In American history, John Wilkes (1725–97) has the dubious distinction of having his name given to Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

He is today primarily known by historians of the eighteenth century, but in the Age of the American Revolution, he may have been one of the most famous men in the British Empire.

Robin Eagles explains why in a new, absorbing biography, Champion of English Freedom: The Life of John Wilkes, MP and Lord Mayor of London—the first in nearly two decades.

A renegade member of parliament and a libertine, Wilkes inspired a popular but controversial movement known as “Wilkes and Liberty” in the 1760s and 1770s. Though Wilkes may not have been an original thinker, his importance as a symbol of anti-Court and anti-government agitation in London in the third quarter of the eighteenth century can hardly be overstated.

During this time, Wilkes became a celebrity throughout the British Empire and even beyond. The townships Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania and Wilkesboro in North Carolina were named after him. Every public figure in the English-speaking world, from Benjamin Franklin to Samuel Johnson, had an opinion about Wilkes. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to his cause in his posthumously published Considerations on the Government of Poland (1782). His supporters were zealous for reform of the political system in Britain, and often for the rights of the American subjects within the British Empire at a time of imperial crisis.

Eagles’s new book effectively contextualizes Wilkes’s life and career. Though we learn a lot about his notorious hedonism, his interest in books and gardening, and his close relationship with his daughter Polly, the book is especially recommended to those with an interest in British politics during the American Revolution.

Politics at the Accession of George III

Wilkes was from a middle-class London background, and educated by Protestant Dissenters in England and then at the University of Leiden in the Dutch Republic. His ambition led him to a seat in the British parliament in 1757. A staunch Whig and a defender of the parliamentary settlement following the Glorious Revolution in 1688–89, Wilkes objected to what he and many others regarded as the revival of Toryism after the accession of George III in 1760. But what did this mean?

George III was the first of the Hanoverian kings to have been born in England as a member of the Church of England. According to their Tory and Patriot critics, George I and George II had been more interested in the fortunes of their native Hanover than Britain. When George II became the last king to lead the British Army on the battlefield—at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743 in Germany, against the French—he wore his Hanoverian uniform.

Partly because George I and George II were foreigners, they had to rely on powerful politicians to effectively govern their new kingdom. As a result, the first Hanoverian kings gave a great deal of power to the Whig aristocracy. They did not trust the Tories, who had campaigned for peace during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) and abandoned their continental allies at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. After the Hanoverian Succession in 1714, moreover, the Tories gained notoriety as “Jacobites” (after the Latin for James). The Jacobites were those who wanted to restore the Stuart family to the throne in England after James II had been deposed in 1688.

On ascending the British throne in 1760, George III remained the elector of Hanover, but Britain was clearly his main interest. He was convinced that his great-grandfather and grandfather had degraded the crown by becoming captives of the Whig aristocracy. Ascending the throne with the ambition of breaking the politics of party, Tories and former Jacobites were once again welcome at court and were given government employment.

As the Tory party lost its identity as an opposition party and disintegrated, politics was reduced to a struggle among various Whig factions led by William Pitt the Elder and the Duke of Newcastle. Neither Pitt nor Newcastle was immediately sacked when George III took the throne, but by 1762 they had both left the government, as George III promoted his “favorite,” Scottish nobleman John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, who was an outsider in parliamentary politics.

Wilkes’s opposition

Eagles expertly demonstrates how the literary opposition to George III and Bute was led by Wilkes in his journal, the North Briton. “North Briton” was an allusion to Scotland, and though Wilkes had many Scottish friends he was certainly prepared to resort to anti-Scottish propaganda. The fact that Bute was a Scot and a Stuart made him an easy target. According to English prejudice, the Scots were not only backward but also had a penchant for absolute monarchy and little understanding of English freedom. Earlier in the century, Scotland had been the nerve center of Jacobitism.

The North Briton mixed Lockean Whiggism with Bolingbrokean “Country party” arguments, and pushed them to their most extreme limit. As Wilkes wrote in North Briton: “Have [the people] not a right to resume the power they have delegated, and to punish their servants who have abused it? If a King can do no wrong, his ministers may, and are accountable to the people for their conduct.” Another piece in 1763 went as far as criticizing the King’s Speech directly, and the king himself for appointing Bute. It was declared a seditious libel, ordered to be burned by the common hangman, and Wilkes was indicted.

The ministry made what were arguably three significant mistakes: they arrested Wilkes on a general warrant, seized his papers, and ignored his legal immunity as a member of parliament. This made him a martyr for the London crowd. Though Charles Pratt (later Lord Camden) secured his release (and earned his own share of popularity as a result), Lord Sandwich identified a privately printed obscene poem, An Essay on Woman, co-written by Wilkes as a parody of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. Wilkes fled to France and spent the next five years in self-imposed exile.

Wilkes and Liberty

As Eagles shows, though the slogan had been used already in 1763, it was after the indebted Wilkes permanently returned to England in 1768 that he inspired a movement known as “Wilkes and Liberty.”

To obtain legal immunity in England, Wilkes attempted to again become a member of parliament, first in the City of London, and then in Middlesex, where he was duly elected. As he was an indebted outlaw, however, Wilkes was sent to prison, which only increased his popularity. Indeed, though Bute had largely retired from politics at this stage, his house was attacked by the London mob.

The House of Commons expelled Wilkes, though the electors continued to vote for him in a series of by-elections in 1769.

Between 15,000 and 40,000 protesters assembled outside the King’s Bench Prison, where Wilkes was locked up. As the crowd threw missiles at the soldiers called in to establish order, the magistrates read the Riot Act, and when the crowd failed to disperse, the troops opened fire. In what became known as the Massacre of St George’s Field, six or seven people were killed, not all of whom may have been involved in actual rioting.

Wilkes was first and foremost an Englishman who gloried in his country’s libertarian traditions, and especially the legacy of the Glorious Revolution.

There were many who sought to take advantage of the general uproar and the popularity of Wilkes’s cause and use it for their own purposes. For the disparate Whig opposition, expelling Wilkes from Parliament was not only an overstep by the ministry but plainly an unconstitutional act. The opposition now included Wilkes’s nearly exact contemporary Edmund Burke as a spokesperson for the Rockingham Whigs. Many, including Burke, conceded that Wilkes’s character may have been unattractive, but that he had regardless won the Middlesex election by presenting himself as a friend to liberty. The “present discontents” in Burke’s canonical Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) referred to the Middlesex election dispute.

Wilkite groups were formed across the country. “Wilkes and Liberty” was to a great extent a personality cult and his own contribution to the cause of parliamentary reform became overshadowed by that of others, though he played his part. After the 1774 general election, Wilkes was finally permitted to sit in parliament as an MP for Middlesex. In this capacity, he advanced parliamentary reform in 1776, arguing “that every free agent in this kingdom should … be represented in parliament.”

In more detail than any previous book, Eagles’s new biography traces the later career and life of Wilkes, who became Lord Mayor of London, and eventually a supporter of William Pitt the Younger.

As Eagles shows, the older Wilkes eschewed much of the “radicalism” of his younger days. As a city politician with military expertise, he played a large part in quelling the Gordon Riots in London in 1780, and lost many friends as a result. In the last two decades of his life, Wilkes unexpectedly morphed into a respectable civic figure, and even visited the royal Court.

Champion of English and American Freedom

The main title of Eagles’s book, Champion of English Freedom—the inscription on Wilkes’s statue in Fetter Lane, London—is highly appropriate. Wilkes was first and foremost an Englishman who gloried in his country’s libertarian traditions, and especially the legacy of the Glorious Revolution. His personal hero was John Hampden, one of the parliamentary leaders who had opposed Charles I over ship money, and died in the civil war against the king in 1643.

Wilkes believed these traditions were under threat after the accession of George III. For many, the clearest example of the “tyrannical” turn was the Stamp Act of 1765, the first British attempt to impose a direct tax on America. There was thus a clear parallel between Wilkes’s career and the cause of the American revolutionaries.

As several studies have shown, the connections between metropolitan “radicals” in Britain and American revolutionaries were many and deep. In the 1760s, Wilkes’s publisher John Almon began a campaign of printing and disseminating pro-American tracts. In this way, Wilkite agitations formed part of skirmishes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Wilkes did not hesitate to equate the American struggle with his own. “[Britain] draws the sword unjustly against America,” he told the House of Commons, “but before administration are suffered to plunge the nation into the horrors of a civil war, before they are permitted to force Englishmen to sheath their swords in the bowels of their fellow subjects, I hope this House will seriously weigh the original ground and cause of his unhappy dispute.” It is no wonder, then, that Wilkes was a household name in the colonies, though he never left Europe.

Politics and Popularity

Champion of English Freedom is a highly readable and learned book. It provides not only a detailed account of Wilkes’s complex career and character, but also his social and cultural milieux. London is depicted as “a world of contrasts, where a minor dispute could easily escalate into a riot and where crime and accidents were commonplaces. … This was an environment that called on all classes to be street-wise.” Wilkes was drawn to the fleshpots of his native city, which he described as “this charming, warm, wicked town.”

Eagles is a prominent parliamentary historian, and the highlight of the book is its meticulous analysis of eighteenth-century British politics, which is often caricatured as an unholy alliance between aristocratic domination and corruption. Such a depiction is not entirely untrue, but it is not the full picture. Thanks to its elected parliament, growing print culture, and the London crowd, it was also a space in which popularity could be a source of political clout.

Like today, celebrity and controversy—and indeed even outlawry—could go hand in hand in eighteenth-century Britain, and governmental prosecution could strengthen rather than undermine the platform of demagogues. This makes Wilkes a significant historical figure in understanding the transition to modern politics. Primarily, however, this book is an accessible and entertaining narrative of a crucial episode in the history of the English-speaking world.