke of Grafton was an indictment of the Duke
for the conduct of the Crown in the case of a murder trial arising out
of the Brentford election. A young man named George Clarke had been
killed in a riot and a man named Edward M'Quirk was tried and found
guilty of the murder. A kind of hugger-mugger inquest produced a
declaration that Clarke's death was not caused by the blow he had
received from his assailant, and in consequence, "whereas a doubt had
arisen in our royal breast," the King formally pardoned the murderer by
royal {130} proclamation. On this theme Junius lashed Grafton and
concluded his letter with a direct allusion to Wilkes. He asked if
Grafton had forgotten, while he was withdrawing this desperate wretch
from that justice which the laws had awarded and which the whole people
of England demanded, that there was another man, the favorite of his
country, whose pardon would have been accepted with gratitude, whose
pardon would have healed all divisions. "Have you quite forgotten that
this man was once your Grace's friend? Or is it to murderers only that
you will extend the mercy of the Crown?"
The attack thus daringly begun was steadily maintained. Wilkes had no
keener, no acuter champion than Junius. With great skill Junius
avoided all appearance of violent partisanship. He was careful to
censure much in Wilkes's conduct, careful to discriminate between
Wilkes's private character and Wilkes's public conduct. The
unjustifiable action of the House of Commons in forcing Colonel
Luttrell upon the electors of Middlesex gave Junius the opportunity of
assailing Wilkes's enemies without appearing to champion Wilkes to the
utterance. Junius admitted that the Duke of Grafton might have had
some excuse in his opposition to Wilkes on account of Wilkes's
character, and might have earned the approval of men who, looking no
further than to the object before them, were not dissatisfied with
seeing Mr. Wilkes excluded from Parliament. But, Junius went on to
argue, "you have now taken care to shift the question; or, rather, you
have created a new one, in which Mr. Wilkes is no more concerned than
any other English gentleman. You have united the country against you
on one grand constitutional point, on the decision of which our
existence as a free people absolutely depends. You have asserted, not
in words but in fact, that representation in Parliament does not depend
upon the choice of the freeholders."
[Sidenote: 1769--The identity of Junius]
The authorship of the letters of Junius is one of those problems, like
the problems of the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, which have
never been settled with absolute certainty and which probably never
will be settled {131} with absolute certainty. But between absolute
certainty and the highest degree of probability there is no very great
gulf fixed, and it is in the highest degree probable that the author of
the letters was Philip Francis. The letters have been attributed to
all manner of men. They were ascribed, absurdly enough, to Wilkes.
Wilkes could write bitterly and he could write well, but he could write
neither so well nor so bitterly as Mr. Woodfall's correspondent. Dr.
Johnson, who ought to have known better, thought they were written by
Burke. It is his excuse that there did not seem at the time any man of
the same ability as the writer of the letters except Burke. But Dr.
Johnson, who had been quick enough to recognize the genius of the
anonymous author of the essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful," erred
when he thought that the same hand penned the anonymous letters. The
prose of Burke was as far above the prose of Junius as the prose of
Junius was above the prose of Wilkes. None of the letters surpasses in
ferocity, none approaches in excellence the letter which Burke wrote to
the noble Duke who had slandered him. The letters were attributed to
Barré; they were attributed to Lee, who was yet to earn another kind of
fame; they were attributed to many hands. To us, at least, it seems
clear that they were the work of Philip Francis.
The electors of Middlesex did petition against the substitution of the
despised Luttrell for the adored Wilkes. The consideration of the
petition was the occasion for one of the most memorable debates that
can be recorded of an age rich in memorable debates. On the one side
the influence of the Ministry and the influence of the King induced
Blackstone to deny himself and to falsify those principles of
constitutional law with which his name is associated. On the other
side principles as little honorable but a far acuter political
perception urged Wedderburn, who was nominally a King's man, to go over
to the popular cause with the air of a Coriolanus. On the one side
Fletcher Norton upheld the authority of the resolution. On the other
side George Grenville argued against it with an acumen which showed
that an able lawyer might have {132} been a great lawyer. In that
famous debate Burke spoke at his best, and yet the event of that debate
was not the speech of Burke, was not the speech of the experienced
politician, of the seasoned statesman, of the famous man of letters,
but the speech of a young man who was almost a boy, the speech of
Charles James Fox. All who have written on the debate agree in their
admiration of the speech of one who, as far as Parliament was
concerned, was but a raw lad and who nevertheless held his own on a
point of law against experienced lawyers, in statesmanship against
Grenville, and in eloquence against Burke.
[Sidenote: 1769--Unpopularity of George the Third]
Of course the petition of Middlesex was rejected; the election of
Luttrell was confirmed. On the day of the confirmation the King
prorogued Parliament in a foolish speech in which he seemed to think
that he had gained a victory. But if the King and the Ministry
believed or hoped that in expelling Wilkes from Parliament they had got
rid of Wilkes for good and all; if they believed or hoped that in thus
degrading Wilkes they would deprive him of his popularity with the
people or even diminish that popularity, they were speedily to be
undeceived and bitterly disappointed. Both King and ministers knew
their business very badly; with limitations of intelligence which would
have been disastrous to the conduct of a small shop, they came in this
instance, as in other instances, within measurable distance of wrecking
a royalty. It is probable that Franklin, shrewd, cool observer though
he was, went too far when he wrote in his journal that if George the
Third had had a bad private character, and John Wilkes a good one, the
latter might have turned the former out of his kingdom. But it is
certain that the signs of the King's unpopularity were now as
significant as were the signs of Wilkes's popularity. It had been said
that at this time a good half of the King's subjects preferred Wilkes
to their King. The estimate is probably under rather than above the
fact. Wilkes was placed in the position of being the champion of all
the rights and liberties that Englishmen most prized; the King in the
{133} position of being their most uncompromising, most obstinate
opponent.
Thus, while honors were offered daily to the prisoner of the King's
bench, insults were daily offered to his royal enemy. The King could
scarcely go abroad without becoming the object of a demonstration of
popular disfavor, and even in his palace he could not escape from
deputations empowered to protest against the conduct of his ministers.
In all parts of the kingdom public meetings were held, and from these
public meetings petitions poured in upon the King calling upon him to
dissolve his Parliament. It has been truly observed that the custom of
holding public meetings for the discussion of public grievances dates
from this period. On two solemn occasions the Lord Mayor of London,
accompanied by the sheriffs, presented addresses to the King
remonstrating against the action of the House of Commons. To the first
address the King replied that it was disrespectful to him, injurious to
Parliament, and irreconcilable to the principles of the Constitution.
After which reply he could think of nothing better, nothing more kingly
to do than to turn round to his courtiers and burst out laughing. He
treated the second address with the same insolence, an insolence which
provoked from the Lord Mayor an uncourtierly reply which reminded the
King that those who endeavored to alienate the King's affections from
his subjects were violators of the public peace and betrayers of the
Constitution established by the glorious Revolution. Those words were
afterwards inscribed in gold upon the monument of the mayor who spoke
them. If those words, and words of like purport and temper, at first
moved the King to laughter, they soon exasperated him past laughing.
Once he clapped his hand to his sword-hilt and declared that he would
sooner have recourse to that than grant a dissolution. The tension of
public feeling can best be estimated when a constitutional sovereign on
the one side could dare to make such a remark; when a representative of
the people like Colonel Barré on the other side could dare in the House
of {134} Commons to say that disregard of public petitions might lead
the people to think of assassination.
While the King was insulted and insulting, and longing to stifle
opposition by the sword, John Wilkes in his prison was receiving new
proofs of the place he held in public affection. He was elected
alderman for the Ward of Farringdon Without. We are told that his
table at the prison was daily supplied with the most rare and costly
delicacies, presented to him by his admirers. The mysterious Chevalier
d'Eon sent him a present of Russian smoked tongues, with the whimsical
wish that they could have the eloquence of Cicero, and the delicacy of
Voltaire, to do him honor. Friendly revellers sent him hampers of the
wine he liked the best. More serious gifts were laid at his feet. For
a while money literally rained in upon him. The leading Whigs provided
him with an income. Nobles and great ladies sent him large sums. A
number of politicians banded together under the title of the Society
for Supporting the Bill of Rights, and raised a great deal of money,
much of which went in meeting some of the heavy debts with which Wilkes
was embarrassed, much of which went in keeping up the princely way of
living which suited Wilkes's temperament, and which was perhaps not
unsuited to the part he was playing as the rival of a prince. In the
public press, on the platform, on the stage, his influence was
enormous. His good pleasure sent politicians to Parliament; his good
pleasure made London sheriffs, made provincial mayors. While the false
rumor that he was the author of "The Letters of Junius" only swelled
the volume of his fame, the author of those letters was adding to
Wilkes's pride and power by public championship and by private letters,
choking with an adulation that seems strange indeed from so savage a
pen. If Garrick dared for a moment to run counter to popular feeling,
as a little earlier he had dared to disdain the praise of Churchill, he
had to give way in the case of Wilkes, as he had given way in the case
of Wilkes's poet. The very name of Wilkes drove men on both sides of
the quarrel into a kind of frenzy. Alexander Cruden, of the
"Concordance," {135} showed his devotion to his King and his dislike of
Wilkes by carrying a large sponge with him whenever he walked abroad in
order that he might wipe out the ominous number, forty-five, whenever
he saw it chalked up. As the number was chalked up everywhere by the
Wilkites, Cruden soon found the task beyond his powers. It was lucky
for him that he got no harm in his zeal, lucky for him that he did not
come across that militant clergyman who pulled the nose of a Scotch
naval officer for attacking Wilkes and then met his man in Hyde Park
and wounded him.
[Sidenote: 1770--A fight for the liberty of the Press]
On April 17, 1770, Wilkes's term of imprisonment came to an end.
Wilkes immediately started for Bath to avoid a demonstration in London;
but London was illuminated in his honor, and in a great number of
provincial towns his release was celebrated with all the signs of a
national holiday. If he had been a hero in prison, he was no less a
hero out of it. He moved from triumph to triumph. While alderman he
won a victory over the Court and the Commons which did much to
establish the liberty of the press in England. The House of Commons,
in a foolish attempt to suppress reports of the debates in Parliament,
tried to arrest certain printers. Wilkes and the Lord Mayor took the
printers' part; advised them to conceal themselves; and in their turn
arrested those who, in obedience to a royal proclamation and the orders
of the House, arrested the printers.
The House of Commons committed the Lord Mayor and Alderman Oliver to
the Tower, and summoned Wilkes to appear at the bar. Wilkes coolly
replied that as he was a member of Parliament, and as he was not
addressed as a member of Parliament should be, and ordered to attend in
his place according to custom, he should ignore the summons. The House
made a second and yet a third order for his appearance, each of which
Wilkes treated with disdain. It is a significant proof of the power of
Wilkes's popularity that the House did not take any steps to punish his
contumacy. While it affected to find a consolation in the assurances
of the King that Wilkes was "below the {136} notice of the House," it
had to endure as best it might an affront resentment of which would
only have added to Wilkes's popularity. The honors paid to the Lord
Mayor and the alderman during their imprisonment showed only too
plainly that hostility to the Court and the Parliamentary majority was
heroism in the eyes of the majority of the citizens of London.
Once again Wilkes had won the day. From that time forward Parliament
put no embargo upon the publication of reports of its debates. Fresh
honors were showered on Wilkes. He was elected sheriff. He was
presented by the Court of Common Council with a silver goblet, designed
according to his own wish with a representation of the death of Caesar,
and graced with the ominous motto from one of the poems of Churchill:
May every tyrant feel
The keen deep searchings of a patriot steel,
a citation which, taken in conjunction with Barré's wild talk in the
House about assassination, was sufficiently significant of the temper
of the time.
[Sidenote: 1774--Wilkes Lord Mayor of London]
Wilkes had been alderman; he had been sheriff; he was now to bear the
crown of civic honors. He was put in nomination for the office of Lord
Mayor. The Court party made a desperate effort to defeat him. They
had tried and failed to prevent him from being elected to Parliament.
They had tried and failed to prevent him from being made alderman, from
being made sheriff. They now tried with all their might to prevent him
from being made Lord Mayor. Wilkes had much to fight against. There
were defections from his own party. The once devoted Horne had
squabbled with his idol over money matters, and was now as venomous an
enemy as he had been a fulsome partisan. Alderman Townshend, an
ex-Lord Mayor, strained all his influence, which was great in the City,
against Wilkes. A wild rumor got about at one time, indeed, that
Townshend had settled the difficulty of the Court forever by
challenging Wilkes and shooting him dead. The story had no foundation,
but for a moment it flattered the hopes of Wilkes's {137} enemies and
fluttered the hearts of Wilkes's friends. The opposition ended as
opposition to Wilkes always ended. Twice he was placed at the head of
the poll, and twice the Court of Aldermen chose another candidate. The
third time, in the election of 1774, Wilkes was at last chosen as Lord
Mayor by the Court of Aldermen in despite of the unwearied efforts of
the Court party to defeat him. "Thus," wrote Walpole, "after so much
persecution by the Court, after so many attempts upon his life, after a
long imprisonment in jail, after all his own crimes and indiscretions,
did this extraordinary man, of more extraordinary fortune, attain the
highest office in so grave and important a city as the capital of
England, always reviving the more opposed and oppressed, and unable to
shock Fortune and make her laugh at him who laughed at everybody and
everything!" It has been well said by Mr. Fraser Rae that the
significance of election to the office of Lord Mayor was very much
greater more than a hundred years ago than it is now. Then the Chief
Magistrate of the City was not necessarily a man who had passed through
certain minor offices and who rose by routine to fill the highest. At
that time the Corporation was a political power, which ministers had to
take into account, and which sovereigns had to propitiate. A greater
triumph than the mayoralty followed in quick succession. At the
general election of 1774 Wilkes came forward again, and for the fifth
time, as candidate for Middlesex. This time he was not opposed.
Luttrell abandoned an impossible position and did not stand. Ten years
after Wilkes's first appearance in the House of Commons he returned to
it again in triumph as the member for Middlesex and the Lord Mayor of
London.
And here, on the top of his triumph, Wilkes may be said to drop through
the tissue of our history. He was to live nearly a quarter of a
century longer, three-and-twenty years of a life that was as calm and
peaceful as the hot manhood that preceded it had been vexed and
unquiet. Although he lives in history as one of the most famous of the
world's agitators, he had in his heart little affection {138} for the
life of a public man. And the publicity of the civic official was
especially distasteful to him. He hated the gross festivals, the gross
pleasures, the gross display of City life. He sickened of the long
hours spent in the business of mayoralty; he sickened yet more of the
pleasures incidental to mayoralty. Though he remained in Parliament
for many years, and conducted himself there with zeal, discretion, and
statesmanship, and always, or almost always, proved himself to be the
champion of liberty and the democratic principle, he did not find his
greatest happiness in public speeches and the triumphs and defeats of
the division lobby. What he loved best on earth was the society of his
daughter, between whom and himself there existed a friendship that is
the best advocate for Wilkes's character. And he loved best to enjoy
that society in the kind of sham classic retirement which had so
powerful an attraction for so many of the men of the eighteenth
century. His cottage in the Isle of Wight, with its Doric column to
the manes of Churchill, with its shrine to Fortuna Redux, was his idea
of the ancient city of Tusculum.
His tastes and pleasures were the tastes and pleasures of a man of
letters. He affected a curious kind of scholarship. The hand that had
been employed upon the _North Briton_, now devoted itself to the
editing of classic texts; the intellect that had been associated with
the privately printed "Essay on Woman" was now associated with
privately printed editions of Catullus which he fondly believed to be
flawless, and of Theophrastus, whose Greek text it pleased him to print
without accents. In his tranquil old age he made himself as many
friends as in his hot manhood he had made himself enemies. Those who
had most hated him came under the spell of his attraction, even the
King himself, even Dr. Johnson. His interview with Dr. Johnson is one
of the most famous episodes in the literary and political history of
the last century. His assurance to King George that he himself had
never been a Wilkite is in one sense the truest criticism that has ever
been passed upon him. If to be a Wilkite was to entertain {139} all
the advanced and all the wild ideas expressed by many of those who took
advantage of his agitation, then certainly Wilkes was none such. But
he was a Wilkite in the better sense of being true to his own opinions
and true to his sense of public duty. When he expressed the wish to
have the words "A friend to liberty" inscribed upon his monument, he
expressed a wish which the whole tenor of his life, the whole tone of
his utterances fully justified. And if he was loyal to his principles
he could be chivalrous to his enemies. Almost his last public
appearance was at the general election of 1796, when he came forward,
with a magnanimity which would have well become many a better man, to
support the candidature of Horne Tooke at Westminster, of the man who,
after having been his fawning friend, his fulsome flatterer, had turned
against him with the basest treachery and the bitterest malignity.
There may have been, surely there must have been, a vein of irony in
the words in which Wilkes complimented the apostate and the turncoat as
a man of public virtues. But the irony was cloaked by courtesy; if the
action smacked of the cynic, at least it was done in obedience to the
behest to forgive our enemies.
[Sidenote: 1797--Death of Wilkes]
On November 38, 1797, the old, worn, weary man, who had worked so hard
and done so much, welcomed, in his capacity of Chamberlain of the City
of London, Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson to the honorary freedom of the
City. The setting star saluted the rising star. Nelson was then
thirty-nine. He had been at sea since he was twelve. He had voyaged
in polar seas and tropic waters. He had fought the Americans. He had
fought the French. "Hate a Frenchman as you would the devil" was his
simple-minded counsel of perfection. He had fought the Spaniards. He
had lost an eye at Calvi. He had lost an arm at Santa Cruz. He was
ten years married. His love, his error, his glory, Emma Hamilton,
Carracioli, Trafalgar, were yet to come.
Less than a month later, in the late December, 1797, John Wilkes was
dead. He was seventy years old. For nearly forty years he had lived
unknown, unheeded. For {140} ten years he was the most conspicuous man
in England, the best hated and the best loved. For twenty years more
he was an honored public and private citizen. He will always be
remembered as one of the most remarkable men of a century of remarkable
men.
{141}