The Spirit of London

Boris Johnson

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007516223
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

First published as Johnson’s Life of London, now released with new material following Jubilee and Olympic celebrations in 2012. This updated history of London, told through a relay-race of great Londoners, shows in one, personality-packed book that the ingenuity, diversity, creativity and enterprise of the city are second to none.

John Wilkes

The Father of Liberty

It was the February of 1768. England was still in the grip of the mini-Ice Age, the Thames had frozen over again, and it was hellish cold in Westminster. A door opened one morning in a street not far from Dean’s Yard, in a handsome town house that once stood on a spot now occupied by a government ministry – these days the department of education and ‘skills’. A pair of bright eyes looked out.

To call them ill-matched was too kind. They had a lascivious nose-goggling squint, of a kind that these days would be corrected at birth. Beneath the eyes was a mouth with hardly any teeth, and a chin that jutted more than any decent chin should. The whole face was the stuff of children’s nightmares; and yet as the owner of these features sniffed the air, he had not only an odd charm, he exuded confidence.

He was forty-one, and had the satisfaction of having just returned after four years of not-very-punishing continental exile to the city he loved and where he had made his name. There was a glint in that squinting eye, of a man who was agog to discover what it was – as he put it – that the womb of fate was big with. He shoved down his hat and tightened his coat about his tall lean frame, and remembered that if anyone stopped him he was supposed to call himself ‘Mr Osborn’.

Seldom can there have been a feebler alias. That cross-eyed squint and jutting jaw had already been satirised in one of William Hogarth’s most famous cartoons, an image that had been run off in its thousands for the enjoyment of friend and foe alike. He was known to the King of England as ‘that Devil’, the most turbulent of all his subjects, and was conceived by some of the monarch’s most strait-laced ministers as the biggest threat to the peaceful government of the country.

He was a human wedge, a jemmy inserted into the weakest points of the constitution, to be driven deeper and deeper by the forces of popular indignation until it seemed the whole edifice might crash. He had scandalised the House of Lords by his co-authorship of one of the most obscene (or most puerile) poems ever written. He had duelled with one peer over a point of honour, and still bore a vivid scar in his groin sustained in another duel with a fellow MP – an episode that some scholars now believe was a stealthy attempt by the Establishment to bump him off.

His lower abdomen had sufficiently recovered for him to keep up his romantic strike rate. Though his heart had just been broken by an eighteen-year-old Italian of internationally celebrated charms, he had consoled himself in Paris with at least two well-born mistresses, neither of whom seems to have resented the other. He was a considerable scholar of Latin and Greek, who had already bested Dr Johnson in lexicography, who had lately dined with Boswell, had helped David Hume with his English usage, and who had laughed with Voltaire at the superstitious terrors that still enslaved much of the human race.

As he stepped out into Marsham Street that February morning, his position in history was already secure. He was a household name, who had been at the centre of legal proceedings that upheld the liberty of the individual and limited the power of the state. He was already so popular that when he had first stuck his toe back onto English soil, a year earlier, the church bells were rung in his honour and crowds formed outside the house where he was staying.

His name was John Wilkes, and he walked with a spring in his step because he had an idea what he was going to do next. He was flat broke – he was more than broke; his debts were immense. He was an outlaw, liable to arrest at any time and to fresh deportation. But something told him that he had enough wind in his sails to try it on again. He was going to stick two fingers up to the King and the King’s toadies.

He was going to do the thing they dreaded: to stand again for the parliament that had expelled him. In so doing he was going to vindicate an important principle of democracy.

I have a terrible feeling that as a fifteen-year-old I wrote a pompous essay on Wilkes, in the course of studying for history O-Level. Thankfully the document has been lost, but the gist was that Wilkes was a berk, a second-rate chancer, an opportunist, an unprincipled demagogue who floated like a glittering bubble on a wave of popular sentiment that he did not really share. It may be that in some places that is still the conventional opinion.

If so, it is wrong. It is not just that I have come to admire Wilkes for his courage and his dynamism and his boundless animal spirits. Any sober assessment of his work confirms that he really was as his adoring crowds saw him – the father of civil liberty. He not only secured the right of newspapers to report the proceedings of the House of Commons, he was the first man to stand up in Parliament and urge explicitly that all adult males – rich or poor – should be allowed to vote.

His campaigns were fervently supported by Americans, as they chafed under the misguided governments of George III. There is a Wilkes County in North Carolina, where the principal township is still Wilkesboro, home to a noted chicken-packing plant and a country music festival. When in 1969 the first black Congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, was excluded from the House of Representatives, it was to the case of John Wilkes that Justice Earl Warren famously alluded, in quashing that exclusion, in overturning the House’s wrong and partially racially motivated decision, and in ruling that it was the sovereign right of the people and of the people alone to elect their representatives.

Wilkes has a good claim to the paternity of key democratic freedoms not just in Britain but in America, too, and that is a pretty big claim to make about anyone.

John Wilkes was born in 1725 or 1726, and his life spanned most of the rest of the eighteenth century. It was an era of explosive growth in the power and wealth of London. By the time he was born, Hawksmoor’s churches were already up, and the squares of Mayfair were being laid out. The Bank of England and the Stock Exchange had been founded in the last thirty years. Thanks to the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Britain was acquiring new colonies in the Americas and elsewhere, and money was pouring into the pockets of merchants of all kinds. There was money from simple trade – importing sugar from the West Indies, say, and then refining it in the docks of London. But more lucrative still were all the associated services that made this commerce possible: the bankers who financed the building of ships and the stocking of plantations, the insurers who took a punt on whether or not the ships would sink or the crops would spoil, the brokers who dealt in shares in the joint-stock operations.

All these people brought money to London, and the needs of the growing mercantile bourgeoisie drove the flywheel of industry, promoting services and manufacturing of all kinds. Wilkes was born in St John’s Square, Clerkenwell, now the scene of architect’s studios and fancy restaurants specialising in parts of animals not normally eaten by people.

Clerkenwell was where Nicholas Tompion had done his experiments with springs and watches, to the orders of Robert Hooke; and now it was a European centre of watch and clock-making. Their wives wanted to show off their jewellery and their tableware, and Clerkenwell was the place to find your cutlers and your jewellers. Then they needed a safe place to store their trophies, and Clerkenwell locksmiths opened their shops and answered the need.

The Wilkes family themselves were in trade. His mother was a tanning heiress, and his father Israel Wilkes was a distiller. He liked to pretend that he was really a brewer of beer, and that none of his malt mash was associated with the social disaster of gin, whose impact on the working classes is viciously summed up in Hogarth’s Gin Lane (the one where a terrified baby is seen tumbling into an open sewer from the arms of his insensible mother).

Whether or not Israel Wilkes was guilty of intoxicating the defenceless proletariat with mother’s ruin, there was a widening income gap between people such as the Wilkes family – the successful bourgeoisie – and the urban poor. London was unsafe, it was unsanitary, and the proletariat were continually assailed by technological change that threatened to devalue their labour. In 1710, a hundred years before ‘Luddism’ became a name, the London framework knitters had smashed more than a hundred stocking knitting frames to stop their masters from employing too many apprentices. In 1720 Spitalfields silk weavers attacked and abused women wearing calico – cheerful and cheap printed cotton from India. They tore the clothes from their backs and denounced them as ‘calico madams’.

These weavers were not bad people; they were just in despair at being endlessly slapped around the chops by the great invisible hand of Adam Smith. It is one of the most astonishing features of Wilkes’ career that he was to become the champion not just of democratic ‘reform’, in the sense that someone like Edmund Burke understood it – a limited concept that meant extending political participation to a small number of men who were thought able to grasp what was going on and who had the leisure for discussions – he was to be the genuine hero of the poor, with a patent brew of insolence and exuberant jingo. That is a surprising outcome, because his parents were determined that he should be a scholar and a gentleman.

Unlike his siblings, he enjoyed a careful and expensive education. He was sent to tutors in Thame, and thence to Leiden University in Holland – then a more prestigious institution than either Oxford or Cambridge, sunk as they were in torpor and jobbery. At university he learned the habits of debauchery that were to last him a lifetime. It is not that he wasted his time at Leiden. He sharpened his mastery of Latin and French; he loved the classics. He first met some of the intellectuals who were to welcome him during his exile into the circle of the philosophes. But he was a firm believer in what you might call a rounded education. As he later said: ‘I was always among women at Leiden. My father gave me as much money as I pleased, so I had three or four whores and got drunk every night. I woke up with a sore head in the morning, and then I read.’ For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, it was now acceptable to discuss fornication in this way, as the supreme recreation of a civilised society. Wilkes associated sex with intellectual creativity. As he once told Boswell, ‘Dissipation and profligacy … renew the mind. I wrote my best North Briton in bed with Betsy Green.’

At the age of only twenty he was back from Leiden and at the urgings of his family he had married a well-off but neurotic woman some ten years older than him, by the name of Mary Mead. It was not a happy union, and in due course the couple separated. But in 1750 they produced a daughter, Polly, who was to inspire in Wilkes an unwavering paternal duty and affection. Even those who disapprove of Wilkes (and there are many) are deeply moved by his devotion to the child, brown-eyed, lively and quick-witted as her father, but cursed with the same prognathous chin. During the summer, the family lived in a property of his wife’s at Aylesbury, and here he became a pillar of the community: a feoffee of the Grammar School, a trustee of the local turnpike, a JP. He might have settled down to a life of quiet squirearchy, but he loved London, and he discovered that he was in increasing demand as a wit and a man of fashion.

‘It only takes me twenty minutes to talk away my face’, he boasted. Sometimes this was reduced to ten minutes. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1749, and to the Beefsteak Club in 1754. In 1755 he was so confident of his position in the world that he launched a sarcastic attack on Dr Johnson himself, on the occasion of the publication of his dictionary.

Johnson had remarked that the letter H hardly ever comes at the beginning of any but the first syllable of a word. Ha! said Wilkes, in a letter to a paper, ‘The author of this remark must be a man of quick apprehension and comprehensive genius, but I can never forgive his unhandsome behaviour to the poor knighthood, priesthood and widowhood, nor his inhumanity to all manhood and womanhood …’ and so on. He blasted Johnson with twenty-six examples of H beginning an internal syllable, and the great man was so stung that he amended subsequent editions, pointing out that there were some compound words where you might find an H at the start of an internal syllable.

Like Blockhead, he said. Wilkes was very far from crushed. He went around in ‘gay and fantastic dress’, accompanied by two dogs called Dido and Pompey. Most famously of all he participated in the idiotic rites of the Medmenham Monks. Think of Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga room, but with an ecclesiastical theme.

The place was a semi-ruined abbey on the lush banks of the Thames near Marlow, and its proprietor, Sir Francis Dashwood, was keen that his fellow monks should exhibit a robust heterosexuality. High-class hookers or adventurous ladies of fashion were invited to dinner, at the end of which they – the women – would choose a partner and repair to the monk’s cell. Children born to such unions were called sons and daughters of St Francis.

One evening, when the candles were guttering low, and half the monks were hogwhimpering drunk, and the lurid shadows of their cavortings were flickering on the erotic frescoes on the ceilings, it is almost certain that Wilkes regaled his fellow celebrants with a reading of a poem by a friend of his called Thomas Potter, wayward son of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was called ‘An Essay on Woman’. Silly tripe though it was, it was to cause him a lot of trouble. Wilkes was engaged in lexical duels with Dr Johnson. He was hobnobbing with earls. He had made it, big time. The next stage, the next fashionable job, was to get into parliament. After one inglorious episode in Berwick, where he made the mistake of failing to bribe the electorate, he was elected MP for Aylesbury as part of the faction of William Pitt the Elder, later to become the Earl of Chatham.

Wilkes did not shine. His teeth were bad; his voice indistinct. But in 1760 his moment came, with a crisis for the Pittites. George II died, and his grandson George III took over.

This was long before his ‘madness’. George III was a serious Teutonic sort of fellow who began with his famous guttural announcement: ‘I glory in ze name of Briton!’ He wanted the best for his country, and he was persuaded that this meant a more active role for the King. The powers of the King of England had been much reduced since the civil war; but there was room for some creative ambiguity. With his residual ability to dissolve parliaments, and to summon and dismiss prime ministers, the monarch could clearly exercise considerable political influence.

George III fat-headedly decided to see what happened if he threw his weight around. He began by advancing the career of his former tutor and father figure, a man who was rumoured to be romancing his mother: Lord Bute (pron. Boot). He used his first King’s Speech, on 12 November 1760, to push the Bute agenda and announce that he would seek an end to the Seven Years’ War.

Pitt’s empire-building wars were popular in the City. They added the big pink patches, in India and Canada, to the Daily Telegraph map that used to hang on my wall as a child. They brought wealth to London. And now this Hanoverian monarch and his languid Scottish Old Etonian mother-bonking minister were threatening to call a peace – and all because of the cost; as we would put it these days, the need to make ‘cuts’ in the defence budget. William Pitt would not hear of it. He left office. His supporters were indignant, and Wilkes found his metier – not as a speaker, but as a writer. Together with a chum and fellow libertine, the poet Charles Churchill, he began to bash the regime in print.

He launched a paper, the North Briton, so called because his main target – Bute – was a Scot; and he began a line in frenzied Jock-baiting that has been ever since a dreary staple of London newspapers. All those pieces complaining about the tartan mafia; all that fulminating about the West Lothian question, and the constitutional outrage that English taxpayers are paying for free nursing care and tuition for the indolent Scots – they all have their origins in the journalism of Wilkes. The funny thing was, he actually quite liked the Scots, and in 1758 he had toured the place, announcing that he was never happier than when he was in Scotland. But that is journalism for you.

His stuff caused such offence that for decades to come angry Scots army officers would stop him in the street and challenge him to a duel, and Scottish children would burn effigies of John Wilkes until Victorian times. For people like Wilkes, this was the age of the Enlightenment, when a civilised man was able to follow Voltaire and do and say more or less what he wanted. Many others were still capable of being deeply shocked.

There was poor old Lord Talbot, who had made such a glorious chump of himself during the Coronation of George III. As part of the ceremony, he was meant to ride into Westminster Hall, salute the King and back out again. This was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: An Unexpected Triumph
• London Bridge
• Boudica
• Hadrian
• Mellitus
• Alfred the Great
• William the Conqueror
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Richard Whittington
• William Shakespeare
• Robert Hooke
• Samuel Johnson
• John Wilkes
• JMW Turner
• Lionel Rothschild
• Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole
• WT Stead
• Winston Churchill
• Keith Richards
• The Midland Grand Hotel
• Epilogue: Mo Farah
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Boris Johnson
• Copyright
• About the Publisher