Political power should emanate from below and not percolate down from above. John Wilkes ¹

In 1774 Wilkes was re-elected in his old Middlesex seat. Even though he still rebuked the government Ministers he confessed privately that he mainly remonstrated to maintain his popularity with the people and the radicals, his base. Wilkes campaigned for parliamentary reform ² and attempted to reach a compromise with American Independence in late 1777 ³. By 1779 his popularity was waning; in 1780 he authorized tough measures (army shooting at riot crowds) against citizens protesting a Roman Catholic emancipation bill. These riots were named ,’ the Gordon Riots’ ⁴. These ‘rioters’ were protesting against Roman Catholic rights whom were roughly the same ‘mob’ that .had supported Wilkes against the establishment for many years.

In CT’s opinion this orderly protest by his own rabble was a major turning point in Wilke’s thinking. A democracy with a ‘mob’ majority is not the type of Sovereign State a thinking man would desire. An unlikely source, Henry Grady Weaver, a mid 20th century General Motors executive, captures, encapsulates the idea,

The Greeks…labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative.” Henry Grady Weaver (1889-1949) “The Mainspring of Human Progress.” ⁵

An older, wiser Wilkes was recognizing the fine line between, ‘freedom’ and ‘anarchy’. The Gordon Riot protestors were objecting to the ‘freedoms’ of the Roman Catholics outlined in the Parliamentary bill. Wilkes, almost single handedly, had created the ‘monster’, the late 18th century London mob. No English Gentleman, no matter how radical, would want true ‘democracy’ if this was its end state: tribal warfare on the minority.

By 1790 Wilkes had split from the radicals. Wilkes had been against the 1789 French revolution because it caused ‘many unjust murders.’ Wilkes abhorred the writings of Tom Paine (1737-1809)⁶ the British ex-patriot American writer who extolled freedoms at any cost. Through these intellectual policies Wilke’s totally lost his previous radical support and didn’t even fight in the 1790 campaign for his Middlesex seat knowing he would have lose it regardless. Wilkes left public life in 1790, lived in London with his beloved Polly and died peacefully in 1797.

CT believes one has to separate John Wilkes the man from his legacy. Wilkes (his father was a brewer) married into the Nobility when in an arranged marriage to Mary Mead (1715-1784) ten years his senior her family held the manor, Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Wilkes received a fat dowry from Mary’s widowed mother⁷.

Wilkes was only treated as a, ‘Gentleman’, after his duel with Samuel Martin. After that he was finally accepted, yet he was still considered an outsider. As Wilkes railed against the establishment as an outsider he became the darling of the populace, the hoi polloi. Wilkes wanted ‘liberty of the press’ to be a counterweight to government propaganda such as the King’s Speech. Wilkes promoted transparency so that the King’s Ministers could not anonymously hide behind the edifice, institution of the King and , as such would not be held accountable for their policies. Wilkes, with some difficulty, finally managed to have the Parliamentary debates published, heretofore they were not. If it weren’t for the hoi polloi’s support for Wilkes and his various gambits Wilkes would not have accomplished anything much in CT’s opinion.

When speaking about American Independence Wilkes proclaimed, “I hold Magna Carta to be in full force in America (8)” which seems to weigh heavily against CT’s hypothesis that Wilkes’s legacy is more important than the Magna Carta. In fact the perception of Wilkes’ that the King had given up power to the Nobles/Oligarchs at the expense of the people was ‘freedom’ as his class, the Gentleman’s class’ held tighter reins on the State, the people. The irony being that to grasp his pristine goals he had to ride the racist, xenophobic English mob.

Though Wilkes, in his dotage, had turned his back on the mob, he had opened the door to future ‘freedoms’ because of the press being able to disseminate ‘official’ information without sedition laws being triggered. The media became the people’s tribunes. This led eventually, although somewhat spasmodically, to representational government, female voting franchise, unions, government pensions, religious tolerance inter alia. Not just in the UK but, in time, all over the Western world.

Today, many of these aforementioned ‘freedoms’ (government payments to the people, larger government, larger debts) became law and traditional because the democratic majority voted to benefit themselves allowing, encouraging the government to borrow monstrous amounts of capital to keep voters happy in the present; and, so effectively allow future generations to be impoverished.

CT believes that the older Wilkes and Henry Grady Weaver had it about right.