FANFARE July 2016 | Page 11

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