"Stuarts without End": Wilkes, Churchill, and Anti-Scottishness

Two separate attempts by Scotsmen on the life of John Wilkes in 1763 suggest the general level of antipathy the Scots felt toward Wilkes and indicate the turbulent nature of an increasingly bitter political quarrel. Yet, as Linda Colley remarks, evidence of such antipathy is "usually omitted from English history books, just as Wilkes's forthright hostility to Scotland is often marginalised as a regrettable vulgarity of no real relevance to the movement that gathered around him." The Scottish were correct "in viewing Wilkes as the personification of arrogant English chauvinism," and his cause as "a celebration of a certain kind of Englishness."¹ The 1762–63 campaign, in the North Briton and elsewhere by Wilkes and his friend the poet Charles Churchill, against the administration of John Stuart, Earl of Bute, has indeed often earned a place in "English history books," but more for its end than its means. That end was a debate on personal liberty and freedom of speech that was to prove of huge symbolic importance in the history of British politics. By 1764 Wilkes was outlawed from Britain (he stayed in exile in France until 1768) and had been expelled from the House of Commons. In November 1763, the publication the North Briton, 45 had been voted a seditious libel against George III in the Commons, and the House of Lords had simultaneously voted that Wilkes's parody "An Essay on Woman" was blasphemous and obscene.

The means of the government in obtaining evidence against Wilkes in the latter case do not stand up to scrutiny. Nor, for that matter, do the means pursued by Wilkes and Churchill in their attempt to overthrow Bute's government. Both before and after his departure for France in December 1763, Wilkes was a popular hero, a supposed martyr for liberty at the hands of tyrannical government. This has led to the obscuring of Wilkes's "regrettable vulgarity," which was the repeated use of a common prejudice against Scotland—its customs, its culture, its people and its leading politician, Bute. The ferocity of Wilkes's attack (often aided by Churchill, in both prose and poetry) forms the subject of the present essay. The kind of Englishness in Wilkes's campaign, it will be argued, is an important example of resistance to the concept of Britishness in the eighteenth century. Colley is right to describe it as a "swaggering and intolerant Little English patriotism" (106), yet its importance lies also in the degree of its prejudice: Wilkes and Churchill present a bigoted form of Englishness that ultimately calls itself into question, so anxious and self-conscious are its attempts at defending and defining itself. The prejudices of the movement associated paradoxically with the slogan "Wilkes and Liberty" indicate some of the problems of defining English identity in the 1760s; this strange episode in British history is full of such contradictions.

I

There was nothing ambiguous about the subjection of Bute, a man doing a political job apparently against his will, to a ferocious level of acrimony, insult, and assault, both verbal and physical. The reasons behind the rise of the third Earl of Bute (1713–92) are well known. As tutor to George III before his accession in the 1750s, Bute was the new king's intellectual companion, ideal chief minister, and, in a mocking term used repeatedly against him, "favorite." The meteoric rise of the "favorite," from Groom of the Stole in November 1760, to First Lord of the Treasury in May 1762, his negotiation of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years' War (November 1762), and the political ideology underlying his relationship with the king have all been the subject of extensive discussion.² More important to my argument is the level of vituperation against him during his tenure, and its motives, with specific reference to his nationality. Modern opinions of Bute are more moderate than those of his contemporaries: for Karl Schweizer, "Bute entered public office out of duty, not out of ambition, and yet, once committed, he proved competent and conscientious in adverse conditions."³ Yet his countryman...