2024 represents the 250th anniversary of John Wilkes’s re-election for Middlesex and election as Lord Mayor of London. It was by any measure a remarkable achievement for a man who had been expelled from Parliament and imprisoned; but what of those who were so determined to cast their votes for someone Parliament deemed incapable of being elected? Dr Robin Eagles looks again at the Wilkes affair, 250 years on.
On 20 October 1774 John Wilkes was returned to Parliament at the general election as one of the two MPs for the county of Middlesex. The election was uncontested and rounded off a successful year for Wilkes who had also just been elected Lord Mayor of London. This all might have been unremarkable enough were it not for the fact that he had previously been expelled the House on multiple occasions and posed a serious challenge to both the government and parliamentary authorities when many in the country had been on the lookout for just such an anti-hero.
Wilkes had long been a controversial figure. He had come to prominence as the proprietor and one of the main authors of the anti-government newspaper, The North Briton, for which he had ended up being arrested. Although the courts released him on the grounds of his privilege as MP for Aylesbury, Parliament later concluded that privilege did not extend to cases of seditious libel, leaving him free to be convicted and expelled.
Wilkes spent the next few years in self-imposed exile but early in 1768 returned home so that he could stand in the general election. After being humiliated in the City of London, he tried again a few days later in the rumbustious county of Middlesex and emerged at the head of the poll. As he had promised before standing, he promptly handed himself in and was sentenced to serve just under two years in prison under his previous conviction. Middlesex, thus, found itself in the peculiar position of having one of its MPs behind bars when Parliament opened that November.
On 14 November Wilkes submitted a petition to the Commons via his ally, Sir Joseph Mawbey, a renowned breeder of rare pigs, seeking redress of grievances. The business was adjourned to the new year when Parliament rejected a motion for Wilkes to be released. Further debates ensued, and during one Colonel Isaac Barre teased the ministry –increasingly perplexed by Wilkes’s continuing popularity – by suggesting that the best way of detaching Wilkes from his supporters was to pardon him and give him a job in government.
Arguments, many of them heated, continued in the Commons on and off until 3 February 1769 when Lord Barrington moved for Wilkes to be expelled:
The arguments for his expulsion were founded on the badness of the man, and the impropriety of suffering such a one to be part of the legislature.
Cobbett, xvi. 545
Of course, not everyone was against him and even some who had reason to dislike Wilkes were willing to argue his case on the grounds of constitutional propriety. The former Prime Minister, George Grenville, now a backbencher and one-time friend of Wilkes’s, who had been pilloried in the North Briton after he took over from the earl of Bute, worried that the ‘mode of proceeding’ was ‘new and unprecedented’. Despite many reservations about Wilkes himself, he concluded ultimately that the Commons’ proposed course of action was ill-advised. Others arguing in favour of Wilkes were the Rockinghamites, Edmund Burke and William Dowdeswell. They were not heeded, and Wilkes was expelled from Parliament by 219 votes to 137.
For many, this would have been the end of the affair. Wilkes was still in prison and Parliament had adjudged that he was not entitled to privilege. But Wilkes was not one to be put off by such a minor setback. Consequently, on 16 February 1769 he stood in the by-election and was re-elected. He was expelled again only for the voters of Middlesex to plump for him once more the following month. Finally, on 13 April, two candidates entered the lists against Wilkes. One need not have bothered as he was able to muster just five votes. The other, Colonel Luttrell, was a more serious proposition. Even so, when the votes were tallied, Wilkes had 1,143 and Luttrell just 296. Two days later, Luttrell was declared the winner.
Even at this stage, there was a sizeable minority in Parliament who were thoroughly unsettled by the implications of seating a person who had so obviously failed to carry the voters with him. There were also concerns about effectively punishing Wilkes twice for the same offence. Thus, on 29 April Sir George Savile presented a petition from the Middlesex freeholders protesting at their votes being discounted. They insisted that this had been no joke return and that they did not mean by doing so:
To throw away their votes, or to waive their right of representation, nor would they by any means have chosen to be represented by the said Henry Lawes Luttrell, esq…
Cobbett, xvi. 588
They requested to be heard by counsel to argue the case out. Parliament agreed and ordered all parties to appear on 8 May, the penultimate day of the session. Once again, the atmosphere was tetchy. Grenville quoted William Blackstone’s Commentaries to support his arguments, while Blackstone himself had put the opposite case. Grenville then came in for criticism from Sir Fletcher Norton when Norton spotted Grenville shaking his head while he was speaking. Norton retorted: ‘I wish the right honourable gentleman, instead of shaking his head, would shake an argument out of it’. [Chatham Correspondence, iii. 358-9] One MP, who had formerly voted with the government, Alexander Wedderburn, now came out against, offering a series of closely argued legal reasons why Luttrell should not be seated. His stance cost him his own seat though he was swiftly inundated with offers of alternative berths.
In spite of such gestures, the House once again voted to abide by their original decision to nullify Wilkes’s votes and accept Luttrell as the new MP by 221 to 152. Wilkes’s supporters may have lost, but Lord Temple, for one, heralded it as a triumph, noting that it was ‘the greatest minority I believe ever known the last day of a session’. [Chatham Correspondence, iii. 357]
The Wilkes case took up substantial parliamentary time and at times passions ran high. In the end, though, Parliament’s right to adjudicate who had the right to be an MP was maintained, whatever the two principals made of it. Following his release from prison in 1770 Wilkes would occasionally irritate the clerks by attempting to take his seat, but was always quietly shown the door. Even Luttrell seems to have become discontented with the situation and applied, unsuccessfully, for the Chiltern Hundreds.
As for those who chose to continue to vote for Wilkes long after it had been made clear that he would not be permitted to sit, their case was portrayed as one where they had opted, knowingly, to make a futile gesture and had thereby suspended their own rights, akin to the modern notion of spoiling a ballot paper:
Those who obstinately and wilfully persevere in voting for an unqualified person, are to be considered as not voting at all; their right of suffrage is acknowledged; but if the elector obstinately refuses to exercise this right according to law, he wantonly suspends his own right for the time, and his act being illegal is consequently void, and he is only in the situation of a man who had neglected to attend…
Cobbett, xvi. 595
RDEE
Further reading:
Chatham Correspondence, III
Cobbett, Parliamentary History, XVI
Robin Eagles’ biography of Wilkes, Champion of English Freedom: the life of John Wilkes MP and Lord Mayor of London, is published in June by Amberley.
The History of Parliament 