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John Wilkes: the perfect imperfect rebel leader
Despite his wealthy background and membership of a secretive aristocratic occult club, the radical politician forged an alliance with the working class to fight for democracy and free speech against the Georgian elite, writes MAT COWARD
TALK OF THE TOWN: (L to R) John Wilkes caricatured by William Hogarth, 1763; John Wilkes before the Court of King's Bench, engraving from The Gentleman's Magazine for May 1768
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IF you were building a perfect rebel leader from a kit, I don’t think you’d end up with John Wilkes. You’d probably prefer someone who wasn’t a member of the orgiastic Hellfire Club, and who hadn’t been expelled from Parliament for writing a libellously pornographic poem. But there you go: history has its whims.
John Wilkes (1725-97) was and is famous for many reasons, not least his celebrated witticisms, which appear in quotation anthologies to this day. (Any reader who has spent time knocking on doors during elections will appreciate Wilkes’s reply to a constituent who told him he’d rather vote for the devil: “But if your friend decides not to stand?”).
For all the colourful gossip fodder with which his life was filled, however, there was one cause to which he stubbornly clung and which was, then and now, of fundamental democratic importance.
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