In 1763, the forty-fifth number of the North Briton brought upon John Wilkes a prosecution for seditious libel. Tried in his absence in February 1764, he was found guilty; following his return from exile in 1768, he was summoned before the Court of King’s Bench to answer the convictions entered against him. On the twenty-seventh of April, the court was to determine whether he might be admitted to bail. His arrival did nothing to quiet the capital: the carriage conveying him toward the prison was halted by the populace, the horses were unharnessed, and the prisoner was borne in triumph to an alehouse in Spitalfields. Taking advantage of the confusion, he slipped away from his admirers and surrendered himself at the prison gates. Thus opens, in the chronicle of Camden Pelham, an affair wherein the cry of “Wilkes and Liberty!” attended a man pursued by his adversaries for his writings and elevated by his partisans into an emblem.
In the 1887 edition consulted, Pelham’s retrospective collection presents Wilkes as the author of two scandalous works: the forty-fifth number of the North Briton and an obscene pamphlet entitled An Essay on Woman. The former assailed the ministry; the latter offended the moral sensibilities of the compiler. Pelham makes no effort to conceal his censure, branding the populace misled and Wilkes’s patriotism mercenary. Yet, despite this marked hostility, his narrative discloses a contest far more complex than the mere chastisement of a seditious scribbler. It sets forth the contested searches, the general warrant declared unlawful, and the profound breach between the letter of the law and those who claimed to enforce it.
Samuel Martin, Secretary to the Treasury and member for Camelford, had been singled out with peculiar severity by the North Briton. On the thirtieth of April 1763, a week after the appearance of the offending sheet, Wilkes was apprehended under a general warrant; his private papers were seized, and he was committed to the Tower. An application for a writ of habeas corpus was promptly carried before the Court of Common Pleas regarding his detention. This initial arrest preceded by several months his duel with Martin on the sixteenth of November 1763. Martin wounded him; the injury confined Wilkes to his house for several weeks and gave rise to grave apprehensions for his life. The Crown’s pursuit extended likewise to An Essay on Woman. Prior to his trial, Wilkes quitted England for France, ostensibly to recruit his shattered health.
Another legal action concerned the measures deployed against him. In the proceedings instituted against Robert Wood, who had participated in the seizure of his papers, the charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Pratt subjected the general warrant to rigorous scrutiny. On the sixth of December 1763, the jury returned a verdict in Wilkes’s favour, awarding him one thousand pounds in damages. This civil determination, however, left the criminal charges of libel untouched. Before his criminal trial came on, Wilkes had fled the realm. In February 1764, a special jury of the county of Middlesex found him guilty in his absence upon both informations. The law reports record that Sir Fletcher Norton, then Solicitor General, had exhibited the informations during a vacancy in the office of Attorney General. To these judicial proceedings were added the revocation of his commission in the Buckinghamshire militia, his expulsion from the House of Commons, and a sentence of outlawry, which was ultimately reversed following his return.
When he announced his return, his adherents welcomed him as a deliverer. Following his appearance at Guildhall, men unyoked the horses from his coach and drew it by their own labour to his dwelling, shouting the now-familiar watchword. This public ovation inextricably bound his name to the denunciation of his arrest and the plunder of his papers. Yet popular acclaim was neither a legal verdict nor an acquittal: the punishments attaching to his prior convictions remained to be pronounced.
On the twenty-seventh of April, the due process of law brought him once more into the hall of the King’s Bench. He stood there in the custody of a tipstaff, that the court might consider his prayer for bail. The determination went against him, and Wilkes was committed to the King’s Bench Prison. Along the way, the concourse of people again seized upon the carriage, took out the horses, and conducted the prisoner to Spitalfields. Wilkes, however, would not linger among those who proclaimed his emancipation. Towards eleven o’clock that night, he eluded his conductors and repaired directly to the prison, surrendering himself into lawful custody. This resolution failed to allay the popular ferment; it served only to render more striking the paradox of a man torn from the officers by his supporters, who then sought by his own hand to return within the grasp of the law.
In the weeks that followed, the Court of King’s Bench reversed the outlawry. This distinct judgment supervened upon the civil action of 1763, in which the general warrant had been condemned and damages awarded. It did not, however, purge him of the libels. The Crown prayed for judgment upon the convictions formerly obtained. According to the judicial reports, the defence argued that Norton possessed no lawful authority to exhibit the informations during the vacancy of the Attorney General, and contested the amendment made to the information after issue was joined. The judges overruled both objections. The report further notes that he subsequently alleged, in his writs of error before the House of Lords, a material variance between the “purport” and the “tenor.” While the advocates disputed the law, an assembled multitude remained posted about the purlieus of the prison. The magistrates appeared with a detachment of troops to effect their dispersal. The Riot Act was read, yet the concourse did not part. The soldiers received the order to fire. Pelham relates that several persons were slain and others grievously wounded, including certain passers-by who stood at some distance from the affray.
On the seventeenth of June 1768, the court proceeded to sentence; the entry in the Calendar of George III recording the judgment is dated the following day. For the North Briton, Wilkes was sentenced to ten calendar months’ imprisonment and a fine of five hundred pounds; for An Essay on Woman, to an additional twelve months and a further fine of five hundred pounds. He was likewise ordered to find sureties for his good behaviour during a term of seven years. By that date, he had already been returned as knight of the shire for Middlesex. In his address to his constituents, he reminded the electors that the judiciary had acknowledged the illegality of the warrant and overturned his outlawry. He framed his return to Parliament not as an absolution of the libels prosecuted, but as the electors’ solemn answer to the arbitrary practices employed against him. The dispute had overflowed the bar of the court: the hustings and the open street had likewise become the arenas wherein the destiny of Wilkes’s name was to be decided.
Throughout these days of unrest, the street outran the legal brief. Rioters shattered casements, compelled the inhabitants to illuminate their windows, and struck down those who refused to join in the cry of liberty. Pelham expressly mentions the mansion of Lord Bute and the Mansion House; he observes that the stones reached even the chamber of the Lady Mayoress. The slogan was no longer merely a petition directed to the king’s ministers: it had become an extortion levied from door to door, reaching into the domestic sanctuary. The throng that had at first encompassed a captive now exerted its own coercion over citizens who had never sought to take part in the quarrel. A stone hurled at the chariot of Count Czernichew was, according to Pelham, caught by that nobleman in his hand. The seamen, followed by the Spitalfields weavers, the watermen, the sawyers, and diverse other artificers, rose in their turn to demand an advance in their wages. They presented petitions, and certain lawless bands went so far as to unrig vessels and detain their crews. The compiler gathers these diverse occurrences under the general rubric of sedition; yet he permits us a glimpse of labour grievances entirely distinct from the cause of Wilkes.
Pelham’s voice ultimately passes sentence upon the tumult, reducing the popular zeal to mere gullibility. Yet his relation does not warrant our confounding all these disparate grievances into one, nor can we accept his estimate of Wilkes’s secret motives as established truth. He records that the riots left men wounded and dead, and that the Crown visited severe retribution upon certain offenders; he acknowledges with equal candour that the challenge brought against the warrants and seizures had received the sanction of the courts of law. The lustre of Wilkes’s name faded with time, and he died in 1797, as this same narrative attests. But his contest left behind a question far more enduring than the fame of any pamphleteer: when the state undertakes to prosecute an author, the lawfulness of the weapons it employs becomes itself a matter of public concern.