Mocked as England's ugliest man, John Wilkes still charmed crowds into a fight for liberty
John Wilkes had a squint, a jutting jaw and a name as the ugliest man in England, yet he boasted he could talk away his face in half an hour. That charm made him a radical hero, a serial duellist, and the man who forced Parliament's debates into print.
Born in Clerkenwell, London, on 17 October 1725, Wilkes was the third child of the distiller Israel Wilkes Jr. and Sarah Heaton. After school in Hertford and study at the University of Leiden, where the Presbyterian minister Andrew Baxter shaped his religious outlook, he stayed Anglican but argued for tolerance of dissenters. Marriage to Mary Meade in 1747 brought him a Buckinghamshire estate; the pair split for good in 1756, and their daughter Polly stayed devoted to him. He joined the Royal Society in 1749 and won Aylesbury in 1757.
His private life was loud. As a member of the Hellfire Club he reportedly let loose a mandrill, dressed in cape and horns and smeared with phosphorus, during its rituals, a stunt that may have hastened the club's end and won him the lasting hatred of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. In 1762 he launched The North Briton, a weekly aimed at the Scottish prime minister, the Earl of Bute, and that October met Earl Talbot at Bagshot for a pistol duel by night; both missed from eight yards and then drank claret together.
Issue 45 of the paper savaged George III's speech of 23 April 1763 praising the Paris peace treaty. General warrants followed on 30 April, and 49 people, Wilkes among them, were seized. He turned the case into a crusade against such warrants and claimed that parliamentary privilege protected him. In November 1763 Samuel Martin shot him in the belly in a second duel, and Sandwich read Wilkes's obscene parody, An Essay on Woman, aloud to the House of Lords. Hounded later by French creditors, he came home in 1768.
That year protests by his followers ended in the Massacre of St George's Fields, while the Middlesex election dispute cast him as defender of voters against the Commons. In 1771 he helped make ministers accept that printers could report Parliament word for word. Backing the American Patriots won him friends across the Atlantic, but leading militia against the Gordon Riots in 1780 cost him radical support, and he lost Middlesex in 1790. He died on 26 December 1797.
Source: John Wilkes
