People versus Parliament: a warning from the 18th century

The British constitution is a beautiful and yet in some of its parts an absurd creation, an old building, part-Gothic, part-Saxon, part-Classical, as Burke might have put it. The intricate dynamic between Parliament and the voters has never been quite settled, despite all its organic evolution over centuries. Nigel Farage’s surprise resignation this week to fight the by-election that his own departure had triggered is such an instance of institutional tension: an appeal, over the head of the House, to the constituency beyond it. Yet there is nothing new under the sun, as the Preacher said. More than 250 years earlier the same appeal had been made by a man who built an entire career upon taking the mantle of the people.

John Wilkes was an improbable tribune of the London crowds. Born in 1725, he was educated in Leiden, and married an Aylesbury heiress, although he preferred the company of the Medmenham ‘monks’ of the Hellfire Club. Wilkes used her fortune to buy his way into Parliament with ‘a good deal of manoeuvre and trick’. Witty, physically courageous and irreverent, he had neither the cold, calculating character of a Robespierre, nor the piety of a Cato. He was a fashionable Georgian rake, and therefore not so dangerous to the established order.

In 1760, Britain had a new king, but the decade was an unsettled one for the country. The old party alignments had been dissolving and, as a new generation of politicians came up, the result was a great political volatility of seven ministries in the first ten years of the new reign. To the disarray of the old oligarchy was added a stirring of popular feeling and a young king’s settled mistrust of politicians. Not only that, but the economic reckoning that usually followed the making of peace fell especially hard after the Seven Years’ War, despite all the imperial bounty that victory had brought. Into that febrile and transitional world stepped Wilkes.

A supporter of the mercurial Pitt the Elder, Wilkes did not attempt to make a mark in the Commons. He chose instead to speak extra muros and use the press. In 1762 he founded the North Briton to harry Lord Bute, the king’s favourite; and on 23 April 1763 its notorious 45th issue attacked the King’s Speech for endorsing the Peace of Paris, assailing, with lawyerly care, the ministers who had put falsehoods into the royal mouth.

The ministry, in an act of folly, decided to prosecute Wilkes for seditious libel, but the legal sloppiness of its response secured his immortality. Lord Halifax issued a general warrant under which some 49 people, including finally Wilkes himself, were seized. Unfortunately for the king’s ministers the law lay with Wilkes; the juries awarded him damages, while the courts condemned general warrants as repugnant to English law. In 1766, Rockingham’s government declared them illegal.

Wilkes’ legal problems kept mounting though, and the ministry then reached for his private vices, with the radical libertine finally slipping to Paris to see his daughter and to recuperate. In January 1764, the House of Commons expelled him from its ranks and, by November, he stood convicted in absentia. Four years of elegant self-exile followed, until debt drove him back to England.

In March 1768, the outlaw stood for the popular constituency of Middlesex and won his election. Having been politically vindicated, he surrendered himself and began his imprisonment. On 3 February 1769 the Commons again expelled him, and George III believed he was at last rid of ‘that rascal’. Instead, an unprecedented constitutional rigmarole commenced. The Middlesex freeholders returned Wilkes unopposed on 16 February and the House expelled him again the following day. Ever defiant, Middlesex returned him once again a month later, only for an equally stubborn House of Commons to void his re-election. Finally, on 13 April, the Middlesex voters gave him 1,143 votes against a mere 296 for Colonel Luttrell, the ministerial candidate, whereupon the Commons resolved that it was Luttrell who ought to have been returned and simply seated him, ignoring the result at the poll. Wilkes’ Commons career was put to a temporary halt.

Parliament’s defiance of the freeholders set off a surge of radical feeling; in the London streets the older cry of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ was now sharpened to ‘Wilkes and no King’. The king thought that Wilkes’ expulsion was ‘a measure whereon my Crown almost depends’, while his hapless first minister, the young Duke of Grafton, feared the worst and thought the internal state of the country ‘really alarming’. All those fears were in the event groundless, not least because Wilkes had no appetite for rule. Without leadership the agitation subsided and a lethargic Latinist, Lord North, was installed in the Treasury.

The irony was that, in legal and constitutional terms, the people were right and the self-proclaimed custodes of the ‘ancient constitution’ were wrong. In the final analysis, Wilkes and his supporters wanted to alter the ways of government, not to bring the entire constitutional edifice down, and their disturbances were a useful reminder of what the political nation beyond the clubs of St James’s and the drawing rooms of Mayfair was willing to tolerate.

This was also a controversy around sovereignty and political legitimacy. George III, the aristocratic Whig opposition and the Wilkite agitators all held different constitutional ideas. Wilkes was disliked by the king and the political elite above all for extending opposition beyond Westminster and, in doing so, threatening their monopoly of the system, that delicate product of 1688, which was not to be disturbed. After all, the Georgian Commons prided itself on holding an independent station, poised between the Crown above and ‘the mob’ below: the aristocratic, one might say Venetian, self-image of a close-knit Whig oligarchy that took itself to share power with the king almost on an equal footing. Take none other than Charles Fox, long before he became ‘a man of the people’. Asked who were the better judges of the public welfare, the people at large or the Commons, Fox pronounced without hesitation in favour ‘of the independency of Parliament despite the loudest huzza of an inconsiderable multitude’ – only to change his tune some fifteen years later, when he found himself in opposition.

Wilkes was a demagogue, but in the classical mould. Provoco ad populum might have served as his motto, but his demagoguery was of an unusual, methodical style, winning his battles in the courts and only once leading a crowd in the streets. Wilkes was not alone in provoking the crowds – arch-ministerialists like Newcastle and lifelong oppositionists such as Burke did not hesitate to rouse the ‘mob’ so long as it suited their interest – but whereas the Whigs used ‘the publick’ in the game of place, Wilkes used it to show the oligarchy how the public felt.

The tension Wilkes exposed was never entirely resolved, only ameliorated by the long evolution of the British constitution. For a representative is chosen by a particular set of people, in a particular place, and yet answers, once elected, to the whole of the nation and to the rules of Parliament. That is the old tension that returns, in one costume or another, whenever someone, for whatever reasons, thinks to put it again to the voters directly.