Born, in Clerkenwell, 17 Oct. 1727. Early education at schools at Hertford and Thame. Afterwards at Leyden University. Returned to England, 1749. Married Miss Mead, Oct. 1749; separated from her soon afterwards. M.P. for Aylesbury, 1757–64. Edited (and wrote) “The North Briton,” 1762–63. Expelled from House of Commons (for attack on the king in No. 45 of “The North Briton”), 19 Jan. 1764. M.P. for Middlesex, 1768. Expelled from House for his part in the publication of a letter of Lord Weymouth’s, 27 Jan. 1769. Re-elected M.P. for Middlesex, 16 Feb. 1769; re-expelled, 17 Feb. Re-elected, 16 March; re-expelled, 17 March. Re-elected, 13 April; unseated, 15 April. Alderman of Farringdon Without, 2 Jan. 1769. Sheriff, 1771. M.P. for Middlesex. 1774. Lord Mayor, 1774; Chamberlain of London, 1779–97. Died in London, 25 Dec. 1797. Buried in South Audley Street Church. Works: (Exclusive of separate speeches): “Observations on the Papers relative to the Rupture with Spain” (anon.), 1762; “The North Briton” (2 vols.), 1763; “An Essay on Woman” (anon.; priv. ptd.), 1763; “Recherches sur l’origine du Despotisme Oriental,” 1763; “The Present Crisis” (anon.), 1764; “Letter to the Worthy Electors of … Aylesbury,” 1764; “Letter to a Noble Member of the Club in Albemarle Street,” 1764; “Letter to … the Duke of Grafton” (anon.), 1767 (8th edn. same year); “The History of England” (only the “Introduction” pubd.), 1768; “Addresses to the Gentlemen … of Middlesex,” 1769; “A Letter to Samuel Johnson, LL.D.” (anon.), 1770; “Controversial Letters,” 1771; “Speeches,” 1786. Posthumous: “Letters … to his Daughter” (4 vols.), 1804; “Correspondence,” ed. by J. Almon, 1805. He edited “Catullus” (priv. ptd.), 1788; “Θεοφραστου Χαραχτηρες Ἠθικοι” (priv. ptd.), 1790; “Supplement to the Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Gibbon,” 1796. Life: by P. Fitzgerald, 1888.

Personal

  On the first Sunday evening I was in Leyden, I walked round the Cingle—a fine walk on the outside of the Rhine, which formed the wet ditch of the town—with John Gregory, who introduced me to the British students as we met them, not without giving me a short character of them, which I found in general a very just outline. When we came to John Wilkes, whose ugly countenance in early youth was very striking, I asked earnestly who he was. His answer was, that he was the son of a London distiller or brewer, who wanted to be a fine gentleman and man of taste, which he could never be, for God and nature had been against him. I came to know Wilkes very well afterwards, and found him to be a sprightly, entertaining fellow,—too much so for his years, as he was but eighteen; for even then he showed something of daring profligacy, for which he was afterwards notorious. Though he was fond of learning, and passionately desirous of being thought something extraordinary, he was unlucky in having an old, ignorant pedant of a dissenting parson for his tutor.

  He had such a flow of spirits that it was impossible ever to be a moment dull in his company. His wit gave charm to every subject he spoke upon, and his humour displayed the foibles of mankind in such colours as to put folly even out of countenance. But the same vanity which had first made him ambitious of entering into this society, only because it was composed of persons superior to his own in life, and still kept him in it, though upon acquaintance he despised them, sullied all these advantages. His spirits were often stretched to extravagance to overcome competition. His humour was debased into buffoonery, and his wit was so prostituted to the lust of applause that he would sacrifice his best friend for a scurvy jest, and wound the heart of him whom he would at the very moment hazard his life and fortune to serve, only to raise a laugh.

  Colonel Wilkes, of the Buckinghamshire Militia, dined with us…. I scarcely ever met with a better companion; he has inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humour, and a great deal of knowledge…. He told us himself, that in this time of public dissension, he was resolved to make his fortune.

  Wilkes is here, and has been twice to see me in my illness. He was very civil, but I cannot say entertained me much. I saw no wit; his conversation shows how little he has lived in good company, and the chief turn of it is the grossest bawdy.

  Bristol, April 14th.—We hear that on Wednesday next, being the day of Mr. Wilkes’ enlargement, forty-five persons are to dine at the “Crown,” in the passage leading from Broad Street to Tower Lane. The entertainment is to consist of two rounds of beef, of 45 lbs. each; two legs of veal, weighing 45 lbs.; two ditto of pork, 45 lbs.; a pig, roasted, 45 lbs.; two puddings of 45 lbs.; 45 loaves; and, to drink, 45 tankards of ale. After dinner, they are to smoke 45 pipes of tobacco, and to drink 45 bowls of punch. Among others, the following toasts are to be given:—1. Long live the King; 2. Long live the supporters of British Liberty; 3. The Magistrates of Bristol. And the dinner to be on the table exactly 45 minutes after two o’clock.

  Did we not hear so much said of Jack Wilkes, we should think more highly of his conversation. Jack has great variety of talk, Jack is a scholar, and Jack has the manners of a gentleman. But, after hearing his name sounded from pole to pole as the phœnix of convivial felicity, we are disappointed in his company.

  Wilkes desired that his tomb should be inscribed, “J. W., a friend to Liberty.” I am glad he was not ashamed to show a little gratitude to her in her old age; for she was a great friend to him.

  He was really a sad dog, but most delightfully amusing, facetious, witty, well-informed, and with much various, though not profound learning. He was sometimes so intolerably sarcastic, and more particularly at the expence of his friends in the city, that the wonder is, how he could so long continue in their good graces.

  Wilkes had, till very lately, been known chiefly as one of the most profane, licentious, and agreeable rakes about town. He was a man of taste, reading, and engaging manners. His sprightly conversation was the delight of green-rooms and taverns, and pleased even grave hearers when he was sufficiently under restraint to abstain from detailing the particulars of his amours and from breaking jests on the New Testament. His expensive debaucheries forced him to have recourse to the Jews. He was soon a ruined man, and determined to try his chance as a political adventurer. In Parliament he did not succeed. His speaking, though pert, was feeble, and by no means interested his hearers so much as to make them forget his face, which was so hideous that the caricaturists were forced, in their own despite, to flatter him. As a writer he made a better figure.

  He was clever, courageous, unscrupulous. He was a good scholar, expert in resource, humorous, witty, and a ready master of the arts of conversation. He could “abate and dissolve a pompous gentleman” with singular felicity. Churchill did not know the crisis of his fortune that had given him to patriotism. He was ignorant, that, early in the preceding year, after loss of his last seven thousand pounds on his seat of Aylesbury, he had made an unsuccessful attempt upon the Board of Trade. He was not in his confidence when, a little later, he offered to compromise with the Government for the embassy to Constantinople. He was dead when, many years later, he settled into a quiet supporter of the most atrocious of “things as they were.” What now presented itself in the form of Wilkes to Churchill, had a clear unembarrassed front;—passions unsubdued as his own; principles rather unfettered than depraved; apparent manliness of spirit; real courage; scorn of conventions; an open heart and a liberal hand; and the capacity of ardent friendship. They entered at once into an extraordinary alliance, offensive and defensive. It is idle to deny that this has damaged Churchill with posterity, and that Wilkes has carried his advocate along with him into the Limbo of doubtful reputations. But we will deny the justice of it.

  All, then, that we dare now say of him is, that with all his faults he was a true-born Englishman, with the marking characteristics, good and bad; who, having once taken up a position, even though driven to do so by his adversary, would maintain and defend it with bull-dog pertinacity, and at all costs, personal, political and social. His courage amounted almost to reckless daring; and he would resent an insult, whether it came from a Chatham, a Grafton, an Onslow, a Martin, or even a Grenville, though it should cost him the friendship of a Temple. He was a good, kind, and dutiful son,—a gentle, tender, and affectionate father. There is something morally beautiful in the fact that when challenged by Lord Talbot, his last act before the mad moonlight devilry began was, to write to Lord Temple thanking him for the friendship which he had ever shown to him, and entreating as a last and crowning favour, that if he fell his Lordship and Lady Temple would superintend the education of his daughter. Though drinking and gaming were amongst the vices of his age, he was no gambler,—and his abstinence was remarkable and a subject of remark. He rose early and read diligently. Indeed, his reading was extensive and varied beyond that of most men of his age not being professed scholars; not merely in the Classics, which he especially loved, but in most of the modern languages that had a literature—French, Spanish, and Italian. As the amusement of his leisure hours, and of that quiet domestic life which in truth he loved, he published editions of Catullus and Theophrastus, said to be almost unrivalled for accuracy—and translated Anacreon so well, that Dr. Joseph Warton, no bad judge, pressed him to publish it.

  One morning when I was a lad, Wilkes came into our banking-house to solicit my father’s vote. My father happened to be out, and, I as his representative, spoke to Wilkes. At parting, Wilkes shook hands with me; and I felt proud of it for a week after. He was quite as ugly, and squinted as much, as his portraits make him; but he was very gentlemanly in appearance and manners. I think I see him at this moment, walking through the crowded streets of the city, as Chamberlain, on his way to Guildhall, in a scarlet coat, military boots, and a bag-wig,—the hackney-coachman in vain calling out to him, “A coach, your honour?”

  Wilkes was without morals of any kind; and only fought for “liberty,” when there was nothing to be made by jobbing.

  To attempt any analysis of such a character would be superfluous; it is so patent in his actions that those who run may read. Trickster, tuft-hunter, bully, humbug, roué, false alike to man and woman, friend and foe, a sceptic in morals, politics, and religion, without honour or honesty, what can be said in his favour? Well, he had courage enough to defend his misdeeds, was a jovial boon companion; and ugly, squinting, lying, dishonest, dissolute as he was, he possessed some mysterious kind of fascination which few men or women could resist, and which we feel even in perusing the records of his life. Such was Jack Wilkes, who, although a Model Demagogue, at least had little of the bilious sourness of the tribe.

  John Wilkes, who now became one of the most prominent figures in English politics, was at this time in his thirty-sixth year…. His countenance was repulsively ugly. His life was scandalously and notoriously profligate, and he was sometimes guilty of profanity which exceeded even that of the vicious circle in which he lived, but he possessed some qualities which were well fitted to secure success in life. He had a brilliant and ever ready wit, unflagging spirits, unfailing good humour, great personal courage, much shrewdness of judgment, much charm of manner. The social gifts must have been indeed of no common order which half-conquered the austere Toryism of Johnson, extorted a warm tribute of admiration from Gibbon, secured the friendship of Reynolds, and made the son of a London distiller a conspicuous member of the Medmenham Brotherhood, and the favourite companion of the more dissipated members of the aristocracy.

  What man was ever more successful in laying siege to female hearts than the demagogue John Wilkes? He was so exceedingly ugly that a lottery-office keeper once offered him ten guineas not to pass his window while the tickets were drawing for fear of his bringing ill-luck on the house. Rogers the poet, who had seen him, speaks of his “diabolical squint.” Yet, though the ugliest man in England, he was at the same time its most accomplished intriguer. He was the Don Juan of his day, sneering at the very women he subdued. He once boasted to Lord Townshend, whom he admitted to be the handsomest man in the kingdom, that, give him but a half hour’s start, he would enter the lists against his lordship with any woman he might choose to name.

  His part in public life he played with courage and consistency; but there was a deeper sense than appeared on the surface in his arch denial that he was ever a Wilkite. By nature unquestionably he was no demagogue, but a man of fashion and a dilettante; nor did he possess the ready eloquence which is characteristic of the born leader of the masses. His speeches were always carefully prepared, and smelt too much of the oil for popular effect. He retained dilettantism, and especially his interest in French and Italian literature and painting, to the last.

General

  That the paper entitled the North Briton, No. XLV. was a false, scandalous, and seditious libel, containing expressions of the most unexampled insolence and contumely towards his Majesty, the grossest aspersions on both houses of parliament, and the most audacious defiance of the authority of the whole legislature; and most manifestly tending to alienate the affections of the people from his Majesty, to withdraw them from their obedience to the laws of the realm, and to excite them to traitorous insurrections.

  The only part of the work [“Correspondence”] we have pursued with any degree of amusement, is that which contains his private letters to Mr. Cotes and his daughter. The former give a very lively and undisguised picture of his feelings during the period of his persecution and popularity; and afford some curious glimpses of constitutional gaiety and Epicurean carelessness, in a mind agitated by a fierce ambition, a distempered vanity, and a rancorous thirst for revenge. The latter are indulgent, cheerful, unconstrained, and every way amiable. Though written in a tone of a man of the world, the morality which they inculcate is entirely unexceptional, and show the author to have been susceptible, in private life, of better feelings and affections than could be guessed at from his public appearances.

  Wilkes’s brilliancy faded away when he proceeded to commit his thoughts to paper, as if it had dissolved itself in the ink…. Some of Wilkes’s colloquial impromptus that have been preserved are perfect, considered in themselves, and without regard to the readiness with which they may have been struck out,—are so true and deep, and evince so keen a feeling at once of the ridiculous and of the real,—that one wonders at finding so little of the same kind of power in his more deliberate efforts. In all his published writings that we have looked into—and, what with essays and pamphlets of one kind and another, they fill a good many volumes—we scarcely recollect anything that either in matter or manner rises above the veriest commonplace, unless perhaps it be a character of Lord Chatham, occurring in a letter addressed to the Duke of Grafton, some of the biting things in which are impregnated with rather a subtle venom. A few of his verses also have some fancy and elegance, in the style of Carew and Waller. But even his private letters, of which two collections have been published, scarcely ever emit a sparkle. And his House of Commons speeches, which he wrote before hand and got by heart, are equally unenlivened. It is evident, indeed, that he had not intellectual lung enough for any protracted exertion or display. The soil of his mind was a hungry, unproductive gravel, with some gems embedded in it.

  His literary qualifications have been extolled beyond their desert. He has been called a good classical scholar; but his reading in Latin was not extensive, and his knowledge of Greek was evidently slight. His editorship of Catullus and Theophrastus was merely nominal; such commendation as the volumes merit belongs to the printer. He seems to have been incapable to any sustained literary effort. After his professed determination to give a life and edition of Churchill and a life of Sterne, it might have been thought that very shame would have urged him to produce something of those works; but what he did for Churchill was nought, and Sterne he utterly neglected. Of his promised History of England nothing was written but a short introduction in praise of liberty and the Revolution. His few attempts at verse are poor and dry.

  The story of the “Essay on Woman” is singular. He had a private press at which he ordered that twelve copies only of this brief poem should be struck off, for he seems to have had no idea of publishing it. One of the printers took one sheet of it with him to wrap some butter in. Having unrolled the butter at a friend’s house where he was to sup, the friend read some of the verses, and finding them spicy, asked for the paper, which he showed to some one else. The paper, passing from hand to hand, found its way to higher quarters. The eminent enemies of Wilkes, anxious to get hold of some charge against him which would go down with the public better than their political indictments, actually bribed the head printer with a place worth a hundred pounds per annum to give them a copy of the whole poem. The ridicule it heaped on the Athanasian Creed Wilkes justified by quoting Archbishop Tillotson’s wish that the Church were fairly rid of that creed; and, with regard to the alleged indecencies of other portions, after making sundry cracks in the glass houses in which many of his accusers dwelt, he confessed that it contained “a few portraits drawn from warm life, with the too high coloring of a youthful fancy; and two or three descriptions, perhaps too luscious, which, though nature and woman might pardon, a Kidgell and a Mansfield could not fail to condemn.” Wilkes does not appear to have lost any friends by the publication of the poem either among men or women…. Wilkes seems to have employed one-half of his active life writing the memoirs of the other half.

  Less polished as a writer than Addison, less incisive in attack than Junius, as good a classic and as much a man of the world as the former, as reckless and brazen-faced as the latter, he had the art of stating a case with singular lucidity, and of illustrating it in a homely and telling manner. His touch was light, and his sarcasm stinging. He anticipated Cobbett in the skill and daring with which he put and reiterated in plain terms the most unpalatable truths. He was the first political writer who not only applied to things their proper epithets, but also called persons by their proper names. The initials and innuendoes to which timorous journalists had resorted, he discarded and disowned, excepting when an illusion was more effective than a simple statement.

  With the exception of the “Essay on Woman,” which was never meant to be published, Wilkes had written nothing that was not sound in reason, and respectful in tone. Number forty-five of the North Briton, if it had appeared in the Morning Chronicle as a leading article at the time when George the Third dismissed Pitt and sent for Addington, or at the time when William the Fourth dismissed the Whigs and sent for Peel, would have been regarded as a very passable effusion, rather old-fashioned in the tenderness with which it treated the susceptibilities of the monarch. Grave statesmen acknowledged that Wilkes in his famous paper had rendered a solid and permanent service to the cause of constitutional government by the clear and attractive form in which he had laid down the doctrine that ministers are responsible for the contents of the royal speech.

  Altogether Mr. Wilkes was one of the most important personages of the last century. He wrote many letters of a very free and easy sort to his daughter “Polly,” born in the year 1750, to whom he was without doubt very greatly attached. He informed her of his movements and narrated for her entertainment much that was lively and laughable. But his letters are certainly not of the kind Mrs. Hester Chapone would have approved, or the Reverend Dr. Fordyce have addressed to young women, or, for that matter, to young men either.

  It has been often repeated that The North Briton was scarcely of sufficient importance to have excited the commotion it did, and that it would have been more prudent to have treated it with contempt. But the truth is, as we read it now, it is found to be a very stirring, vigorous and dangerous opponent, written with much pungency, wit, and even vivacity. This may be imagined, when it is stated that Wilkes had found so valuable a coadjutor as Charles Churchill, who contributed not only his prose but also his verse. Wilkes was often absent, and eventually the whole burden of the paper fell upon Churchill. He must at least have written half of the numbers, and, as Mr. Forster says, “wherever it shows the coarse, broad mark of sincerity, there seems to us the trace of his hand.” The correspondence between them during the progress of the paper shows Wilkes to be full of an unbounded admiration for his friend’s powers, and his gratitude for his assistance corresponds with his generous appreciation, which certainly was beyond the merits of the work.