A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 6

Wilkes had wearied of Continental life. His affection for his own country was so earnest and so sincere that, in a letter to the Duke of Grafton, he declared his willingness to bury himself in the obscurity of private life, if he were permitted to return unmolested to England.

The appeal failed to extract a satisfactory reply. The Ministers would make no terms with their ruined foeman. Wilkes then resolved to show that he was not so helpless as his enemies appeared to think him. He published in 1767, in London, a pamphlet, in which he stated his case with indignation, but not without dignity. When the pamphlet had obtained a wide circulation, Wilkes followed {116} it up by appearing himself in London in the February of 1768, at the moment of the general election, and announcing himself as a candidate for Parliament for the City of London. The audacity of this step amazed his enemies and delighted his friends. If it had been taken a little earlier it might have won him the seat. So calm and so wise an observer as Franklin, at least, thought that it would have done so. As it was, though Wilkes came late into the field, and was placed at the bottom of the poll, he secured more than twelve hundred votes, and did, in the conventional phrase too often used to soothe defeat, gain a great moral victory.

The courage of the outlaw had more than revived all the old enthusiasm for him. We know on the authority of Burke that the acclamations of joy with which he was welcomed by the populace were inconceivable, and that the marks of public favor which he received were by no means confined to the lower order of the people. Several merchants and other gentlemen of large property and of considerable interest openly espoused his cause, and a subscription was immediately opened in the City for the payment of his debts. We know on other authority that in an age when betting was the mode the extraordinary betting as to Wilkes's success in his desperate enterprise was actually organized by a certain number of brokers into stock which was quoted on 'Change.

Burke ascribes the reason for the failure to the open voting. The electors were obliged, he said, to record their names, and the consequences of an opposition to great corporate and commercial connections were too obvious not to be understood.

[Sidenote: 1768--Wilkes as Member for Middles.e.x]

As soon as Wilkes knew of his defeat in the City, he struck a yet bolder note for success. He came forward at once as a candidate for the County of Middles.e.x in opposition to the established interest of two gentlemen who had represented it for several years, who were supported by the whole interest of the Court and who had considerable fortunes and great connections in it. But Wilkes, too, had powerful abettors. The Duke of Portland was one of his most prominent supporters. His old friend Temple {117} supplied the freehold qualification which was then essential for a Parliamentary candidate.

Horne, the Rector of Brentford, where the election took place, gave all his great influence and all his gifts to the service of Wilkes with the same devotion that had formerly animated Churchill. Horne was not altogether an admirable character, and his enthusiasm for Wilkes had hitherto awakened no corresponding enthusiasm on Wilkes's part. But Horne was invaluable at a crisis like the Middles.e.x election. He had the eloquence of a sophist; he had the strategy of a tactician; he was endowed with an unconquerable energy, an indomitable determination. He was exceedingly popular in his parish; he caught the mood of the popular party, and he happened to be on the right side. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the services he rendered to Wilkes and to the cause of which Wilkes was the figurehead by his work in the Middles.e.x election. The zeal of Horne, the friends.h.i.+p of Temple, the daring of Wilkes carried the day. It was no ordinary victory. It was an astonis.h.i.+ng triumph. As Burke pointed out, the same causes did not operate upon the freeholders at large which had prevented the inclinations of the livery of London from taking effect in Wilkes's favor, and the result of the polling on March 28 was that Wilkes was returned to Parliament by a prodigious majority. Wilkes polled 1290 votes. Mr. George Cooke, the Tory candidate, who had been the representative for eighteen years, only scored 827, and Sir W.

Beauchamp Procter, the Whig candidate, only got 807 votes.

There was great excitement in London when the result of the election was known. It pleased the popular voice to insist that every window should be illuminated in honor of Wilkes's triumph, and all windows that were not lit up were unhesitatingly broken. Those persons who were known to be Wilkes's princ.i.p.al opponents received the special attentions of the mob. Lord Bute's house had to stand a siege; so had the house of Lord Egremont, who had signed the warrant for Wilkes's committal; so had other houses which were either known to belong to the {118} opponents of the hero or showed themselves to be such by their darkened windows. All such windows were instantly broken, to the joy of the glaziers, who declared that a Middles.e.x election was worth any number of Indian victories. The mob had it all its own way, for the strength of the constabulary had been drafted off to Brentford in expectation of rioting there which never took place. But the mob did not abuse its triumph. It was in its playful, not its dangerous mood.

It stopped the carriages of the gentry, made the occupants cheer for Wilkes and Liberty, scrawled the number Forty-five upon the polished panels, broke the gla.s.ses, but in the main let the carriage-owners go unmolested. The Duke of Northumberland was forced to toast the popular favorite in a mug of ale. One ludicrous occurrence very nearly became an international episode. The Austrian Amba.s.sador, Count Hatzfeldt, famed for his stateliness, for his punctiliousness in ceremonial, fell a victim to popular misapprehension. The mob that surrounded his coach took him, unhappily, for a Scotchman, either because of his stiffness of demeanor or because they could not understand what he was saying.

To be thought Scotch was a bad thing for any man in the hands of a mob that howled for Wilkes, that howled against Bute. The Austrian Amba.s.sador was dragged from his carriage and held uplifted in sufficiently uncomfortable fas.h.i.+on while the magic number Forty-five was chalked upon the soles of his shoes. He was no further hurt; if he had been a more prudent man he would have grinned at the mischance and said no more about it. But he chose to consider his dignity and the dignity of his empire affronted by the follies of a crowd. He lodged a formal complaint with the English Government. The English Government could do nothing more than express regret with such gravity as it could muster. As for the irreverent rogues who had laid their hands upon the feet of the representative of a friendly State, it was not in the power of the Government to punish them. The earth has bubbles as the water has, and they were of them.

For two days the town was practically at the mercy of {119} the Wilkite mob. The trainbands were called out by the Mayor, who was an ardent courtier, but the men of the trainbands were, for the most part, no less ardent Wilkites. They lent their drums to swell the noise of Wilkes's triumph; they could not be counted on to lend their muskets to the suppression of Wilkes's partisans. Even the regular troops were not, it was thought, to be relied upon in the emergency. It was said here that certain regimental drummers had beaten their drums for Wilkes; it was said there that soldiers had been heard to declare that they would never fire upon the people.

The fury of the Ministry, and especially the fury of the King, flamed high. The King's heat was increased by a letter which Wilkes had addressed directly to him on his return to England. In this letter Wilkes made a not undignified appeal for the King's mercy and clemency, complained of the wicked and deceitful acts of revenge of the late Ministry, and a.s.sured the sovereign of his zeal and attachment to his service. To this letter, naturally, no direct reply was made. The form that the King's answer took was to insist that all the strength of the Government must be used against Wilkes in order that he should be driven from that Parliament to which the electors of Middles.e.x had dared to return him.

[Sidenote: 1768--Wilkes in prison]

In the mean time the force of the law was slowly exerted against Wilkes. Wilkes had promised that on the first day of the term following his arrival in England he would present himself at the Court of King's Bench. He kept his promise and surrendered himself on April 20. The judges of the King's Bench seem to have been paralyzed by the position. It took them a whole week to decide that they would refuse Wilkes bail--a whole week, every day, every hour of which served to make Wilkes's cause better known and Wilkes himself more popular.

Wilkes went to prison under the most extraordinary circ.u.mstances. His journey from Westminster to Bishopsgate was more like a royal progress than the pa.s.sage of a criminal and an outlaw. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Wilkes was able to detach himself from the zeal of the populace {120} and get quietly into his prison. The prison immediately became an object of greater interest than a royal palace.

Every day it was surrounded by a dense crowd that considered itself rewarded for hours of patient waiting if it could but get a glimpse of the prisoner's face at a window. All this show of enthusiasm exasperated the ministers and drove them into the very acts that were best calculated to keep the enthusiasm alive. On the day of the opening of Parliament, May 10, the Government, under the pretence of fearing riot, sent down a detachment of soldiers to guard the King's Bench Prison, in St. George's Fields. This was in itself a rash step enough, but every circ.u.mstance attending it only served to make it more rash. As if deliberately to aggravate the popular feeling, the regiment chosen for this pretence of keeping the peace was a Scotch regiment. At a moment when everything Scotch was insanely disliked in London such a choice was not likely to insure good temper either on the part of the mob or on the part of the military. That good temper was not intended or desired was made plain by a letter written by Lord Weymouth, the Secretary of State, to the local magistrate, urging him to make use of the soldiers in any case of riot.

What followed was only what might have been expected. The crowd, irritated by the non-appearance of Wilkes, still more irritated by the presence of the soldiery, threatened, or was thought to threaten, an attack upon the prison. Angry words were followed by blows; the brawl between the mob and the military became a serious conflict. A young man named Allan, who seems to have had nothing to do with the scuffle, was killed in a private house by some of the soldiers who had forced an entrance in pursuit of one of their a.s.sailants. Then the Riot Act was read; the troops fired; half a dozen of the rioters were killed, including one woman, and several others were wounded.

News of this bad business intensified the angry feeling against the Government. A Scotch soldier, Donald Maclean, was put on his trial for the murder of Allan. His {121} acquittal caused an indignation which deepened when the colonel of the regiment presented him with thirty guineas on behalf of the Government. This was taken as an example of the determination of the Crown to silence the voice of the people with the weapons of Scotch mercenaries. Pamphlets, speeches, sermons, all were employed to stimulate the general agitation and to brand with atrocity the conduct of the Ministry. The tombstone erected over the murdered man Allan chronicled his inhuman murder "by Scottish detachments from the Army," and quoted from Proverbs the words, "Take away the wicked from before the King."

[Sidenote: 1768--The Ministry on its defence]

The ministers, on their side, were not slow to defend themselves.

Burke, with his usual fairness, has stated their case for them when he tells how they painted in the strongest colors the licentiousness of the rabble and that contempt of all government which makes it necessary to oppose to a violent distemper remedies not less violent. This is, of course, the excuse of every overbearing authority, which, having aroused irritation by its own mismanagement, can conceive of no better way of allaying that irritation than the bayonet and the bullet. The Ministry and the advocates of the Ministry maintained that the unhappy disposition of the people was such that juries under the influence of the general infatuation could hardly be got to do justice to soldiers under prosecution, unless Government interposed in the most effectual manner for the protection of those who had acted under their orders.

They further urged that, in view of the danger of the insolence of the populace becoming contagious with the very soldiery, it was necessary for them to keep those servants firm to their duty by new and unusual rewards. "Whatever weight," says Burke, dryly, "might have been in these reasons, they were but little prevalent, and the Ministry became by this affair and its concomitant circ.u.mstances still more unpopular than by almost any other event." But it must in fairness be admitted that, foolish, stubborn, and even brutal as the King's ministers showed themselves to be, their position was a very difficult one.

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It was well open to the Government to urge, and to urge with truth, the peculiar lawlessness of the hour. It is an effective example of the ineffectiveness of a mere policy of coercion that, at a time when the penal laws of Great Britain were ferocious to a degree that would have disgraced Dahomey, the laws were so frequently defied, and defied with impunity. The laws might be merciless, even murderous, but the Executive had not always the power to compel respect or to enforce obedience. Among the lower cla.s.ses in the great city, and not merely that portion of the lower cla.s.ses who are qualified by the appellation of the dangerous cla.s.ses, but in strata where at least a moderate degree of civilization might be hoped for, an amount of savagery, of lawlessness, and of cruelty prevailed that would have not ill become the pirates of the Spanish Seas or the most brutal of Calabrian brigands. The hideous inst.i.tution of the pillory stimulated and fostered all the worst instincts of a mob to whose better instincts no decent system of education sought to appeal. Ignorance, and poverty, and dirt brooded over the bulk of the poorer population, to breed their inevitable consequences. Murder was alarmingly common. Riots that almost reached the proportions of petty civil wars were liable to arise at any moment between one section of the poorer citizens and another.

The horrors of the Brownrigg case show to what extent l.u.s.t of cruelty could go. The large disbandments that are the inevitable consequence of peace after a long war had thrown out of employment, and thrown upon the country, no small number of needy, unscrupulous, and desperate men, only too ready to lend a hand to any disturbance that might afford a chance of food and drink and plunder.

[Sidenote: 1752--Mob violence in London]

Mob law ruled in London to an extraordinary degree during the whole of the eighteenth century. It reached a high pitch, but not its highest pitch, at the time when the watchword was Wilkes and Liberty. London was to witness bitterer work, bloodier work than anything which followed upon the Middles.e.x election and the imprisonment of the popular hero. But for the time the audacity of the mob seemed to have gone its farthest. The temper of the {123} mob was insolent, its insolence was brutal. It hated all foreigners--and among foreigners it now included Scotchmen--and it manifested its hatred in vituperation, and when it dared in violence. A white man would hardly be in more danger in a mid-African village than a foreigner was in the streets of London. There is a contemporary account written by a French gentleman who travelled in England, and who published his observations on what he saw in England, which gives a piteous account of the barbarous incivility to which he, his friends, and his servants were exposed when they walked abroad. The mob that jeered and insulted the master very nearly killed the servant for the single offence of being a Frenchman.

But the brutalities of the mob were not limited to strangers. The citizens of London fared almost as badly if not quite as badly as any Frenchman could do. Fielding gives a picture in one of his essays of the lawless arrogance which was characteristic of the rabble. He gave to the mob the t.i.tle of the Fourth Estate in an article in the _Covent Garden Journal_ for June 13, 1752, and in another article a week later he painted an ironical picture of the brutal manners and overbearing demeanor of the mob. "A gentleman," he wrote, "may go a voyage at sea with little more hazard than he can travel ten miles from the metropolis." On the river, on the streets, on the highways, according to Fielding, mob manners prevailed, and brutal language might at any moment be followed by brutal actions. When the largest allowance is made for the exaggeration of the satirist, enough remains to show that the condition of London in the second half of the eighteenth century was disorderly in the extreme. People who ventured on the Thames were liable to the foulest insults, and even to be run down by those who were pleased to regard the stream as their appanage, and who resented the appearance on it of any who seemed better dressed than themselves.

Women of fas.h.i.+on were liable to be hustled, mobbed, insulted if they ventured in St. James's Park on a Sunday evening. No one could walk the streets by day without the probability of being annoyed, or by night without the risk of {124} being knocked down. After painting his grim picture in the Hogarth manner, Fielding concluded grimly that he must observe "that there are two sorts of persons of whom this fourth estate do yet stand in some awe, and whom, consequently, they have in great abhorrence: these are a justice of the peace and a soldier. To these two it is entirely owing that they have not long since rooted all the other orders out of the commonwealth."

[Sidenote: 1769--Wilkes's expulsion from the Commons]

The Government hoped that the longer Wilkes lay in prison, the more chance there was that the enthusiasm for him would abate. But in this hope the Government were disappointed. Even in the ranks of the ministers the King was not able to find unswerving agreement to his demands for Wilkes's expulsion from Parliament. Outside Parliament the agitation was not only undiminished, but was even on the increase.

This was shown conclusively by a fresh event in connection with Middles.e.x. Cooke, who was the colleague of Wilkes in the representation of the county, died. Serjeant Glynn, who had made himself conspicuous as the champion of Wilkes and the advocate of the popular cause, came forward to contest the vacant seat, and carried the const.i.tuency in spite of the most determined efforts on the part of the royal faction to defeat him. There were more riots, more deaths on the popular side, more trials, more convictions for murder and more pardons of the condemned men. The agitation which had been burning at a steady heat blazed up into a flame. Wilkes made every use of the opportunity.

He had succeeded in getting a copy of the letter which Lord Weymouth had sent to the magistrates, the letter in which Lord Weymouth had practically urged the magistrates to fire upon the people. Wilkes immediately sent it to the _St. James's Chronicle_, a tri-weekly independent Whig journal which had been started in 1760. The _St.

James's Chronicle_ printed the letter, and Wilkes's own letter accompanying it, in which he accused the Ministry of having planned and determined upon the "horrid ma.s.sacre of St. George's Fields." The letter, said Wilkes, "shows how long a h.e.l.lish project can be brooded over by some infernal {125} spirits without one moment's remorse." It may be admitted that if the language of Wilkes's enemies in the two Houses was strong even to ruffianism, Wilkes could and did give them as good as he got in the way of invective and vituperation.

The Government, goaded into fury by this daring provocation, resolved to make an example of the offender. Lord Barrington brought the letter formally before the House of Commons. The House of Commons immediately voted it a libel, and summoned Wilkes from his prison to the bar of the House. On February 3, 1769, Wilkes appeared before the Commons. With perfect composure he admitted the authors.h.i.+p of the letter to the _St.

James's Chronicle_, and, with an audacity that exasperated the House, he proclaimed his regret that he had not expressed himself upon the subject in stronger terms, and added that he should certainly do so whenever a similar occasion should present itself. "Whenever," he said, "a Secretary of State shall dare to write so b.l.o.o.d.y a scroll, I will through life dare to write such prefatory remarks, as well as to make my appeal to the nation on the occasion." Wilkes found champions in the House of Commons. Burke, Beckford, and many others either defended Wilkes or urged that the matter was not for the House of Commons, but for the law courts to deal with. In the division the Government was triumphant by a majority of 219 against 137, and Wilkes was formally expelled from the House of Commons on the ground, not merely of his comments on the letter of Lord Weymouth, but on account of the Number Forty-five of the _North Briton_ and the "Essay on Woman."

A new writ was issued for the county of Middles.e.x. The county of Middles.e.x promptly re-elected Wilkes without opposition on February 16.

On February 17 the House of Commons again voted the expulsion of Wilkes. This time the House of Commons exceeded its powers and its privileges in adding that the expelled man was incapable of sitting in the existing Parliament. Every blow that the royal party had struck at Wilkes had only aroused stronger sympathy for him; and this illegal act, this usurpation {126} by one House of powers that only belonged to Parliament, caused the liveliest indignation. It was resolved by the friends of Wilkes, and by all who were the friends of the principles with which Wilkes had come to be identified, to fight to the utmost in defence of their const.i.tutional rights, that were now so gravely, so wantonly jeopardized. On March 16 there was a new polling at Brentford, and, as before, Wilkes was returned unopposed. There was, indeed, an effort made by an obscure merchant named Dingley to oppose him, but he could find no freeholder to second him, and he was chivied ignominiously from the scene of the election. On March 17 the House of Commons, for the third time, played what Burke called the tragi-comedy of declaring the election void. A new writ was again issued, and this time the Ministry were resolved that, come what come might, Wilkes should have an opponent. It was not the easiest of tasks to find a man willing to oppose Wilkes's candidature on the hustings at Brentford.

Dingley, the merchant, had experienced the violence of the mob; it was confidently a.s.sumed that any other antagonist would fare very much worse. But the Ministry found their champion in a young officer, Colonel Luttrell, of the Guards, a son of Lord Irnham. Luttrell was a gallant young soldier, a man of that temper which regards all popular agitations with supreme disdain, and of that courage that would face any danger, not merely with composure, but with pleasure. His friends were so apprehensive that he was going to his death that his life was insured, and the gentlemen of the clubs, who were always willing to bet upon any imaginable contingency, betted freely on his chances of surviving his adventure. Wilkes's friends, however, were resolved to disappoint the expectations of their enemies. Thanks to their energy and patience, the election went off with perfect order. Wilkes was, of course, returned at the top of the poll by an enormous majority.

Luttrell came next with less than a quarter of his votes, and an absurd attorney, who had thrust himself into the election at the last moment, came last with a ludicrous poll of five votes.

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[Sidenote: 1769--Lord North and the Wilkes case]

On Thursday, April 13, Wilkes was elected. London was again illuminated, and a great demonstration outside the King's Bench Prison congratulated the hero of the hour on his third triumph. On the following day the House of Commons prepared again to reject Wilkes.

The debate lasted over the Sat.u.r.day--a rare event in those days--and in the early dawning of Sunday morning Colonel Luttrell was declared to be duly elected as the member for Middles.e.x. The ministerial victory was not a very great victory. They had only a majority of 197 votes to 143. It served their turn at a pinch, but it was not a big enough majority to inspire Lord North with the courage to resist a proposal that a fortnight should be allowed to the electors of Middles.e.x in which, if they wished, to pet.i.tion against conduct which practically deprived them of their const.i.tutional rights.

Lord North had many years of public life before him, many years of slumbering and blundering on the treasury bench, before his death in 1792, as Lord Guildford, in a melancholy, premature old age. In those years he was privileged to do a vast amount of injury to his country, uncompensated for by any act to her advantage. Lord North's conduct in the case of Wilkes was not the most foolish act in a career of folly, but it certainly served as an illuminating preface to a chronicle of wasted time. No proofs of the wit that endeared him to his contemporaries have been preserved; his fame for an unalterable urbanity is but an empty memory; his record is only rescued from oblivion by the series of incredible follies which began with the unjust attempt to annihilate Wilkes.

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CHAPTER L.

THE SPIRIT OP JUNIUS.

[Sidenote: 1769--The Letters of Junius]

While all this was going on a new force suddenly made itself felt in English political life. The King and his ministers found themselves attacked by a mysterious and dangerous opponent. On March 21, 1769, a letter was addressed to the _Public Advertiser_, signed "Junius," which marked the beginning of a new era in political literature. At that time the _Public Advertiser_ was the most important paper in London.

It had first appeared under that name in 1752, but it was the direct descendant, through a series of changes of name, of the _Daily Post_, which Defoe had helped to start in 1719. It had its rivals in the _Daily Advertiser_, which was founded in 1724, and the _Gazetteer_ and _New Daily Advertiser_, which was started in 1728. In the course of time both these journals had sunk to be little more than advertising sheets. They gave hardly any news, and they had no political influence. The _Public Advertiser_ was a much more important paper.

It gave abundance of foreign and domestic intelligence, it had original contributions in prose and verse, and its columns were always open to letters from correspondents of all kinds on all manner of subjects.

It was not until the first letter signed with the signature of Junius appeared that the paper a.s.sumed a serious political importance. The writer, whoever he was, who chose that signature had written before in the columns of the _Public Advertiser_. In 1767 Woodfall, the publisher, received the first letter from the correspondent who was to become so famous, and from time to time other letters came signed by various names taken from cla.s.sical nomenclature, such as Mnemon, Atticus, Lucius, Brutus, {129} Domitian, Vindex, and, perhaps, Poplicola. But it was with the adoption of the name of Junius that the real importance of the letters began. They came at a crisis; they spoke for the popular side; they spoke with a bitterness and a ferocity that had hitherto not been attempted in political journalism. The great French writer Taine has said that the letters of Junius, at a time of national irritation and anxiety, fell one by one like drops of fire on the fevered limbs of the body politic. He goes on to say that if Junius made his phrases concise, and selected his epithets, it was not from a love of style, but in order the better to stamp his insult.

Oratorical artifices in his hand became instruments of torture, and when he filed his periods it was to drive the knife deeper and surer, with an audacity of denunciation and sternness of animosity, with a corrosive and burning irony applied to the most secret corners of private life, with an inexorable persistence of calculated and meditated persecution.

The first few letters of Junius were devoted to an altercation with Sir William Draper over the character in the first place of Lord Granby and in the second place of Lord Granby's defender, Sir William Draper. Sir William, though he fought stoutly for his friend and stoutly for himself, did neither himself nor his friend much good by engaging in the controversy. He was no match for the weapons of Junius. He had neither the wit nor the venom of his antagonist. But the great interest of the letters began when Junius, taking up the cause of Wilkes, struck at higher game than Sir William Draper or Lord Granby.

His first letter to the Duke of Grafton was an indictment of the Duke for the conduct of the Crown in the case of a murder trial arising out of the Brentford election. A young man named George Clarke had been killed in a riot and a man named Edward M'Quirk was tried and found guilty of the murder. A kind of hugger-mugger inquest produced a declaration that Clarke's death was not caused by the blow he had received from his a.s.sailant, and in consequence, "whereas a doubt had arisen in our royal breast," the King formally pardoned the murderer by royal {130} proclamation. On this theme Junius lashed Grafton and concluded his letter with a direct allusion to Wilkes. He asked if Grafton had forgotten, while he was withdrawing this desperate wretch from that justice which the laws had awarded and which the whole people of England demanded, that there was another man, the favorite of his country, whose pardon would have been accepted with grat.i.tude, whose pardon would have healed all divisions. "Have you quite forgotten that this man was once your Grace's friend? Or is it to murderers only that you will extend the mercy of the Crown?"

The attack thus daringly begun was steadily maintained. Wilkes had no keener, no acuter champion than Junius. With great skill Junius avoided all appearance of violent partisans.h.i.+p. He was careful to censure much in Wilkes's conduct, careful to discriminate between Wilkes's private character and Wilkes's public conduct. The unjustifiable action of the House of Commons in forcing Colonel Luttrell upon the electors of Middles.e.x gave Junius the opportunity of a.s.sailing Wilkes's enemies without appearing to champion Wilkes to the utterance. Junius admitted that the Duke of Grafton might have had some excuse in his opposition to Wilkes on account of Wilkes's character, and might have earned the approval of men who, looking no further than to the object before them, were not dissatisfied with seeing Mr. Wilkes excluded from Parliament. But, Junius went on to argue, "you have now taken care to s.h.i.+ft the question; or, rather, you have created a new one, in which Mr. Wilkes is no more concerned than any other English gentleman. You have united the country against you on one grand const.i.tutional point, on the decision of which our existence as a free people absolutely depends. You have a.s.serted, not in words but in fact, that representation in Parliament does not depend upon the choice of the freeholders."

[Sidenote: 1769--The ident.i.ty of Junius]

The authors.h.i.+p of the letters of Junius is one of those problems, like the problems of the ident.i.ty of the Man in the Iron Mask, which have never been settled with absolute certainty and which probably never will be settled {131} with absolute certainty. But between absolute certainty and the highest degree of probability there is no very great gulf fixed, and it is in the highest degree probable that the author of the letters was Philip Francis. The letters have been attributed to all manner of men. They were ascribed, absurdly enough, to Wilkes.

Wilkes could write bitterly and he could write well, but he could write neither so well nor so bitterly as Mr. Woodfall's correspondent. Dr.

Johnson, who ought to have known better, thought they were written by Burke. It is his excuse that there did not seem at the time any man of the same ability as the writer of the letters except Burke. But Dr.

Johnson, who had been quick enough to recognize the genius of the anonymous author of the essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful," erred when he thought that the same hand penned the anonymous letters. The prose of Burke was as far above the prose of Junius as the prose of Junius was above the prose of Wilkes. None of the letters surpa.s.ses in ferocity, none approaches in excellence the letter which Burke wrote to the n.o.ble Duke who had slandered him. The letters were attributed to Barre; they were attributed to Lee, who was yet to earn another kind of fame; they were attributed to many hands. To us, at least, it seems clear that they were the work of Philip Francis.