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John Wilkes, Debt, and Patriotism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

John Sainsbury
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Extract

The career of John Wilkes was full of paradoxes. John Brewer's description of him as “a mercurial elusive rake” is apt in two senses: Wilkes eluded those who sought to crush him, and, posthumously, he continues to frustrate those who seek to understand him. He was a libertine who was lauded for political virtue; an aspiring aristocrat who rose to prominence as the self-proclaimed champion of those he dubbed the “middling and inferior class of people.” He would succeed in achieving a remarkable rapport with his plebeian followers, yet all the while preserving an ironic detachment from them. The judgment of one of his contemporaries still contains solace for the historian: “It is … not altogether unpardonable if a writer should err in the portrait of a character so equivocal.”

Understandably, one response to the problematic issues of Wilkes's personality and conduct has been to steer clear of them, treating them as irrelevant to the supposedly larger questions of those movements conducted in his name or in response to his persecution. From this kind of perspective, his presence on the political scene is construed as merely the occasion and not in any significant sense the cause of campaigns assumed to have separate, deep-seated origins. Such an approach offers some advantages that have been realized in distinguished studies of the crusades with which Wilkes was associated. But it is also limiting in that it forecloses the possibility that the nature of the movements that swirled around him was influenced by the idiosyncracies of his character and behavior.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , April 1995 , pp. 165 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1995

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References

1 Brewer, John, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Annual Register (1763), p. 139.

3 Holloway, Robert, A Letter to John Wilkes, Esq; Sheriff of London and Middlesex; in which the extortion and oppression of sheriffs officers, with many other alarming abuses, are exemplified and detected; and a remedy proposed (London, 1771), p. 2Google Scholar.

4 Some important studies that downplay the significance of Wilkes's personality are Rudé, George, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962)Google Scholar, still the indispensable account of the socioeconomic sources of Wilkes's support; Christie, Ian R., Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760–1785 (London: Macmillan, 1962)Google Scholar; and Thomas, Peter D. G., “John Wilkes and the Freedom of the Press (1771),” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 33 (1960): 86–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A significant start in exploring the relationship between Wilkes as a personality and his supporters has been achieved by Brewer, John in Party Ideology and Popular Politics, pp. 163–200Google Scholar, and in a number of subsequent articles and book chapters, including “Commercialization and Politics,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 197–262Google Scholar.

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7 “Toby” to Wilkes, September 1781, British Library (BL) Add. MSS 30872, fol. 214. “Toby” was an ironic and apparently independent observer of City politics. See, e.g., Gazetteer (June 26, 1777).

8 On the operation and contemporary perceptions of the credit system, see in particular the following works by Hoppit, Julian: Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790,” Historical Journal 33 (1990): 305–22Google Scholar; and “The Use and Abuse of Credit in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Business Life and Public Policy: Essays in Honour of D.C. Coleman, ed. McKendrick, Neil and Outhwaite, R. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is a succinct account of the process of imprisonment for debt in Innes, Joanna, “The King's Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century: Law, Authority and Order in a London Debtors' Prison,” in An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Brewer, John and Styles, John (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 250–61Google Scholar.

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18 This characterization of Wilkes's Middlesex support is from Rudé (n. 4 above), p. 89.

19 Controversial Letters of Wilkes and Home, pp. 83, 147, 282. Davies, N. C., “The Bill of Rights Society and the Origins of Radicalism in Britain” (M.A. thesis, University of Wales, 1986), pp. 93–105, 144–50, 197–215Google Scholar, provides a competent account of the SSBR's attempt to address the complexities of Wilkes's indebtedness and of how contentions over this issue contributed to the fracturing of the society.

20 Controversial Letters of Wilkes and Home, pp. 58–67; Bleackley, pp. 264–65. A modern investigation concludes that Wilkes did indeed divert Foundling Hospital funds for his own use: Hart, V. E. Lloyd, John Wilkes and the Foundling Hospital at Aylesbury, 1759–1768 (Aylesbury, 1979), pp. 47–52Google Scholar.

21 Truth, , Gazetteer (August 9, 1771)Google Scholar. On the hostility toward Jewish moneylenders, see Hoppit, , “Attitudes to Credit” (n. 8 above), pp. 313–14Google Scholar.

22 Controversial Letters of Wilkes and Home, p. 183.

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24 Quoted in Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 103Google Scholar.

25 Brewer, , “Commercialization and Politics” (n. 4 above), pp. 217–30Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., p. 223; Money, John, “The Masonic Moment; Or, Ritual, Replica, and Credit: John Wilkes, the Macaroni Parson, and the Making of the Middle-Class Mind,” Journal of British Studies 32 (October 1993): 358–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Broadley, A. M., Brother John Wilkes, MP; Alderman, Chamberlain, and Lord Mayor of London, as Freemason, “Buck,” “Leech” and “Beefsteak” (London, 1914)Google Scholar; Brewer, , “Commercialization and Politics,” p. 233Google Scholar; Wilkes to Jean-Baptiste Suard, April 13, 1770, and April 27, 1770, Wilkes MSS, 3:32, 33. Wilkes also joined the Friends of Freedom, a group dedicated to promoting the political independency of the citizens of Westminster: London Evening Post (February 6–8, 1772). On the patriotic endeavors of the Antigallicans, see Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 88–90Google Scholar.

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29 Brewer, , “Commercialization and Politics,” pp. 233–35Google Scholar; Middlesex Journal (June 15–17, 1769); Independent Chronicle (April 13–16, 1770).

30 For some examples of this kind of limited and pragmatic support, see Gunn, J. A. W., Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983), p. 207Google Scholar; and my Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769–1782 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987), p. 18Google Scholar.

31 Such idolatry was manifested in a blasphemous parody of the Apostle's Creed in A New Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving for the Happy deliverance of John Wilkes (London, 1768), p. 7Google Scholar.

32 Patriotism, in the eighteenth-century context, was a complex, shifting, and multivalent notion, and its mantle was frequently claimed by competing factions. Hence the need to give it definition in particular cases. For acute discussions of some of the conceptual problems attaching to the term, see Skinner, Quentin, “The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole,” in Historical Perspectives: Studies in European Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. McKendrick, Neil (London: Europa, 1974), pp. 93–128Google Scholar; and Cunningham, Hugh, “The Language of Patriotism,” in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Samuel, Raphael, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989), 1:57–87Google Scholar. Colley, Britons, is a rich account of the evolution of patriotism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the links and frequent discordances between English patriotism and an emerging British national consciousness. In this connection, it has important things to say about the anti-Scottish character of Wilkes's patriotism (pp. 105–17).

33 An Englishman, “To the Worthy and Independent Inhabitants of the Ward of Farringdon Without” (1769) and a jingle, “Wilkes and the Livery: To the Voters for the City of London” (1768?), in City Elections, 1768–96, pp. 7, 24. There were interesting literary precedents for the lionization of Wilkes. Sixteenth-century stories, addressed to London citizens, conferred hero status on local worthies who conducted themselves with the valor of ancient Romans and on merchants who spent like gentlemen: O'Connell, Laura Stevenson, “The Elizabethan Bourgeois Hero-Tale,” in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Malament, Barbara C. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 269–75Google Scholar.

34 Earl Temple to Wilkes, November 21, 1762, The Grenville Papers, ed. Smith, William James, 4 vols. (London, 1852–1853), 2:3Google Scholar; A Son of Freedom, Middlesex Journal (September 2–5, 1769); Edw. Thompson to Wilkes, BL Add. MSS 30871, fol. 180; Letters from the Year 1774 to the Year 1796 of John Wilkes, Esq…. to his Daughter, 4 vols. (London, 1804), 1:121Google Scholar; Banister, Judith, “‘In the Cause of Liberty’: A Cup and Cover in the Mansion House,” Country Life 170 (1981): 1671–72Google Scholar. On Wilkes's classicism, see McCracken, George, “John Wilkes, Humanist,” Philological Quarterly, vol. 2 (1923)Google Scholar.

35 Bleackley (n. 13 above), p. 65; Langford, Paul, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 297Google Scholar; “The Duellist,” in Grant, ed., pp. 259–89. Wilkes preened himself on his “courage and coolness” during one of his duels: Wilkes to Earl Temple [September 1763], Letters between the Duke ofGrafton [etc.] … and John Wilkes (London, 1769), p. 16Google Scholar.

36 Bleackley, pp. 60–65; my Disaffected Patriots, pp. 31–33, 82, 129.

37 On the legacy of popularity, to which Wilkes laid claim, see Wilson, Kathleen, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon,” Past and Present, no. 121 (November 1988), pp. 74–109Google Scholar; Rogers, Nicholas, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 87–129Google Scholar; Peters, Marie, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years' War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), passimGoogle Scholar.

38 [Cradock, Joseph], The Life of John Wilkes, Esq., in the Manner of Plutarch (London, 1773), pp. 20–21Google Scholar.

39 Quoted in English Liberty: being a Collection of Interesting Tracts from the Year 1762 to 1769 (London, 1769), p. 60Google Scholar. Compare Gunn, , Beyond Liberty and Property, p. 30Google Scholar.

40 Wilkes to Jean-Baptiste Suard, March 2, 1770, Wilkes MSS, 3:30; Langford, , Public Life, p. 233Google Scholar.

41 [Almon, John], Memoirs of a Late Eminent Bookseller (London, 1790), pp. 56–57Google Scholar.

42 Burtt, Shelley, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 100–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 447–48Google Scholar.

43 Hoppit, Julian, “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39 (1986): 39–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 A Citizen of London, Middlesex Journal (May 16–18, 1769). See also “Andrew Marvel [sic],” Ibid. (January 9–11, 1769), and Hue and Cry, Ibid. (September 30–October 3, 1769), which in patriotic vein blames high taxes in England for giving a competitive advantage to French traders. Clearly the debate over public debt intensified antagonism between the “monied interest,” those rich merchants and financiers who, as fund holders, were the beneficiaries of the system, and the middling and lower orders who saw themselves as its victims. Presumably though, this divide was not an absolute one because some members of the “middling sort” purchased government and allied stocks. (On holders of stock, see Dickson, P. G. M., The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 [London: Macmillan, 1967], pp. 249–303, 415–53Google Scholar.) Amateur investors even had their own guidebook, Thomas Mortimer, Every Man his own Broker, which went through numerous editions from the middle of the eighteenth century and occupied a curious status in the discourse on public debt. The book contained a vehement attack on stockjobbers, but despite its title, Mortimer was far from being a proto-Thatcherite apostle of people's capitalism. His advice was directed to “merchants and gentlemen,” and he was quite scathing about artisans and lesser tradesmen who involved themselves in high finance.

45 Annual Register (1769), p. 199Google Scholar. See also the petition of the London livery, Ibid., p. 202.

46 Annual Register (1763), p. 139Google Scholar; Libertas, Middlesex Journal (August 15–17, 1769). See also Middlesex Journal (April 6–8, 1769).

47 Gentleman's Magazine (1768), p. 124Google Scholar. For the account of an artisanal victim of a general warrant, see The Battle of the Quills: or Wilkes Attacked and Defended (1768), pp. 50–51Google Scholar. Debtors were not without some legal protections from their creditors, as Innes has pointed out (“The King's Bench Prison” [n. 8 above], pp. 255–56), but the frequency of their complaints suggests that these were frequently violated.

48 For some suggestive comments concerning the moral burden placed on debtors, see Hoppit, , Risk and Failure (n. 8 above), pp. 161–81Google Scholar. For appeals to the public by debtors, see [Penrice, William], The Extraordinary Case of William Penrice (London, 1768)Google Scholar, and The Case of Anne and Isaac Scott, Bankrupts, late Merchants and Dry-salters (London, 1768)Google Scholar. The Scott pamphlet prompted a libel action, and a copy of it is contained in the Public Record Office, KB 1/17 pt. 1, Bundle Hilary 9th George III, no. 2, London.

49 Cotes to Wilkes, June 16, 1767, London, BL Add. MSS 30869, fol. 132; also letters to Wilkes from John Nesbitt, C.B. (a woman in distress), [?] Preston, Charles Churchill (the son of Wilkes's friend of the same name), and John [?] Burnby, in BL Add. MSS 30868, fols. 141–42, 173, 183–84; 30870, fols. 157–58; 30871, fol. 32; 30872, fols. 149–50, 153.

50 For a good summary of available evidence on Forman, see Gold, Joel J., “‘Buried Alive’: Charlotte Forman in Grub Street,” Eighteenth-Century Life 8 (1982): 28–45Google Scholar.

51 Forman to Wilkes, June 12, 1768, October 28, 1769, April 9, 1770, BL Add. MSS 30870, fols. 52–53, 216, 30871, fol. 26; Forman to Hillsborough, August 19, 1769, BL Add. MSS 30870, fol. 66.

52 Stewardson, William, Middlesex Journal (August 5–8, 1769)Google Scholar; Barrell, Maria, The Captive (1790)Google Scholar; “A fair comparison between Mr. Wilkes and the D--- of G-----n,” Middlesex Journal (August 29–31, 1769)Google Scholar.

53 The most forceful recent statement of the importance of “bourgeois” values is Kramnick, Isaac, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, which asserts the essential “bourgeois radicalism” of the Wilkites, including Wilkes himself. John Brewer warned against the parlor game of “spot the bourgeoisie” (“English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” in Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980], p. 330Google Scholar), yet in a concurrent publication, he concludes that Wilkite “attitudes” were “bourgeois,” while conceding that Wilkes himself represented a special case (“The Wilkites and the Law, 1763–74: A Study of Radical Notions of Governance,” in Brewer, and Styles, , eds. [n. 8 above], p. 171Google Scholar). Kramnick's formulation is pitted against that of Pocock, a dogged yet subtle proponent of the persistence of civic humanism as a central mode of opposition thought, who argues that commerce and classical notions of virtue were opposed. See esp. his Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), esp. pp. 48–49, 68–69, 114–15Google Scholar. Pocock does, however, acknowledge the possible appearance “in middle-Georgian London” of “a democratic radicalism furnishing the individual with the politics of life in a world of exchange relationships” but warns that we should not “fetishize the term ‘bourgeois’ and construct a naive and crude antithesis between republican and Lockean forms of radicalism” Ibid., p. 260).

54 Compare the comment of the indigent hack, William Combe: “Love of gain entirely envelopes all traits of feeling and delicacy of sentiment, … I bless heaven I am not a man of merchandize.” Quoted in Barker-Benfield, , Culture of Sensibility (n. 10 above), p. 219Google Scholar.

55 Middlesex Journal (April 22–25, 1769).

56 On the campaign for prisoners' rights, see Innes (n. 8 above), pp. 290–98. Two printed versions of the rules of the prison college are in Guildhall MS 659.1, Guildhall Library, London. Biographical information on Stephen is contained in his son's Memoirs of James Stephen, ed. Bevington, Merle M. (London: Hogarth, 1954), pp. 89–103Google Scholar.

57 Considerations on Imprisonment for Debt (n. 9 above), pp. 14, 64–65.

58 Jackson to Wilkes, King's Bench Prison, November 18, 1770, BL Add. MSS 30871, fols. 46–47. For details of Dublin-born Jackson's colorful and disputatious career, which ended with his suicide in 1795 after his prosecution for revolutionary activities in Ireland, see Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, ed. Bayler, Joseph O. and Grossman, Norbert J., 3 vols. (Sussex: Harvester, 1979), 1:254–59Google Scholar; and Werkmeister, Lucyle, “Notes for a Revised Life of William Jackson,” Notes and Queries 206 (1961): 43–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Innes, pp. 293–96.

60 Public Advertiser (January 25, 1772), and (December 26, 1771).

61 Miller's London Mercury (November 23, 1771).

62 London Evening Post (January 18–21, 1772). Significantly, Wilkes had earlier sought to combine patriotism with regard for creditor confidence by agreeing to challenge the privilege of immunity from imprisonment for debt enjoyed by servants of foreign diplomats: Gazetteer (July 17, 1771).

63 A Civilian, Public Advertiser (January 13, 1772); Jackson, Ibid. (December 26, 1771).

64 A True Briton, C.P.G., Westminster Journal (December 28, 1771–January 4, 1772); Anglo-Brunsivicensis, London Evening Post (January 2–4, 1772); Wilkes, Ibid. (January 18–21, 1772).

65 Public Advertiser (December 21, 1771), and (January 22, 1772); Gazetteer (November 8, 1771); A True and Genuine Account of the Life, Trial and Execution of James Bolland, 2d ed. (London, 1772), p. 15Google Scholar. One of Wilkes's severest critics was Robert Holloway, a self-declared gentleman of Gray's Inn, who was bitter at the seizure of his “furniture, books, papers, and every thing [he] was possessed of, under Pretence of debt, and the more flagrant Pretence of Execution”: HoUoway (n. 3 above), p. vii. Holloway bombarded Wilkes with recommendations for reforming abuses in the sheriff's office and eliminating the alleged corruption of attorneys, but he was clearly not satisfied with Wilkes's response: Public Advertiser (December 13, 1771).

66 My conclusions differ somewhat from those in Brewer, “Wilkites and the Law” (n. 53 above), pp. 128–71. Brewer's article offers a valuable compendium of those instances where the Wilkites did use the courts for promoting the redress of popular grievances, but it inadequately demarcates the limits of such activity. Specifically, Brewer overstates the extent to which imprisoned debtors were championed by Wilkes and his circle. Further, his statement that the Wilkites “abhorred the use of capital punishment as in terrorem” (p. 169) is too cut-and-dried. On their retirement as sheriffs, Wilkes and Bull manifested concern about the infliction of hanging for “inferior crimes” (“Supplement to English Liberty,” MS 3332/2, p. 159, Guildhall Library), but later Wilkes expressed support for capital punishment in all its “severity”: [Romilly, Samuel], Memoirs of the Life of Samuel Romilly written by himself with a selection of his correspondence written by his sons, 2d ed., 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1840), 1:84Google Scholar. In this general connection, it should also be noted that Wilkes, an avid consumer of legally acquired game, was taken to task for his reluctance to oppose “the unconstitutional the slavish Game Act”: A Reformed Wilkite, Public Ledger (June 24, 1771).

67 Masters, Betty R., The Chamberlain of the City of London, 1237–1987 (London: Corporation of London, 1988), esp. pp. 53–71Google Scholar.

68 Ibid., p. 63; Treloar (n. 14 above), pp. 142–49, 173–90; Bleackley (n. 13 above), pp. 306–7; Tho. Clarke to Wilkes, May 26, 1774, BL Add. MSS 30871, fol. 216; Journals of Common Council, vol. 67, fols. 85, 100, Corporation of London Record Office. The question of whether the Common Council should discharge Wilkes's debts was discussed in a tradesmen's club, the Society for Free Debate: Gazetteer (January 3, 1777).

69 On Janssen, see Masters, pp. 59–60; City Biography, 2d ed. (London, 1800), p. 63Google Scholar; Colley, , Britons (n. 27 above), p. 95Google Scholar.

70 Wilkes to Janssen, November 18, 1775, BL Add. MSS 30871, fol. 259; Controversial Letters of Wilkes and Home (n. 16 above), p. 101. On Hopkins, see Masters, pp. 60–61; and The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754–1790, ed. SirNamier, Lewis and Brooke, John, 3 vols. (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1964), 2:639–40Google Scholar.

71 Morning Chronicle (February 22, 1775).

72 Quoted in History of Parliament, ed. Namier, and Brooke, , 2:640Google Scholar.

73 A Liveryman, Gazetteer (February 24, 1776).

74 “A Calm Address to the Worthy Liverymen of London,” City Elections, 1768–1796, p. 85Google Scholar.

75 An old-fashioned citizen of SirBarnard's, John days, Morning Chronicle (February 14, 1776)Google Scholar; An Impartial Citizen, Morning Post (February 24, 1776).

76 Burtt, , Virtue Transformed (n. 42 above), p. 33Google Scholar.

77 The Humours of the Times, being a collection of several curious pieces, in verse and prose. By the most celebrated geniusses, for mirth, wit, and humour (London, 1771), p. 211Google Scholar.

78 Justice, Gazetteer (February 24, 1776).

79 Examiner, Ibid. (April 15, 1777); Observator, Ibid. (May 2, 1777).

80 London Evening Post (February 22–24, 1776); Regulus, Gazetteer (April 12, 1776).

81 Examiner, Gazetteer (April 15, 1777), (May 17, 1777), and (March 20, 1777).

82 Ibid. (June 25, 1777).

83 The Dramatic Works of Richard Brins ley Sheridan, ed. Price, Cecil, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 1:300–303Google Scholar; Morwood, James, The Life and Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), pp. 72–73Google Scholar; Plain Truth, Gazetteer (May 20, 1777).

84 Treloar (n. 14 above), pp. 196–99.

85 On the impact of the American War on City politics, see my Disaffected Patriots (n. 30 above), pp. 114–43.

86 See above, n. 53.

87 For example, Colley, Linda, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760–1820,” Past and Present, no. 102 (February 1984), pp. 94–129Google Scholar.

88 Treloar, pp. 204–5.