Tooke, JOHN HORNE, was born 25th June 1736, in Newport Street, Westminster, the third son of John Horne, a well-to-do poultryer. He was educated chiefly at Westminster and Eton (where a schoolfellow's pen-knife destroyed the sight of one eye), and then at St John's College, Cambridge. Taking his B.A. in 1758, he entered at the Middle Temple, and for a time was an usher at Blackheath, but in 1760, to please his father, accepted the living of New Brentford. He had neither liking nor reverence for the clerical profession, and dropped it during two travelling tutorships (1763-65); at Paris he met John Wilkes, and conceived the strongest admiration for him. When in 1768 Wilkes stood for Middlesex 'Parson Horne' pledged his credit for his expenses, and vowed that 'in a cause so just and holy he could dye his black coat red,' but ere long they fell out, and in 1771 had a rasing epistolary controversy. Horne, however, who in 1770 had composed the famous (unspoken) speech of Lord Mayor Beckford to the king, still continued to meddle in politics, and even encountered, not without success, the formidable 'Junius.' In 1773 he resigned his living, and resumed the study of law. About this time his spirited opposition to an enclosure bill procured him the favour (plus £8000) of the rich Mr Tooke of Purley in Surrey; and to this were due both his assumption in 1782 of the surname Tooke and the sub-title of his Epea Pteroenta, or the Diversions of Purley (2 parts, 1786-1805), that witty medley of etymology, grammar, metaphysics, and politics, which he commenced during an imprisonment in the King's Bench for promoting a subscription for the Americans 'barbarously murdered at Lexington by the king's soldiers in 1775.' In 1779 he found himself debarred from the bar by his orders; in 1790, and again in 1797, stood unsuccessfully for Westminster; in 1794 was tried for high-treason, but acquitted; and in 1801 obtained a seat for the rotten borough of Old Sarum, only, however, to be excluded by a special act from the next parliament (see CLERGY). He died at Wimbledon, his home for the last twenty years, on 18th March 1812, bequeathing his property to his natural children.
See the Life by A. Stephens (2 vols. 1813), and Thorold Rogers' Historical Gleanings (2d series, 1870).