John Wilkes

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(b. Oct. 17, 1725, St John's Square, Clerkenwell, London – d. Oct. 26, 1797, Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London )

Gender: M

John Wilkes (1725-1797) was born in London, the son of a distiller, and studied in Leiden, Holland. In 1747, he married Mary Meade (1715-1784) and through her acquired an estate in Buckinghamshire. They had one child, Mary (known as Polly), to whom John was devoted for the rest of his life, but he separated from his wife in 1756. Wilkes never married again and gained a reputation as a rake; he was known to have fathered two other children. He was MP for Aylesbury from 1757-1764, when he supported William Pitt the Elder. In 1762, when Pitt resigned, he founded a newspaper, The North Briton, in order to attack the Earl of Bute, the new Prime Minister; this led to his arrest in 1764 for seditious libel, and he fled to France, where he lived for four years. On his return in 1768, Wilkes stood for the influential two-member Middlesex constituency, defeating William Beauchamp Proctor, who had held the seat for nearly twenty years, At a by-election in December 1768, Proctor was opposed by John Glynne, Wilkes’s lawyer; on the first day of polling, a mob stormed the polling booth at Brentford, and one man was killed. There were rumours that Wilkes had paid a former prizefighter, Broughton, to lead the rioters. Glynn won the poll and Proctor withdrew from politics. Wilkes became known as a radical, demanding parliamentary reform and supporting American independence. Wilkes waived his parliamentary privilege to immunity and presented himself to the court on the former charge of seditious libel. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and fined £1,000, but his supporters appeared before King’s Bench, London, chanting “No liberty, No King.” Troops opened fire on the unarmed men, killing seven and wounding fifteen, in an incident that came to be known as the St George's Fields Massacre. Parliament expelled Wilkes in February 1769, on the grounds that he was an outlaw when returned, but his Middlesex constituents promptly re-elected him; he was expelled again and re-elected in March. In April, after his expulsion and another re-election, Parliament declared his opponent to be the winner. In defiance, Wilkes became an Alderman of London, with the support of the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights. Wilkes eventually succeeded in convincing Parliament to allow him to take his seat. Wilkes supported religious toleration and freedom of the press, but his popularity declined after he supported the government’s harsh measures following the Gordon Riots. Despite his earlier radical views, he was an opponent of the French Revolution. In 1790 his popularity with Middlesex voters had sunk so low that he was obliged to decline the poll. He died at his home in Westminster at the age of 72.

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Mentioned in 3 letters

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