A HISTORY OF MIDDLESEX 



in 1573. His son, a second Sir Robert Wroth, was first returned in 

 1572, and again in 1585, 1588, 1601, and 1602. Sir Gilbert Gerrard 

 represented Middlesex throughout the Long Parliament, and Sir Thomas 

 Allen and Sir Launcelot Lake in the Restoration Parliament. 



The most familiar name in connexion with Middlesex politics is 

 that of ' Jack ' Wilkes. When Wilkes offered himself as candidate for 

 Middlesex in the general election of 1768, he had just been defeated 

 as candidate for the City. He had already been prosecuted in 1763 for 

 his criticism of the king's speech in No. 45 of the North Briton. He 

 had been attacked by the House of Lords for the * Essay on Woman ' 

 (November, ij6^)^ and expelled by the Commons (he was member 

 for Aylesbury), on account of No. 45, on 19 January, 1764.*" On 

 2 1 February of that year he had been condemned by the Court of King's 

 Bench as a libeller and as the author of an obscene poem, and he had 

 later been outlawed for duelling and forced to flee to France.* 42 His 

 character was certainly not of the highest, and his personality was most 

 unattractive. Yet when he returned from France in 1768, he found 

 himself exalted to the position of popular idol. Technically he had 

 suffered injustice, because the liberty of the subject had been outraged 

 by his arrest under a general warrant for the publication of No. 45 ; 

 and the privilege of Parliament had been denied him by his imprison- 

 ment in the Tower. But what appealed to the people was that an 

 unpopular court, the adherents of an unpopular king, had pursued him 

 with unexampled animosity. The country was just entering on that 

 period of unrest and smouldering revolution in which it continued until 

 the Reform Bill of 1832 : the period which beheld the rise of democracy 

 and the expansion of a formidable party of reform. Wilkes, the son of 

 a rich distiller of Clerkenwell, an atheist, and a notorious evil-liver, yet 

 appealed to the people as one who, himself a victim of tyranny, might 

 lead them to fuller freedom.** 3 He was supported because of his 

 indomitable resistance to a king who was hated as much for the corrup- 

 tion by which he controlled Parliament as for the policy by which he 

 had brought about the war with the American colonies. 



In 1768, then, Wilkes was elected for Middlesex by a large 

 majority in opposition to the established interest of men who already 

 represented the county, and who, besides having considerable fortunes in 

 connexion with Middlesex, were supported by the whole interest of the 

 court. Wilkes's partisans were jubilant, forcing even the inhabitants of 

 London to celebrate his triumph, and marking every door with the 

 popular number '45-' 444 Their champion had, however, to appear 

 before the Court of King's Bench on his outlawry, and he was committed 

 on a capias utlagatum. He was rescued by the mob, but again surren- 

 dered himself. His outlawry was reversed, but he was sentenced to two 



M Erskine May, Const. Hist, i, cap. x. Par/. Hist, xv, 1346. 



"' Com. Journ. xxix, 689. "' GnnviUe Papers, ii, 155. 



143 Hist. M 55. Com. Rep. iii, 415. Lord Hardwicke to President Dundas, 16 Mar. 1762 : 'We 

 are now got into a strange flame about an object, in himself of no great consequence, Mr. Wilkes, and it 

 has spread far and wide.' Erskine May, op. cit. i, 391. 



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