The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (68 page)

Wilkes’s private life was a scandal in an age and a city not easily scandalized; reports regularly circulated of his participation, with a group called the “Medmenham Monks” (alternatively the “Hell-fire Club”), in orgies of the most obscene character in the ruins of the abbey at Medmenham. The order broke up when Wilkes released a baboon, dressed as the devil, in the middle of a prayer to Satan by one of the members, who
went nearly insane upon seeing his prayer answered so swiftly and in the flesh.

Wilkes habitually skewered his critics with verbal thrusts, more than one of which were appropriated by subsequent sharp tongues. After Wilkes entered politics a constituent vowed he would vote for the devil over Wilkes. “Naturally,” retorted Wilkes. “But if your friend is not standing, may I hope for your support?” The Earl of Sandwich predicted that Wilkes would die on the gallows or of venereal disease. “That depends, my lord,” Wilkes replied, “on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.”

Wilkes entered Parliament in 1757 but made little splash until five years later, when he began publishing a paper called
The North Briton.
With the encouragement of William Pitt and others in opposition, Wilkes ridiculed Bute and the ministry he headed. The Paris peace treaty became a particular target. “It is certainly the peace of God for it passeth all understanding,” Wilkes declared in the fifth issue of
The North Briton.
Bute could not abide the criticism, and retired from office in early 1763. (Lord Shelburne was not surprised, observing of Bute that despite being “proud, pompous, imposing,” he was “the greatest political coward I ever knew.”) Wilkes’s triumph raised questions as to what he would do next. On a visit to Paris he was asked by Madame de Pompadour how far freedom of the press extended in England. “I do not know, madame,” Wilkes replied. “But I am trying to find out.”

He did, soon. Wilkes typically attacked by indirection, denying some low rumor about a minister but in the process publicizing it—if not simply creating it. He modified this approach in the forty-fifth issue of
The North Briton,
an issue of that journal that became as famous, or notorious, as any single publication in the history of English-language journalism. The occasion of Wilkes’s latest blast was a speech from the throne proroguing Parliament in the wake of Bute’s resignation. Wilkes took a large swipe at the king even as he disclaimed doing so. “The King’s speech,” he wrote, “has always been considered by the legislature, and by the public at large, as the speech of the Minister.” The minister in question was the new premier, George Grenville, whom Wilkes accused of putting falsehoods in the mouth of the king. The speech asserted that the Paris treaty was honorable to the Crown and beneficial to the people; this was a lie, Wilkes alleged. The speech asserted that the peace was beneficial to Britain’s allies; another lie, Wilkes asserted. The treaty had been ratified not on its merits but by bribery, Wilkes claimed. The chief culprit—Bute—had been forced from office, but the current ministers
were no better: “tools of despotism and corruption.” Summarizing, Wilkes registered indignation and wonder that “a prince of so many great and amiable qualities” could be persuaded “to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures, and to the most unjustified public declarations.”

Whatever
The North Briton
Number 45 said about Grenville and the other ministers, it put George in the position of choosing between being a ventriloquist’s dummy and a liar. The king felt no obligation to accept such a choice; instead he signed a general warrant (one that did not name a particular individual) for the arrest of those responsible for the publication of the noxious issue. The charge was seditious libel. The sweep yielded more than two score prisoners before Wilkes was apprehended. He was clapped in irons and tossed into the Tower of London.

But the arrests backfired. A judge freed Wilkes on grounds that his arrest violated his immunity as a member of Parliament. Juries threw out charges against the other prisoners. Wilkes and the others sued the ministers who signed the general warrant; Wilkes won £1,000, while several others received smaller amounts, and the use of general warrants was declared illegal.

But Wilkes’s scrapes were far from over. Some years earlier he had collaborated on an obscene, blasphemous, and likely libelous parody of Pope’s
Essay on Man,
entitled
Essay on Woman.
Through theft and bribery the authorities acquired copies of the proof sheets. These were read to Parliament, with some gusto, by Lord Sandwich, formerly a Wilkes ally but now a member of the government. (“Satan preaching against sin,” remarked one listener of Sandwich’s performance.) Wilkes’s ouster from Parliament seemed certain, prosecution probable. Hoping to add injury to insult, a partisan of Bute’s challenged Wilkes to a duel. Wilkes was considerably less skilled with pistol than pen; moreover, his challenger had been practicing. This was frowned upon among gentlemen, but few gentlemen were willing to include Wilkes among their number.

Yet the masses loved him. Mobs crowded the streets shouting “Wilkes and Liberty!”; the scrawled numeral “45” decorated walls across the city. Nor did enthusiasm diminish when Wilkes, assessing the weight of the forces arrayed against him, decamped from London on Christmas Eve of 1763 and fled to France. Three weeks later he was formally expelled from Commons; the following month a (specific) warrant was sworn out for his arrest. When he refused to return to England he was officially declared an outlaw. And thus was completed, according to the
Annual Register,
“the ruin of that unfortunate gentleman.”

Events
would reveal the gross prematurity of this judgment, but it was one Franklin shared. Writing at the time of Wilkes’s expulsion from Parliament, Franklin told Richard Jackson he was “pleased to find a just resentment so general in your House against Mr. W.’s seditious conduct.”

Gratified though he was at Wilkes’s comeuppance, Franklin could hardly take comfort from other developments in British politics. Strahan, as promised, provided Franklin a firsthand view. Bute’s fall, Strahan asserted, was richly deserved. “I am sorry to tell you that my countryman [both were Scots] has shewn himself altogether unequal to his high station. Never did a ministry, in our memory, discover so much weakness. They seem to have neither spirit, courage, sense, nor activity, and are a rope of sand.” Pitt, the leader of the opposition, was no better. Citing recent insults the former prime minister had hurled against constituents who differed with him on the merits of the peace treaty, Strahan said, “Did you ever before hear of such an instance of arrogance?” Strahan went on to call Pitt “this imperious tribune of the people,” a man “of whose honesty I entertain no good opinion, and whom I strongly suspect to be a secret abettor and fomentor of the present unreasonable discontents, and of that contempt with which the king and his government hath of late been treated.”

Strahan saw little prospect of improvement. The “jaws of faction” were closing on the king, who was well meaning but “not possessed of any striking talents or any great degree of sagacity.” Strahan closed gloomily: “In my mind the danger is greater than most people seem to apprehend.”

Such a statement from the most ardent advocate of Franklin’s relocation to England could not but call the project into question. “Surely you would not wish me to come and live among such people,” Franklin said half jokingly. “You would rather remove hither, where we have no savages but those we expect to be such.”

Yet Franklin hoped for better, as he usually did. “I think your madmen will ere long come to their senses, and when I come I shall find you generally wise and happy.”

If Strahan
spied danger in political corruption, Richard Jackson detected it in political reform. At the end of the war with France and
Spain the Grenville ministry undertook to reorganize the finances of the empire and reinstitute responsibility where profligacy had reigned. Government debt had reached record levels, largely from the cost of the war. Government spending, which included enormous sums devoted to debt service, was projected for 1764 at twice what it had been just twenty-five years earlier. Grenville, head of the Treasury as well as premier, scrutinized both sides of the ledger in seeking a solution to the country’s financial problems; he would raise revenues even as he curtailed expenditures.

Revenues meant taxes. Inhabitants of Britain paid a discouraging diversity of taxes, of which the most important were property taxes, import taxes, and excise taxes. By the end of the war the British people bore about all the taxes they or their leaders thought they could stand; indeed, an excise on cider touched off demonstrations in Exeter and the burning of Bute in effigy.

If Britons in Britain could not be made to pay more, perhaps Britons across the sea could be. From the east side of the Atlantic the Americans looked like the chief winners of the war, which freed them from fear of the French. They were taxed lightly by British standards, and little of what they paid went to imperial purposes, broadly construed. It certainly occurred to Grenville and others contemplating new sources of revenue that the Americans, unlike those boisterous cider-makers in Exeter, could not vote for members of Parliament. This rendered new American taxes constitutionally suspect, in that a cardinal tenet of English constitutionalism insisted that taxes could be levied only by the representatives of those who would pay. But it made such taxes politically tempting. If the Americans complained, who would be listening?

As part of the Grenville program, Charles Townshend, the president of the Board of Trade, proposed a change in the duty on molasses imported into America from non-British sources—meaning, for the most part, the French and Spanish West Indies. For thirty years the tax had been six pence per gallon; Townshend recommended a reduction to two pence. This may have seemed like a gift to the Americans but decidedly was not. At six pence the duty had been widely evaded, via smuggling and bribery of customs officials; at two pence importers might actually pay it, for honesty would then become competitive with criminality. It would certainly be so if, as London threatened, it cracked down on bribery in the customs ranks and sent warships to patrol the coasts.

“I fear something relating to America will be done very much against my opinion,” Jackson wrote Franklin regarding the molasses proposal. “But I shall endeavour to prevent it by all the means in my power both in
the House and out of the House.” The government and British molasses-makers were too strong to prevent some such change as Townshend proposed, but Jackson would try to mitigate the ill effects. “I shall only say that though I wish the duty on foreign molasses was but 1
d.
I shall not oppose a duty of 2
d.
a gallon.”

In the event, Jackson’s efforts were not simply unsuccessful but perhaps counterproductive. By the time the Townshend proposal became the Sugar Act of 1764, the duty on foreign molasses had been increased to three pence per gallon. The measure also levied a fee on foreign wine and certain luxury goods, including silk from the East Indies.