The Great Cat Massacre (24 page)

Wilkes’s enemies – and there were plenty of them – got hold of the verses. One such man was John Montagu, Earl Sandwich, who had a personal axe to grind: Sandwich was a fellow member of the Hellfire Club and Wilkes had apparently embarrassed him with a prank during one of the Club’s meetings, possibly involving a monkey dressed as Satan. Sandwich read the poem out to the House of Lords – perhaps the only time such language has been heard in that chamber
– resulting in a declaration of blasphemy (a debatable claim) and obscenity (it would be hard to argue with that one). Upon hearing the decision, Wilkes, not fancying another stint in the Tower, fled to Paris. A trial was held
in absentia
and he was found guilty of obscene and seditious libel.

In 1764 the case against Wilkes and the
North Briton
was also heard. By this time, Wilkes was in France and he had a quandary: if he failed to return he couldn’t defend himself but if he returned to Britain he would be arrested. He stayed where he was.

For refusing to appear in court, the government declared him an outlaw, meaning that he could be shot on sight and the only thing his killer would get would be a pat on the back. The
Annual Register
wrote that the declaration ‘completed the ruin of that unfortunate gentleman’.

Four years later, however, Wilkes was broke and had to return to Britain. Not one to slip into obscurity, he decided to meet his opponents head-on by standing in the forthcoming general election. And, on 28 March 1768, he duly became the member for the County of Middlesex. London went mad for Wilkes. His supporters charged about the streets once more crying ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ and writing the number 45 – the number of his famous pamphlet – on every surface.

Still an outlaw, however, he handed himself in to the Court of the King’s Bench. But the presiding judge, too scared to arrest John Wilkes, ruled that, since no officer had brought him in, he was invisible to the court. It took Wilkes a week to arrange his own arrest and detention while he waited for the case against his outlawry to be heard.

Even behind bars, he caused chaos. During his incarceration, a number of his supporters surrounded the prison, chanting, ‘No justice, no peace!’ – at which point an altercation arose with the troops stationed there. The soldiers shot a volley of bullets, killing six of Wilkes’s men and injuring 18 others. They then broke into a tavern and killed another man whom they took to be one of the ringleaders. A coroner’s jury found the soldiers guilty of murder, but a grand jury overturned the verdict. It was clear there would be no justice for Wilkes or his supporters.

Perhaps the febrile atmosphere that followed was the reason the government decided to clear Wilkes, declaring there had been a technical error in the language of the original writ of outlawry. On the other hand, he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for the original libel.

Things have changed in the last 200-odd years and the King’s Bench Prison of those days would hardly be recognised as a house of correction now. The wealthier denizens lived in something like a gated community, with their own suites of rooms, servants, coffee house and tavern. Visitors of both sexes came and went and many females arrived to entertain Wilkes in the way he enjoyed most.

Still the government wanted to put a stop to Wilkes and had him thrown out of the Commons on the basis that he had been an outlaw at the time of the election. But his expulsion resulted in a by-election at which no other candidate had the nerve to stand against him. Wilkes was re-elected. The Commons expelled him again; he was elected again – the voters were beginning to enjoy this. Once more expelled, once more he put himself up for
election – but this time he had an opponent, one Henry Luttrell, who was clearly a government and King stooge. Once again, the people of Middlesex happily voted for Wilkes in their droves, defeating Luttrell by 1,143 votes to 296, but the House of Commons declared any votes for Wilkes had been ‘thrown away’ and Luttrell ‘should have been returned’, thus giving him the seat that Wilkes had won handsomely. Luttrell, an Irishman, was rewarded with the Adjutant Generalcy for Ireland.
**

After this odd interpretation of voters’ preferences, the politician and historian Edmund Burke imitated the language of the popular playbills of the time, describing it as ‘the fifth act of a revenge tragic-comedy acted by His Majesty’s servants, at the desire of several persons of quality, for the benefit of Mr Wilkes and at the expense of the constitution’.

This was the spark that lit the dry hay under the corrupt, pocketed government that Britain had for so long been labouring under. It had been a merry game for the electorate of Middlesex, going to the polls every five minutes to re-elect their choice of MP. But now Parliament and the King had gone one step further and imposed a man they disliked upon the voters. Across the country, the latent forces of popular democracy were awoken – signatures were collected on petitions, public meetings held, speeches were made in taverns and coffee houses. The Civil War may have asserted the superiority of Parliament over the will of the King, but Wilkes and Liberty was asserting the superiority of the
electorate over the entire corrupt Establishment. Sixty thousand people signed the petition. There were even expressions of support from political groups in the American colonies, perhaps encouraging them in their own growing interest in throwing off the shackles of taxation without representation – the South Carolina Assembly sent Wilkes 10,000 South Carolina pounds, equivalent to £1,500.

The King’s speech to Parliament that year did not mention Wilkes but it did have a lot to say about the diseases of horned cattle – no doubt an important subject for those interested in cattle, but something of an oversight to those what wanted a representative democratic process.

It took time but eventually Wilkes managed to overturn the bar on him sitting in the Commons and took a seat. Perhaps the government had been worrying over nothing because, when Wilkes was back in Parliament, he did his best to introduce radical bills, but generally without success. His greatest coup was to end Parliament’s censorship of reports of debates and to end the practice of General Warrants, which were a hammer to destroy the Free Press. It was through one of these that Wilkes had originally been arrested for the 45 pamphlet – without it, his fame and entire career may never have happened. Inside Parliament his effect was small, but by keeping him out, the Establishment had pushed the populace to decide it was they who ran the government, not the other way around.

In 1774 Wilkes went on to be elected Lord Mayor of London. He was a liberal – not quite so liberal as he had been but still a damn sight better than what had gone before him – although his record was blackened by the
event of the Gordon Riots, the anti-Catholic violence of 1780. After nights of Catholic homes being attacked, he called out the militia, who promptly shot 257 rioters. They may have had cause, but it was still a massacre. Wilkes’s reputation never recovered.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Lincoln, was a distant relative of his.

In the early nineteenth century, women’s suffrage was not just a minority concern, it was virtually unknown. Some oddballs on the fringes of political thought, such as Jeremy Bentham, thought it might be a nice idea but no one was organising any serious campaign. However, when the Great Reform Act of 1832, which overhauled the House of Commons and extended the franchise a bit, was written, it made the error of specifically stating only men would be allowed to vote.
*
Prior to that, a few women had –
theoretically – been able to vote, as some constituencies were enfranchised on the basis of property ownership, so wealthy women were able to cast a vote. There had been one or two – literally, one or two – cases of it actually happening.

So when their secondary status came to be enshrined in law, rather than just being custom, women and their male supporters had a specific target and cause – the Great Reform Act had actually taken away women’s right to vote. And, having argued for and secured the Reform Act itself, many political reformers were feeling confident and looking for a new project. Why not let the ladies have a bit of a go?

As part of the ensuing debate, in August 1832 Henry Hunt, MP brought a petition from Mary (or Margaret) Smith, a property-owner and spinster, asking that she might be allowed to vote. Some observers were bemused by the idea – the
Age
magazine, for instance, stating: ‘We suspect that the petition is nothing more than an advertisement for a husband.’ Others were more credulous, but it wasn’t until 1865 that female suffrage became a major issue again when the name of Lily Maxwell, a shop owner, was accidentally added to the list of voters in a by-election. Her wealth meant that, under the law prior to the Reform Act, she would, technically, have been eligible to vote. It was the Act that had specifically barred her but because her name had been added to the list she became the first woman to cast a vote after the 1832 Act. A court case ensued and the Court of Common Pleas nullified her vote.

Thanks to the Great Reform Act, women’s suffrage was
now an issue being debated in court – it could no longer be ignored as a triviality not worth discussing.

Queen Victoria, the dumpiest of British monarchs, was not beyond a bit of petty revenge, especially when it came to Flora Hastings.

Lady Flora was one of her ladies-in-waiting and the young Queen disliked her because Flora was rumoured to be having an affair with John Conroy. What was that to Victoria? Well, Conroy was also rumoured to be enjoying an affair with Victoria’s mother, and Victoria hated him both for that and for creating the Kensington System, a series of rules for Victoria’s upbringing, designed to make her weak-willed and dependent upon her mother and Conroy, so that they could be the power behind the throne when she became queen.

Flora, therefore, would be Victoria’s revenge.

When, in 1839, Flora’s waistline began to expand, the Queen pointed to her ‘friendship’ with Conroy and declared that Lady Flora was in a certain condition. She insisted that doctors examine ‘that nasty woman’ to confirm the imminent arrival of a minor Hastings.

Lady Flora’s brother, Lord Hastings, then entered the fray. He informed the
Times
of the Queen’s despicable behaviour and said it was born out of a ‘depraved court’. Their mother, also named Flora, then wrote a furious letter to Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, demanding an end to the ‘atrocious conspiracy’.

Melbourne replied equally furiously: ‘The demand which your ladyship’s letter makes upon me is so unprecedented and objectionable that even the respect due to your ladyship’s sex, rank, family and character would not justify me in more, if indeed it authorises so much, than acknowledging that letter for the sole purpose of acquainting your ladyship that I have received it.’

After it transpired that Flora’s swelling was not a pregnancy, but a cancerous tumour on her liver, which killed her a few months later, the case became a national scandal, hotly talked about in the press, the coffee houses and the theatres. When Victoria attended the opera, she was publicly booed and heckled by the patrons who – quite reasonably – felt she had done wrong by Lady Flora.

The heckling even reached the royal enclosure at Ascot, when the Duchess of Montrose and Lady Sarah Ingestre publicly booed and hissed their monarch. The Queen’s response was to declare: ‘Those two abominable women ought to be flogged.’ They were, however, expressing a public mood. Victoria’s reign had got off to a very unpopular start and might have fallen apart were it not for the fact that she herself fell pregnant a year later.

You have to feel sorry for Spencer Perceval. His sole contribution to British history is to remain the only prime minister to be assassinated. That is not for the want of trying on the part of amateur hit men – a good number of PMs have had their stalkers. But few have experienced
would-be killers so incompetent as Robert Peel’s failed murderer, Daniel M’Naghten.

M’Naghten was probably crazy. On 20 January 1843 he walked up to the Prime Minister’s private secretary, Edward Drummond, in Whitehall and shot him from behind. Drummond died five days later from complications, probably because his doctors ‘treated’ him by draining his blood, as was the unhelpful practice of the time.

M’Naghten, of course, thought he was killing the Prime Minister. It was a case of mistaken identity stemming from the fact that Peel was a generous sort who had chosen not to reside in 10 Downing Street, preferring his own house nearby, and had lent the residence to Drummond as a house-sitter. M’Naghten had been watching Number 10 and concluded that the man who came and went all the time must be the PM.

M’Naghten’s case led to the definition in English law of insanity regarding defendants. He was found not guilty on these grounds and incarcerated in a mental asylum rather than a prison.

Charles Bradlaugh, MP is responsible for atheists being allowed into Parliament, thus undermining the grip that religion had on government in the Victorian era.
Bradlaugh had worked his way up from humble beginnings as a messenger boy in London. Via the Army, he became a solicitor’s clerk, radical atheist and pamphleteer who railed against Christianity. He produced
a journal, the
Free Thinker,
which brought him to the attention of the political classes, and went on to found the National Secular Society in 1866 (two years after publishing a pamphlet entitled ‘A Few Words About The Devil’, which ranks as his most intriguing title). When he was editor of the
Reformer
newspaper, the journal was unsuccessfully prosecuted for blasphemy and sedition, but this clearly didn’t worry the people of Northampton, who elected him to Parliament in 1880.