Wilkes, JOHN, the second son of Israel Wilkes, a distiller at Clerkenwell, where John was born on 17th October 1727. He was educated first at Hertford under Mr Worsley, and second at Aylesbury under Mr Leeson, who accompanied him to Leyden as his tutor. Charles Townsend and Dowdswell, afterwards Chancellors of the Exchequer, and the Rev. Dr Carlyle were among his fellow-students at Leyden. He travelled through the Netherlands and a part of Germany before returning home. The acquaintances he made abroad were his introducers to fashionable society at home, where he became the boon companion of young profligates. He married to please his parents at the age of twenty-two, his wife being Miss Mead, the daughter of an eminent physician and an heiress. She was ten years his senior, and the union, as he phrased it, was 'a sacrifice to Plutus, not to Venus.' After a daughter had been born to them, the ill-matched pair agreed to live apart. Wilkes was one of a select and disreputable society, the Monks of Medmenham (q.v.), of which Sir Francis Dashwood, afterwards Lord Le Despencer, was the chief, and the Earl of Sandwich was a member. He was intimately acquainted also with some of the best men of the day, William Pitt and Lord Temple being among them. He agreed with Pitt's politics, and aspired to be his follower. An unsuccessful candidate for Berwick upon-Tweed in 1754, he was returned to parliament for Aylesbury in 1757. Though not then a man of note, he filled positions of honour, being high-sheriff for Buckinghamshire, and first lieutenant-colonel and next colonel of the Bucks Militia. His electoral contests had involved the expenditure of £10,000, and he wished to serve his country in a lucrative office. Lord Bute having declined to appoint him ambassador to Constantinople or governor of Quebec, he vigorously attacked the ministry in the North Briton (1762-63), a weekly journal which he had founded. Before the twenty-seventh number appeared he was threatened with prosecution, while he had to atone for unpleasant references to Lord Talbot by fighting a duel with him. In the forty-fifth number some strong but not unjust comments were made upon the king's speech on opening parliament. Lord Halifax, one of the secretaries of state, issued a general warrant for the apprehension of all concerned in the article, which was deemed a libel. The person and papers of Wilkes were seized: after examination before Lords Halifax and Egremont, he was committed a close prisoner to the Tower. Lord Chief-justice Pratt, of the Common Pleas, ordered his release on the ground of privilege as a member of parliament.
It was then held and afterwards determined that general warrants were unconstitutional, and that everything done in virtue of one was illegal. He obtained large damages at law for the indignities of which he had been the victim. His resistance and protests made him the hero of the hour; 'Wilkes and Liberty' became the cry of the people. But he had a private press at which some scandalous verses were printed for private circulation, and an inkling of this was obtained from the papers which were seized. The Earl of Sandwich read extracts in the House of Lords from the purloined copy of an 'Essay on Woman,' which was declared to be a most scandalous, obscene, and impious libel. The ministerial majority in the House of Commons expelled Wilkes on 19th January 1764 for being the reputed author of No. 45 of the North Briton. Before this he fought a duel with Mr Martin for words at which the latter took offence, and received a bullet in his belly. He was tried and found guilty during his absence from England for printing and publishing the 'Essay on Woman' (1763), of which a copy had never been made public, except by Lord Sandwich in the House of Lords, and he was outlawed for non-appearance. Returning to England in 1768, he became a candidate for the City of London, but failed, while a subsequent attempt to represent the county of Middlesex in parliament ended in his triumphant return. On his appearing before the Court of King's Bench his outlawry was reversed on a purely technical point, and the Lord Chief-justice afterwards sentenced him to twenty-two months' imprisonment and to pay a fine of £1000. While in prison he wrote a preface to a letter of Lord Weymouth in which he charged the secretary of state with instigating the massacre in St George's Fields, and this was declared a seditious libel and made the pretext for his expulsion from parliament. He was re-elected and, after his fourth election, the House of Commons declared him ineligible to sit, and admitted Colonel Luttrell in his stead. These high-handed proceedings against him increased his popularity. In 1771 he was elected sheriff for London and Middlesex; in 1774 he became Lord Mayor, was returned without a contest for Middlesex and re-entered parliament. In 1782 the resolutions invalidating his previous elections were expunged, on his motion, from the journals of the House. He had become chamberlain of the city in 1779; he retired from parliament in 1790, and died on 20th December 1797. His life was agitated and eventful. Since his day general warrants have never been issued, and the privileges of electors have been respected by parliament, while the liberty of the press owes much to him. He wrote pungently. His tastes were literary, and his acquaintance with the classics was wide. He wrote and spoke French with precision and fluency. If he had not been subjected to a persecution which was fomented by the king and conducted by his advisers he would have been less of a martyr and, possibly, of a patriot. Franklin said of him that if his moral character had been equal to that of the king he might have taken the king's place. But though his failings were many, his services to the country were considerable, and, while not one of the great men of his age, he was a far more useful personage than many who stood high in the peerage and in the good graces of George III.
See Biographies of John Wilkes and William Cobbett, by Watson; Historical Gleanings, by Rogers; Papers of a Critic, by Dilke; Wilkes, Sheridan, Fox: the Opposition under George III., by the present writer; and Life and Times of John Wilkes, by Fitzgerald.