The Political Allure of a Bad Man
Once, there was a volatile politician. He sported with women, directed ire toward ethnic minorities closely bound to pressing public issues whom elites sought to protect, and used his access to advanced communication technology to send inflammatory messages directly to his supporters. His swampy moral life did not diminish his popularity. He attacked the people in power and demanded protection for common people. His supporters rioted. The authorities hated him. They searched his home, filed charges against him, and tried to keep him from holding office ever again. This behavior just made him stronger. He became a symbol of patriotism. National attention was fixed on whether he could return to power.
I speak, of course, of the mid-eighteenth-century British politician John Wilkes. His career suggests conditions under which an unscrupulous politician can build a large, enthusiastic base of support consumed with his personal fate. Unresolved public tensions offer opportunities to intervene. Establishing himself as an anti-elite patriot binds him to the ambitions and deepest loves and fears of those outside the centers of power. A hapless ruling class fuels his rise by trying to bar him from power outside the electoral process. But the story of Wilkes also suggests that in at least some cases amalgamation into the powerful and the obstacles of political inertia can tame the wild politician.
Wilkes was born in 1727 into a wealthy family, received a good education, and married a wealthy woman, but he was still in many ways an outsider. By law, eighteenth-century Britain favored those who worshiped in the Church of England. Wilkes was nominally a Dissenter, a non-Anglican Christian, but in practice he shrugged off Christianity entirely. He was also not in the social class of the political elite.
Wilkes was well-suited for political leadership but also had severe liabilities. He was intelligent and skillful at verbally roughing up his enemies, getting attention, and charming the public. On the other hand, he was headstrong, bombastic, and dishonest. Historian Fred Anderson has called him a “prince of disorder.” He used his position as treasurer for a local foundling hospital to embezzle money. He would not tame his sexual appetites. In a raunchy bit of poetry he described sex as the best part of life. He abandoned his wife to chase other women, including a French teenager.
In 1763, artist William Hogarth made a drawing of Wilkes that suggested his explosive potential. Wilkes appears charismatic but untrustworthy. He is a literary man. He sits next to a table bearing a pen, an inkstand, and two issues of the newspaper he edited. But his influence may not be good. He slouches in a chair, his legs spread and feet planted on the floor. He looks ready for trouble. His face is at an angle to the viewer so that he looks out of the corner of his eyes. The eyebrow nearest the viewer is arched, and his face wears a naughty grin. On a pole he holds over his head a hat labeled “liberty,” but it also brings to mind an overturned chamberpot.
In 1757, Wilkes entered English politics when he spent £7,000 – the amount a wealthy person made in a year – to win a race for Parliament. Wilkes’s political career began in a setting in which the English enjoyed abundant but also restricted liberty and faced change and uncertainty. Enhancing liberty, the English could vote for representatives in Parliament. The Civil War and Glorious Revolution of the seventeenth century had transferred much of the monarchy’s power to Parliament, rendering English monarchs hobbled, unlike their European peers. In the early eighteenth century, the Whigs, who favored limits on monarchical power and less restrictions on Dissenters, began an era of dominating Parliament that lasted a century.
On the other hand, England was no democracy. Only a small minority could vote: large-scale rural landowners and London taxpayers. In the eighteenth century, as early industrialization caused many towns to grow, the proportion who could vote fell to only 3 percent of the whole population, lower than it was at the time of the Civil War. The wealthy were growing even more powerful. A few hundred large landholders determined who won an increasingly large proportion of the seats in Parliament. The cost of winning an election was rising, increasing the usefulness of money in politics. Lords were winning a rising proportion of positions as bishops, king’s ministers, and members of Parliament. Not surprisingly, members of Parliament tended to be upper class. A few wealthy Whigs dominated government. In the early eighteenth century the crown-appointed ministers who oversaw the execution of government policy became more influential over who won elections and how they behaved in office by punishing officials who did not vote their way or providing perks such as pensions and offices to members of Parliament who followed their lead. Thus more than half of Parliament always supported the ministry. Many English were angered by such practices because they believed they led to corruption and restored much of the crown’s power.
In 1760, George III became king. The new king tried to empower the the Anglican Church and the monarchy. He reinforced the army, navy, and bureaucracy, and his government profited from the East India Company, which provided it with a source of revenue that did not require Parliamentary approval.
England became increasingly divided in the 1760s. Conflict heightened between those with wealth and political power and the disfranchised, which included a growing middling population of merchants and professionals, such as lawyers. Many middling British began calling for the right to vote. Suspicion that George III and his ministers were seeking to snuff out liberty concerned many British, including Whigs aligned with the Marquis of Rockingham, the faction Wilkes was connected to. Many British said they wanted to “restore the constitution.” Many middling people also called for action against corruption and privilege in government.
When George III came to the throne, Britain was defeating France in the Seven Years’ War. The new king wanted peace more than he wanted to run up the score, so in 1763 Britain agreed to a treaty that delivered vast expanses of French territory to Britain, including Canada, but also required Britain to return some of its conquests. Many British believed that the 1763 treaty let the French off easy. Still, even the limited victory brought uncertainty about what the war’s great cost and engrossment of the empire would mean.
England was also growing by becoming part of a larger nation. In 1707, the Act of Union permanently fused England and Scotland into Great Britain. But producing more than legal unity would be difficult because the two had frequently invaded one another for centuries, including a Scottish attack on England as recently as 1745. After that, British authorities began trying to integrate the Scots more fully into British life. This included arousing Scottish loyalty by increasing Scottish access to positions in the government, such as military command. England’s attempt to win over the Scots was one reason Scottish power and achievement rose in the second half of the eighteenth century. Scotland was becoming wealthier through more trade with England and its empire, its intellectuals were more productive than England’s, its universities were better than England’s, its leaders were winning a rising number of seats in Parliament, and Scots were winning many private sector jobs in England. Many English reacted to the rise of Scotland with what historian Linda Colley has called “Scottophobia.” They feared that England would lose its hold over British politics and culture, and the poorly connected resented the increasing difficulty they faced in finding jobs. Scottophobes depicted their rivals as lustful social climbers who were, in the words of one, “violent and tyrannical.”
These stereotypes were not entirely baseless, for the Scots did try to strengthen the British government and monarchy by helping it to tighten its grip on its colonies. Partly for this reason, beginning in the mid-1760s, Britain began to try to increase its control of its American colonies, resulting in intense conflict and, eventually, war. Britain’s colonial policy intensified fear that the nation was losing its liberties.
As these changes roiled England, Wilkes did little to stand out from the pack. In the early 1760s, he was passed over when he tried to be named governor of Canada. A Scot won the position instead, embittering Wilkes.
He got a chance to smite the government in 1761 when Lord Richard, Earl Temple, gave him a newspaper called the North Briton – a name designed to needle the Scots. Temple sought revenge on prime minister John Stuart, Earl of Bute, a favorite of the king, by turning Wilkes into a flamethrower against him. Wilkes’s new platform allowed him to become what twentieth-century writer Russell Kirk called a “demagogue.”
Just as Temple had hoped, Wilkes torched Bute relentlessly. The North Briton depicted him as a boot. It reviled him for failing to make enough demands on the French in the resolution to the Seven Years’ War. And he was Scottish. Like many Scottophobes, Wilkes even contended that Bute had bedded the king’s mother. The claim was probably false, but it still made for a spicy story. Wilkes had an ideal opponent. Many British resented Bute because they believed that he gave too much power to both the Scots and the king.
Wilkes and his supporters defined themselves as English patriots. Colley has said that they displayed “xenophobic Englishness.” They depicted themselves as English in their roots and culture, confident in English greatness, and protective of the people’s rights against those acting out of line with English traditions. They propounded the Whig view of English history: that it was a story of the advance of freedom, largely achieved through the Civil War and Glorious Revolution. Wilkes supporters depicted George III as one of these un-English threats to liberty. Wilkes’s message gained plausibility because his enemies often included Scots in high places. Wilkes succeeding at achieving a powerful resonance for his name. “Wilkes and Liberty,” his supporters often proclaimed.
Wilkes and his supporters frequently ran down the Scots as a means of asserting that English influence would survive. They depicted the Scots as other – as kilt wearers with accents who always looked out for each other. They referred to Britain as “England” and called a person who inhabited this place an “Englishman.” Scots did not share the English love for liberty, they claimed. Scottish nobles trampled the people and their imperial policy provoked the Americans.
In 1763, Wilkes’s use of his mouthpiece made him a central figure in British politics. In April, Bute slunk out of office in shame, largely because of Wilkes’s assaults. But just days later, in the North Briton’s forty-fifth issue, Wilkes imperiled everything he had achieved by turning his flamethrower on a more fire retardant target and setting himself alight. He attacked the king for lying when he claimed that Britain had not given up too much to end the Seven Years’ War. The vengeful ministry struck back with a search of Wilkes’s home and a seditious libel charge.
Wilkes was saved by the bungling of his enemies. Instead of going to the trouble of obtaining a court order to legalize the search, they justified it through a general warrant. This angered Wilkes supporters, who saw the government’s actions as an infringement on a man’s rights in order to shut down objectionable speech. Worse, the government’s response ran afoul of the law. Members of Parliament were immune from arrest for most crimes. A judge ruled that parliamentary immunity protected Wilkes’s writing and acquitted him. Wilkes ran wild in the aftermath. He sued those responsible for the search – and won damages from a jury. He published all previous issues of the North Briton as a single volume. He held rallies.
His enemies sought revenge. A rival member of Parliament challenged Wilkes to a duel – and shot him in the groin. The search of Wilkes’s quarters did succeed at turning up a lewd poem called An Essay on Woman. Officials charged Wilkes with blasphemy, and the ministry and House of Lords thereafter tried to demean Wilkes by portraying him as a sexually perverted affront to God, but those involved in the effort foolishly allowed the Earl of Sandwich to take the lead. Just as much a womanizer as Wilkes, he was mentioned in Wilkes’s dirty poem, which began, “Awake, my Sandwich, leave all meaner things; this morn shall prove what rapture swiving brings!” All these efforts just diminished the government’s stature. More significant, at the behest of the king’s ministers, Parliament also tried to get Wilkes expelled so that he would become vulnerable to prosecution. Sensing trouble, Wilkes ran off to France in late 1763. This may have been a mistake, for once he was out of the way, Parliament expelled him for failing to show up to face the charges against him, which it construed as contempt of Parliament. Now that Wilkes no longer could use his office as a shield, the Court of Kings Bench charged him with blasphemy and seditious libel. When Wilkes failed to answer the charges, it made him an outlaw, subject to arrest if he ever set foot in Britain again.
But the elite nightmare was not over. The government’s attempts to outlaw Wilkes backfired, historian Fred Anderson has noted, by making him “a folk hero.” By the late 1760s, Wilkes had a powerful base. It contained a few wealthy English, but mainly it consisted of the lower orders and middling people. His supporters did not hope to eliminate inequality but did want to increase liberty. Even many Americans loved him because they, too, believed the British government was out to extinguish freedom. They showed it by naming counties after Wilkes and sending him gifts. To commemorate the number of the fateful North Briton issue, Marylanders sent him forty-five hams.
Furthermore, retreating into the wilderness had not diminished Wilkes’s interest in English politics. In France, he burnished his Whig credentials by writing The History of England from the Revolution to the Accession of the Brunswick Line, a well-written if derivative Whig reading of recent English history, published in 1768. That same year, he eventually concluded that the perils of his debtors in France outweighed those of vindictive authorities in Britain, so he returned home and attempted a comeback. Middlesex County, which contained part of London and was populated by increasing numbers of restive middling people, promptly elected him to Parliament. His supporters celebrated with two days of rioting in London. The mob demanded that everyone celebrate by placing lights in the windows.
But not everyone was delighted to see Wilkes back. The mob smashed windows belonging to the many who refused to light up for Wilkes. Parliament saw the moment as equally dark, and it refused to let Wilkes take his seat. Wilkes was sent to prison. The Rockingham Whigs believed that Wilkes sullied their image and feared that he would fuel mobocracy and irreligion, but they also enabled him out of fear. Privately, member of Parliament Edmund Burke tried to get him to go back to France, but publicly they held their tongues about his excesses and sometimes defended him.
Wilkes kept building momentum. While the wealthy spurned him, Wilkes could win elections because he could take the majority of the small property holders who could vote. Twice in 1769 he won elections for Parliament by running unopposed – but each time Parliament refused to let him take his seat. Later in the year, he defeated an opponent 1,143-296 – in a county with a population of 700,000 – yet Parliament gave the seat to the loser.
Wilkes’s popularity made his fight for access to Parliament a major issue. His supporters donated enough money to get him out of debt, bought mugs and plates decorated with his face, and assembled for protests. At these events, they often increased participation by force. One way was requisitioning drinks from pubs so that participants could toast Wilkes. In 1770, 60,000 people signed petitions to demand that Parliament seat him.
Wilkes and his supporters successfully made Wilkes’s fate a symbol of the English struggle for liberty, thereby generating much of his popularity. They donned the mantle of patriots by fitting the issue into their fight against what they saw as the government’s attempt to reduce the rights of Englishmen. They did this by tying Wilkes to the events of English history to which people felt the strongest emotional ties and depicting the question of Wilkes’s future as an episode in the English struggle for liberty. The Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, referring to the 1689 English Bill of Rights, pursued dramatic reforms and paid Wilkes’s legal bills. Wilkes supporters carried flags acclaiming the Bill of Rights and 1215 Magna Carta.
The symbolism of Wilkes’s struggle allowed him to connect with a wide range of people. His middle class supporters wanted England to make more liberty available through highly specific reforms. They wanted rights equal to the large landowners, including the right to vote for Parliament even if they did not own land, a ban on bribery, annual Parliamentary meetings, and less coercion of the American colonies. They tied themselves to Wilkes to make their program more appealing.
The majority of Wilkes supporters were less interested in particular issues. Many were poor. These people did not want much change. They even wanted a strong monarch. But they cared about holding onto their liberty, and Wilkes committed himself to the same cause. They saw Wilkes’s fate as connected to the maintenance of traditional liberty, so they cared above all about what happened to him, rather than about what he would do. They showed their conflation of Wilkes and English liberty by singing about him to the tune of patriotic songs like “God Save the King” or by mentioning Wilkes and the king together in toasts and slogans.
Wilkes’s ability to prevail against the odds also enhanced his popularity. Wilkes faced the king and his ministers and did not adhere to the dominant Anglican faith but won anyway. This mattered because of his symbolic tie to liberty. If he could win, people were less fearful that liberty would survive in the future. His victories also helped his support because, Colley has written, “John Wilkes and his followers” were “English outsiders.” When he won, those with power and status were shamed. Wilkes supporters wanted to keep enjoying the thrills Wilkes gave them.
In 1774, Wilkes broke through. Resisting a popular politician made Parliament look petty. At last, Parliament gave in and let Wilkes serve. Middlesex then elected him yet again. At the same time, London elected him Lord Mayor. Wilkes remained in political office until 1790.
The aftermath of Wilkes’s triumph suggests that Parliament may have worried too much. Wilkes did use his power to pursue reform. He tried to increase religious liberty, reduce restrictions on the American colonies, make Parliament’s activities more transparent, and ban the practice of making members of Parliament the patsies of their patrons. Since his authority as Lord Mayor allowed him to decide which printers were arrested, he did manage to allow the publication of all Parliamentary deliberations by leaving the printers free to act. But Wilkes did not spark a cataclysm in English politics. Most of the initiatives he supported were defeated. He could never build enough support for universal suffrage to make it a reality. Even middling people only tepidly supported the idea. They were more interested in policies that promoted their businesses and protected their property. Furthermore, he moved away from representing the broad public and toward participating in the wealthy elite. In June 1780, working-class mobs rioted across the country against Parliament’s grant of more religious freedom to Roman Catholics, an attempt to build Irish support during the American Revolution. They snagged the wigs of religious and political leaders in Westminster Palace and attacked sites associated either with Catholicism, such as parochial schools or the homes of wealthy Catholics, or with the financial and political order, such as prisons or the Bank of England. Wilkes opposed the violence and tried to protect the Bank of England. His mellowing did not stop there. Late in his life, he opposed the French Revolution and called himself “an extinct volcano.”
For more on Wilkes and his times, see:
Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837. 2nd ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.
Kirk, Russell. Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. Rev. ed. Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997.
Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1990.
Roberts, Clayton, David Roberts, and Douglas R. Bisson. A History of England, Volume II: 1688 to the Present. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002.
Savelle, Max, and Darold D. Wax. A History of Colonial America. 3rd ed. Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden, 1973.
Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. London: Allen Lane, 2014.