Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  Pitt’s empire-building wars were popular in the City. They added big pink patches, in India and Canada, to the Daily Telegraph map that used to hang on my wall as a child. They brought wealth to London. And now this Hanoverian monarch and his languid Scottish Old Etonian mother-bonking minister were threatening to call a peace—and all because of the cost; as we would put it these days, the need to make “cuts” in the defence budget. William Pitt would not hear of it. He left office. His supporters were indignant, and Wilkes found his metier—not as a speaker but as a writer. Together with a chum and fellow libertine, the poet Charles Churchill, he began to bash the regime in print.

  He launched a paper, the North Briton, so called because his main target—Bute—was a Scot; and he began a line in frenzied jock-baiting that has been ever since a dreary staple of London newspapers. All those pieces complaining about the tartan mafia; all that fulminating about the West Lothian question, and the constitutional outrage that English taxpayers are paying for free nursing care and tuition for the indolent Scots—they all have their origins in the journalism of Wilkes. The funny thing was, he actually quite liked the Scots, and in 1758 he had toured the place, announcing that he was never happier than when he was in Scotland. But that is journalism for you.

  His stuff caused such offence that for decades to come angry Scots army officers would stop him in the street and challenge him to a duel, and Scottish children would burn effigies of John Wilkes until Victorian times. For people like Wilkes, this was the age of the Enlightenment, when a civilised man was able to follow Voltaire and do and say more or less what he wanted. Many others were still capable of being deeply shocked.

  There was poor old Lord Talbot, who had made such a glorious chump of himself during the Coronation of George III. As part of the ceremony, he was meant to ride into Westminster Hall, salute the King and back out again. This was a lot to ask of a horse, but he rehearsed it many times, and thought he had it taped. Alas, on the day itself the beast was alarmed by the noise of the crowd, turned round, lifted its tail and presented its rear end to the King. At which the entire English nobility roared with laughter and burst into applause—not the done thing at a coronation. Wilkes milked it for all it was worth. The horse was a legendary steed, he wrote in the pages of the North Briton. It was like Quixote’s Rosinante; it was like one of the wandering planets of Milton, a celestial body. The horse had such marvellous natural style, he said, that it should be awarded a pension by the crown.

  These days that would be classed as gentle stuff. Lord Talbot was apoplectic. He demanded to know if Wilkes was the author of the anonymous skit, and he demanded satisfaction. On 5 October 1762 they fought a duel at Bagshot Heath, a sinister place frequented by highwaymen. Wilkes arrived with his second, wearing the red officer’s coat of the Bucks Militia. He had a terrible hangover, having been up with the monks of Medmenham until 4 a.m., and thought the duel was not until the following day. Talbot insisted on fighting that night and went into a terrible rage. Was Wilkes the author or not? he demanded. Wilkes refused on principle to answer the question, and said that God had given him a firmness of spirit equal to his lordship’s.

  The truth was that Wilkes was in a dreadful position. His eyesight was wonky, whereas Talbot was an athlete with a good pair of eyes. Worse, if he killed Talbot he would probably be hanged, while Talbot would be sure to win a king’s pardon. At 7 p.m., with a bright moon, they went into the garden of the Red Lyon coaching inn. They stood back-to-back. They walked eight yards apart; and on the word they whirled about and fired at the same time.

  It says something for eighteenth-century ballistics or for their collective terror that they both missed, but Wilkes had acted with bravery and honour. He walked up to Talbot and said that, yes, he was the author of the offending satire, while Talbot said that he was the noblest fellow God ever made.

  In a way, the affair was absurd. Talbot was the victim of a monstrous sense of humour failure, and Wilkes was conscious of the glory he could win by fighting an honourable duel. But there was more to it. Talbot represented the government and its general indignation at these anonymous attacks. Wilkes was sticking up for the right of journalists to write and publish anonymous attacks without the fear of retribution. Wilkes’s reputation soared, and so did his romantic chances.

  He wrote to Churchill that “a sweet girl whom I have sighed for unsuccessfully these four months, now tells me she will entrust her honour to a man who takes so much care of his own. Is that not prettily said? Pray, look out honour in the dictionary, as I have none here, that I may understand the dear creature.”

  In a sense his satirising was all a great game to Wilkes. He knew that he was doing it all partly for self-promotion, and like many other polemical hacks, he knew that he often turned up the volume of his attacks far higher than his victims deserved. When he later met Boswell in Italy, he admitted that he duffed up Johnson for crimes the great man had not actually committed. He treated him “as an impudent pretender to literature, which I don’t think, but ’tis all one. So is my plan.” Political writers were like Zeus at the end of The Iliad, he later said, arbitrarily dishing out blessings and curses from the tubs of good and evil.

  Sometimes their subjects got a bashing, sometimes a whitewash. Most politicians these days accept that is how journalism works. They develop a thick skin. Not so the ministers of George III. Since Wilkes’s admission of authorship to Talbot, other figures were starting to sue; and as the circulation of the North Briton grew—to a dizzying high of two thousand!—the controversy grew hotter. Damned by Wilkes as a Scot and a peacemaking toady of the King, Lord Bute found himself hissed at and stoned by the mob.

  Wilkes was offered all sorts of bribes to shut him up: the governorship of Canada, directorships of the East India Company. He declined. When the Peace of Paris was signed in 1763, he said it was like the “peace of God, which passeth all understanding.” On 23 April 1763 he published No. 45 of the North Briton, with page after page of sarcastic attacks on ministers. At one point he denounced the cider tax, a means, he said, by which the homes of freeborn Englishmen might be invaded by the authorities on the pretext of looking for illegal hooch. It was unconstitutional to search people’s homes to see if they were fermenting apple juice, he said, and he called for resistance. For King George III it was too much.

  Though Wilkes was technically loyal to the crown, everyone knew that the attacks on the peace, on Bute and others, were effectively attacks on the King. He demanded that Wilkes be arrested. The ministers were nervous. It wasn’t that easy to arrest an MP, even when the King was in a rage. There was parliamentary privilege, after all.

  Nor were they entirely sure what kind of charges to make against Wilkes. After much faffing about, they went for a charge of “treason,” and sent the King’s Messengers with a “general warrant,” in which they named the offences but not the culprits. Armed with this extraordinary document the King’s Messengers—the nearest thing in those days to police officers—went off to arrest anyone they could find who had anything to do with the North Briton.

  They entered buildings and ripped papers from the presses. They arrested ink-stained journeymen printers and their servants and apprentices, and rounded many of them up in a pub. Altogether they arrested forty-eight people, not including Wilkes. They found the editor of the North Briton in a state of alcoholic elation. He gave them such a lecture on parliamentary privilege that they crept back to their political masters for reassurance.

  Yes, said Lords Halifax and Egremont, the secretaries of state, you must arrest Wilkes. Eventually he consented to be taken to their presence—though he insisted on a sedan chair, for a distance of a hundred yards or so, and was followed by a cheering crowd. Wilkes then gave a thoroughly cheeky interview, in which he announced that “all the quires of paper on your lordships’ table shall be as milk-white as at the beginning.” The infuriated ministers sent him to the Tower of Londo
n.

  By now word was starting to spread. People had become familiar with Wilkes as the scourge of an unpopular government. He was becoming a martyr to liberty. Parades of notables came to see him in the Tower. Ballads were composed in his honour—one of them called “The Jewel in the Tower,” whose theme was that Wilkes was the most precious of all the gemstones in the kingdom, and allegedly written by a noble lady. Within days a dozen inns bore his crooked visage on their signs, and a great crowd followed him as he was taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall for his hearing. This took place in the southeast corner of that great building, before Lord Justice Pratt, later to become Lord Camden. Pratt became a judicial hero himself.

  Publishing a libel was not a breach of the peace, he ruled. Wilkes was protected by parliamentary privilege. He was let off. “This is not the clamour of the rabble,” the demagogue told the judge, “but the voice of liberty which must and shall be heard.”

  Wilkes was pupating, morphing from a larrikin scribbler and man-about-town into a radical. Perhaps it was the inheritance of his mother’s Puritanism and nonconformism; in the personality of this libertine and show-off there was now emerging a streak of principle and cussedness. Wilkes was becoming consumed with a genuine obsession: to uphold liberty, and above all the freedom of the press.

  Furious at his release, the King’s ministers leaked what they hoped would be a damaging detail. Among the effects being returned to him by the state was a packet of condoms. Like the rest of his “private” life, this did him no harm whatever in the eyes of the London public.

  Wilkes proceeded to retaliate. He launched legal actions against the secretaries of state. He accused them of trespass and robbery, since in the course of ransacking his house someone appeared to have made off with a silver candlestick.

  Nor was he alone in exploiting the case of No. 45 to torment the ministry of George III; no fewer than twenty-five journeymen printers and apprentices entered suits against the messengers. For what must have been the first time in British history, working-class men were using the legal system to stick up for liberty and to attack the emanations of the state—the King himself. Wilkes was in the ascendant, and set up a new printing press in Great George Street, from which he peppered the government with squibs, blasts and further editions of the infernal North Briton. Then he had a stroke of bad luck.

  On the floor of the printing shop one of his men—a printer named Samuel Jennings—spotted an interesting scrap of paper. It seemed to be some sort of filthy poem, with corrections in the hand of Mr. Wilkes himself. It wasn’t much good as poetry, and plainly intended to be a political satire. One pair of decidedly unheroic couplets read: “Then, in the scale of various pricks ’tis plain / Godlike erect, Bute stands the foremost man.”

  Hmm, said Jennings, that’s rum. I’ll take that home and read it to my wife. What he had found was a proof sheet of the Potter-Wilkes “An Essay on Woman,” which Wilkes had rashly caused to be printed in a limited edition of thirteen copies. We don’t know what Mrs. Jennings thought of the poem, with all its coy “f***s” and “c***s,” but the following day she used it to wrap a pat of butter for her husband’s lunch. This repast took place in a pub called the Red Lion, where they obviously didn’t mind about customers bringing packed lunches.

  Jennings shared his meal of onions, radishes, bread, butter and beer with another printer, Thomas Farmer. Oho! said Farmer, reading the butter-smeared words that appeared beneath his knife, what’s all this about? He took the paper back to his own printing shop and showed it to the foreman.

  The foreman showed it to the owner. The owner was a Scot named Faden. He hated Wilkes. He consulted a dodgy libertine parson called Kidgell, who took it to Lord March, who took it to the secretaries of state. Halifax and Egremont read it with rapture unconfined. They could see it was a load of schoolboy nonsense, but it was surely enough to get their enemy locked up. It was one thing to scribble a smutty and insulting poem—but to have it printed!

  That was sedition. That was blasphemy. Wilkes was betrayed by one of his printers, a man named Curry, who was paid for handing over some of the incriminating proof sheets. Having failed with Lord Justice Pratt, the King and his ministers hatched an audacious and unprecedented plan—to have Wilkes simultaneously put on trial in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. “The continuation of Wilkes’ impudence is amazing,” sniffed the King, “when his ruin is so near.” The King was personally requesting MPs to try John Wilkes MP for seditious and dangerous libel. It was an abuse of his constitutional position, and it is incredible and pathetic that MPs bowed to this monarchical pressure.

  In a debate of stunning pomposity, speaker after speaker stood up to monster Wilkes and No. 45. The paper was false, scandalous, seditious, libellous, insolent and, as someone harrumphed, “it tended to alienate the affections of the people.” Worst of all for Wilkes was the moment when Pitt staggered to his gouty feet—Pitt, under whose banner Wilkes had fought; Pitt, in whose name he had raved against Bute—and joined the general condemnation of the North Briton. Next door in the House of Lords the government sprang what they hoped would be the decisive trap.

  Their lordships watched in puzzlement as bony Bishop Warburton rose to say he had been libelled by Wilkes in an obscene poem. Even as he spoke, copies of the text, freshly printed at the orders of ministers, were being passed among the trembling peers. Next up was Lord Sandwich, he who invented the swift lunch composed of a piece of meat between two slices of bread. Sandwich had once been a Hellfire Club chum of Wilkes, but they had fallen out over one of his pranks (thought to have involved the introduction of a baboon kitted out with horns), and now he was full of indignation.

  Pandemonium broke out as he began to read: “Awake, my Fanny, leave all meaner things. This morn shall prove what raptures swiving brings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just a few good fucks, and then we die), Expatiate . . .” etc., etc.

  Some peers had to leave the chamber to collect their senses. Others thought it ludicrous that Sandwich should be moralising—as one put it, like the devil preaching against sin; and at first it looked as though neither of these parliamentary trials would be successful. People were appalled at the sneakiness of the government in the whole affair—bribing a man’s servant to betray him about a smutty poem, and then, in the very height of absurdity, printing more copies of the poem than Wilkes himself.

  Curry was vilified for his treachery and later committed suicide. One of Wilkes’s parliamentary victims demanded satisfaction in a duel, and when he shot Wilkes in the groin, there was a general and not baseless suspicion that it was an Establishment assassination attempt. When the public hangman tried to obey the edict of the Commons and burn a copy of No. 45, he was interrupted by tumultuous crowds. They seized the paper and beat off constables who tried to interfere. Perhaps sensing the mood of the public, the courts now confounded the government, and ruled that general warrants were illegal.

  No longer could the King’s Messengers make arbitrary arrests, or arbitrary seizures of private property. The King’s public appearances were now met with silence, and when he went to the theatre he was treated to cries of “Wilkes and Liberty!” But Pitt’s U-turn was decisive. On 19 January 1764, Wilkes was expelled from the Commons while he was visiting his daughter in Paris.

  In the courts a reluctant jury convicted him of libel for publishing the North Briton and “An Essay on Woman,” and since he failed to turn up for the sentencing, he became an outlaw. He could no longer sue. He had no protections under the law. He could be arrested at any time and he could be shot on sight by a sheriff. But what did he care? He was in Paris, with his beloved daughter, Polly, and he was lionised. For the intellectuals of pre-revolutionary France, Wilkes was a hero, a man who had stood up to the crown and won. A French king might claim that “l’état, c’est moi.” No English king could dream of saying any such thing, not after what Wilkes had done t
o general warrants. When he wasn’t in Paris, he was doing a kind of grand tour. He met Voltaire in Geneva and was entertained by the great scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Rome. At one stage he had dinner with Boswell, who found Wilkes in terrific spirits. Explaining his happiness, he confided: “Thank heaven for having given me the love of women. To many she gives not the noble passion of lust.”

  For much of his exile the chief but by no means sole object of his lust was an eighteen-year-old “actress” by the name of Gertrude Corradini. The great thing about Gertrude, Wilkes told a friend, was that unlike most English and French women of that epoch she believed in taking her clothes off in bed. She was possessed, he said, of the “divine gift of lewdness”—the perfect complement, one would have thought, to the “noble passion of lust.” Alas, Gertrude possessed the divine gift of lewdness in such abundance that when she gave birth, and Wilkes consulted his diary, he worked out that she had been in the company not of himself but of a man who claimed to be her “uncle.” Wilkes was sad, because he loved Gertrude, but, as we have seen, he was easily consoled. Much more worrying was his financial position.

  He was meant to be writing a history of England and editing the poems of Charles Churchill. Like most sensible authors, he had already spent the advance, but nothing much had been written. He had sold his books and his house in Aylesbury. He owed money in France. It was time to go back to London and face the music, and so on that cold February morning of 1768 he was furtively prowling down Marsham Street and pondering his options.

  He began by standing for the City of London. Despite the frenzied support of the poorer liverymen—“my brother joiners, carpenters, soap-boilers, distillers”—he came last. He then astonished everyone by announcing that he would go one bigger.