CHAPTER VI.
JOHN WILKES AS A POPULAR REPRESENTATIVE.
In the whole history of electioneering no figure is more conspicuous than that of John Wilkes, the quondam patriot, who was by the attacks of others brought into a prominence which neither his abilities nor character justified.
Hogarth commenced hostilities against Wilkes, Churchill (The North Briton), and Beardmore (The Monitor) by attacking their publications incidentally in that unfortunate attempt at political satire of his, christened “The Times,” Plate I. (1762). It will be remembered that the figure of the artist’s patron, Lord Bute, is there glorified as a Scotch husbandman engaged in extinguishing a general conflagration; while a frenzied man, intended to personify the Duke of Newcastle, is driving a wheel-barrow filled with Monitors and North Britons against the legs of the zealous Scot, who, unmoved, continues his exertions to subdue the threatened ruin of the State. Pitt and Lord Temple are further assailed—not too cleverly—in this view of the “Times.” On this provocation, Wilkes and Churchill naturally took up the cudgels in their own defence, and certainly gave Hogarth cause for irritation. He prepared the second plate of “The Times,” with a further pictorial castigation of his now-declared adversaries, but was induced to reconsider the policy of publishing the plate, and thus giving greater offence; consequently it was not until thirty years later, when the quarrel was almost forgotten, and the opponents had long been at rest,[49] that the world was favoured with a view of this equally laboured satire, when it was published by the Boydells at their Shakespeare Gallery, with the collected works of W. Hogarth (May 29, 1790). George III., Bute, Temple, Lord Mansfield, and others, are introduced in this version, but the portion which is pointed at Wilkes, in continuation of this “rough bout of clever men clumsily throwing dirt at each other,” as it has been described, is the figurement of Miss Fanny, of “Cock-lane ghost” notoriety, pilloried and held up to infamy side by side with Wilkes, whose offence is indicated as “Defamation.” On his breast is pinned a copy of the North Briton, the No. 17 which was specially devoted to a base attack upon Hogarth. This incendiary publication is already threatened with flames from the penitential candle held by “Miss Fanny,” his shrouded companion in disgrace. Indignities are showered upon Wilkes in allusion to his involved circumstances; his empty pockets are turned inside out, a school-boy is watering his legs, a woman is trundling a mop over his head, and he is generally regarded with derisive contempt by the crowd.
The crowning effort of Hogarth’s revenge for the abuse showered upon him by both Wilkes and Churchill was the famous etching in which the popular favourite is pilloried to all time as the type and very personification of everything false and sinister, and yet most lifelike as to resemblance; for Wilkes was himself so cynically candid as to admit in after-life that he was “growing more like his portrait every day.” The famous likeness represents Wilkes seated in a chair at a low table, on which is an inkstand and the North Briton, Nos. 17 and 45; he is holding the staff, topped with an inverted vessel to simulate the cap of liberty. Attitude and features are alike expressive, and, as Mr. Stephens has described it, “he leers and squints as if in mockery of his own pretences to patriotism.” When brought up from the Tower, to which Lord Bute’s party had ventured to commit him for the attack in the North Briton, No. 45, Wilkes was tried at Westminster, before Chief Justice Pratt—subsequently eulogized as “the champion of Freedom and Justice,” and better known to fame as Lord Camden,—who caused the prisoner to be discharged, to the frantic delight of the populace. It was on this occasion that Hogarth secured his opportunity of sketching the idol of the people and the thorn of the Court. In a note prefixed to “An Epistle to William Hogarth,” by Churchill, it is averred that when Mr. Wilkes was the second time brought from the Tower to Westminster Hall, Hogarth skulked behind a screen in the corner of the gallery of the Common Pleas; and while Lord Chief Justice Pratt was enforcing the great principles of the Constitution, the painter was employed in caricaturing the prisoner. So popular was this print, issued at one shilling, that Nichols mentions “nearly four thousand copies were worked off in a few weeks.” “The Epistle” referred to was provoked by the etching of John Wilkes, “Drawn from the Life.” Hogarth is said to have felt severely the retort which the vigorous and “bruising” Churchill thought proper to make.
JOHN WILKES, A PATRIOT. AFTER HOGARTH.
“Lurking, most ruffian-like, behind a screen,
So plac’d all things to see, himself unseen,
Virtue, with due contempt, saw Hogarth stand,
The murd’rous pencil in his palsied hand;” etc.
To this pasquinade, which revelled audaciously in the realms of libel, and was otherwise a false and indefensible attack on the artist’s private life, Hogarth characteristically replied with his graver; but not to lose time, while his mind was heated by the attack, he utilized a plate on which was already engraved his own portrait and his dog, after the painting now in the National Gallery, and burnishing out those parts which were in his way, he engraved—
“The Bruiser, C. Churchill (once the Revd.!), in the character of a Russian Hercules, regaling himself after having kill’d the monster Caricatura that so sorely gall’d his virtuous friend, the Heaven-born Wilkes.
“‘But he had a Club this Dragon to drub,
Or he had ne’er don’t I warrant ye.’”(Dragon of Wantley.)
