40. Wilkes and Liberty: The Massacre of St. George's Fields

The bonds between the popular libertarian causes in England and those in America, and in their respective struggles against the British government, were in fact greatly strengthened during the critical year 1768. For 1768 saw the resumption of the libertarian Wilkite movement in England, and its attendant rioting inspired and strengthened the American and especially the Bostonian will to resist, just as the English cider tax rebellion had helped to inspire the stamp tax resistance in the colonies.

John Wilkes had been fretting in exile in Paris since the end of 1763. Wilkes was unable to persuade the sympathetic but shaky Rockingham ministry to let him back into England; it had enough troubles without him on the scene. Rebuffed coldly by Chatham, Wilkes took the bull by the horns and boldly returned to England in early February 1768, to find a highly receptive climate among the people. Unhampered by the Crown, Wilkes stood for Parliament from the City of London, backed by Sir William Baker, Newcastle’s friend and an alderman, and by numerous craftsmen, with the cry of “Wilkes and Liberty!” Defeated in London, the bulk of the liberal votes having gone to their spokesmen Beckford and Trecothick, Wilkes decided to run from Middlesex County in the general elections of late March 1768. His leading supporters in the election were the Reverend John Home, and the counsel at his trial in the old North Briton days, Serjeant John Glynn, MP. The inspired public rode in hundreds of coaches, bedecked in blue and carrying “Wilkes and Liberty” cards, out to Middlesex to campaign. The eager Wilkites were anxious to be peaceful, but were confronted by a crowd supporting the Tory incumbent Sir William Proctor. Armed with placards proclaiming “No Blasphemers” and “No French Renegade,” and hurling insults, the crowd briefly scuffled with the Wilkites. At the Middlesex election, Wilkes led the poll by a sizable majority. The joyous Wilkite masses celebrated by rioting for two straight days in London and Westminster, chalking every door with “Number 45” and breaking the windows of the leading Tories, including Lord Bute. Particularly roughly treated was the house of Wilkes’ old enemy Thomas Harley, now lord mayor of London, whose windows were broken to the shouts of “Wilkes forever!” Among those arrested as leaders of the mob were Matthew Christian, a wealthy gentleman from the West Indies, and Robert Chandler, a London teabroker. Notwithstanding the arrests, the Wilkites continued to riot and to control the streets for several nights thereafter.

The sudden resurgence of John Wilkes and the mass libertarian movement posed a critical problem to the politicians of Great Britain. How should they react to the Wilkite movement? The range of opinion was what ought to have been expected. The new turn of events was favored by the Whig leaders. The Duke of Richmond hailed Wilkes’ election as demonstrating to the administration that “though they may buy Lords and Commons,... yet they are not so much approved of by the Nation.” The venerable Duke of Newcastle agreed, and wrote that “Wilkes’ merit is being a friend to Liberty; and he has suffered for it.” His old friend Earl Temple was still favorably disposed. And such as the Duke of Grafton and Lord Chatham shrewdly favored a royal pardon for Wilkes (still under the old sentence of outlawry) and letting him take his seat in Parliament, thus quelling the Wilkite agitation. But the right wing of the government—the Bedfords, including Lord Hillsborough, and the king himself—wanted full punishment for the rebel Wilkes.

The decision on how to handle Wilkes came before the government at the same time, April, that it was confronted with the Massachusetts letter against the Townshend Act. The British government saw the radical-libertarian philosophical link between the two rebellions, and the instinct of the dominant Tories was to maximize royal power by crushing both.

Not receiving a royal pardon, John Wilkes was tried for escaping punishment for his old offense. When the Tory judge Lord Mansfield imprisoned Wilkes without bail on April 27, the London crowd liberated Wilkes, but he put on a disguise to sneak back into prison in order to obey the royal command. In reaction to the arbitrary imprisonment, the Wilkite mobs rioted continuously for two weeks, especially outside the prison where Wilkes was being held. The prison lobby was demolished to the shouts of “Wilkes and Liberty!” But Wilkes himself at one point persuaded the crowd to disperse.

On May 10 Parliament opened, and a large crowd gathered in front of the House to demand that Wilkes be allowed to assume his rightful seat. In St. George’s Fields a huge crowd of twenty to forty thousand people from all over London gathered ominously in front of Wilkes’ prison. Wilkes’ old enemy Robert Wood, undersecretary of state, had persuaded the secretary, Viscount Weymouth, to put a troop of infantry and cavalry into the Fields that day.

As the day wore on, the huge crowd and the troops confronted each other, each growing more restive. The crowd managed to paste on the prison walls a poem including the line: “Venal judges and Ministers combine, Wilkes and English liberty to confine.” When the paper was torn down on magistrates’ orders, the crowd became more radical, shouting not only, “Give us the paper” and, “Wilkes and liberty forever,” but also, “No Wilkes, no king!” “Damn the king, damn the government, damn the justices,” and, “This is the most glorious opportunity for a revolution that ever offered.” At this point Justice Samuel Gillam read the riot act to the crowd, which responded with a volley of stones. One hit Gillam, and he ordered the soldiers to pursue the stone-thrower. The soldiers did not catch the assailant, but managed to kill William Allen, an innocent bystander. Finally, the soldiers were ordered to fire into the crowd, killing five or six and wounding fifteen—an act of brutality that became widely known as the “Massacre of St. George’s Fields.” Many of those shot were innocent bystanders. One policeman wrote that the soldiers “seemed to enjoy their fire; I thought it a great cruelty.”

The massacre did not succeed in repressing the people’s movement. Two of the magistrates implicated in the massacre had their houses pulled down, but the magistrates called the troops into play and dispersed the crowd. Throughout the metropolis, houses of leading Tories and anti-Wilkites were attacked. The next day several thousand sailors were posted before Parliament. With the encouragement of Parliament, the magistrates redoubled their repression, arresting thirty-four persons for participating in the riots. Of these, however, only a half-dozen were convicted and sentenced. Of those arrested the great bulk were of the poorer classes, mostly laborers and the rest artisans.

Grand juries tried their best to strike blows for the people against the government. The jurors tried to indict the troops responsible for the murder of the innocent man mistaken for a stone-thrower, and indeed indicted Justice Gillam for “willful murder,” but these culprits were all acquitted.

The charge of outlawry against Wilkes was dropped on technical grounds. But on June 18, Lord Mansfield, surrounded by troops, ordered Wilkes to serve a twenty-two month imprisonment on a variety of minor charges. The Wilkite movement was now in good shape. It had the memory of the authentic martyrs of St. George’s Fields, and it had a leader whose continuing imprisonment was a standing reproach to the government and a standing inspiration and rallying point to the popular libertarian cause.

The Massacre of St. George’s Fields and the incarceration of John Wilkes were a goad and an inspiration to the liberal movement in America. As early as the first Wilkite agitation in 1763, Americans recognized their kinship to liberty and their enmity to the tyranny of British rule. In commemoration of Colonel Barré’s famous pro-American speech in Parliament against the Stamp Act, Pennsylvanians named a new town Wilkes-Barré in honor of the two heroes. Now on June 6, 1768, a committee of the Boston Sons of Liberty, including John Adams, Benjamin Church, Joseph Warren, and others, wrote to the “Illustrious Patriot” Wilkes as “the Friends of Liberty, Wilkes, peace and good order.” The Bostonians hailed Wilkes’ fight for the true British constitution, commended John Dickinson’s pamphlet to his attention, and sent a monetary token of their esteem. On July 19, Wilkes significantly replied from prison that his dedication to liberty had no local confines, and that he was “a friend to universal liberty.” Wilkes warmly commended Dickinson’s “generous and rational... Farmer’s Letters, in which the cause of freedom is perfectly understood,” and never so ably defended. Such was the beginning of a more formal linkage between the libertarian movements in Britain and America, and of a voluminous correspondence between John Wilkes and the Boston Sons.

The American press had closely followed the events of Wilkes’ European exile, and followed still more closely the drama of his return, imprisonment, and rioting by the people. In New London, Connecticut, in August 1768, the popular toast was, “May we never want [lack] a Wilkes and may Wilkes never want liberty.” The speeches of Wilkes and his supporters were included among the radical ideas propagated by Adams, Otis, and the other popular leaders in America. The harsh treatment meted out to Wilkes and his followers helped intensify the feeling of resentment in America against the Crown. The Wilkite uprising also greatly raised American hopes, for any American resistance to British troops would be much aided by any distraction provided by the London radicals.