In praise of John Wilkes: how a filthy, philandering dead-beat helped secure British—and American—liberty

Reason, July, 2006 by Daniel McCarthy

John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, by Arthur H. Cash, New Haven: Yale University Press, 482 pages, $37.50

THE LIBERTARIAN journalist Albert Jay Nock once told the story of a friend who visited St. Petersburg in early 1917, when the Kerensky republic was in power and liberalization rather than Bolshevism still seemed possible for Russia. The proletariat was eager to hear any speaker who climbed a soapbox--even agents of the German government, with whom Russia was at war. Nock's friend asked one group of workers whether this was their idea of free speech, and whether they understood the difference between "liberty" and "license."

The workers didn't know these English words, so Nock's friend explained: Liberty is "when some perfectly respectable person gets up and says something everybody agrees to," while "license is when some infernal scoundrel, who ought to be hanged anyway, gets up and says something that is true." After conferring for a moment, the Russians decided they were not for liberty. They were for license.

So was John Wilkes--radical journalist, member of Parliament, outlaw, prisoner, lord mayor of London, and self-described libertine--some 150 years earlier. His life and career go a long way toward dispelling the superstition that liberty must advance hand in glove with order, guided by men of sterling moral character. Probably born in 1726 (the exact year is uncertain), Wilkes was a near contemporary of our Founding Fathers, and his clashes with George III and his ministers set an example for the rebellious colonists. But Wilkes, rake that he was, is in no danger of becoming an object of veneration for Americans today. In John Wilkes, his new biography, Arthur H. Cash shows us why that's so--and why lovers of liberty, at least, should celebrate this colorful Englishman. Cash tells his readers from the outset, "If you think the police have the right to arrest forty-nine people when they are looking for three, shut [this book] now."

Cash, a professor emeritus of English at SUNY New Paltz, argues convincingly that Wilkes helped lay the foundation for some of the most basic rights taken for granted in the United States and Great Britain: freedom of the press, the right to privacy, religious liberty. Most often Wilkes did this--at considerable risk to himself--by goading the government into overreaction and then suing the king's ministers and agents. Along the way, he conducted innumerable adulterous affairs, dabbled in dueling, accumulated debts he had no intention of paying--"I take the liberty to inform you that at present it is not my interest to pay the principal, neither is it my principle to pay the interest," he told one creditor--and published what some have considered the filthiest poem in the English language. (One sample couplet: "... life can little more supply/than just a few good Fucks and then we die.")

Cross-eyed and with a prognathous jaw that would put Jay Leno to shame, Wilkes entered Parliament in 1757 at the age of 31. He was the protege of Thomas Potter, wealthy son of the late archbishop of Canterbury, who introduced the younger man to politics while encouraging him in his already pronounced womanizing. The two occasionally traded mistresses, and Potter brought Wilkes into "the Order of the Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe," also known as the "Hellfire Club" because of its supposed black masses, though on Cash's account it seems more like a cross between a bawdy dinner club and a by-the-hour hotel. Wilkes was married but had separated from his wife--their union was loveless, though it produced a daughter, Polly, whom Wilkes cherished above all else.

Once elected to Parliament from Aylesbury--his only opponent in the race withdrew after Wilkes bribed uncommitted voters, a common practice at the time--Wilkes aligned with the Whig faction of Pitt the Elder and Lord Temple, which soon found itself in opposition to the ministry (that is, government) of Lord Bute, a Whig of a very different sort. With the Whig Party ascendant, its internal divisions were as significant as its differences with the other great party, the Tories. Pitt's wing, sometimes called "Patriots," was nationalistic and (relatively) populist; Bute, on the other hand, sued for peace with England's enemies and was perceived as a staunch royalist.

Wilkes served his faction as one of its ablest propagandists, anonymously publishing a newspaper, the North Briton, that lampooned Bute as a friend of royal absolutism and enemy of English liberty. Wilkes especially damned the ministry's excise tax--not simply because it was a tax but because, as Cash argues, collecting it "would legitimate forced entries and searches of houses and barns, putting into the hands of politicians the means to harass and even destroy their opponents." This, says Cash, "was Wilkes' first expression of the right to privacy that he would later champion in the courts."

With the publication of North Briton No. 45 in 1763, the ministry--even with Bute himself now fallen from power--could tolerate no more and issued a "general warrant" for the arrest of anyone connected with the paper. Wilkes' authorship was an open secret, but the ministry needed firm proof to prosecute him for "seditious libel." The general warrant named a crime but no suspect, empowering the king's messengers, as the royal police were called, to round up anyone they pleased and seize anything that might be useful as evidence. Wilkes was arrested, along with 48 printers and other people involved with publishing issue 45, and his papers were confiscated.