John Wilkes
John Wilkes was an unlikely focus for campaigners demanding workers’ rights. A flamboyant and rakish figure, he married into money, and spent most of his time drinking and carousing with his friends in the West End’s notorious Hellfire Club.
But before his political career petered out he would become the figurehead for a rash of East End uprisings against poor pay and conditions.
Wilkes was born on 17 October 1725, the son of a City malt distiller. In 1747 he married Mary Meade, an heiress who owned a large estate at Aylesbury. It was a marriage of convenience and Wilkes spent most of the next ten years in London’s clubs rather than at home. Eventually, bored by his life of pleasure, Wilkes decided to try politics and in 1757 he was elected MP for Aylesbury.
But it was for his extra-parliamentary attacks that Wilkes would gain notoriety. In 1762 his weekly paper, The North Briton, began a series of attacks on Scotsmen in general and prime minister Lord Bute in particular.
Bute was a favourite of the king, George III, and after one article on 23 April 1763, George and his ministers prosecuted Wilkes for seditious libel. The Lord Chief Justice ruled that, as an MP, Wilkes was protected by privilege from the charges. The politician left the court as a champion of liberty and a huge popular favourite.
The establishment had other ways of targeting Wilkes though. Samuel Martin, a supporter of George III, challenged him to a duel that November. Martin, his skills suspiciously honed by a summer of shooting practice, hit and wounded Wilkes in the stomach. Worse was to come. A week later, Parliament ruled that privilege did not protect Wilkes from prosecution and the troublemaker was hurried off to France by friends.
In 1768, Wilkes returned to England, but was soon at odds with the Government once more. He stood as a Radical candidate for Middlesex, a constituency that included the East End. But after being elected, the new MP was arrested and taken to the King’s Bench Gaol, on the South Bank of the Thames.
For the next fortnight large crowds gathered outside the prison. On 10 May, 1768, a crowd of around 15,000 arrived, yelling “Wilkes and Liberty”, and “No Liberty, No King”. The hapless Government had, in trying to contain Wilkes’s threat, only made matters worse. Panicking troops opened fire, killing seven protesters, and sparking protests all over the capital.
Wilkes became a focus for various disenchanted groups in Tower Hamlets. In 1768, the Spitalfields weavers tried to cut the wages of their worlers. The workers paraded down Piccadilly that March, giving out pamphlets proclaiming “Wilkes and Liberty”. A month later, coal heavers marched down the Ratcliff Highway. Their grievance was the lack of lighting in their poor dwellings; “Wilkes and Liberty and coal heavers forever”, read their banners.
On 8 June that year, Wilkes was found guilty of libel for comments he had written about the St George’s Massacre, and received a 22-month sentence and a fine of £1,000. On his way to jail, the mob rescued him, and he appeared at the upstairs windows of the Three Tuns Tavern, next to Christ Church in Spitalfields, waving to his overjoyed supporters. But Wilkes realised his cause was lost, and later he quietly slipped away and surrendered to his jailers.
As a felon, he was expelled from the House of Commons but, in February, March and April, 1769, Willkes was three times re-elected for Middlesex. Each time Parliament threw out the result, and each time there was rioting in the East End. The disturbances culminated in the hanging of riot leaders John Valline and John Doyle at the southern end of Bethnal Green that December.
John Wilkes was freed from prison in April 1770, then in 1774 was elected Lord Mayor of London. And finally, he was again elected to represent Middlesex in the Commons – and at last admitted.
Wilkes spent his political career campainging for religious tolerance and parliamentary reform, demanding seats be redistributed from the old ‘rotten boroughs’ in the Shires to the new centres of industry, such as the East End.
Like many radicals, though, Wilkes’s fire cooled with age. He became more conservative, the radicals grew dissatisfied with him and in the 1790 General Election he was defeated at Middlesex. Wilkes died on 29 December, 1797.