In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

One of the seminal moments of Pulteney’s career occurred at the end of the parliamentary session on 31 May 1725 when he was dismissed from his post as cofferer of the household, on account of his opposition earlier in the session, most notably over the Civil List bill. There followed a period of opposition which ended only with the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole from the Treasury on 3 February 1742. Pulteney then entered the Cabinet, but consistent with his oft-repeated pledge not to take office, he did not take an administrative post. On 14 July, the penultimate day of the 1741-2 session, he was raised to the earldom of Bath, taking his seat in the Lords on the following day.

Pulteney lost a lot of popularity when entering the House of Lords, and he failed twice to attain major office in the years following: he was overlooked in favour of Henry Pelham, as first lord of the Treasury, upon the death of the earl of Wilmington in July 1743 and failed to construct a ministry when the Pelhams and most of their colleagues resigned in February 1746. From then on, his political career is deemed to have been over and he spent his time in ‘retirement’.

However, there was another side to Pulteney, related to the accumulation of power and influence. On the very day he took his seat in the Lords, a bill to prevent the marriage of lunatics received the royal assent. This was managed through the Commons by Pulteney’s long-term associate Phillips Gybbon and served to offer some protection to Pulteney’s investment in the reversion of the estates of the Newport, earls of Bradford.

The heir to the estates of Pulteney’s friend, Henry Newport, 3rd earl of Bradford (1683-1734) was Bradford’s illegitimate son, John Newport, whose mother Ann Smyth was on her deathbed. The reversion of Bradford’s estates had been granted to Pulteney (in return for paying for Newport’s maintenance and the debts of the third earl). Now Newport could not be married off by unscrupulous operators for the estates. Similarly, the third earl’s brother, Thomas Newport, who succeeded to the title as 4th earl of Bradford, was a certified lunatic.

The Bradford estates were destined for Pulteney’s son, William, Viscount Pulteney, who pre-deceased his father in June 1763. Sir Lewis Namier detailed the battle waged by Bath to become lord lieutenant of Shropshire following the accession of George III. Bath used his connexions with the new king and John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, to overcome the claims of his rival, Henry Arthur Herbert, created Baron Herbert of Chirbury in 1743 and promoted earl of Powys in 1748. In 1736 when Ann Smyth had petitioned for a bill to allow her son (at the time known as John Harrison) to be adopt the surname Newport, the first two-names on the drafting committee were Herbert and Pulteney, with Herbert managing the bill through the House.

The death of Viscount Pulteney did not end Bath’s interest in the Bradford estates. On 21 March 1764 a bill received the royal assent allowing the guardians of John Newport to make leases of his estates during his lunacy. It was managed through the Lords by Pulteney’s ally, Samuel Sandys, Baron Sandys, and through the Commons by John Rushout, the future Baron Northwick (son of Pulteney’s friend, Sir John Rushout, 4th bt.).

Bath turned 80 on 22 March, but continued to exhibit considerable vigour, sitting on eight of the 18 days remaining in the session, including on 2 April despite being begged by Lady Elizabeth Montagu ‘not to lose all this lovely morning in the House of Lords’ [https://emco.swansea.ac.uk/emco/letter-view/1297/]. Following the end of the session, Bath travelled to Shropshire, where he reviewed the militia at the end of May. Upon his return to London, he fell asleep in a garden, caught a fever and died on 7 July 1764.

The dynastic implications of Bath’s actions become clear if we look beyond the contemporary criticism levelled at him for leaving his estate to his elderly brother, General Harry Pulteney. In fact, the descent of the estates followed the intentions laid down by Henry Guy in his will of 1711 (which provided the basis of Bath’s wealth). Guy’s list of remainders ended with the male heirs of Daniel Pulteney, Bath’s cousin.

The ultimate beneficiary in 1767 was Frances Pulteney, daughter of Daniel and the wife of William Johnstone, who took the name Pulteney after Frances succeeded to the Pulteney estates. This William Pulteney succeeded his brother (Sir James Johnstone) as 5th baronet in 1794 and spent over 30 years as MP for Shrewsbury. His daughter and heir, Henrietta, was created successively Baroness Bath (1792) and countess of Bath (1803). Upon her marriage to Sir James Murray, 7th bt. in 1794 he also took the name Pulteney.

SNH

As the Prince of Wales was 26 years old, it was assumed that he would be made regent during his father’s incapacity. Although Prime Minister William Pitt agreed that the Prince was the obvious choice for a regency, he was wary of taking this step because of the younger George’s well-known friendships with Opposition politicians. The Opposition, led by Charles James Fox, clamoured for their ‘friend’ to be made regent on the assumption that George III would not recover. Meanwhile, Pitt and the government stalled, insisting that a full regency was unnecessary, as the king would recover in short order. Instead, the government suggested a restricted regency, which would limit the prince’s powers and place some responsibility in the hands of the queen: Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. This approach was immediately viewed by the Opposition and their supporters as unconstitutional, and as an attempt by Pitt to control the country through Queen Charlotte.

Although Queen Charlotte had never shown any interest in influencing British politics before, she suddenly found herself saddled with a reputation for political meddling. Such was the belief that the queen was colluding with Pitt that her second son, the duke of York, confronted her and warned her that if she sided with Pitt, it would cause a falling out with the Prince of Wales.

Although the Prince was often described within the family as the queen’s favourite child, their relationship certainly cooled in the winter of 1788-89. Courtiers were shocked by the way the two eldest princes treated their mother at this time. William Grenville remarked to his brother, the marquess of Buckingham, ‘I could tell you some particulars of the Prince of Wales’s behaviour towards her [the queen] within these last few days that would make your blood run cold.’ [Buckingham and Chandos, 68] Charlotte Papendiek, whose family were in service to the royal family for decades, recalled that the Prince of Wales was ‘very heartless’ as he ‘assumed to himself a power that had not yet been legally given to him, without any consideration or regard for his mother’s feelings.’ [Papendiek, 15] Meanwhile, Queen Charlotte was deeply affected by the king’s erratic behaviour and the seriousness of his illness; one of her attendants, the author Frances Burney, witnessed her pacing in her rooms and crying ‘What will become of me?’ [Burney, 293]

In the press, the queen’s reputation was dragged through the mud by newspapers and satirical prints produced by supporters of the Prince of Wales and the Opposition. One satirical print portrayed the queen looking on with satisfaction as her son was attacked by British and foreign politicians.

Another showed her stepping on the Prince of Wales’s emblem as she left the Treasury with Prime Minister Pitt. The Morning Chronicle cast aspersions on her devotion to her husband, claiming that she was motivated by a desire to take possession of diamonds worth thousands of pounds, not by any wish to help the king.

When it was suggested that the queen would take charge of the royal household and privy purse in a restricted regency, The Times published a comment made by Opposition MP Edmund Burke in Parliament that he ‘by no means thought her [the queen] the most proper person to be entrusted with the giving away of such an immense sum of money.’ In January 1789, as plans for a regency became more urgent, Earl Harcourt recorded a remark made by Burke during a debate: ‘The question is now come to this. Is it to be the House of Hanover, or the House of Strelitz that is to govern the country?’ [Harcourt, 167] For all its hyperbole, Burke’s question had explicitly marked Queen Charlotte, previously a queen of excellent reputation, as a threat to the established order.

Charlotte wasn’t the only woman whose reputation was tarnished by accusations of political meddling in Georgian Britain. Her mother-in-law, Augusta, Princess of Wales, was accused of influencing her son, George III, for decades. There were also long-term rumours of a supposed affair with the former Prime Minister, the earl of Bute. Horace Walpole recorded that during the princess’s funeral procession to Westminster Abbey, Londoners ‘treated her memory with much disrespect.’ [Walpole, 17] Anxiety over the influence of women in politics was expressed in the contemporary phrase ‘petticoat government’, which suggested that male political leaders were being unduly influenced by women, be they mothers, wives, or lovers.

Most critiques of Queen Charlotte portrayed her as a willing follower of Pitt’s schemes, rather than an active agent in her own right, but the queen was not afraid to stand up for herself and the king when necessary. In January 1789, a further scandal of the Regency Crisis unfolded after the queen insisted that a more positive note be included in the king’s daily health bulletin. The bulletins rarely varied, but in early January, Charlotte was informed by one of the royal physicians that the king seemed slightly better. One of her attendants, Lady Harcourt, recorded that when the head physician argued that he saw no improvement, the queen overrode him and insisted that the phrase ‘His Majesty is in a more comfortable state’ be added [Harcourt, 125-8]. When the Opposition heard of this, they insisted on a government inquiry into the credentials of the king’s physicians: their ambition for power through the Prince of Wales depended on George III’s illness being permanent and any suggestion to the contrary was unwelcome.

Fortunately for Queen Charlotte, just as the government was beginning to put in place a restricted regency in February 1789, George III began to show signs of sustained improvement. By March, he was sufficiently well to make a formal speech in Parliament announcing his recovery. Queen Charlotte led the nation in celebrating his recovery, organising Thanksgiving services and ordering official commemorative gifts for loyal attendants. Despite this happy ending and the ensuing national celebrations of the king and his loyal consort, the spectre of the Regency Crisis would taint Queen Charlotte’s public reputation for the rest of her life.

NG

Further Reading
Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, vol.2 (Hurst & Blackett, 1853).
Charlotte Papendiek, Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte: Being the Journals of Mrs Papendiek, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe and Reader to Her Majesty, Edited by Her Granddaughter Mrs Vernon Delves Broughton, vol.2 (R.Bentley & Son, 1887).
Frances Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, Author of Evelina, Cecilia etc, ed. Charlotte Barrett, vol.4 (H. Colburn, 1842-6).
[Anon.] The Restricted Regency (1789).
Morning Herald, 5 January 1789.
The Times, 7 February 1789.
The Harcourt Papers, ed. Edward William Harcourt, vol.4 (Oxford: J. Parker & Co., 1880).
Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third, from the year 1771-1783, ed. John Doran (1859).
Report from the Committee Appointed to Examine the Physicians Who Have Attended His Majesty During His Illness, Touching the Present State of His Majesty’s Health, 13 January 1789 (John Stockdale, 1789).

In March 1771 James Townsend spoke in the Commons of his concerns of secret influence behind the throne. He insisted that:

the Princess Dowager of Wales was the real cause of all the calamities which had befallen this country for these last ten unfortunate years, and that an inquiry should be made into her Royal Highness’s conduct.

Brooke, George III, 266

Since the death of her husband, Prince Frederick, in March 1751 Princess Augusta had played an important role as the symbolic head of the prince’s former political faction at their London residence Leicester House. Even before the prince’s early demise, it had been clear that Augusta was a capable woman. She had arrived from Saxe-Gotha in 1736 with barely a word of English, but rapidly became fluent in her adopted language and demonstrated keen political sensitivity in attempting to win over her new in-laws. Despite this, according to Lord Hervey, although she made a good initial impression on the court, ‘on better acquaintance’ it ‘afterwards soon mouldered away’.  She was rather more successful in her efforts to win over the burghers of Bristol when she and Princess Frederick staged a progress to the west in 1738, talking ‘freely to the ladies in good English, which entirely won their hearts’.

Frederick’s death handed to her additional responsibilities as mother to the heir to the throne and with it she assumed a far greater political importance. In the immediate aftermath of Frederick’s death a regency bill was rushed through Parliament, nominating Augusta regent in the event of George II dying before the new Prince of Wales (the future George III) came of age. A move to have Frederick’s brother, the duke of Cumberland, named regent instead roused bitter opposition, with some making dire comparisons between Cumberland, notorious for his role in the suppression of the ’45 Rebellion, and another ambitious royal uncle, Richard III. As a result it was shelved and a compromise arrived at with the princess regent assisted by a council, including Cumberland.

What confirmed her reputation for nefarious political machinations, though, was Augusta’s relationship with John Stuart, earl of Bute. Contemporary opinion assumed they must be lovers and the caricaturists had a field day depicting the princess cavorting with Bute, often depicted as a jack-boot. The reality was likely more prosaic. The princess found Bute, who had been appointed tutor to Prince George, erudite and interesting and it was to prove the beginning of a formative relationship, which would culminate in Bute’s appointment as Prime Minister shortly after George ascended the throne.

Augusta’s dependence on Bute coincided with her growing discontent with the government of the Pelhams, which had held sway for much of the time since the fall of Walpole. In May 1755 George Bubb Dodington, who had hoped to take a leading role in Prince Frederick’s administration, had he lived, recorded visiting Leicester House. There he found the Princess holding forth on the current state of the government, just over a year after the death of Prime Minister Henry Pelham since which the premiership had been in the hands of Pelham’s brother, the duke of Newcastle. It was quite clear, she insisted,

that the duke of Newcastle could not stand as things were. She desired it might be understood, that her house had no communication with Newcastle House; but not that she said it, because it would be told at St James’s, at which place she desired to avoid all disputes.

Dodington Diary, 319

Later the same month she held a long conference with Dodington about the current state of the government, again laying into the untrustworthiness of Newcastle and the need for wholesale change in the administration, while lamenting ‘there were a hundred good reasons that tied her hands from interfering with the King; those of her children were obvious enough; and if she was to stir, it would make things worse’. [Dodington Diary, 324]

Horace Walpole was insistent that the Princess was acquiring increasingly malign influence. In October 1755 he took evident pleasure in writing to Richard Bentley of a rupture in the royal family on the eve of a new parliamentary session and in pointing the finger at the princess for many of the current political tensions:

In short, the lady dowager Prudence begins to step a little over the threshold of that discretion which she has always hitherto so sanctimoniously observed. She is suspected of strange whims… A strong faction, professedly against the treaties, openly against Mr Fox, and covertly under the banners of the aforesaid lady Prudence, arm from all quarters against the opening of the session…

Horace Walpole

Augusta may have been successful in advancing the cause of the earl of Bute (Frederick had dismissed him as suitable fodder only for a lesser embassy) but her son proved to be quite as forceful as his mother. Amid discussion of a possible bride for him the Prince coined a new word, refusing to be “bewolfenbuttled” in response to efforts to pair him off with a daughter of his relative the duke of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel.

Whether she wielded significant influence or not, the British public became increasingly suspicious of Augusta and by the time of her death in 1772 she was a rather unpopular figure. Walpole enjoyed circulating tales of her supposed amour with Bute, and of her apparent request on her son’s accession to be named ‘Princess Mother’, only to be told there was no precedent for such a thing. Quite how extensive the princess’s political influence truly was is difficult to determine but it is worth remarking that in his letter to the duke of Gloucester informing him of their mother’s death, George III noted that one of their last conversations had been about the projected Royal Marriages Act, which she ‘greatly approved of’ [RA, GEO/MAIN/15957-9]. Some clearly thought she did wield undue influence, including Newcastle and Pitt the Elder, though George III’s biographer John Brooke believed the former ‘should have known better’. He concluded, ‘It is time that justice was done to this much maligned lady’.

RDEE

Further Reading:

The Diary of the Late George Bubb Dodington

John Brooke, King George III

Christine Gerrard, ‘Queens in waiting: Caroline of Anspach and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha as Princesses of Wales’, in C. Campbell Orr, ed. Queenship in Britain, 1660-1837: royal patronage, court culture, and dynastic politics

Papers of Princess Augusta in the Royal Archives at Windsor, via the Georgian Papers Programme

For more from the Georgian Lords project click here, or follow them on twitter here.

Other women’s history blogs, including those written for Women’s History Month 2020, can be found here.

George III came to the throne in 1760 determined to bring to fruition plans for a fundamental change in the political balance of power within Britain. Emulating the programme of his father’s opposition court based at Leicester House, the new king wished to bring to an end what he perceived to be the corruption and divisiveness of factional politics centred on the various Whig groupings. To this end he turned to John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute (pronounced Boot): a member of his household who had become close to his mother, Princess Augusta. Under Bute’s guidance George sought an end to the popular if expensive war then being waged against an alliance including France and Spain, and which had dominated affairs since 1756. Early in 1763 the war was brought to a conclusion with the treaty of Paris.

Although many welcomed the cessation of hostilities, there was much about the peace that was resented. The Seven Years’ War had been a successful one for Britain. It had seen the overturning of a number of the reverses of the War of the Austrian Succession (1739-48) and reached its peak in 1759 “the Year of Victories”. British commanders such as James Wolfe and Robert Clive went on to become household names while imperial gains in America and India attracted the support of the mercantile community. Ending the war, thus, unsurprisingly attracted quite as much criticism as it did celebration.

One of the most forthright critics of George’s administrations was the colourful Whig politician, John Wilkes. Wilkes had come into politics initially as an adherent of the Temple faction and a friend of Thomas Potter, a member of the household of the dowager Princess of Wales. Disappointed in his ambitions to secure colonial office, Wilkes had turned to journalism to make his mark. In 1762 in partnership with Charles Churchill he launched an anti-ministerial paper entitled the North Briton – a none-too subtle jibe at Bute’s Scottishness and obvious counterfoil to the pro-ministry paper The Briton, edited by the novelist, Tobias Smollett. For Wilkes, Bute was an easy target. Scots peers were frequently teased for their relative poverty and were often regarded as stooges of the administration. Bute’s surname, Stuart, also conjured up the spectre of Jacobitism.

The catalyst for Wilkes’ dramatic fall from grace was the king’s speech at the close of Parliament in April 1763, in which he lauded the new peace treaty. On 23 April, Wilkes published his response in Number 45 of the North Briton. He lambasted Bute as usual, but then went a step further by obliquely casting aspersions on George himself.

The result was a dramatic brouhaha with Wilkes and his associates arrested for the publication of a seditious libel. Wilkes responded by claiming parliamentary privilege and secured his release on the order of Lord Chief Justice Pratt. Pratt and his fellow judges ruled that as libel did not constitute a breach of the peace, Wilkes’ privilege could not be laid aside. In reaching their verdict, the judges made reference to the infamous case of the Seven Bishops in 1688. [For more, see The Eighteenth Century Constitution: documents and commentary, ed. E.N. Williams, p. 233]

The immediate consequence of Wilkes’s release was a noisy demonstration in his favour amid cries of Wilkes and Liberty: a slogan that would remain a popular rallying call for years to come. Unsurprisingly, the administration did not let the matter rest. On 15 November, the Commons took the case into consideration and eventually resolved that North Briton No. 45 should be condemned as a ‘false, scandalous, and seditious libel’ to be burnt by the common hangman. On 24 November, it was resolved in the Commons 258 to 133 that parliamentary privilege did not extend to the publication of seditious libels and five days later the Lords voted to concur with the Commons’ decision, though 17 peers registered a written protest.[i] On 19 January 1764 Wilkes was expelled from the Commons. Stripped of all his available defences, Wilkes was tried both for his role in publishing the North Briton and for blasphemy and pornography over his hand in the composition of An Essay on Woman: an obscene parody of Pope’s poem, An Essay on Man, the majority of which was probably the work of Thomas Potter (by then safely dead).

By then, though, Wilkes had taken advantage of the delays in his case to abscond to France. He remained there for the next four years. He was condemned in his absence and it was not until the spring of 1768 that he finally presented himself to the authorities to serve out his sentence. The next chapter of Wilkes and Liberty, his campaign to be returned for Parliament once more, and his efforts to secure freedom of the press are subjects for future posts.

RDEE