The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [110]
The cry “Wilkes and Liberty!” resounded as the protagonist stood again for Middlesex, was defiantly returned by its voters, again expelled, again elected and expelled a third time. He became both a constitutional symbol and a popular hero, focus of the commoners’ discontents. When the Government put up its own candidate for Middlesex and declared him elected by ruling out the votes for Wilkes, tumult and agitation convulsed London. The city “is a daily scene of lawless riots and confusion,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. “Mobs patrol the streets at noonday, some knocking down all that will not roar for Wilkes and liberty.” Coalers, sailors, watermen and all sorts of rioters overturned carriages, looted shops, broke into noble residences, while the ministry was “divided in their counsels” and apprehensive of what might come.
By its fatuous suppression of the Middlesex vote, the Government aroused the ever-ready cry of alarm about English liberties. The connection with American liberties, constantly propounded among the Wilkesites by the more active American agents, was confirmed. “The persons who wish to enslave America, would, if it lay in their power, enslave us,” said a linen draper and elector of London during the canvass for votes in 1768. The 236 elected councilmen and 26 aldermen, mainly shopkeepers and self-employed artisans, who made up the London Court of Common Council, condemned virtually every measure for coercion of the colonies.
At the head of the advocates was the Lord Mayor himself, the spirited merchant William Beckford, who, like most partisans of America, reached that position through his advocacy of Wilkes; to oppose the Government on one was to oppose it on both. As the scion of a wealthy Jamaica family of sugar planters and the island’s largest landowner, Beckford enlarged his fortune in English commerce, rose from alderman to sheriff to Lord Mayor and addressed to the King the protest of the city of London against the doctoring of the Middlesex election. Though snobbishly said by Walpole to act from “a confused heap of knowledge … so uncorrected by judgment that his absurdities were made but more conspicuous by his vanity,” he made a bold voice among the critics of American policy. English Radicals reflected the colonists’ view of a ministerial conspiracy to suppress their liberties. Josiah Wedgwood, a leading Radical, believed the Townshend Act was a deliberate effort toward that end, although he thought it would be counter-productive in that it would accelerate American independence by a century.
The London Magazine in August 1768 compared the authors and abettors of “the present impolitick measures against America” to the Crown and its “wretched ministers” of the 17th century. “From our own observations we will venture to say that nine persons in ten, even in this country, are friends to the Americans” and believe they “have right on their side.” Nine out of ten was certainly exaggerated; some journals estimated the proportions just in reverse. Ralph Izard, an American resident in London, judged that four out of five Britons were opposed to America and that Parliament’s support of the Government correctly reflected public opinion. When the opposition regularly produced no more than eighty votes, “you may depend on it, the measure is not thought a bad one, for corruption does not reach that deep.” Public opinion is hard to judge from the contemporary press because many of the pro-American articles were contributed anonymously or under pseudonyms by Americans in London. Nevertheless, English printers would not have given the fair amount of space they did to paragraphs and letters favorable to the colonies if an important section of public opinion had not opposed the Government’s policies.
It should be added that the political concerns of public opinion are often overestimated by posterity. The real