With a multiple of parties vying for your vote in the 2024 General Election, the Whig and Tory monopoly of the 18th Century would have presented a much more limited choice for Georgian voters. However, in today’s blog for the Georgian elections project Dr Robin Eagles explores how one new party in particular threatened to upset the apple cart…
Direct comparisons with today’s political parties and those in the 18th century are not straightforward. Neither the Whigs nor Tories were unified political units; there was no party headquarters, no single accepted leader, and at election time not the same sense of a manifesto to pursue. Rather, people identified broadly with one or other group and if active in politics they were likely to be associated more with a factional leader than with the party as a whole. This was certainly true of the Whigs who, during the mid-eighteenth century, were divided between a variety of different noble factions. Some Tories favoured a rapprochement with the Leicester House grouping, closely associated with the Prince of Wales’s reversionary interest (looking forward to the time when their man became king and could start handing out rewards), while others were inclined to embrace near permanent opposition. The remainder, though increasingly a small minority, clung on to their identity as Jacobites.
In this sense, new parties were forever breaking onto the political scene as one grandee or another decided to go his own way or join with another alliance. However, in 1769 the imprisonment of John Wilkes helped give rise to a new political grouping that threatened to upset matters in a very real way.
Richard Houston, based on a work of after 1769
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Wilkes had returned from exile in 1768 to fight the general election that year. He had then surrendered himself to the courts and been imprisoned following his earlier convictions for libel. One of his reasons for quitting the continent had been his unsustainable level of indebtedness and, in response to this, a new organization, The Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights [SSBR], was formed with the express aim of helping Wilkes pay off his creditors.
However, alongside the aim of saving Wilkes from his bank account, the new group also had a clear political agenda. They believed that the people of Middlesex, who had elected Wilkes but had their choice overturned by Parliament, had been abused by the system. They also saw in Wilkes himself an example of how the power of the state had unfairly interfered in the liberties of an individual. In response, the SSBR co-ordinated nationwide petitions covering a raft of issues, though at the root of them all was the notion of the freedom of the individual and their right to have their voice heard. As they declared from the outset:
Their sole aim is to maintain and defend the constitutional liberty of the Subject. They mean to support Mr WILKES and his cause, as far as it is a public cause… [quoted by Thomas, 111]
Several MPs were prominent members of the new group, among them Wilkes’s lawyer, John Glynn, who had been elected to Middlesex at a by-election in 1768 following the death of George Cooke. There were also influential radicals from the City of London, such as Brass Crosby, John Sawbridge and James Townsend – who would each of them go on to become Lord Mayor. A downside of having so many big personalities – all the more so once Wilkes was freed from prison and able to play a more active role himself – was the tendency to fall into in-fighting. That was precisely what happened and in 1771 the SSBR fractured with one section (including Sawbridge and Townsend) leaving to become the Constitutional Society, under the leadership of John Horne Tooke.
Left at the head of the SSBR, Wilkes oversaw a reform programme, committing its members to campaign for a series of measures, including shorter parliaments and reform of the franchise. The group targeted both parliamentary and local elections, and established its own newspaper, the Freeholders Magazine, or, Monthly Chronicle of Liberty. Wilkes, after all, had huge experience of the power of the press, having previously co-edited the North Briton, which had helped bring down Lord Bute.
That the SSBR was serious about its efforts to bring about reform was apparent even before the split. In April 1771, Sawbridge introduced a motion in Parliament for reducing the length of Parliaments. Although he pronounced his own view to be in favour of annual Parliaments, he conceded the question of annual or triennial Parliaments should be a matter for future debate. At the heart of the reform, though, was the concept of accountability:
The length of Parliaments gave up that power which the constituents ought to have over their representatives, that of frequent examination into their conduct, and rejection of them if they thought them unworthy… long Parliaments gave an opportunity to such an intimacy between the minister and the Members, always dangerous and destructive to the constitution… [quoted in Jones]
In spite of the bad-tempered arguments, and a very public spat in the press between Wilkes and Horne Tooke, at the general election of 1774 both SSBR men and members of the Constitutional Society contested several seats on Wilkes’s reform programme. They had their greatest successes in and around London, winning six seats there, and a seventh at Dover. Elsewhere, they struggled and Sir Watkin Lewes, a flamboyant supporter of Wilkes, failed three times standing for Worcester. He was eventually successful at London in 1781.
Ultimately, the SSBR failed to cut through and in time Wilkes himself became a cheerleader for Pitt the Younger. According to Peter Thomas, ‘The Wilkite cause had little appeal to the electorate outside London’ [155], which was certainly Watkin Lewes’ experience. It was also reflected in their failure to carry any of the major elements of their political programme.
RDEE
Further Reading:
Nicola Jones, ‘Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights’
Peter D.G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty, Chapters 7 and 9
Find out more about the political parties that existed in the 18th century via our Georgian Elections Project blogs, or in some of our recent TikTok videos!
The History of Parliament 