The threat of disorder was real. The Jubilee was set to take place in a country in the midst of a constitutional crisis, bringing thousands of people together at a time when public violence was commonplace. As the American in London Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1769,
I have seen, within a year, riots in the country about corn; riots about elections; riots about work-houses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of sailors; riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairmen; riots of smugglers, in which custom-house officers and excisemen have been murdered, the King’s armed vessels and troops fired at, &c.
The unrest was so frequent, he wrote, “one would think riots part of the mode of government.”
It had not always been this way. The 1760s had begun with an emphatic series of victories over France in the Seven Years War, which had dismantled the French empire overseas and seized for Britain half the world’s trade. But instead of assuring prosperity, victory was followed by a sharp economic decline as repatriating soldiers found little work and industries lacked the stimulus of war. A recessionary slump caused a wave of inflation that was further deepened by problems in food production; more than ten years of poor harvests had resulted in shortages of meat and bread that pushed many to the brink of starvation. Concerned at “the exhausted state of the public revenues,” George Grenville, first lord of the treasury, compounded the misery by raising taxation. “In England,” wrote one foreign observer,
the people are taxed in the morning for the soap that washes their hands; at nine for the coffee, the tea and the sugar they use for their breakfast, at noon, for the starch that powders their hair; at dinner for the salt that savours their meat; in the evening for the porter that chears their spirits; all day long for the light that enters their windows; and at night for the candles that light them to bed.
By 1768, the price of bread had doubled, making it hard even for working families to feed themselves. Crime worsened in spite of a penal system that listed more than two hundred offenses punishable by death, among them damaging fruit trees and impersonating a Chelsea pensioner. “The papers are filled with robberies and breaking of houses,” wrote The Gentleman’s Magazine, “and with recitals of the cruelties committed by the robbers, greater than ever known before.” The crisis had come about through the systematic dismantling of a political establishment that had once been considered the most open and stable in Europe. Since the accession of George I in 1714, Britain had been ruled by a claque of Whig politicians who had considered it their divine commission to defend Britain against France, Catholics, Jacobites, and Pretenders Old and Young. Yet when the twenty-two-year-old George III came to the throne in 1760, this reliable faction was pulled apart. The new king was a lonely and isolated man who did not learn to read until he was eleven, and at the time of his coronation still wrote like a child. He despised the ministers who had counseled his predecessors and was determined to replace them with his adored boyhood tutor, Lord Bute. In 1761 he forced the resignation of the popular William Pitt, tormentor of the French, who was then serving as both foreign minister and war minister, installing in his place his beloved Bute and instructing him to end the war and make peace with France. Bute did as he was told, but proved unequal to the task of governance, and as the old, reliable, political machine began to unravel, infighting and incompetence led to seven governments rising and falling in quick succession. It was, in the words of the statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, “a tessellated pavement without cement . . . utterly unsafe to touch, and unsure to stand on,” with a political establishment “dreaded and contemned” by the people, and stripped of all legitimacy. “The laws are despoiled of all their respected and salutary terrors,” Burke continued,
and all the solemn plausibilities of the world, have lost their reverence and effect; that our foreign politicks are as much deranged as our domestic oeconomy . . . that hardly any thing above or below, abroad or at home, is sound and entire; but that disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties, in families, in Parliament, in the nation, prevail beyond the disorders of any former time.
From the discord rose a man who would become the most divisive figure in Britain, loved and loathed in equal measure. He also happened to be a good friend of James Boswell. Named John Wilkes, he was the son of a London distiller who had overcome the significant social barriers of modest birth and unfortunate features thanks to great charm and wily intelligence. Wilkes had made his first foray into politics in the 1750s, having bribed his way to become the MP for Aylesbury, squandering his wife’s fortune and destroying their unhappy marriage in the process. Having secured his seat, he seemed content to live as an idle carpetbagger, paying more attention to his appetites than his duties while espousing the popular patriotism that supported Pitt’s aggression in the war against France.
Once Pitt was ousted, Wilkes’s life was turned around. The king sued for peace with France, thus angering many bellicose populists, among them Wilkes, who discovered in himself a profound talent for troublemaking and political agitation. As a parliamentarian and orator, he had never done well—bad teeth, cross-eyes, and a distracting lisp ensured that his few performances in the House of Commons had been awkward and unpopular affairs—but as a writer of polemic, he was exceptional. In 1762, together with the poet Charles Churchill, he founded a weekly newspaper they called The North Briton, ostensibly in support of Lord Bute (who was Scottish, and therefore “North British”) but actually a savage and thinly veiled critique of his policies, bullient with antigovernment bile. Like many, Boswell followed the North Briton avidly—despite his own conservative politics, which were based on a sentimental reverence for ancient ties rather than a formal ideology. During his extended sojourn in London between November 1762 and August 1763, Boswell would walk to the printer’s shop in Ludgate Street to secure his copy as it came off the press at four o’clock, enjoying the paper’s “poignant acrimony” that he found “very relishing.”
Following Bute’s resignation in 1763, The North Briton fell contentedly silent, pleased with a job well done. Until, that is, George III offered his customary speech at the closing of Parliament, during which he praised the Treaty of Paris—the diplomatic agreement that had official brought hostilities with France to a close and returned many conquered territories to the French—as “honorable to the crown, and so beneficial to my people.” This statement enraged Wilkes, who like many supporters of William Pitt considered the treaty to be a betrayal of British sacrifices and a negation of its victories. And so The North Briton went back to the press. Unable to attack a reigning monarch, Wilkes used his magazine to argue that the king was himself a victim, the unwitting puppet of spineless ministers and despicable men who had used him to ventriloquize their own treacherous policy of surrender. “I am in doubt,” he wrote, “whether the imposition is greater on the sovereign, or on the nation. Every friend of this country must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures, and to the most unjustifiable public declarations, from a throne ever renowned for truth, honour, and unsullied virtue.”
Politician, polemicist, campaigner, hedonist—John Wilkes. © National Portrait Gallery, London
The piece, which appeared in issue 45 of North Briton on April 23 (Shakespeare’s birthday), 1763, indirectly accused the king of treason by way of the rhetorical device known as litotes in which speech affirms its opposite by means of understatement. (A famous Shakespearean example is Antony’s repetition of the phrase, delivered over the corpse of Julius Ceasar, “But Brutus is an honorable man.”) It was an audacious slice of effrontery that earned a furious retaliation from the government and a general warrant for the arrest of the “Authors, Printers and Publishers of a seditious and treasonous paper intitled, the North Briton Number 45.” Wilkes’s house was ransacked, hundreds of documents were seized, and forty-nine people were arrested, including children.
After a nervous standoff at sword point, Wilkes allowed himself to be escorted to the Tower of London, but he was soon released. Drawn to the excitement of current events, Boswell joined the crowd that had gathered outside the Tower to meet him, defying his mentor, Samuel Johnson—the recipient of an annual pension of three hundred pounds from George III “solely as the reward of his literary merit,” Johnson believed that Wilkes should be ducked in the river by a troop of footmen. In its disproportionate fury, the government had miscalculated the legality of its warrant and its blanket call to round up unnamed individuals irrespective of any evidence of their guilt, which—when combined with Wilkes’s own claims to immunity from prosecution as a sitting MP—caused their case to become quickly snagged in confusion. Wilkes seized the initiative by seeking damages for wrongful arrest, presenting himself in the process as the champion of a political system considered the freest and most enlightened on earth, thanks to a mixed constitution that had traditionally balanced monarchical power, aristocratic oligarchy, parliamentary democracy, and a system of laws to create what Edmund Burke called an “isthmus between arbitrary power and anarchy.”
As a self-styled victim of tyranny, Wilkes became a political idol. In his home constituency of Aylesbury, he was escorted into town by an honor guard who hailed him in a long series of boozy toasts. Impressed by his bravery and willingness to endure hardship without complaint, more and more people came to his cause—“the middling and inferior set,” he called them, “who stand most in need of protection,” a yeomanry of fiercely independent and patriotic supporters who adopted “Wilkes and Liberty!” as their rallying cry. In London, he was applauded in the streets, receiving the support of the freemen of the City of London and County of Surrey. Not everyone was convinced. “This hero is as bad a fellow as ever hero was,” wrote Horace Walpole to his friend Sir Horace Mann, “abominable in private life, dull in Parliament, but, they say, very entertaining in a room, and certainly no bad writer.”
Wilkes’s initial ascendancy was short-lived. When Parliament reopened, he was openly insulted by the MP Samuel Martin, resulting in a duel in which Wilkes took a shot in the groin that almost killed him. Believing with just cause that this was a bungled attempt at assassination, he fled to Paris and was expelled from Parliament, declared an outlaw, and found guilty of libel in absentia. It was during this exile that Boswell came to know Wilkes well. At the end of his long stay in London in 1763, Boswell had been ordered by his father to study law at the University of Utrecht, a miserable sentence made endurable only by the promise that he would be allowed to travel in Europe once his studies were concluded. It was then that he crossed paths with Wilkes in the customs office in Rome, and decided to follow him and his mistress, Gertrude Corradini, to Naples, where they spent three weeks together, talking, calling on William Hamilton, the British envoy to the court of Naples, visiting the tomb of Virgil and the sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii. At Mount Vesuvius, Wilkes had to be pushed and pulled by five porters to make sure he reached the top, but once at the summit, he and Boswell lay on their bellies and gazed into the crater surrounded by clouds of sulfurous smoke.
Boswell found Wilkes to be a “rough, blunt fellow, very clever” and considered his company to be “boisterous” but enjoyable—“the phoenix of convivial felicity,” as Johnson mockingly described him. As their friendship grew, Boswell, a habitual writer of letters, diaries, and memoranda, recorded surprisingly little of it, a signal perhaps of his concern that a friend like Wilkes might bring the scrutiny of the authorities upon himself. While Boswell’s politics would not allow him to think of Wilkes as anything other than “an enemy to the true old British Constitution, and to the order and happiness of society”—a phrase he addressed to Wilkes directly—a personal regard for his companion grew daily, fueled by respect for his unrelenting candor and unflagging spirits, and for his ability to pay heed only to the demands of the present. “Never think on futurity,” Wilkes told Boswell, “as not data enough.”
Even more intriguing, Wilkes appeared to be immune to the pressures of social conformity, especially around sex. When Boswell read Wilkes an excerpt of a letter from Belle de Zuylen, a Dutch woman he had met in Utrecht and over whose affections he had been obsessing, Wilkes’s only comment was “Go home by Holland and roger her.” Wilkes, too, had been sent to Holland to study as a young man, but where the young Scot had spent his time struggling to master his senses and control every urge, Wilkes had gloried in his dissipation: “three or four whores: drunk every night.” For the hypochondriac Boswell, the matter-of-factness with which Wilkes owned his desires was thrilling. “Thank heaven for having given me the love of women,” he told Boswell, reveling in the feeling of freedom sex gave him, especially given that “to many she gives not the noble passion of lust.” Taking the elder man’s mentorship to heart, Boswell tried to sleep with as many women as possible in Italy, writing in his journal, “Be Spaniard: girl every day.” As he later told Rousseau, “I sallied forth of an evening like an imperious lion.” One night he even arranged an orgy, recording the payments in his account book under the heading “badinage.”
After three weeks, he and Wilkes parted company. Boswell returned to Rome to study antiquities, with Wilkes telling him that he hoped that the “champions of liberty will in time pluck out of your lairdish breast the black seeds of Stuartism, etc., with which you are now so strongly impregnated.” Boswell himself largely hoped to be rid of the nuisances he had acquired in Naples—namely, crabs and gonorrhea.
Boswell returned to Scotland in 1766. Wilkes’s exile lasted until the spring of 1768, just as Parliament was dissolved to prepare for fresh elections. In his absence, the government had continued to change hands, with one weak minister following another and the king experiencing the first bout of the madness that would dog him for the rest of his life. Reasoning that the dissolution of Parliament meant that his expulsion was no longer valid, and seeking to gain fresh immunity from prosecution by getting himself reelected, Wilkes announced an audacious plan to vex his enemies by standing as a candidate. Boswell, who had not seen his friend since Naples, went to see him on the hustings, where “the confusion and the noise of the mob roaring ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ were prodigious.” He made no attempt to speak to Wilkes: he was a lawyer now, a famous author, and an advocate for Corsican independence, for whom it would do no good to be seen fraternizing with a seditious fellow. Boswell was happy to be mistaken for Wilkes two days later, though, while wearing a suit of green and gold not unlike his friend’s. “Sir, I beg pardon, is not your name Wilkes?” asked a man coming up to him. “Yes, Sir,” replied Boswell, who proceeded to cheerfully stroll the length of Long Acre with the man, stringing him along with talk of liberty and general warrants and telling him that the king secretly held him in high regard, before finally admitting that he wasn’t Wilkes after all. When he recounted this tale to Samuel Johnson, Johnson inquired why he hadn’t asked the man to lend him money.
Gold Badge commemorating issue number 45 of the North Briton, inscribed with the word “LIBERTY.” © The Trustees of the British Museum
Against all expectations, Wilkes won the Middlesex election. His supporters celebrated for two days, demanding that every house in London from Temple Bar to Hyde Park Corner illuminate its windows or risk having them broken. The lord mayor’s residence was attacked, causing more than two hundred pounds of damage as supporters passed through the city taking aim at the houses of prominent courtiers, among them Lord Bute and the Duke of Newcastle. The Austrian ambassador was pulled from his coach and manhandled by the crowd, who chalked “No. 45” on the soles of his shoes to commemorate the issue of the North Briton that had sparked their revolution. The Duke of Northumberland narrowly averted a disaster by hastily putting lights in his windows and ordering the Ship alehouse to serve free beer to the mob. After the second night of disorder, Boswell surveyed the damage for himself. Feeling in the “very sink of vice” after spending the night with a “red-haired hussy” in a “horrid room” that lacked fire, curtains, and had “dirty sheets,” he crept out at dawn, the broken windowpanes and riotous devastation mirroring his own self-loathing.
Having embarrassed his enemies, Wilkes announced that he would surrender himself and answer for the charges leveled against him prior to his exile. After a series of anticlimactic hearings, he was ordered to be detained in the squalid and overcrowded King’s Bench prison, a medieval slum where 700 inmates scuffled over 250 beds. On the way, a crowd barred the passage of his coach, unhitched the horses, and carried him to the Three Tuns tavern in Spitalfields for a night of celebration that put Wilkes in the unusual position of having to escape a party to attend a prison. The next day, crowds began to amass in St. George’s Fields, the Lambeth marshland that abutted the jail, shouting encouragement and sending in gifts. Like previous Wilksite assemblies, it had the feel of an impromptu fair, with ballad singers, ribbon sellers, and speeches in favor of liberty, albeit tinged with an air of expectation and menace. Wilkes’s supporters camped out for the next two days, growing in number and testing the nerve of the Surrey magistrate, who requested the assistance of a hundred soldiers of the Third Regiment of Foot. As rumors circulated that the prison was about to be stormed, the crowd continued to swell, growing from one thousand in the morning of the second day, to as many as twenty thousand in the afternoon. The mood remained largely peaceful until the magistrate tore down a piece of Wilksite verse that had been pinned to the prison doors. Shouts went up: “Wilkes and Liberty,” “Damn the King,” and (according to one account) “This is the most glorious opportunity for Revolution ever offered!” Samuel Gilliam, a justice of the peace, came forward to read the Riot Act, a piece of legal verbiage intended to be read aloud whenever twelve or more persons were thought to be assembled for riotous purposes, ordering them to disperse in the name of the king or be guilty of a felony punishable by death. Gilliam was jeered and hit in the head with a stone, prompting three soldiers to give chase to a man they believed was the assailant. Losing sight of him, they shot and killed William Allen, an innocent boy exiting his father’s cowshed.
At the doors of the jail, the roars and hissing rose to a deafening pitch. Gilliam read the Riot Act a second time, and the foot guards, now reinforced by a troop of horse, began shooting into the crowd, recharging their muskets up to three times and bayonetting those who came too close. Eleven people were killed. The crowd fled, flooding into the city for another night of vengeful destruction.
The St. George’s Fields Massacre, as it came to be known, served only to make martyrs of Wilkes’s supporters and bring more people to his cause. Wilkes himself was convicted of libel and handed a sentence of twenty-two months. His imprisonment meant that his parliamentary seat became vacant, but his support was such that he emerged from the subsequent by-election victorious nonetheless, prompting a nullification of the vote and a ridiculous sequence of events in which repeated elections were held and voided after Wilkes won every one. By the beginning of 1769, the government’s attempts to mute the popular voice had become so egregious that even those who found Wilkes personally objectionable could not fail to agree with Edmund Burke’s assessment that he had become the “object of persecution,” for “his unconquerable firmness, for his resolute, indefatigable, strenuous resistance against oppression.”
In the London Tavern, Bishopsgate, a group of men styling themselves the “Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights” drafted a document that demanded wide-ranging redress against all kinds of government abuse, calling upon the king to uphold the rule of law, assert the constitutional right of trial by jury, investigate the abuse of military power, shorten the duration of Parliament, and resolve the grievances of the American colonies. Similar meetings took place in taverns and public houses across the country, their members drafting petitions that framed the farce of the Middlesex elections as a constitutional crisis that mocked the basic principles of free election. Fifteen county petitions and eleven borough petitions were generated, containing more than sixty thousand signatures from every corner of the country, including Buckinghamshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Durham, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Kent, Middlesex, Northumberland, Somerset, Surrey, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, and Yorkshire.
In Warwickshire, where the Wilksites were described as “the restless offspring of the cruel murderers of Charles I,” the many parallels that might be drawn between the Jubilee and a Wilksite rally caused concern. The thousands of people preparing to descend on Stratford wearing ribbons, bearing banners, and singing ballads in praise of a national icon were virtually indistinguishable from a political mob. One newspaper even reported a fable in which Garrick’s mulberry box and Keate’s mulberry standish attended a meeting at the London Tavern to conspire on behalf of Wilkes, intending to use the celebration as a smoke screen for revolution. Others held that Wilkes was merely an excuse, and what people really wanted was an outlet through which to let off steam. “The people of England were always falling out of one fit of madness into another,” wrote one commentator, “and that the passion for Mr. Wilke’s politics had totally given place to the Shakespeare mania.”
Having initially resisted it, Boswell caught the Shakespeare mania himself. This was not the only thing he had caught, having returned from his Irish wife-hunting trip in the late spring of 1769 with another case of venereal disease and the realization that his cousin Margaret Montgomerie was the woman he should marry after all. He proposed to her and went immediately to London to consult with Dr. Gilbert Kennedy, a physician he considered “very old, large and formal and tedious,” but who he hoped could “purify my blood from every remain of vicious poison,” and get him ready for marriage. Once in London, the lure of the Jubilee took hold. “When I left Scotland I was resolved not to go,” he wrote. “But as I approached the capital I felt my inclination increase, and when arrived in London I found myself within the whirlpool of curiosity, which could not fail to carry me down.” Still undecided, he asked his friend George Dempster for advice, who replied merely that “it belonged to the chapter of whims, as to which no advice should ever be given.”
Next, Boswell called on his mentor, Samuel Johnson, hoping that they might make the journey to Stratford together, but Johnson was away visiting a friend in Brighton. Mrs. Williams, the blind old lady who shared Johnson’s house, encouraged Boswell to go by himself, knowing that Johnson had already dismissed the Jubilee with scorn and denounced the Dedication Ode that Garrick proposed to deliver over the gifted statue as “terrible.” Johnson and Garrick’s relationship was particularly tense around the topic of Shakespeare, pitting as it did actor against scholar. Johnson had every claim to know Shakespeare just as well as Garrick, having published his own edition of the collected works in 1765, prefaced with perhaps the strongest critical essay on Shakespeare written to date. This essay had sought to introduce some objective critical distance to evaluations of the poet’s merit without (in Johnson’s words) “envious malignity or superstitious veneration,” a countermand to what Boswell called “a blind indiscriminate admiration [that] had exposed the British nation to the ridicule of foreigners.” Eyeless esteem of any kind irked Johnson, and he would bait the genuflecting Garrick by proclaiming that “Shakespear never has six lines together without a fault,” and that William Congreve was the superior poet. Even more pointedly, Johnson claimed he could teach a boy of eight to read “To be or not to be” just as well as Garrick could “in a week.”
Samuel Johnson in the year 1769. © National Portrait Gallery, London
It was a shame that Johnson would not “partake in the festival of genius,” and “upon this occasion,” wrote Boswell, “I particularly lamented that he had not that warmth of friendship for his brilliant pupil.” Johnson “insensibly fretted a little,” he said,
that Davy Garrick, who was his pupil and who came up to London at the same time with him to try the chance of life, should be so very general a favorite and should have fourscore thousand pounds, an immense sum, where he has so little. He accordingly will allow no great merit in acting. Garrick cannot but be hurt at this, and so unhappily there is not the harmony that one would wish.
Despite this disappointment, the very thought of the Jubilee, Boswell told Dempster, “makes all my veins glow.” Promising his friend that he wouldn’t write any anonymous articles about himself and send them to the press while he was there, he went on to consult with Dr. Kennedy, who allowed him to defer his cure—two bottles daily of his patent Lisbon Diet Drink, a miracle beverage composed of sarsaparilla, licorice, and guaiac wood—until his return from Stratford. Next, he made a quick tour of the shops to ensure he had all he needed. He found a musket, a pistol, and a stiletto, and paying a visit to Mr. Dalemaine, a Covent Garden tailor, asked him to run him up a makeshift cap. Finally, he went to a shop in Cheapside, where he purchased a walking stick that looked like “a very handsome vine with the root uppermost, and upon it a bird, very well carved.” The price was six shillings. “Why, Sir,” he told the shopkeeper, “this vine is worth any money. It is a Jubilee staff. That bird is the bird of Avon.”