The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The importance of John Wilkes is that he became not merely a national figure but the first ‘popular’ politician to create a distinctive political movement. He appealed directly to the mass of the people, not just the political nation, in a campaign which he was to sustain over many years and on a succession of issues. There was little that was particularly modern or progressive about John Wilkes. He was no orator, no thinker – not even a competent administrator. But he played to the gallery, casting himself as an anti-hero, a joker, a lord of misrule. He masterfully worked upon some of the principal elements in popular culture, appealing to popular traditions of self-expression and of resistance to power, identifying himself with English liberties and English rights. His use of mockery and satire to draw attention to himself and to the injuries he suffered at the hands of those in authority – not least the loftiest members of the royal family – was inspired. But he had a fund of moral courage, he was untroubled by self-doubt and he was a genius at self-publicity. Through his outrageous behaviour and his willingness to challenge the authorities he cultivated an enormous following, which accepted his identification of his own personal cause with that of English liberty in general. His career was a succession of crises, of instances of victimization at the hands of governments, sometimes goaded beyond endurance by Wilkes himself. He could thus present himself as the champion of the people and as a martyr for liberty. In doing so Wilkes willingly kept the searchlight of publicity on himself, his figure, his life, his cause. Wilkes employed the press to marvellous effect, using printed addresses to encourage his followers and to impose upon events his own personal dramatic, story. Above all, he kept his supporters constantly informed, tailoring his material – pamphlet, paragraph, print, handbill, cartoon, ballad and verse – to vastly different audiences, geographical and social. Much of this material was passed around by hand, displayed on walls and windows and, not least, reproduced in the local press, thus projecting the man and his cause throughout the country. The press was ready and more than willing to report the extravagant career of John Wilkes. Given this inspiration, Wilkite clubs and groups sprang up in many major, and some minor, towns.

  Its home, of course, was London but it would be a mistake to regard the Wilkite movement as overwhelmingly metropolitan. It prospered in a number of seaport towns which enjoyed both good communications and strong political traditions, such as Portsmouth, Liverpool, Bristol and Newcastle upon Tyne. It flourished in a number of industrial regions: the west Midlands, the West Riding of Yorkshire and some of the small towns of the south-west. It was particularly strong in a number of market towns and cathedral cities, especially Worcester and King’s Lynn. It is dangerous, however, to leap to broad conclusions from a number of instances. There are traces of Wilkite activity in many places of diverse character.

  Who were the people who supported the ‘man of the people’, brandishing ‘No. 45’ placards and shouting ‘Wilkes and Liberty’? The membership of Wilkite clubs seems to have been drawn from sections of the middle ranks of settled, urban society, and included small merchants, small manufacturers, wholesalers, publishers, innkeepers, retailers and craftsmen. As Paul Langford has remarked, ‘Men of very small property rarely found their way on to the political stage.’ But in 1763–4 and in 1768–70 they did.10 There seem, furthermore, to have been few denominational tendencies in Wilkes’s followers. Dissenters as a body were not involved in the movement to any great extent. If it is possible to hazard any sort of generalization about Wilkes’s following it may be that they were drawn from generally literate sections of the middling and lower middling orders who were removed from, and in many cases dissatisfied with, local power structures (such as corporations and patronage networks) and located in or near well-politicized communities. Many of them were debtors or men and women who feared debt. As Nicholas Rogers remarks, ‘The men who clubbed together to protect themselves from bankruptcy, whether in Masonic lodges or pseudo-masonic fraternities, provided much of the infrastructure of Wilkite politics.11 Wilkes’s message, however, in places penetrated much further down the social scale than the middling orders. In the metropolis the Wilkite crowds included Spitalfields weavers, rural freeholders, coal-heavers and many day-labourers from the East End.

  One of the most interesting achievements of Wilkes and those around him was to use his personal experiences as triggers for huge exhibitions of popular enthusiasm. These employed many features of an active, traditional popular culture. The Wilkites utilized popular habits of taking to the streets by mobilizing (surprisingly peaceful) crowds, by organizing celebrations and processions and, not least, by using the calendar to commemorate recent events in politics in general and in Wilkes’s career in particular. There was an explosion of national celebration when Wilkes was released from the King’s Bench Prison in April 1770. On such occasions Wilkite managers exploited the popular love of display by distributing cockades, ribbons and colours. They deployed Wilkite consumables, almost all of them – badges, pictures, cartoons, porcelain, rings, buttons – embellished with the No. 45 symbol in order to generate enthusiasm and to manifest loyalty. This aspect of Wilkite organization can be seen as ‘a commercialization of polities’, the publicization of Wilkes and his career through the techniques of the market. By using commercial techniques he was able to open up a national market for his propaganda, and to make his cause a national issue.12 But the culture of the middling orders was utilized, too. Many of the old clubs and lodges, such as the Albions, the Bucks and the Robin Hood debating societies, were to be found supporting Wilkes by the later 1760s. Regular political meetings, debates and discussions were held, even the occasional large public meeting. In 1769 the movement organized a nationwide petitioning campaign which yielded over twenty petitions with over 50,000 signatures. At the Middlesex election of 1768 Wilkes circulated no fewer than 40,000 handbills for an electorate of less than 4,000.

  The ideological significance of the Wilkite movement is not readily apparent. In some ways, it is not strictly accurate to regard the Wilkes phenomenon as a ‘radical’ movement. Wilkes himself had no political programme. The movement that takes his name was mobilized in order to support and protect him in his disputes with successive governments; it was not intended either to profess to or prosecute a programme of reform. Only as late as 1769 did the reform of Parliament seriously enter into Wilkite politics, when a number of London merchants, lawyers and other professional groups formed the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights (SSBR). The SSBR aimed to mount a nationwide petitioning campaign in defence of Wilkes’s election for Middlesex. With the funds it collected and with the propaganda at its disposal it made considerable headway in organizing support not only in London and Middlesex but also even as far afield as Yorkshire and the West Country. At this point, the Wilkite agitation may be said to be moving beyond the boundaries of a personal protest movement. The SSBR began to advocate shorter parliaments and a redistribution of seats. Most significantly, the friends of Wilkes were unhappy at this development. Conflict ensued, and in April 1771 a group of radicals including Home Tooke and Alderman Sawbridge detached themselves from Wilkes and formed the rival Constitutional Society in London. The Wilkite movement, thus fractured, was profoundly weakened and was thereafter incapable of maintaining its earlier momentum. By the date of Wilkes’s election as Lord Mayor of London, it was for all intents and purposes over.

  Yet these conflicts should not be allowed to conceal the very robust ideological foundations upon which ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ was built. The politics of reform drew on established practice, while applying traditional language and ideology to ideals of resistance and patriotism. It derived its ideological inspiration from the Country party principles of the first half of the century. These Wilkes magnified and enlivened with entertaining dashes of Little Englander patriotism. His attack on Bute and the Scots touched a popular nerve, enabling him to pose as the epitome and, at this vital point in history, as the guardian of English liberties. Both in his wi
lling self-characterization as a John Bull figure, in the frequency of patriotic allusions in his writings and in the incessant singing of patriotic songs at Wilkite events there can be little doubt that the Wilkite movement was patriotic, loyalist, even conservative in its ideological stance. Professor Colley has even deemed it ‘traditional ... offering reassurance ... administering comfort’ that England would retain her primacy within Great Britain.13 But there was far more to the Wilkite movement than English nationalism. Both in its tone and in its content, in the issues which Wilkes raised and the manner in which he treated them, the movement was intensely anti-oligarchical, taking its stand on the assumption that those in power were accountable to the people. Indeed, some Wilkite pamphlets even adopted a markedly Lockean interpretation of the Glorious Revolution, emphasizing rights of resistance and placing Wilkes in a long line of Whig heroes, including Hampden, Sydney and Russell. The construction of a radical tradition, alongside the popularization of a radical view of the Glorious Revolution, is one of the more positive, if indirect, aspects of the Wilkite phenomenon.

  How successful was the Wilkite movement? In the short term it achieved its immediate objectives of having general warrants declared illegal (in 1765), of winning the Printers’ Case in 1771, thus vindicating the principle of public access to knowledge of parliamentary proceedings, of returning John Wilkes to Parliament (in 1774) and ultimately of having the Middlesex election resolutions expunged from the record (in 1782). At the electoral level, a handful of independent radicals won parliamentary seats between 1768 and 1774. At the general election of 1774 about one dozen radical MPs were returned, most of whom retained their seats at the general election of 1780. At the municipal level, radicals penetrated every layer of the government of the City of London for over a decade. Elsewhere they were much less successful in prising open existing corporations. Nevertheless, the establishment of permanent oppositions to local elites was a significant development in many places. Less measurable than electoral success, but in the long run just as important, was the politicizing effect of the Wilkite phenomenon. Although it is true that John Wilkes, unlike his rivals in the Constitutional Association, was uninterested in perpetuating the political organizations which he created once they had served his immediate purposes, their true significance was very much greater. The best tribute to the organizational techniques of the early radicals is that they were imitated by most extra-parliamentary groups in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, not least the movement for the abolition of the slave trade and the campaign by Protestant Dissenters for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in the 1780s. The long-term effect of John Wilkes’s campaigns is difficult to measure, but large numbers of people were drawn into both national and local politics, many of them for the first time. Whether as participants in crowds and processions or simply as readers of Wilkite newspapers, pamphlets and broadsides, a wide public, sympathetic to Wilkes, was mobilized, entertained and deployed. More specifically, vitriolic criticism of successive governments poured off the presses in the 1760s and 1770s, stimulated partly by the controversial stance of the monarchy in politics, partly by the American problem but principally by John Wilkes and the causes which he made his own.

  In the end the movement ran out of steam when the man who was essential to it lost interest, when serious divisions weakened its momentum and when events overtook it. The support of the radicals for the American colonists ensured that they were among the most prominent victims of the popular mood of loyalty to crown and Parliament which swept over Britain in the early years of the American war. Although there was manifest opposition to the war – in 1775–6 in the shape of petitions from 47 boroughs and towns signed by 45,000 people – it was predominantly seen within a Tory or Loyalist context of defending the traditional constitution in Britain and her empire, of maintaining the Hanoverian monarchy and protecting the Anglican church. Many of those who had sympathized with opponents, of General Warrants and of the Middlesex election in the 1760s now stood behind the government of Lord North. Nevertheless, the American war certainly expanded the audience for political and military news. This is illustrated by the partisan furore evoked by the court martial of Admiral Keppel. Keppel was a Rockinghamite supporter who had engaged a French fleet in July 1778. After an indecisive engagement, in which he at least retained control of the English Channel, Keppel’s court martial for ‘misconduct and neglect of duty’ became an emblematic issue between government and opposition. In at least seventy-five places Keppel’s major critic, Sir Hugh Palliser, was burned in effigy in front of enthusiastic crowds. Keppel’s ultimate acquittal in 1779 was greeted rapturously, revived patriotic morale and maintained popular interest and involvement in the conduct and fortunes of the war.

  The war in America ultimately gave rise to a further instalment of extra-parliamentary agitation albeit one less focused on the career of a single individual. The petitioning movement associated with the name of Christopher Wyvill was the product of two wartime forces. First, the serious economic consequences of the war steadily intensified in the late 1770s, causing interruption to trade with consequent unemployment, low wages and high prices. Many of the counties and towns which participated in this next phase of radical reform had been badly hit by the war. Second, the issue of the responsibility for the ill success of British arms revived the old accusations of secret influence, ministerial corruption and plain executive incompetence. What the American crisis did was to highlight old fears about court conspiracies and secret influence. Irrespective of the constitutional rights and wrongs of American taxation, somebody must have been responsible for the fact that Britain was locked in a thankless and uphill military struggle 3,000 miles away whilst at war with half of Europe, and with a first-rate economic crisis threatening to ruin the country. Wyvill’s movement was a popular attempt to weaken and destroy the secret influence which was at the root of the disasters afflicting the country.

  Significantly, the petitioning movement was a provincial movement. It had its origins in Yorkshire where in December 1779 the Reverend Christopher Wyvill summoned the gentry to a county meeting to protest against high wartime expenditure and excessive taxation. These, of course, were the gentry who had been among the most determined supporters of Lord North’s ministry and the sternest advocates of a war policy in America. For Wyvill and the gentry of Yorkshire the ultimate cure for corruption in government was to restore the independence of the House of Commons from executive influence by making MPs more accountable to those who elected them. This could be achieved by a programme of economical (or administrative) reform as a prelude to a cautious restructuring of the electoral system. After much negotiation, Wyvill announced his programme: triennial parliaments, the abolition of rotten boroughs and the addition of more Country members. Wyvill determined to set about these objectives by organizing a series of petitions to present to Parliament. He directed the operation from Yorkshire, appealing to the entire nation and obtaining in the early months of 1780 no fewer than twenty-six petitions from the counties and another dozen from some of the larger boroughs. He proceeded to hold a meeting of delegates of the petitioning bodies in London in early 1780.

  The petitioning movement did not maintain the early cohesion imparted by the energy and efficiency of Wyvill. The movement in London and the south-east of England was markedly more radical than Wyvill’s cautious programme. It was inspired by the radical ideology which had its origins with the SSBR in 1769, by the radical theory of the American Revolution and by the enormous attention generated by the publication of Major John Cartwright’s Take Your Choice in 1776, which had argued the case for universal suffrage, annual parliaments, secret ballots and equal member constituencies. This was to be the programme of the metropolitan radicals, who worked through their own radical bodies, such as Major Cartwright’s Society for Constitutional Information. This body, founded in April 1780 by Major Cartwright, John Jebb, Brand Hollis and the playwright R. B. Sheridan, adopted Cartwright’s
programme and decided to achieve it by adopting Jebb’s idea of a permanent association. The association, a standing, unofficial ‘Parliament’, would be elected by local bodies on the basis of the principle of universal suffrage, and it would be supported by a national network of corresponding societies. Such a body, enlivened by popular election, would challenge Parliament and, it was hoped, by its example peacefully compel that body to reform itself. Not surprisingly, such ambitious objectives aroused real fears among many moderate supporters of Economical Reform.

  For the moment, however, the parliamentary opposition led by Rockingham and Shelburne sought to use the public support aroused by Wyvill’s petitioning movement to strengthen their own campaign against secret influence aimed at diminishing the influence of the executive over Parliament. The purpose of their Economical Reform was not to make Parliament more efficient, still less more representative. It was to restore the independence of Parliament from the executive and thus restore the balance of the constitution established at the time of the Glorious Revolution, not to embark upon a long-term strategy of political reform. Although the influence of the crown (although not that of the executive) over Parliament was diminishing in this period, many contemporaries continued to believe the opposite. Given the Rockingham Party’s prejudices against Lord Bute and secret influence, its sponsorship of Economical Reform legislation was both natural and reasonable. Indeed, its support for it goes back to 1770 when one of its leaders, William Dowdeswell – significantly; an ex-Tory – moved in 1768 to disfranchise revenue officers.14 The Rockinghams rediscovered the issue in 1778 when Sir Philip Jennings Clerke moved a Contractor’s Bill. It narrowly failed, encouraging Clerke to reintroduce it in February 1779, when it was easily thrown out. In the session of 1780 the centrepiece of the Rockinghams’ attack was Burke’s plan of Economical Reform. In order to minimize government waste and extravagance, Burke sought to eliminate offices which served no useful function. To achieve this he proposed to reduce expenditure on pensions and to cut down the number of hereditary offices. More boldly, he wished to abolish the separate administrations of Chester, Lancaster, Wales and Cornwall as well as the third secretaryship of state. Although Dunning’s famous resolution ‘that the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’ passed the Commons by 233 to 215 the string of Economical Reform bills introduced by the opposition in the spring of 1780 all fell victim to Lord North’s majorities. Burke ran the ministry close on several divisions, but he was unable to overcome the independent Country gentlemen’s reluctance to interfere with the monarch’s customary freedom to appoint to the household.