WILKES, JOHN (1727-1797), English agitator and re former, was born in St. John's Square, Clerkenwell. His father, Israel Wilkes, a successful malt distiller, came from a yeoman family of Leighton Buzzard. John was the second son; his elder brother, Israel, emigrated to America and became the grandfather of (Admiral) Charles Wilkes (q.v.).
was schooled at Hertford and afterwards privately by the Rev. F. Leeson, a dissenting minister of Aylesbury, under whose charge he went to Leyden university in 1744. Here he learnt little—"Jack has great variety of talk, Jack is a scholar, Jack has the manners of a gentleman," said Dr. Johnson. He be came close friends with Andrew Baxter and D' Holbach (qq.v.).
On his return to England, he married Miss Mary Mead, an Aylesbury heiress. "In my nonage," he says, "to please an in dulgent father, I married a woman half as old again as myself ; of a large fortune—my own being that of a gentleman. It was a sacrifice to Plutus, not to Venus. I stumbled at the threshold of the temple of Hymen: Their marriage, uneventful for a time, and even successful while they lived at Aylesbury (they had one child, Mary), was broken up soon after Wilkes entered into politics, and they separated by mutual consent. Mrs. Wilkes had hardly any affection for either her husband or daughter, and she was scandal ized by Wilkes' loose life and companions. He had been introduced by Thomas Potter, a finished profligate, to the society of Sir Francis Dashwood, chief of the "Medmenham Monks," of whom he became a member. This was a secret fraternity, which met occasionally in the summer in the ruins of St. Mary's abbey at Medmenham, for obscene orgies, in which it parodied Roman Catholic ritual. Dashwood, Lord Sandwich, Paul Whitehead, Potter, Wilkes and perhaps Charles Churchill the poet were among the ringleaders; the "order," whose reputation for in decency probably exceeded even the reality, was broken up by a practical joke of Wilkes', who unexpectedly released from a box a baboon disguised as a devil during a prayer addressed to Satan by Lord Orford, who nearly went out of his mind in the belief that his supplication was answered.
Partly under the encouragement of these friends, Wilkes had entered politics as a follower of Richard, Lord Temple (q.v.).
He unsuccessfully fought Berwick in 1754, having bribed a captain to land a shipload of opposition voters from London in Norway instead of Berwick, but in 1757 by a complicated arrangement with Potter and Pitt, which was made to cost him the absurd sum of £7,000, he was elected M.P. for Aylesbury. In 1762, with the aid of Churchill and the countenance of Temple, he began to publish the North Briton. The wit and virulence of its attacks on Lord Bute, the Tory favourite of the King, silenced the Auditor and Briton, the ministerial papers, and were chiefly responsible for the wave of indignation which carried Bute from office on Mar. 8, 1763. Wilkes then held his hand, but when Pitt and Temple read an advance copy of the King's speech sent to them by George Grenville, the new Premier, they decided that Grenville's ministry was no more than a camouflage of the same autocratic power, and encouraged Wilkes to publish (April 23) the famous "No. 45" of the North Briton, which was a devastat ing attack on the statements in the King's speech, which he de scribed as false. Though he had carefully prefaced his attack by the remark "the King's speech has always been considered by the legislature and by the public at large as the speech of the Minister," George III. chose to consider Wilkes' article as a personal insult, and instigated immediate proceedings. A "general warrant" (one that did not name the persons to be arrested) was issued over the signatures of Lords Halifax and Egremont, secre taries of State, and 48 persons were seized by the authorities before Wilkes was arrested (April 3o). He was thrown into the Tower and for a short while kept in the closest confinement. To the public delight, however, Lord Chief Justice Pratt on May 6 released Wilkes on the ground that his arrest was a breach of privilege. Actions against Under-Secretary Woods (who was fined ii,000), against Halifax (who by repeated evasions ad journed the case till 1769 when he was fined £4,000), and against minor agents, established the illegality of general warrants.