Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  The great thing about being an MP—as he had demonstrated—was that you had parliamentary privilege and a protection against being sued for libel; and so now he stood for Middlesex, that small county north of the Thames that has been engulfed by Greater London. The poll was to take place in Brentford, and soon the town was gripped with Wilkite fervour. Whatever Wilkes really stood for, the poor of London felt he was on their side.

  The cost of bread was rising. The winter was perishingly cold. Their jobs were precarious. But when Wilkes stood up and began his incantatory shout of “Independence!—Property!—Liberty!” they were wild with excitement. To an illiterate weaver or sawyer, the concept of Wilkes and Liberty could be simply rendered with a scrawl of a squinting man. Simpler still were the digits 45, the number of his seditious edition of the North Briton, which came to be a shorthand for Liberty itself.

  It became a magic number, scrawled on every door in Brentford. After Wilkes was elected, mobs several thousand strong marched down the Great West Road to London, stopping every carriage they could find, calling on its occupants to huzzah for Wilkes, and hurling mud and stones at all who refused to join the jubilation. They stopped the coach of the French ambassador, handed him a glass of wine and ordered him to toast “Wilkes and Liberty!,” which he did with good grace, standing on the steps of his carriage. When the Austrian ambassador declined to do likewise, this “most stately and ceremonious of men” was turned upside down and the numbers 4 and 5 painted on the sole of either shoe.

  The diplomat stormed into Whitehall the following day, to protest on behalf of his government, and found that ministers could not stop laughing. Not everyone was thrilled by Wilkesism. He told the story himself of how he had come upon an old lady shaking her head at one of his pub signs as it swayed in the wind. “He swings everywhere but where he should,” she said. Wilkes passed her, turned around and bowed with his usual politeness.

  The government was in a blue funk. Wilkes was an outlaw who had been elected to parliament. As Lord Camden wrote to the Prime Minister, there was a real risk that if they arrested and punished him, the fury of the mob would be uncontainable. But what else could the government do? He still faced counts of blasphemy and libel, and he had shamelessly absconded to France rather than face his sentence. He was the publisher of infamous attacks on the King and his ministers.

  If they turned a blind eye, then the whole authority of the crown would be held up to ridicule. In the first hearing, on 20 April 1768, Wilkes was dismissed by Lord Mansfield, who said slightly mysteriously that the wrong type of warrant had been made out for his arrest. In the end it was Wilkes himself who insisted on being delivered into custody and having a trial; because that, he knew, was the best way of testing the matters at issue—the right of free speech and the privileges of an MP—and ensuring the maximum publicity. Being an MP meant you couldn’t be sued for libel, and being in prison meant you couldn’t be sued for debt: so the best thing of all was to be an MP in prison!

  He was being remanded in custody when a crowd of his adoring fans tried, unhelpfully, to intervene. On Westminster Bridge they overpowered his guard and unhitched the horses of the carriage conveying him to the King’s Bench Prison. One of them told him: “I tell you, Master Wilkes, horses often draw asses, but as you are a man, you shall be drawn by men.”

  Wilkes whispered to the tipstaves—the guards—that they had better scarper, and that he would see them later on in jail; and in due course, having gratified the mob with the belief that they had released him, he put on a disguise and slipped into the prison. Like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, he had worked out that prison was the safest, best and cheapest place to be. He had been elected by the people and martyred by the government. He was a cult hero.

  To all Americans who felt bullied and belittled by the King of England, Wilkes was their man. He was discussed and quoted in the Virginia Gazette more than any other man, while the men of Boston sent him turtle feasts. In Newcastle in England they had crazy 45-themed banquets, at which 45 gentlemen sat down to lunch at precisely 45 past one and consumed 45 gills of wine with 45 new-laid eggs in them, followed at precisely 45 minutes past two by 45 dishes including a 45-pound sirloin of beef, after which there took place a ball with 45 ladies and 45 dances and 45 jellies, and the whole thing being wrapped up with great mirth and festivity at 45 minutes past three. “In china, in bronze or in marble, he stood upon the chimney pieces of half the houses in the metropolis,” it was said. He swung upon the signposts of every village.

  His number appeared on sleeve buttons and breast buckles, punch bowls, snuff boxes and mugs. There were wigs with 45 curls and special bras with 45 pieces; and yet he was cheered just as loudly by people who could afford none of this stuff. When no one else seemed to be speaking up for them or their problems, Wilkes was somehow for them. When robbers and pirates wore Wilkite blue cockades in their hats, it was because he stood not just for free speech and parliamentary privilege, but for anyone who felt an injustice at the hands of the system or the state.

  As a man who was technically loyal to the King and to the constitution, Wilkes was a lightning rod, a focus for legitimate protest. He was no revolutionary, but in his jovial and satirical style he chipped away at the renewed pretensions of the monarchy. He was a very English and a very Londonian response to a constitutional problem.

  We didn’t have a Terror in late eighteenth-century England. We didn’t have decapitations of the aristocracy; and instead of Danton and Robespierre, we had John Wilkes. But there were moments when it looked ugly.

  Wilkes’s prison was next to a large open space called St. George’s Fields, and on 6 May 1768 the crowd had grown so huge and noisy that the government sent in troops. The mob was good-humoured at first, and took off the boot of one of the soldiers, burning it as a symbol of Lord Bute. Then they became more insulting; a man was shot by mistake. A full-scale riot broke out, and the troops opened fire over their heads, hitting and killing about half a dozen spectators.

  The whole of the city was soon in an uproar, said the visiting Benjamin Franklin, “with mobs patrolling the streets at noonday, some knocking all down that will not roar for Wilkes and Liberty.” Five hundred sawyers tore down a new wind-driven sawmill. The coal-heavers and the Spitalfields weavers rioted, and the sailors stopped the boats from leaving London. George III threatened to abdicate, and Wilkes’s popularity soared to the stratosphere.

  French intellectuals sent him messages of support; American proto-revolutionaries visited him in prison. The cry of “Wilkes and Liberty!” was heard in Boston and the number 45 was inscribed on doors and windows across town. Even in Peking an English sea captain came across a Chinese merchant who showed him a porcelain bust of an Englishman with a squint and a jutting chin.

  “He knockifar your king,” said the Chinese merchant. “Your king fooly king. Do so here [draws hand across throat] cutty head.” I assume that being Chinese, he was urging the King to execute Wilkes rather than the other way round.

  Wilkes wrote articles blaming the government for provoking and planning the St. George’s Fields massacre. By 1769 Grafton’s shell-shocked ministry had taken enough. They moved that Wilkes should be expelled from parliament for his libels, and the motion was carried by 213 to 137. Wilkes was undaunted. He immediately stood in a by-election, for the same seat, and on 16 February he was returned unopposed. The Grafton ministry was in a quandary. Wilkes was making the King and his ministers appear wholly absurd, and he was becoming so popular that Benjamin Franklin believed the people would have traded him for the monarch.

  Prison was no particular barrier to his way of life. He seems to have left more or less at will to attend election hustings, and among the hampers of food he received from his supporters were a firkin of rock oysters, a Cheshire cheese, a brace of fat ducks, turkeys, geese, fowls and so on. When one of his supporters made the mistake of visiting in the company of his wife, Wi
lkes spotted her as an ex-girlfriend, passed her a billet-doux, and she was soon visiting regularly and without her husband.

  A group of Wilkes backers was preparing to pay off his debts. The date of his release from prison was approaching. The only option, the Grafton ministry decided, was to expel him from parliament again. This time the shameful lickspittles of the Commons voted that he was “incapable” of election, and to make matters worse they used military force to impose a stooge candidate—Colonel Henry Luttrell—on the people of Middlesex.

  It was an outrageous abrogation of the sovereign right of the people to decide who shall represent them. Plenty of pamphlets and blasts were produced on either side, of which the most famous is Samuel Johnson’s “The False Alarm.” Johnson the Tory argued that the House was right to expel Wilkes, because the House was the only judge of its own rights. Wilkes replied, in “A letter to Samuel Johnson LLD,” that “the rights of the people are not what the Commons have ceded to them, but what they have reserved to themselves.” For Wilkes the key point was that political power emanated from below and did not percolate down from above.

  In April 1770 Wilkes was released from prison amid national rejoicing. A table 45 feet long was laid in a London street. In Sunderland 45 skyrockets were fired at 45-second intervals, and in Greenwich there was a salute by 45 cannon fired in sequence. In Northampton 45 couples did a country dance called the “Wilkes wriggle.” The affair of the Middlesex election was over for now. Wilkes was no longer an MP; but he had already spotted the first step of the way back. On the very day after his release the officers of the City of London gathered in the Guildhall to make him an alderman of the city.

  Wilkes now began the long and distinguished Part Two of his career, in which the libertine demagogue evolved into a highly effective London politician, and eventually Mayor of the City. He was still capable of striking powerful blows for liberty. He prevented the packing of juries, opposed the death penalty and banned the press gang. He was also instrumental in tearing down the ancient barrier between press and public, the prohibition on the reporting of parliamentary proceedings. What with the frenzy surrounding the Middlesex election, the political press had been expanding fast; but ever since Caxton’s first press there had been a law against reporting parliament. For the City merchants, this was plainly illiberal. It looked like a royal attempt to prevent them from finding out what was being done in their name.

  Wilkes, ever the champion of the City radicals, organised a challenge. Various printers started to break the law, and to print verbatim accounts of what had happened in parliament. As Wilkes had foreseen, the King’s Messengers were sent to arrest the printers, in particular a man named Miller. At which point a constable appeared and arrested the messenger.

  This unlucky fellow was taken before the Lord Mayor, one Brass Crosby, a drunken follower of Wilkes, who appeared in his nightshirt and proclaimed that no power on Earth could allow a citizen of the City of London to be seized without the consent of a magistrate. The King was enraged and called for the Lord Mayor and another alderman to be sent to the Tower. But Wilkes—well, His Majesty had finally learned his lesson.

  Chatham reported that “his majesty will have nothing more to do with that devil Wilkes.” It was another chapter in the central conflict of the capital, between the Cities of London and Westminster, between the desires of the merchants and (in this case) the reactionary wishes of the crown.

  Once again Wilkes was able to enlist the support of the mob. They attacked the carriage of Lord North and virtually demolished it around him. Ministers acquiesced in the privilege of the City to read parliamentary reports. Wilkes had helped establish a vital democratic freedom, even if the real parliamentary struggle these days is not to keep their debates secret but to persuade the papers to report them at all.

  Wilkes’s mayoralty was a splendid affair, and with the multilingual Polly playing the role of lady mayoress he put on all kinds of balls and parties at the Mansion House. As ever, he ran into debt, and when he ran into debt Wilkes pursued his usual strategy. He ran yet again for parliament, and in 1774 he was elected unopposed, serving as an MP and Mayor of London at the same time. Wilkes now gave regular speeches, full of research and a liberal idealism. He denounced rotten boroughs, and argued that greater weight should be given to the large population of London—still a good point today.

  In 1776 he became the first parliamentarian that I can discover to call for every man, rich or poor, to be able to vote. “The meanest mechanic, the poorest peasant and day labourer, has important rights respecting his personal liberty,” Wilkes told a snoozing handful of MPs. “All government is instituted for the good of the mass of people to be governed,” he concluded. “They are the original fountain of power.” Alas, this noble bill was tossed out with a desultory voice vote. But Wilkes was years ahead of the French, who instituted universal (male) suffrage only after their revolution in 1792. He had effectively begun a campaign for the extension of the franchise that was to last until 1928 and the granting of votes for women. He was right about voting, and he was right about America and her struggle for independence. In many ways this was the perfect Wilkesian cause—simultaneously allowing him to stick up for liberty and to bash the government of George III.

  Stop calling it a rebellion, he warned MPs in 1775. Unless the government made a better effort to understand American feelings, “the whole continent will be dismembered from Great Britain, and the wide arch of the raised empire will fall.” His speech was published in the Boston Gazette. In April 1775 he obtained the signatures of two thousand of his fellow City radicals, liverymen who cared more about free trade and low tax than “sovereignty” over America. The capitalists happily signed Wilkes’s petition, in which he accused the King of “trying to establish arbitrary power over America,” and to what must have been the mortification of the ministers, Wilkes exercised his right to present the petition personally to the King.

  For the first time the two antagonists were eyeball to eyeball, or as near as Wilkes’s ocular peculiarities would allow. The veteran troublemaker bowed low, and with every appearance of deference he handed the insult into the gracious hands.

  George III afterwards said that “he had never seen so well-bred a Lord Mayor”—though he immediately changed the rules so that the scene could not be repeated. By the end of the year Wilkes was becoming so zealous in his pro-American sympathies that he is suspected of downright treason and actively abetting a network that was raising cash for American guns.

  In November 1777 he denounced the American war as bloody, expensive and futile. “Men are not converted, sir, by the force of the bayonet at the breast”; and in 1778, by which time things were going pretty badly for the blundering British, he was scathing. “A series of disgrace and defeats are surely sufficient to convince us of the absolute impossibility of conquering America by force, and I fear the gentle means of persuasion have equally failed.” This was not demagoguery.

  As ever in war, the public was starting to rally behind “our boys,” and Wilkes was incurring some unpopularity for his stance. If you want any further evidence of his daring willingness to pursue the logic of liberty, take these remarks in the course of a speech on the relief of Catholics. “I would not, sir, persecute even the atheist. . . . I wish to see rising in the neighbourhood of a Christian cathedral, near its gothic towers, the minaret of a Turkish mosque, a Chinese pagoda and a Jewish synagogue, with a temple of the sun. . . .”

  It is here, on the issue of religious tolerance, that we can see what finally mattered to Wilkes. When it came to persecuting the Catholics, he was far more interested in the serious defence of liberty than the acclaim of the mob.

  Sir George Savile’s Catholic Relief Act was a modest measure designed to give Catholics full rights to buy and inherit land and to join the army. This piece of common sense caused a panic in sectarian Scotland, where stories circulated that the Pope had or
dered undercover Catholics to join the army and turn their fire on the Protestants. Riots broke out, and soon the trouble spread to England.

  A bonkers MP named Lord George Gordon began to whip up anti-Catholic feeling, gathering a petition of 120,000 signatures for the repeal of Savile’s Act—and it is important to note that his sickening proposals were supported by old political chums of Wilkes in the City of London. On 2 June 1780 Gordon led a huge mob, fifty thousand strong, from St. George’s Fields to Westminster, and as the debate on his motion was going on, he would pop out from parliament to wind up the crowd with reports on those MPs who were opposing their bigotry.

  At 11 p.m. the mob went wild. They broke into the chapel of the Sardinian ambassador, in Duke Street, smashed it up and set it ablaze. The Bavarian embassy received the same treatment. The next day the rioters followed the example of the Peasants’ Revolt and stormed Newgate and other prisons with pickaxes and sledgehammers, and soon the jails were burning and tinkling with the noise of felons taking off their fetters.

  Parliament evaporated in alarm. The King ordered the army to act, without permission of magistrates, to subdue the mob; and yes, there were some thugs and criminals among them, but on the whole these were the very people who had carried Wilkes aloft during the Middlesex election—labourers, apprentices, journeymen, waiters, domestic servants, craftsmen and small traders. And once again John Wilkes was at the heart of the tumult—on the other side.

  A mob was attacking London Bridge, setting it on fire in several places, when a party of soldiers appeared on the scene—headed by Alderman Wilkes MP!

  A struggle ensued, in which many of the rioters “were thrown over into the Thames.” Later that day the crowd turned their attention to the Bank of England, the very symbol of money, power and the capitalist conspiracy, the building that in our own time was daubed and bombarded by the G20 protestors. Where was Wilkes, the firebrand radical? He was leading a detachment of troops who shot and killed several rioters and drove the rest away.