PART III Ideology and Religion 16 The Threat of the Anglican Bishops

During the first half of the eighteenth century, there were sporadic schemes to impose Anglican bishops upon the American colonies. The schemes had been bitterly resented by all the non-Anglicans in America, and even opposed by most of the Anglicans themselves, who were generally low church and happy to be governing themselves free of English control. The schemes had died down during the war with France, but even then Bishop Thomas Secker, who had assumed the post of archbishop of Canterbury in 1758, quietly laid plans to revive the scheme as soon as the war was over. His installment was the occasion for the Reverend Samuel Johnson of New York, a long-time advocate of an American episcopate, to join with a group of Anglican ministers in New York and New Jersey to petition for this innovation. Secker replied with the assurance that he had long had at heart the idea of American bishops. He added that the matter must remain in abeyance, but that the powerful Lord Halifax, president of the Board of Trade, was enthusiastic over the scheme.

As soon as the war was over, Secker launched his campaign. The Grand Design for imperial assumption of power over the colonies was well under way, Secker informed Johnson, and the time was therefore right for pushing the project for American bishops. The imperialistic Duke of Bedford was, not surprisingly, quite willing, but Secker continued in secrecy until plans could fructify.

It was in an atmosphere of fear and rumor engendered by these machinations that agitation against an American bishopric resumed in the colonies. The controversy burst to the fore in early 1763 when the great libertarian divine of Massachusetts, Jonathan Mayhew, was provoked by an Anglican minister’s spirited defense of the Anglican Society for Preservation of the Gospel. The Reverend Mr. Mayhew’s famous reply “Observations on the Charter...” strongly attacked the SPG’s long-standing and dangerous agitation for an American episcopate. Against this scheme Mayhew thundered: “When we consider her [Church of England] enormous hierarchy ascending by various gradations from the dust to the skies,” and the threat “that all of us [will] be taxed for the support of bishops and their underlings,” can we avoid crying out:

Will they never let us rest in peace?... Is it not enough, that they persecuted us out of the old world? Will they pursue us into the new to convert us here?—compassing sea and land to make us proselytes... what other new world remains as a sanctuary for us from their oppressions, in case if we need?... Where is the Columbus to... pilot us to it, before we are... deluged in a flood of episcopacy?

Mayhew’s stirring “Observations” performed the function of intensifying and polarizing the conflict, stirring interest and activity among his supporters and drawing bitter replies from several prominent Anglicans. Many of the replies called for a full-fledged Anglican establishment, while a rebuttal pamphlet by Archbishop Secker tried to be more moderate and to stress the simple administrative functions of American bishops. Jonathan Mayhew was unimpressed. Once they are here, Mayhew replied, the bishops will try to attain to the power of their English colleagues, and “ambition and avarice never want plausible pretexts, to accomplish their end.” A gradual plan for bishops was in the long run as grave a threat as an extreme one. Indeed, Mayhew wisely commented, “people are not usually deprived of their liberties all at once, but gradually, by one encroachment after another, as it is found they are disposed to bear them.” Furthermore, Mayhew expressed great distrust of the revival of “high-church Tory principles and maxims” under the new king, George III.

Jonathan Mayhew’s pamphlets in 1763 and 1764 on the Anglican question had a profound effect in rallying colonial opposition to an episcopal scheme and in sowing distrust of and hostility to English imperial projects. The treasurer of Massachusetts wrote of the unprecedented “general approbation and applause” greeting Mayhew’s “Observations.” John Adams, writing later of these events, testified to the importance of the controversy that began with Mayhew’s pamphlets:

It spread an universal alarm against the authority of Parliament. It excited a general and a just apprehension, that bishops, and dioceses, and churches, and priests, and tithes, were to be imposed on us by Parliament. It was known that neither king, nor ministry, nor archbishops, could appoint bishops in America, without an act of Parliament; and if Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England, with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes, and prohibit all other churches....

So influential were Mayhew’s writings, indeed, that the conservative, Calvinist Congregationalists, who had been hostile to Mayhew’s highly liberal views, now ranged alongside him and the other liberal Congregationalists and forged a new unity against the common danger.

So severe was the reaction that the frightened Archbishop Secker was soon willing to call off the whole thing. But the damage had been done. Furthermore, rumors tended to fly overseas of impending appointments of American bishops, thereby keeping America hostile and on the alert. Meanwhile, irritations against church and state accumulated in America. The Anglican governor of New York, James DeLancey, refused to allow Presbyterians and Lutherans to control their own property. And as early as 1761 the Crown had prohibited the emigration from England of any schoolteacher to New Hampshire who was not an Anglican and certified by the bishop of London.

17

The Parsons’ Cause

A particular area of trouble with England over the Anglican establishment appeared during this period in the colony of Virginia. Of the seventy or so Anglican clergy in Virginia the bulk were moderate, liberal, and easygoing, in keeping with the low-church moderation of Virginia Anglicanism. In the western valley of Virginia, the local vestry—the important local political organ in that province—included Presbyterians and other Dissenters for many years, since the valley was almost exclusively Dissenter. Local vestries, furthermore, selected their ministers, who rapidly fell into the tolerant and liberal spirit of religion in Virginia.

A little knot of high-church Anglicans bitterly opposed this condition and strove to bring church and British control over ecclesiastical and other affairs of the colony. These men, largely English-born, clustered in and around the faculty of the College of William and Mary.

In the fall of 1755, Virginia passed the first of its Twopenny Acts. Since Virginia’s major currency was tobacco, its dues, contracts, and obligations were generally payable in that commodity or in more convenient warehouse receipts for quantities of tobacco. In such a system, a poor tobacco crop and a consequent rise in tobacco prices injured debtors and advantaged creditors. In 1755, a year of high tobacco prices, there was inaugurated a Virginia practice of fixing tobacco at an arbitrary price of twopence a pound—this at a time when the market price of tobacco was far higher than that. Virginians generally approved the measure because the main “creditors” or receivers of fixed obligations (in tobacco) were the tax collectors and the receivers of government fees. The Twopenny Act caused a welcome reduction in the real economic burden of taxation and government spending on the Virginians, and did this precisely during a time of economic crises when such relief was most needed.

Government bureaucrats receiving fixed fees in tobacco lost a heavy wind-fall as a result of the Twopenny Act. Particularly affected were the Anglican parsons, who each received a fixed sum of a little over seventeen thousand pounds of tobacco per year. The knot of high-church ministers zealously protested the Twopenny Law; a small clique of parsons (including four professors at William and Mary) sent several bitter protests to the bishop of London. They were led by the Reverend John Camm of York County, a professor of divinity at William and Mary.

The 1755 law was meant to be in force for ten months only, after which the crop crisis would be over. The most important of the Virginia twopenny laws was passed in the fall of 1758, amid a catastrophic drought that lowered Virginia’s tobacco production by nearly ninety percent. A fixed maximum price of twopence a pound was placed on tobacco for the following year.

The Tory faction of the Virginia establishment was embittered at the loss of its windfall gains (the market tobacco price had risen to sixpence a pound). Half of the Anglican clergy of the colony convened and with dispatch sent John Camm to England to plead their “Parsons’ Cause” for royal disallowance of the law. Camm took with him the ministers’ “Representation of the Clergy of the Church of England.” The “Representation” bitterly and incorrectly denounced the Twopenny Act as deliberately designed to injure the Anglican clergy, and angered the Virginians by warning that the royal prerogative was being violated by the colony. The Anglican clergy were thus urging a royal veto over the self-governing acts of the Virginians, and went from there to urge the nullifying rather than the mere setting aside of the law, so that the Twopenny Act would be null and void from the beginning. The importance of this stemmed from the short-term nature of the crisis and of the law; if it could be voided from the beginning, Virginia would be liable for a large retroactive salary to its established clergy.

The Virginia Assembly countered the appointment of Camm in early 1759, by appointing its own agent in London and selecting a Committee of Correspondence to carry on the struggle. The argument was now carried to England, where Virginians were further embittered by a vicious attack upon them by Bishop Thomas Sherlock of London (who had long been one of the prime movers in the scheme for an American episcopate). Sherlock leveled false accusations of a deliberate attack on the Virginia clergy, and then went on in a crescendo of calumny to charge the Virginia Assembly, in its passing of the Twopenny Act, with committing an act of “treason, and I do not know any other name for it in our law.” Sherlock went on to denounce the increasing number of Dissenters (largely Presbyterians) in the colony.

The Camm petition, aided by Archbishop Secker, traveled favorably through the ranks of the British bureaucracy; finally, in August 1759, the Privy Council disallowed the two Twopenny Acts. It also went beyond this to order the Virginia governor not to sign in the future any such law that did not have a suspension clause delaying execution of the law until the king should approve—a serious threat to the self-rule of the colony.

The Crown had merely disallowed the Twopenny Act rather than nullified it from the start. The outcome of the dispute was therefore still unclear, a fact that would rankle Virginia-British relations for eight more years. The Reverend Mr. Camm and a few other Tory parsons immediately decided to sue in the courts for the missing back pay, and if these cases were won, total nullification would be a fact. The Virginia taxpayers would then be burdened with huge windfall salary payments to the established clergy. The Assembly and its Committee of Correspondence decided to back the vestries in the court cases, and its Committee of Correspondence warned that the royal decision called into question the powers of the Virginia legislature to make temporary laws “for the public weal.” The Assembly in late 1760 petitioned the Crown for power to pass such temporary measures, but in vain.

News of Bishop Sherlock’s bitter blast particularly infuriated Virginians and set off a pamphlet war in the colony. Two of Virginia’s leading planter oligarchs, Colonel Richard Bland, Jr. and Colonel Landon Carter, both burgesses and both Anglicans, attacked Sherlock and became involved in a series of exchanges with John Camm. The Bland family was intermarried with such eminent planter families as the Randolphs, and the Carters with the Randolphs, Byrds, and Harrisons. Bland’s pamphlet, A Letter to the Clergy (1760), was notable for a sardonic statement on the royal prerogative: “Like the King of Babylon’s decree, it may, for aught I know, almost force the people of the plantations to fall down and worship any image it shall please to set up....” Moreover, “as solus populi est suprema lex... every consideration must give place to it, and even these [royal] instructions may be deviated from with impunity....”

But the major threat lay in the court suits of the Reverend Mr. Camm and four of his fellow ministers. For their victory would mean that the Twopenny Act had been void from the start, and that the government would have to reimburse the ministers. The slow processes of the courts kept the whole issue alive and festering. The first case to be decided was that of Reverend Alexander White of King William County. White’s case was turned over in toto in the fall of 1762 to the jury, which naturally found for Virginia. In the case of the Reverend Thomas Warrington, decided soon afterward, the Elizabeth City County Court, headed by George Wythe, sustained the original validity of the Twopenny Act. Furthermore, it also found for the defendant.

The third case to emerge was that of the Reverend James Maury of Louisa County, and was decided in Hanover County Court. On November 5, 1763, Judge John Henry decreed that the Twopenny Act had been null and void from the start. The only problem remaining was a jury trial fixing the amount of damages due to Maury. The trial was held in December. To Maury’s disgust, the jury included “the vulgar herd,” two of which were ardent New Light Presbyterians. Dissenters had obvious reason to be hostile to levying taxes upon themselves for the benefit of an Anglican establishment.

The great significance of the Maury trial was the emergence upon the scene of the brilliant young lawyer Patrick Henry. Henry, son of Judge John Henry, a leading planter of Hanover County, was a nephew of a venerable Anglican minister, the Reverend Patrick Henry, who was one of the ministers filing suit against the colony. Young Patrick had every family incentive to be on the Tory-Anglican side of the dispute. Instead, hired despairingly at the last minute, Henry, presumably in a helpless situation, radicalized the atmosphere and captured the imagination of the colony in a dramatic speech to the jury. In short, Henry escalated the dispute straight up to the Crown. By annulling the good and necessary Twopenny Act, the king had violated the “original compact” between king and people, by which the latter had promised obedience in return for royal protection of their rights. Therefore, concluded Henry inexorably, “A King, by disallowing acts of so salutary a nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all rights to his subjects’ obedience.” At that point, the Reverend Mr. Maury recounted that “the more sober part of the audience was struck with horror.” Peter Lyons, the leading lawyer of the area and Maury’s counsel, cried out at this that Henry “had spoken treason,” and murmurs of “treason” arose from the audience. But Henry, unruffled, continued to denounce bitterly the Anglican clergy: “The clergy of Virginia... [on] refusing to acquiesce in the law... ought to be considered as enemies of the community,” and Maury and his colleagues should be not rewarded but stripped of their appointments. In a stirring peroration, Henry warned that unless the jury “were disposed to rivet the chains of bondage on their own necks, he hoped they would not let slip the opportunity which now offered, of making such an example of him [Maury] as might hereafter be a warning to himself and his brethren, not to have the temerity, for the future, to dispute the validity of such laws....”

The jury, swayed and moved, brought in a verdict for token minimum damages: one penny. Judge Henry, moved to tears by his son’s great speech, upheld the verdict, and the happy crowd, “wild with delight,... seized their champion and bore him on their shoulders in triumph around the court yard.”

John Camm’s own case came to trial in April 1764. This critical case was decided by the Council of Virginia sitting as the Supreme General Court of the colony. The Council decided against Camm by a vote of five to four.*White, Warrington, and Maury each had appealed their cases to the Council sitting as the Supreme General Court, and the Reverend Mr. Henry’s suit was dismissed when the Camm case was decided. All the other cases were now ended, and the Parsons’ Cause rested on Camm’s further appeal to the Privy Council in England.

Meanwhile, the pamphlet war between Camm, on the one hand, and Bland and Carter, on the other, had renewed in 1763 and 1764. Finally, Richard Bland published in August 1764 his famous The Colonel Dismounted, which the historian Lyon G. Tyler has called “the great critical paper of the revolution.” Colonel Bland began by asserting that the Virginians properly retain the rights of all Englishmen. He added: “Under an English government all men are born free, are only subject to laws made with their own consent.” If then Virginians are freeborn and have the rights of Englishmen, then laws over them can be made only by their own representatives—this, Bland declared, applied to internal laws, whereas external laws are to be determined by Parliament. As for the royal prerogative, Bland warned that “submission, even to the supreme Magistrate, is not the whole duty of a citizen...: Something is likewise due to the rights of our country, and to the liberties of mankind. To say that a royal instruction to a governor... is to have the validity of a law, and must be obeyed without reserve is, at once, to strip us of all the rights and privileges of British subjects, and to put us under the despotic power of a French or Turkish government....”

Thus, the strictures of Bland and Henry emphasized the importance of the Parsons’ Cause in expanding the colonial conflict with Britain—from taxation by colonists themselves to legislation by the colonists. As historian Richard Morton puts it, “From the principle of ‘no taxation without representation,’ Virginians had moved on to no ‘legislation without representation.’... During this debate, Virginians developed the great constitutional arguments which they were to use effectively a few years later to justify rebellion; and it started Patrick Henry on his eloquent and outspoken defiance of British authority in America.”*

Nullifying the Twopenny Acts by the Crown irritated the Virginians in many ways; it involved using royal power to annul a law popular in the colony; it attempted to impose suspension clauses to restrict further Virginia legislation; it gave rise to the Parsons’ call for rendering such laws initially null and void; it rendered obnoxious to moderate low-church Virginia an influential portion of the Anglican clergy devoted to high-church Tory principles; and it recalled the episcopal schemes of the leaders of the Church of England. Furthermore, the Parsons’ Cause polarized Virginian opinion, aligning the Anglican and dissenting laity of Virginia against the reactionary wing of the local Anglican clergy, the English church, and the Crown itself.

The Parsons’ Cause now rested on Camm’s appeal to the Privy Council. To combat Camm’s case, the Virginia Assembly’s Committee of Correspondence, in July 1764, prepared argumentation against Camm. The main brief was drawn up by committee member Robert Carter Nicholas of Williamsburg, who had been chief defense lawyer against Camm before the General Court, and by George Wythe of Williamsburg. The case dragged on unresolved until the end of 1766, when the Privy Council dismissed Camm’s appeal on a legal technicality. The Parsons’ Cause was ended, but even then unclearly and inconclusively. It left a significant legacy of opposition and hostility by Virginians to the Crown.*

*Voting against Camm were: John Blair of Williamsburg, sometime president of the Council; John Taylor; William Byrd III; Robert Burwell; and Pressley Thornton. Voting for Camm were: Richard Corbin; Robert Carter; Peter Randolph, surveyor general of the customs; and Philip Ludwell Lee. William and Thomas Nelson of York County excused themselves from voting as parishioners of the Reverend Mr. Camm.

*Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 2:819

*Professor Tate’s attempt to depreciate the importance of the Parsons’ Cause in the brewing temper of colonial revolution is unconvincing. See Thad W. Tate, “The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia: Britain’s Challenge to Virginia’s Ruling Class, 1763—1776,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1962): 325–33.

18

Wilkes and Liberty, 1763–1764

In June 1762, John Wilkes, a country squire who was high sheriff of Buckinghamshire and a member of Parliament, set up his weekly newspaper, the North Briton, in opposition to the Tory Bute regime in Great Britain. Wilkes took the Newcastle-Whig line in opposition to the harshly expansionist peace terms the British were exacting from the French, especially their insistence on ousting the French completely from the North American continent. At the end of December, the North Briton denounced the purge of the Newcastle Whigs from the administration and called for a determined popular opposition to Tory rule. Out of power for the first time in two generations, the disoriented Whigs polarized: the more conservative moved to make their peace with the Tory administration; the younger and more radical members, led by the young Marquis of Rockingham, formed an opposition “club” with the tentative and worried blessing of Newcastle.

On April 11, 1763, Lord Bute was driven from office by the revolt in Parliament against the tax on cider, a revolt joined by Whigs and West Country Tory gentlemen.

With his old enemy Bute ousted from office, John Wilkes felt that his task was done, and he suspended publication of his radically liberal North Briton. But the Tory regime continued virtually unchanged, and the king’s speech at the opening of Parliament on April 19, 1763, inspired by the new prime minister, George Grenville, goaded Wilkes into publishing a harsh comment in the famous Number 45 of the North Briton. The Crown decided to take the opportunity to crack down on the annoying Wilkes as a libeler of the king, and issued a general warrant for the arrest of everyone connected with the publication of the “seditious and treasonable” North Briton. In doing so, the Crown also hoped to discredit the opposition by associating them with a notorious rake and libertine like Wilkes. Wilkes was summarily arrested, along with forty-eight others connected with the publication of his journal, and sent to the Tower. Those most closely implicated in the Crown’s decision, aside from Grenville and the king, were the powerful secretaries of state, Lords Egremont and Halifax; Charles Jenkinson, the secretary of the treasury; Jenkinson’s counsel, Philip Carteret Webb; and the Crown’s law officers, Sir Fletcher Norton and the renegade Whig, Attorney General Charles Yorke.

The Whigs were now placed squarely on the spot by the summary arrest of Wilkes and the suppression of his paper. Wilkes’ mentor and patron, Earl Temple, did not hesitate to rush to the aid of his beleaguered friend. But what would Newcastle do? The aging Whig leader was beset by conflicting advice on where he—and hence his party—should go. For on his position in the Wilkes affair rested the choice of whether the Whigs would subsist in moderate and respectable dissent from the administration, or whether they would become a party in radical opposition to the status quo in behalf of liberty. The Whigs were again being polarized by the larger polarization occurring in England as a whole: between the aggressive Tory imperialists in power, and the rising agitation of the people, as expressed in the rebellion against the cider tax, for “Liberty, Property and No Excise!”

The younger and more ardent Whigs pressured Newcastle to declare for Wilkes. These liberals were headed by Newcastle’s nephew George Onslow and, particularly, Lord Middleton, another nephew, who, like Temple, declared his intention to visit Wilkes in the Tower. But on the other side, the older and more tired Whigs counseled caution. These were led by Lord Hardwicke, the father of Yorke, who bitterly denounced Wilkes’ “audacious... libel” as “not only unjustifiable but inexcusable.” Hardwicke carefully concealed the secret role that he himself had played in the affair, when he had advised the Crown to proceed with the stamping out of its most ardent opposition. Pitt, of course, remained cool to the Wilkes cause. Newcastle finally was persuaded by his old friends not to plunge into the Wilkes imbroglio.

Wilkes, undaunted, fought on brilliantly, his first success being to win a writ of habeas corpus and a release from the Tower. Wilkes carried on his fight on two levels: the legal level, aided by his counsel, Serjeant John Glynn; and the political level, aided by his own appeal at the London trial. At his trial in early May, a cross section of Londoners—gentlemen, shopkeepers, craftsmen—packed the courtroom and first raised the thunderous shout: “Liberty! Liberty! Wilkes forever!” The Wilkite cause had been swiftly adopted by the people of London. In his argument at the trial, Wilkes made sure that his London followers got the point: “The liberty of all peers and gentlemen, and, what touches me more sensibly, that of the middling and inferior set of people, who stand most in need of protection, is in my case this day to be finally decided....” Chief Justice Charles Pratt ruled general warrants to be legal but freed Wilkes on his privilege as a member of Parliament. The crowd (which included George Onslow) on hearing the verdict burst into loud cheers, and Wilkes was borne home by many thousands of Londoners shouting “Whigs forever, no Jacobites” and the new slogan of the radicals, “Wilkes and Liberty!”

John Wilkes followed up his victory by a direct challenge to the Crown. After his arrest, his house had been ransacked for evidence, and Wilkes now boldly and heroically called upon Lords Egremont and Halifax to return his “stolen” papers. Receiving the expected angry reply, Wilkes now magnificently brought suit against Halifax, Egremont, and Undersecretary of State Robert Wood for theft, and against Webb for perjury. With widespread support in the press, and numerous bonfires and rejoicings among the people at every Wilkite victory, Wilkes and the printers associated with the North Briton won numerous damage suits against Wood and other government officials during the remainder of 1763. The sympathetic juries took care to award heavy damages to the Wilkes forces.

But the big question to be decided was the legality of general warrants. The Crown case rested on precedent; for nearly a hundred years it had issued similar general warrants against persons suspected of “seditious libel” against the government. Until Wilkes, their validity had not been challenged. Hardwicke and Newcastle regarded such warrants as perfectly legal. But Chief Justice Pratt was now increasingly taking the position that both general and specific warrants for seditious libel were illegal. The Whig-oriented city councils of London, Dublin, and Exeter voted their gratitude to Pratt for his new stand. In the end, Wilkes won his point and a significant victory for individual liberty; by 1765, Pratt was able to win over the bench and to rule such general warrants null and void.

As Wilkes piled up victories in the courts during 1763, he became the idol of the London populace. He was mobbed by cheering throngs, and the merchants and financiers of the City expressed ardent support for his cause. From the City of London to Surrey County and to English sailors at port, “Wilkes and Liberty” was the common cry.

In a short time John Wilkes had sparked a libertarian mass movement in England; the possibilities for the movement and for Wilkes himself were limitless. But Wilkes, besides a leader, was a man of personal irresponsibility of the kind fatal to the leadership of a great cause. And this flightiness was to lay him low. For as he prepared to bind and reprint the North Briton, he also blithely and frivolously decided to print for private circulation an obscene parody of Pope’s Essay on Man, which had been written a decade before. While Wilkes, in the autumn of 1763, was lightheartedly visiting in Paris, Philip C. Webb bribed Wilkes’ printer and fellow victim of the general warrant, Michael Curry, to turn over to him the proofs of the obscene Essay on Woman. The Crown now eagerly prepared to proceed against Wilkes for obscenity and blasphemy, and at the same time to split and neutralize the Wilkite forces, especially the respectables who were sure to place aesthetics and propriety above the great principles of liberty. Ironically, the leading role in the prosecution was played by the Earl of Sandwich (successor to the deceased Egremont), who until recently had participated with Wilkes in the frequent orgies of a notorious and exclusive club, “The Monks of Saint Francis.” In mid-November, Sandwich, with enthusiasm, read the Essay on Woman aloud to the scandalized House of Lords. All the shocked respectables seized the opportunity to abandon a cause to which their devotion was at best questionable, and took turns in denouncing the harried Wilkes. Pitt’s denunciation was typical: the North Briton series was “unmanly and detestable” and Wilkes “did not deserve to be ranked among the human species.” Wilkes, in short, was the “blasphemer of his God and the libeler of his King.”

As the Crown had hoped, the irrelevant Essay on Woman was used to turn opinion against and to condemn Number 45 of the North Briton and to vanquish the Wilkite movement. Frederick Lord North of the Treasury led the attack for the government in the House of Lords, charging the North Briton with being false, seditious, insulting to royalty, and intending to excite the people to insurrection against the government. Wilkes objected only to the charge of falsehood. Thirty-five noble lords managed to hold their ground to vote for him. They included Temple, and the Whigs Devonshire, Grafton, and Portland. Pitt’s man Lord Shelburne naturally voted to condemn John Wilkes. The House of Commons condemned Number 45 as “false, scandalous, and seditious libel” by a vote of 273 to 111, and Parliament ordered it burnt by the common hangman.

The middle- and lower-class supporters of Wilkes, however, were not as easily swayed from principle by irrelevant aesthetics. At the appointed time of the burning on December 3, a large crowd of over five hundred Londoners gathered, pelted the sheriffs with wood, attacked their coaches (wounding the high sheriff), and rescued the North Briton from the bonfire. Instead, the mob burned a boot and a petticoat in the bonfire, items symbolizing the hated Lord Bute and the king’s mother, who had been a long-time friend of Bute. The Common Council of the City of London demonstrated its solidarity with Wilkes by pointedly refusing to thank the sheriffs for their part in the proceedings. And when the king went to the theater, instead of the customary applause there arose a general shout of “Wilkes and Liberty!” It was in the same month that Wilkes was awarded one thousand pounds damages from the Crown by a London jury—to the cheers of great London crowds and shouts of “Wilkes and Liberty!”

Probably Wilkes could still have remained and forged a successful libertarian mass movement. But wounded in a political duel, deliberately provoked by an enemy in Parliament, and knowing that Parliament was about to expel him, Wilkes, at the end of December, again showed his irresponsibility by departing the country for France. With Wilkes gone, his enemies could now proceed at will. In January he was expelled from Parliament; in February he was found guilty of blasphemy and seditious libel by a grand jury in printing the essay and reprinting the North Briton; and on November 1, 1764, while still in France, he was declared an outlaw. And with Wilkes gone, the great Wilkite movement in England necessarily collapsed, at least for the time being. Many Wilkites were dismissed from public office, including the Whigs Colonel Isaac Barré and General Henry Conway. But Wilkes and his cause still remained high in the hearts of the people. When the liberal Whig Edmund Burke was elected to Parliament two years later, the people toasted “Burke and Wilkes” and “Wilkes and Liberty.” And though Wilkes himself was gone, the people could and did take revenge on his tormentors: Sandwich was generally derided; the informer Michael Curry was scorned as a renegade and blacklisted by all the master printers; and Philip Webb lost his post at the Treasury in mid-1765 as a direct result of his ill fame in the persecution of John Wilkes.

The sudden flowering of the Wilkite movement had a profound influence on the accumulating tensions between Britain and the American colonies. There were many reasons for this. For one thing, the bursting forth of the Liberty and Property agitation against the cider tax, merging into the Wilkes and Liberty movement, articulated the grievances of the colonies—against taxation and against invasions of liberty. In short, the Whig ideals of liberty and property were under attack for citizens in England, as well as in the colonies—and under attack by the same imperial Tory government. In fact, the same persons—the Grenvilles, the Halifaxes, the Jenkinsons, etc.—were reviled as despotic at home as well as abroad. In brief, the Tory oligarchy was busy aggrandizing the royal prerogative against the liberty and property of the people at home and abroad. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Americans should eagerly follow and be inspired by the Whigs and radicals of England. Second, the theorists most cherished by the Americans (Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, the Commonwealthmen) were precisely the patron saints of radical Whiggism and had been for a century. Third, the radical Whigs reciprocated American interests and staunchly championed American liberties in English politics. And fourth, the particular tactics, especially the spirited mob actions by the English of London and of the West Country, also provided inspiration to Americans of what direct mass action could accomplish, above and beyond mere legalistic petitioning of Parliament or the Crown. Fuse these current examples of revolutionary mass action in England with those of the great colonial revolutions against English tyranny in the middle and late seventeenth century, and an explosive mixture was at hand. In short, what the Marxists call the “objective conditions” and the “subjective conditions” for any American revolution were now virtually imminent. The “objective conditions” were a crescendo of despotic actions by Great Britain striking hammer blows against “constitutional,” economic, and individual rights and liberties of Americans. The “subjective conditions” were nurtured by their own revolutionary traditions, by the libertarian ideals common to the English Whigs and themselves, by the inspiring example of the libertarian Whig rebellion in the home country, and by an increasing willingness of the American people to embark on mass civil disobedience, and on even more violent forms of revolutionary overthrow of tyrannical British rule.