July ig, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
15 
Life and Letters 
By J. G. Squire 
Wilkes and 
Liberty 
FREEDOM must often wish to be saved from her 
friends. Men vigilant over the Uberty of the subject 
frequently find themselves compelled to support 
undesirable and even unsavoury persons. If the 
authorities prosecute a speaker or writer under the effete 
Blasphemy Laws, the victim is normally a man with whom 
it is impossible to sympathise except theoretically : and 
censored journahsts, authors and orators are. more often 
than not, madmenvor malignants who have expressed views 
with which the majority of their defenders do not agree. 
Governments which desire to break a law or invade a principle 
commoiily choose the most favourable ground they can find : 
and their opponents are obliged, for the sake of a general 
belief, to treat ate heroes and martyrs men whom they would 
prefer not to touch with a barge-pole. 
* * « * * 
John Wilkes {The Life of John Wilkes, by Horace Bleackley, 
John Lane, i6s. net), was the most remarkable illustration 
of this truth in all our history. The first great struggles in 
which " Wilkes and Liberty " was a battle-cry arose out of 
No. 45 of the North Briton and the Essay on Woman. " No. 
45 " was the culmination of a series of attacks upon George 
III. and Lord Bute, wliich no decent man would have written 
and which no decent man could approve : the final nastiness 
of it was the suggestion that illicit relations existed between 
George's mother and his Prime Minister. The Essay on 
Woman was one of several poems, remarkable only for the 
utter coarseness of their blasphemy and obscenity. Few of 
Wilkes's reputable supporters thought these compositions 
anything but what they were : and, in the heat of the conflict 
the wives of the very Whig magnates who were financing him 
and defending him in Parliament refused to let him into their 
drawing-rooms. But in each instance an important principle 
was at stake, or believed to be at stake. After "No. 45 " 
Wilkes was arrested on a Genera] Warrant which mentioned 
no names : and it was feared that this opened the door to 
the promiscuous apprehension of persons obnoxious to 
Ministers. And the Essay on Women had been printed and 
not published ; its authorship (though now indubitable) 
was not definitely brought home to Wilkes ; and the Govern- 
ment had only been able to get hold of a copy by means of 
bribes and espionage. A large number of those who backed 
Wilkes were pohticians, delighted to find a stick with which 
t o beat rivals in office ; and he was also helped by the general 
dislike and fear of Scotsmen. But his great strength, through- 
out his fighting career, lay in the fact that the attacks on him 
were beUeved to be part of a general scheme for establishing 
a royal autocracy, working through a subservient Parhament. 
The aristocratic adherents of the 1688 settlement — oligarchs 
threatened with a loss of power^ — and the general public, 
anxious to preserve what freedom it possessed, were bound 
to mobilise behind Wilkes. For a dozen years, triumphant 
at the polls, in prison, in exile, or defying the ministers of 
the Crown from his throne in the Mansion House, he was 
the idol of democrats in England, and the inspiration of 
democrats in France and North America. The county of 
Middlesex returned him again and again when the House 
of Commons declared liim incapable of election : given free 
choice, almost any other constituency of any size in the country 
would have done the same tiling. Whenever he scored a 
success in his prolonged trial and lawsuits, he was drawn 
through the City by triumphant crowds ; in the King's 
Bench prison he was almost buried under gifts of money and 
provender ; his trips into the country were triumphant 
progresses ; his electoral ;victories sent multitudes cheering 
through illuminated streets. He fould bring tears of 
sympathy into innocent eyes, and for' a good many years 
he was continually doing so. But his own view of the matter 
was summarised in a characteristic phrase : " I must raise 
a dust or starve in a gaol." 
« « * * * 
"mSrv" xvfr?°''^'°^'*''^*"^"«d^i^lithe help of 
andiminTi ™st catenng to the Nonconformist vote 
WesS.S «f u"""^ ""^ P'^P''^^ churchwarden at St. Margaret's 
fratern V wh ^' T^ """l °^ '^' Medmenham monks, a con^ 
SonS^thJ p ^^'''u^'^l' ^^'^ ^°' generations a legend 
amongst the Buckmghamshire peasantry. His immorahtv 
Ssted hir'^-^n^'^'^^^^*^ ^^"*"^y- H*^ frequentTy si? 
gested his price to the Government of the dav : now the 
Ambassadorship to Constantinople, now the Governorship of 
pension' oT?™ ^ ^'"^ P^''1°"' ^ ^^^"^ °^ ^'"OO- ^"d a 
fe^^^\l^A^°-''J^^'' °" t'^^ I"sh estabHshraent." He 
him the nn"""^ 'I''" ^'"'^'- ^' '^'' ^^'"P''^ P^P^l^^^ ^ho made 
him the power he was, and at the end of his life, safe in the 
Sw^ fnn''' 'P u '^' "^''y- ^' «^^l^°^^d most of his old 
rTbpnHon'J'^K^";''"'" ^ P'"^"" ^^ ^he Throne. He was 
^hnnf ^K libertine, an unscrupulous demagogue, and 
SZiZTT^r^'' adventurer as has ever yet become 
prominent m Enghsh politics, which is saying a good deal. 
* * * * *. 
Th?l'*ir°'" he would not have succeeded-he had his points. 
liHi; nfff'^'''' '".u "»<'p^''«^- a scholar, probably made very 
ill! Tu'^l''^' *^°V&h It almost reconciled Dr Johnson to 
^.^; I.T . i"" ""'uf' '" ^'l^ '°"^' ^^y- a gentleman, certainly 
made him tolerable to the more respectable of his pohtical 
associates. But his greatest assets were his high spirits and 
his courage, and the wit that proceeded from the two 
Shame, said Gibbon, " is a weakness he has long since 
surmounted. He had never known what it was. He 
never hesitated because of a mind harassed by conscience 
tie was audacious in action, and always ready with the 
effective and impudent word. No misfortune depressed him 
and no personahty or dignity abashed him. The crowd 
loved to picture him as a victim of circumstance, bankrupted 
and slandered by a Government of tyrants, standing up for 
the rights of a Briton against all the forces of birth and wealth • 
and he acted the part with astonishing dexterity, humour 
and charm,— and with an appreciation of the value of noble 
catch-phrases that would have served him even better in a 
later age. He was thoroughly "game"; he fought his 
duels as though they were games of billiards. 
***** 
In spite of all his vices and his cant, in spite of a 
physical ugliness (he had a long thin, sallow, almost concave 
face, and squinting black eyes) which approximated to that 
of his near relative Sin, it was difficult not to be attracted 
by him when he was physically present.' He belonged to the 
type, a favourite one with modern biographers, of the 
fascinating blackguard. And, as a politician, though he 
really cared nothing about the distresses of the disfranchised 
and disinherited proletariat which he used, he had unusual 
insight. The " Wilkes and Liberty " struggle gave birth to 
the movement which ultimately produced the Reform Bill ; 
and all his life Wilkes saw that reform must come, and said' 
that it should come. He predicted the French Revolution, 
and did his best to avert the American one : he was the 
direct cause of the obsolescence of the veto on the pubHcation ' 
of Parliamentary Debates ; and he was at every stage a very 
good judge of the abihties of statesmen. Modern Radicals 
must regard him as one of the most important of their 
ancestors : we all have scoundrels in our pedigrees, and it 
cannot be helped. 
***** 
We must, in fact, accept the description of him by the young 
Gibbon, who met him as a brOther-oflScer in the Militia : " A 
thorough profligate in principle as in practice." From the 
beginning, when the son of the Clerkenwell distiller married 
a Buckinghamshire heiress for her money, induced her to 
make over her estates, to him, and then separated from her, 
his career was one of unusual blackguardism. During his 
first election campaign, he denounced bribery in the loftiest 
way : in his second he spent ^(7,000, informing a friend 
Mr. Bleackley tells his story well. His historical judgments 
are more sensible than we have any right to expect from the 
author of an illustrated biography ; he has spent much time 
upon his documents ; and he works in all the amusing anec- 
dotes. But his English is not of the first order. His grammar 
is very seedy, and one frequently encounters sentences like 
" Being the most gregarious creature that ever lived, his 
room was nearly always full of company." He has a fine 
flow of cliches and the most exasperating habit of tacking 
«.*w..w*, ....V. f^v.....*. J.^.i.J..,, wv^^, ...-w pv....«. j«.... ....iVV.J, 
the tactful John," and " the autocratic John," one yearns 
to come across a name standing alone in unqualified sim- 
plicity. Mr. Bleackley's one original enterprise in the way of 
expression is his coinage of the highly regrettable adjective 
" Wilkish." He bad better, here/ also have stuck to the stock. 
