LO CAL HER O
Then, Aylesbury beckoned and he fell
in love. In the summer of 1746 on a visit
to friends in the lively Buckinghamshire
coach-stop town on the road from London
to Oxford, he married Mary Mead. She
was from a well-to-do family, and had
been friends with the young Wilkes as a
boy. And the house they lived in had been
built by Mary’s great uncle when High
Sheriff of Buckinghamshire.
Within five years, the lease on Prebendal House came into Wilkes’ ownership
along with its title, Squire of Aylesbury. He
made new friends and connections, becoming a justice of the peace. Overnight,
Wilkes the outsider was now an insider.
But he had little interest in squirearchical pursuits like hunting and shooting.
Instead he spent most spare time reading,
building up a library of over 1,000 books
at Prebendal House.
By the age of 30, Wilkes had cultivated
a wide circle of friends both in Buckinghamshire and London. In 1757 he was
elected an MP for the “rotten borough”
Aylesbury, having paid out bigger bribes to
voters than opposing candidates.
But once Wilkes had scrambled into
the corridors of power, he found a heaving
system of faction politics ushered in by the
Hanoverian succession so corrupt, that he
felt impelled to vocalise what many felt. It
was to prove a dangerous game.
No great orator, like leading parliamentarians, Wilkes turned to the printed
word, the Press, to give vent to his feelings. And the vehicle he used to influence
the opinions of others was the country’s
first radical newspaper, The North Briton.
His daring and impetuosity cost Wilkes his quiet life as the Squire of Aylesbury.
His fearless campaigning saw him exiled to
France for four years and imprisoned for
two. He was never a gambler or drunkard,
or misappropriator of other’s money.
But he was an impulsive borrower and
he ran up a mountain of debt. And, to top
it all, there was his libertine indulgences.
But Wilkes himself is not known to
have felt any guilt for his libertine life. Like
members of the Dilettanti Society founded
by his good friend Sir Francis Dashwood,
a libertine was a scholar and a gentleman.
Wilkes’ invincible self-confidence
fuelled his scathingly fluent muck-raking,
freewheeling journalism which won him
a wide audience throughout the entire
country – and in the American press where
his every move, victories and setbacks were
celebrated in a country on the brink of its
own revolution.
John Wilkes became a leading critic of
the governement in the House of Com-
mons, and took to the printed word to
vent popular anger. In June 1762 Wilkes
published the first edition The North Briton newspaper that excoriated the king and
his Prime Minister.
This was too much for government,
which launched a prosecution of Wilkes
for seditious libel.
The attack on Wilkes was twin-tracked:
the King called for Commons action for
the seditious libel of North Briton No. 45,
while the Lords mobilised the bishops to
prosecute the obscene poem An Essay on
Women for blasphemous libel.
The case provoked outrage among the
general population. The hangman, ordered
to publicly burn North Briton No.45, was set
on by a London mob chanting: Wilkes and
Liberty.” The government backtracked. The
Lord Chief Justice ruled Wilkes was protected by privilege and his arrest out of order,
As a result the general warrant was rendered
obsolete as outwith the rule of law. Wilkes
left the court as a champion of liberty.
John Wilkes returned to England from
exile in Paris in 1768 and stood as Radical
candidate for Middlesex. After being elected, Wilkes was arrested again and taken
to King’s Bench Prison. For the next fortnight huge crowds thronged St. George’s
Field, a large open space by the prison.
On 10th May 1768 a crowd of around
15,000 arrived outside the prison. The
crowd chanted “Wilkes and Liberty, No
Liberty, No King”, and “Damn the King!
Damn the Government!
Damn the Justices!”
Wilkes was then repeatedly elected,
arrested, elected and arrested, with each
election being overturned by the government. Eventually, he was released from
prison in April 1770. Still banned from
the Commons, Wilkes stepped up the
campaign for the freedom of the Press,
which demanded an end to government
censorship of newspapers.
In 1774 John Wilkes was elected Lord
Mayor of London. He was also elected
to represent Middlesex in the House of
Commons. Wilkes also campaigned for
religious toleration and on 21st March,
1776 he introduced the first motion for
parliamentary reform.
The times were truly a’ changing but
Wilkes was not to live to see fruits of his
endeavours, dying in 1797 at the grand old
age of 71. He passed the last 15 years of his
life pleasantly enough as an Alderman of
the City of London, entertaining friends,
presiding over lavish dinners, mixing
company with the great and good including
Dr Johnson’s biographer Boswell, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, and even the Prince of Wales.
England’s scandalous father of civil
liberty had a profound effect on the
founding of the American republic. The
1787 Constitutional Convention abolished
the “monstrous absurdity” of property as a
qualification to vote and stand for election,
James Madison citing the Middlesex
imbroglio as proof of the need for curbs on
unlimited legislative power.
And of course the general warrants
which the British government had used to enforce the Townsend Duties were abolished
by the fourth article in the Bill of Rights.
In 1969, the US Supreme Court cited
Wilkes when it ruled that House of Representatives had acted illegally in excluding
Adam Clayton Powell from standing for
election.
As Arthur H Cash remarked in his
acclaimed 2006 biography, it was Wilkes’
success in expunging the UK Parliament’s
record of his own exclusion over Middlesex, that set the precedent upon which the
US court based its decision.
“It was a landmark in American law
and culmination of Chief Justice Earl
Warren’s lifework. It reaffirmed the responsibility of the Supreme Court as ultimate
interpreter of the Constitution, and the
duty of the court to intervene when the
executive or legislative branches of government transgressed the limits of their
constitutional power,” says Cash.
John Wilkes, local hero and Squire
of Aylesbury, would have broken out the
bunti