John Wilkes and the Hellfire Club (By David McCulloch)
John Wilkes (17 October 1725 – 26 December 1797) was a British journalist and politician, as well as a magistrate, essayist and soldier. He was also an MP from 1757 to 1790. A noted leader of the Radical wing of the Whigs in Parliament for 20 years, he was instrumental in persuading the government to publish daily accounts of parliamentary debates. During the American War of Independence, he supported the rebels prominently, making himself hugely popular in the American colonies. After 1780, however, he ordered the London militia to open fire and kill many during the Gordon Riots. During his life, he earned a reputation as a libertine, and became famous for his connection with the notorious Hellfire Club. The purpose of this article is to discover whether his credentials as a political radical truly stand up to scrutiny, or whether they stem mostly from his tendency to be involved with scurrilous incidents of his time.
Born in Clerkenwell, John Wilkes was the third child of a successful distiller Israel Wilkes Jr. and Sarah Wilkes, née Heaton. He had at least 5 siblings. He was educated in Hertford and then privately, and went to university at Leiden in the Netherlands. He had contacts in early adulthood with Andrew Baxter, a Presbyterian clergyman who greatly influenced Wilkes’ views on religion. Wilkes developed a deep sympathy for religious Noncomformity, despite remaining nominally an Anglican. Rather incongruously, Wilkes also developed a deep patriotism, rushing home to London to defend the capital against the Scottish invaders during the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, before returning to complete his studies in the Netherlands.
In 1747, he married Mary Meade, and came into possession of an estate and income in Buckinghamshire. The couple had one child, Mary (known as Polly), to whom John was utterly devoted. John and Mary however separated in 1756. Wilkes never married again, but he gained a reputation for having many affairs with women, fathering at least two other children. He also declared that “a month’s start of his rival on account of his face” would secure him a successful conquest in any love affair. Wilkes was clearly taking account of his appearance, as he was notoriously ugly. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it “took him only half an hour to talk away his face”. He was well known for his wit, for instance when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: “Naturally,” adding: “And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?”
Wilkes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1749 and appointed High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1754. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the 1754 Aylesbury election but was elected for the same borough in 1757 and again in 1761. In Parliament, Wilkes began his parliamentary career as an enthusiastic supporter of William Pitt the Elder, and particularly Britain’s involvement in the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763. When the Scottish Earl of Bute became Prime Minister in 1762, replacing Pitt, Wilkes started a satirical weekly publication, the “North Briton”, to attack the government. Wilkes was particularly incensed by what he regarded as Bute’s betrayal of British interests in granting overly generous peace terms with France to end the Seven Years’ War. On 5 October 1762, Wilkes fought a duel with Earl Talbot, a prominent follower of Bute. The encounter took place at Bagshot in Surrey at night to avoid attracting legal attention. When the matter later became widely known, it soon became an object of satire.
King George III opened Parliament on 23 April 1763 with a speech endorsing the Treaty of Paris and making peace with France. Wilkes attacked the King’s speech and Bute in an article in issue 45 of “The North Briton”. The King felt personally insulted and ordered the issuing of general warrants for the arrest of Wilkes and his publishers on 30 April. General warrants were unpopular and widely regarded as unlawful. Wilkes gained considerable popular support as he asserted that the King’s warrants were unconstitutional and that his arrest was illegal. At his court hearing, Wilkes argued that, as an MP, parliamentary privilege protected him from arrest on a charge of libel. The Lord Chief Justice ruled in his favour and he was soon restored to his Parliamentary seat. People were soon chanting on the streets of London, “Wilkes, Liberty and Number 45”, referring to the “North Briton” article. This episode probably represented the highpoint of Wilkes’ influence over progressive opinion in England.
A few years earlier (probably around 1760) it is widely believed that Wilkes became a member of the “Knights of St Francis of Wycombe”, also known as the Hellfire Club or the “Medmenham Monks”. This was a gentleman’s club founded by fellow libertine Sir Francis Dashwood, meeting from 1749 until possibly 1766. Such clubs were rumoured to be the meeting places of “persons of quality” who wished to take part in socially unacceptable acts, and members of such clubs were often involved in politics. The club motto was “Fais ce que tu voudrais” (Do whatever you want). Other reputed members apart from Dashwood and Wilkes included Thomas Potter, Robert Vansittart, Paul Whitehead the poet, and William Hogarth, the famous artist. Benjamin Franklin, the mastermind of the American Revolution, is known to have occasionally attended the club’s meetings during his time in England. Originally meeting at the George and Vulture Inn in London, later at Dashwood’s estate at Medmenham Abbey on the Thames, the club eventually required more privacy for its activities, and moved into tunnels under the hills of Dashwood’s country estate at West Wycombe. Proof of Wilkes’ membership sadly does not exist due to the later destruction by fire of the society’s records.
According to Horace Walpole (son to Robert, the first “Prime Minister”), the members’ “practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church sufficiently informed the neighbours of the complexion of these hermits.” Drunkenness, suggestions of Satanism, pagan rituals, and accusations of orgies hung around the club. On one occasion, Wilkes reportedly brought a mandrill monkey, (dressed in a cape and horns, the monkey’s features heightened with dabs of phosphorus) into the “devilish” rituals performed at the club, producing considerable mayhem among the members. Wilkes is rumoured to have delighted in causing embarrassment to other members, especially John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, reputedly once terrifying Montagu during a séance.
The downfall of the “Hellfire Club” was intimately associated with Wilkes’ as well as Dashwood’s fall from grace. In 1762, the Earl of Bute appointed Dashwood Chancellor of the Exchequer in his government, despite Dashwood being widely held to be incapable of understanding anything to do with finance. In the early 1760s “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea” was published by Charles Johnston. It contained stories clearly based on the dubious activities at Medmenham and West Wycombe, and created widespread scandalous gossip and public fascination with the Club. In 1763, Wilkes’ association with the Club was involved in scandal caused by a newly published poem entitled “An Essay on Woman”, intended as a parody of Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man”. The work was almost certainly principally written by fellow club member Thomas Potter, and can probably be dated to before Wilkes became a prominent figure in the Club. The poem was scurrilous, libellous, and bawdy, though hardly pornographic. Nevertheless it was still widely considered disgraceful, and Wilkes’ political opponents subsequently used it to ruin his political career (interestingly Wilkes did not use the defence that the poem was unconnected with him). The Earl of Sandwich, seeking revenge on Wilkes, read the poem to Parliament to denounce Wilkes, despite the hypocrisy of his action, as he too was a member of the Hellfire Club. The House of Lords declared the poem obscene and blasphemous and resolved to expel Wilkes from Parliament. He subsequently fled to Paris before any expulsion or trial. Nevertheless, the legal process continued in Wilkes’ absence and he was found guilty of obscene and seditious libel, being declared an outlaw on 19 January 1764.
By 1767, Wilkes returned to England to escape from his French creditors and to prove his innocence. Wilkes unsuccessfully stood for election in the City of London, but was quickly elected MP for Middlesex (it was still lawful to stand in two different constituencies then), where most of his support was located. He stood trial in April 1768 after waiving his parliamentary immunity and was sentenced to two years imprisonment and fined £1,000. When Wilkes was imprisoned on 10 May 1768, his supporters appeared outside the court chanting “No liberty, no King.” Troops opened fire on the unarmed crowd, killing seven and wounding fifteen, an incident that came to be known as the St George’s Fields Massacre.
After campaigning for a year, Wilkes eventually succeeded in convincing Parliament to cancel the bar to him sitting. While in Parliament, he condemned the Government’s hostility towards the American colonies. In 1770, Wilkes’ return to political acceptance was shown by his appointment as a sheriff of London. In 1774 he became Master of the Joiners’ Company, changing the company’s motto to “Join Loyalty and Liberty”, a political slogan associated with him personally. Shortly afterwards, he was elected as Lord Mayor of London. In 1779 he was elected to the permanent position of Chamberlain of the City of London, a post which he held until his death in 1797.
After 1780, his popularity among lower-class people declined as his growing conservatism was revealed through his actions. During the uprising known as the Gordon Riots against proposed Catholic Emancipation, Wilkes was in charge of the soldiers defending the Bank of England from the angry mobs. He ordered the troops to fire into the crowds, killing many. The working classes of London, who had previously seen Wilkes as a “man of the people”, then criticised him as a hypocrite; his middle-class support was scared off by the rioters and Wilkes’ violent response. While he was returned as MP for Middlesex in 1784, he lost support consistently as the decade wore on so that by the next election in 1790, he withdrew his candidacy. This marked the end of his active political career.
Consistent with his more conservative position, Wilkes was publicly critical of The French Revolution in 1789. This view was more associated with conservative figures, such as Edmund Burke, who had nevertheless also campaigned like Wilkes for American Independence. This move to the right was common among former radical and Enlightenment thinkers at the time of the wars against France in the 1790s.
Statue of John Wilkes (Fetter Lane, London)
Wilkes died at his home at 30 Grosvenor Square, Westminster, London on 26 December 1797. His body was buried in a vault in Grosvenor Chapel , South Audley Street, London on 4 January 1798.
Wilkes has often been seen as a hero to political radicals in Britain and North America. His struggle convinced many that the British constitution was being subverted by a corrupt administration, which was a significant idea in the early development of the ideals of the American Revolution and English Radicalism. Although an undoubtedly significant figure in the fervid political atmosphere of the 1760s and 1770s in England, Wilkes’ long term impact has perhaps been exaggerated by some. It is impossible to ignore his rapid transition from a campaigner for radical change to a supporter of the status quo once he had gained an entrenched position in the administration of London.
Interestingly, if he is known today, it is probably as a member of a scandalous club to which we cannot even prove his membership. Contemporary culture, however, continues to be fascinated with the Hellfire Club: a 1960 British film named after it; mentions in Marvel comics and the film “X-Men – First Class”; allusions in the writings of Robert Graves, Jerome K. Jerome and Ian Fleming; and mentions in TV shows such as “The Avengers”, “Blackadder the Third” and “Stranger Things”. A desire among the public for influential figures to be prone to secretive and illicit activities has consistently acted as a motor for interest in the “Hellfire Club”. Amusingly, The West Wycombe Caves in which the “Medmenham Monks” once met are now a tourist site known as the “Hell Fire Caves”. The attraction is highly rated (four stars) by users of TripAdvisor. Perhaps the satirical side of Wilkes, possibly his most attractive characteristic, would have appreciated this.
This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and David McCulloch. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
