126 Chapter VI
name, was issued for the arrest of the publishers. The courts in 1769 declared gen-
eral warrants illegal, and awarded damages to Wilkes, thus demonstrating that the
law did allow more freedom of political expression in England than in most parts
of Europe. Wilkes meanwhile, expelled by the House of Commons, fled to France.
He was hailed there as a defender of liberty by the Parlement of Paris in its strug-
gle against the “ministerial despotism” of Louis XV. Handkerchiefs à la Wilkes were
for a time à la mode in French parlementary circles.^25
Returning to England in 1768, he was elected to the Commons by the county
of Middlesex, the environs of the city of London. The Commons expelled him
again. He was again elected by Middlesex; the Commons not only declared him
disqualified, but gave the seat to his opponent, who had received fewer votes. Thus
in this case the Commons assumed the power to determine its own membership.
A man repudiated by the county of Middlesex sat for it in the Parliament.
Wilkes’ followers in 1769 founded the society of the Supporters of the Bill of
Rights, the earliest in a long series of societies organized to demand parliamentary
reform. They also toured the country in a new kind of popular political campaign.
Public meetings protested against the quashing of the will of the people of Mid-
dlesex. Some 60,000 signatures were gathered for petitions. It was a large number
at a time when Arthur Young judged the entire electorate of all Britain to be no
more than 250,000, and when Richard Price estimated that 5,723 persons chose
half the members of the House of Commons.^26 Some constituencies sent instruc-
tions on the Middlesex affair to their members of Parliament, a procedure not yet
thought to be quite constitutional. “Such is the levelling principle that has gone
forth,” cried one member of the House, “that the people imagine they themselves
should be judges over us.”^27 Or as one of Wilkes’ more judicious biographers puts
it, the principle was now widely publicized, “perhaps for the first time, that the
sovereign power was vested, not in Parliament, but in the ‘great public’”^28
Wilkes became the hero of London, and not of the rabble only. Great mer-
chants warmly supported him, including William Beckford, with his £100,000 a
year. In 1774 Wilkes was chosen for the by no means popular office of Lord
Mayor. He and his followers won the right to have debates in Parliament pub-
lished in the London newspapers. It is from about this time that we can really
know what was said in the two chambers. From a kind of board of directors, meet-
ing in private to manage the affairs of the country, Parliament thus took another
step toward a more modern form, in which the “great public” could keep watch on
it as on a body of deputies. Elected again to the Commons, and this time admit-
ted, Wilkes in 1776 introduced the first reform bill in that body, the Duke of
Richmond introducing one also in the Lords. It had no success. Ten years before,
25 For the handkerchiefs see F. Acomb, Anglophobia in France, 1763–89 (Durham, 1950), 32–33.
They were linen handkerchiefs imported from England with a letter from Wilkes to his Middlesex
constituents printed on them.
26 Young’s estimate is in his Political Essays, 1772, 34; Price’s, in his Observations on the Nature of
Civil Liberty (London, 1776), 11.
27 Quoted in Pares, George III and the Politicians, 49.
28 H. Bleackley, Life of John Wilkes (London, 1917), 409. See also R. Postgate, That Devil Wilkes
(N.Y., 1929).