America’s First Free Speech Crisis
Wriggling toward democracy
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
In late 1763, one of the most powerful men in the world stood up before his peers and began reading pornographic poetry. In the House of Lords. Which had been written about his mistress. This scandal began with a free speech crisis and ended, in a sense, with the American Revolution some years later. If you thought Jimmy Kimmel being another canary in the coal mine for American dictatorship was weird, wait until you hear the story of John Wilkes (not John Wilkes Booth)-- which has some things to tell us about resisting tyranny today.
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1763 should have been a triumphant year for the British Empire. They finally signed a treaty in the devastating Seven Years’ War with France, and the result was British domination of North America. There were still powerful Indigenous communities– more on them in a minute– but with France no longer available as an ally against Britain, their situation was tenuous. With Britain’s main enemy out of the action (for now), imperial bureaucrats began an exciting and ambitious reform program.
America had long been the weird younger sibling of Britain, with its own laws and its own governance structures. With the war over, there had never been a better time to clean house: the state could properly focus on reforms, and British subjects would no doubt accept them in a surge of post-victory patriotism. And tax reforms could solve material problems as well. British subjects in the homeland had long been taxed at a higher rate than those in the colonies. New taxes would help pay off war debts, fund continuing garrisons to deal with Indigenous communities (and provide sinecures to military officials), and integrate the colonies more tightly into the empire.
Obviously this was not what ended up happening. Independent of and prior to any unpopular reforms– we’ll get to those– the British Atlantic was politically divided. Britain proper had only become “Britain” a few decades earlier, with the union of Scotland and England. Rising capitalist profits were changing class power in Britain: aristocrats and the church clashed with the new bourgeoisie over cultural norms and government policy. And although Britain was not meaningfully democratic until 1832 (Parliament was representative, but not democratic– the elections were a joke, the constituencies fake, and the franchise limited and bafflingly constructed), the public was increasingly involving itself in politics.
Across the Atlantic, colonial subjects had their own issues with the state. They had long ignored customs laws that restricted and taxed trade between empires. New England’s essential rum production industry was dependent upon smuggled French Caribbean imports. This was one of numerous areas in which colonists’ actual practices and sense of what was right and normal differed dramatically from what was actually formally legal and expected. Only 15 years earlier, the Royal Navy came close to obliterating Boston following riots in a dispute about naval conscription. Legally the rioters were wrong. But formal law was one thing, and what I call “dockside tradition” (in my not-too-distant book Enemies of Order: Labor and Power at the Atlantic Dockside, where you will be able to read much more about the concept) was another.
Both metropolitan and colonial fissures began to widen in 1763. In America, the imperial government began applying existing laws– or trying anyway– and imposing new ones, leading to a multi-year crisis around both taxes and the naval conscription required to enforce them. In Britain, war fervor became war disappointment, as critics of the government insisted Britain should have fought for an even better peace treaty than the (very, very British-favoring) 1763 Treaty of Paris.
Among them was a politician and firebrand named John Wilkes.
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John Wilkes became a hero of “liberty”, but he was an unlikely cause celebre. A man of contradictions, he never gambled, but was perpetually in debt and once mislaid money from a hospital treasury he had been charged with governing. He was once part of a later-infamous “hellfire club” whose members satirically wore monastic attire to orgies; Wilkes was entirely unapologetic about his membership and activities. In 1761 he considered asking the Earl of Bute, a powerful minister, to give him the governorship of Canada. That same year, he was elected to Parliament, setting the stage for a scandal that would resound across the Atlantic.
One of his enemies in that scandal was John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich and a mirror of Wilkes. Both of them enjoyed debauchery– Sandwich, originally Wilkes’s friend, was a member of the same club. He reportedly invented the eponymous sandwich so that he could eat lunch without getting up from his gambling table. Sandwich later helped lose the American Revolution.
These two men were emblematic of, and on opposite sides of, the same political conflict at work in the American crisis: a conflict among British Whigs, between what historian Sarah Kinkel (you can find her book here; it’s excellent) calls “authoritarian whigs,” “Walpolean whigs” and “patriots/patriotic whigs.” The Whig tendency collectively were rivals of Britain’s “Tories”, who represented the traditional landowning elite and social conservatism. In a pattern that might be familiar to you today, the Whigs represented… everyone else (everyone who actually mattered in Parliament, anyway). Primarily this meant merchants and the bourgeoisie, but there was plenty of room for differing political views even within, let alone beyond, that class.
Authoritarian Whigs believed the earlier Walpoleans had let society fall into disorder. They advocated for reforms, yes, but reforms that would strengthen existing hierarchy. The measures that produced a customs enforcement crisis and ultimately the American Revolution were emblematic of a political impulse I call (in my book Enemies of Order, which isn’t quite done yet) “elite reason,” which was not exclusively an authoritarian Whig vision, but very much part of that vision.
Practitioners of elite reason looked around them and saw a world in which rules– moral, legal, economic– were taken as suggestions. Changing this was paramount. They were willing to remove some rules if that was the necessary price for tightening those that remained. In America, this meant actually lowering some taxes now that they were being enforced. This did not placate colonists, because particular taxes alone were not the problem.
Against the authoritarian whig tendency, “patriots” argued disorder and chaos came from corruption at the top rather than chaos at the bottom. This is an even broader tendency than the authoritarians, and I’m using this more loosely than Kinkel’s more specific category, focused as her book is on naval matters, but Wilkes definitely belongs here. After the end of the Seven Years’ War, he argued his soft political opponents had gone too easy on France. He also argued the government was corrupt, deserving of ridicule, and an enemy of the people.
The patriot tendency of the 1760s has plenty that is not worth defending. Wilkes seems to have been the kind of man one could enjoy at parties and find insufferable beyond them. His bawdy poetry does not exactly display a respectful attitude toward women. And “lol the government is Scottish” is not a particularly principled ground on which to oppose authoritarian whiggery. Wilkes was a troll, and I mean that in a critical sense, not as a way to downplay the toxicity of his oeuvre. But he often found himself on the right side of important historical conflicts
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In 1762 Wilkes began publishing a satirical newspaper called the North Briton mocking the government. Its very title was a joke: it mocked the pro-government Briton, by analogizing it to Scotland, which was then a somewhat uneasy and recently rebellious part of the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Briton was backed by the Earl of Bute, now the most powerful minister of King George, and written (pseudonymously) by Tobias Smollett, better known for his intellectually light adventure novels– not, in other words, the man for the job, and absolutely no match for Wilkes (who was a friend of his). (Here let me note I’m drawing on Arthur Cash’s thorough biography of Wilkes)
Written pseudonymously, North Briton defended freedom of the press from its first page. Importantly this was not a freedom Wilkes actually had: his mockery and critique of the government could, and would, lead to prosecution. The weekly paper was meant to be controversial. Its third issue claimed the imperial bureaucracy was being replaced by Scots. Its fifth issue drew on 14th-century history in a thinly-veiled allegory to call for the execution of Bute and accuse him of having an affair with the King’s mother.
While his 45th issue is his most infamous, issue 40 arguably began the controversy that would define his legacy. It revealed an embezzlement scandal involving spoiled oats and the military, then denounced the treasury secretary responsible as “the most treacherous, base, selfish, mean, abject, low-lived and dirty fellow that ever wriggled himself into a secretaryship.” While this was an exaggeration, Martin did lack both competence and ethics. The son of one of Antigua’s most prominent slaveholders, Martin did not take the insult lying down.
Meanwhile, the corrupt government Martin was a part of sought a reasonable peace with France via decidedly questionable methods, including bribery and extortion. They succeeded in forcing the Treaty of Paris through Parliament– and pouring more fuel on the fire of Wilkes’s critiques. More investigative journalism and invective followed. In part because of the paper, Bute soon resigned from government… but remained an important advisor, hoping to act as a kind of political puppet master.
Wilkes’s 45th issue was his most daring yet. It denounced a speech by the King himself, insulted his ministers, and called for political resistance in line with “the spirit of liberty” and “the English constitution.” King George demanded his arrest– but Wilkes won the resulting court proceedings, because as a member of parliament, the court decided, he could not be charged with libel. He bowed to the assembled audience and received not only a standing ovation but shouts of joy. “Wilkes and Liberty!” went the cry of his supporters– a cry that would echo for more than a decade.
The government got serious. Wilkes’s former friend, Sandwich, helped orchestrate his prosecution for a joke poem Wilkes had circulated years ago– the Essay on Woman, satirizing Alexander Pope’s famous Essay on Man and mocking a notable bishop. The goal was to shame him and have his peers expel him from Parliament, stripping him of the protection that allowed him to get away with North Briton 45. At the same time, Samuel Martin, the aforementioned wriggling secretary, challenged him to a duel. Wilkes would later claim with evidence– to my mind, convincingly enough, on account of a mysterious and massive series of payments for “secret and special services” in this same period— that Martin plotted this on behalf of the state as an assassination. The planter failson may have rigged the duel by giving Wilkes a pistol without powder, then failed to kill him anyway. Martin’s bullet was deflected downward into a nonlethal blow by Wilkes’s buttons.
He became a hero in Britain and in America, where newspapers covered Wilkes at length and in detail– I first became acquainted with him because Rhode Island’s Newport Mercury, which I was reading for different reasons, would not shut up about him. Wilkes became a symbol for tyranny against the “rights of Englishmen,” which in time became recombined as the rights of man, and of Americans. His example was on the colonial mind as Americans debated riots by enslaved sailors, rebellious statements by patriot lawyers, and ultimately, revolution.
It’s impossible to say exactly how significant he was in that conflict, but he was one rallying cry among many for revolutionaries, a contributor to the conception of liberty that won out, and an advocate of press freedom necessary for expanding that liberty thereafter. Freedom of the press had consequences for ordinary Americans that Wilkes never intended it to. America’s free press and tradition of speaking truth to the power helped undermine America’s fundamental traditions of slavery and violence, and it still can today.
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John Wilkes was a rare example of something we are sorely lacking right now: brave political and cultural elites. He is not a personal example of behavior or politics, and I don’t think you should act like him unless you want to end up banned from dating apps. My point in telling you he was a misogynistic troll is not to excuse him as a “man of his time,” but to explain his limited yet powerful role as an elite with a spine.
Today’s wealthy and powerful are not people I would consider exemplars either. Anyone who has become CEO of a major company has stomped on others to do it, and is anyway at the head of a people-stomping apparatus. University Presidents are sometimes the kind of people best described in decidedly Wilkesian language– treachery, wriggling, etc. Congressional representatives are rarely much better and often far worse. All of these people by definition come from and/or rise to power in rotten hierarchies– like John Wilkes. None of them are going to become personal heroes of mine any time soon.
But they can play a heroic role in spite of their shortcomings by just having a spine. Wilkes did not need to be kind, thoughtful, or politically radical in order to make the world a better place. He just needed to be brave and have some limited sense of decency. This can be cantankerousness as much as virtue– Wilkes badgered the government after his arrest for stealing his candlestick.
Two other incidents in his history clarify what I mean here. In the 1750s, when he was put on the board of the Foundling Hospital in London, he reportedly intervened on behalf of poor mothers, insisting that charity should apply to more than just children deserted on doorsteps. He did so not because of particularly complicated or thoughtful views on women (he held quite the opposite) but because he knew suffering when he saw it. And in 1780, as Lord Mayor of London, he refused to side with an anti-Catholic mob– and in the process lost much of his political support. Partly this came down to historically complicated stuff– shifts in his own political position, the details of wartime politics– but it also speaks of moral character beneath the bawdy quips and anti-Scottish goading.
A society that hopes to move toward justice, to improve itself, to right its wrongs, to better its condition, needs people like Wilkes– people in power, and with status, with all the moral shortcomings that entails, who are nevertheless willing to challenge obvious injustice and pave the way for something better. I don’t expect our university presidents and CEOs to bear the standard of equality– they can’t and shouldn’t. But they can throw themselves against regime forces trying to bring down that standard. So should we all.
If John Wilkes had been a less brave or simply less cranky man we would remember him as a joke, or a failed Governor of Canada, or an agent of the East India Company (Sandwich offered him the post to try to get him to go quiet; he declined). But instead he gets to be a participant in global movements toward freedom and justice– movements that became far more progressive and just than he ever would be. In that sense, he is aspirational. We can all hope to be as just and compassionate as we can– and knowing that we won’t perfectly succeed, we can aspire to be imperfect heralds of a more perfect world.