Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/251

 the Scotch were treated in the ‘North Briton.’ Wilkes accepted the challenge on condition that Egremont should have precedence; and this punctilio suspended the affair until Egremont's death (21 Aug.), when the Scotchman was no longer forthcoming. Wilkes returned to England on 28 Sept., and renewed his attack on the government (12 Nov.) in the ‘North Briton’ (No. 46). Egremont's successor was Wilkes's old friend Sandwich, but Wilkes gained nothing by the change. Sandwich in office was a different being from the jolly monk of Medmenham. There fell into his hands an indecent burlesque of Pope's ‘Essay on Man,’ entitled ‘An Essay on Woman,’ dedicated to a fashionable and frail beauty, Fanny Murray, and garnished with notes ascribed to Bishop Warburton, and an appendix of blasphemies containing (inter alia) an obscene paraphrase of the Veni Creator Spiritus. The work was pseudonymous; but Wilkes's printers deposed, and their evidence was corroborated by some of Wilkes's papers, that it had been printed by Wilkes's direction at his private press. The whole edition consisted of a dozen copies, of which one or two had been stolen by workmen, the rest had remained under lock and key. The author appears to have been Thomas Potter. A manuscript (neither Potter's nor Wilkes's) of a poem with the same title is in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 30887). It lacks the dedication and notes, begins with the words, ‘Awake, my Sandwich,’ and is in fact entirely distinct from the poem inscribed to Fanny Murray, of which one of the few extant exemplars, beginning with the words ‘Awake, my Fanny,’ is in the Dyce Library at the South Kensington Museum. The spurious piece was, however, printed under Wilkes's name during his lifetime, was not disavowed by him, and was thus incautiously accepted by Lord Mahon (History of England from the Peace of Utrecht, v. 66) as the original poem printed at Wilkes's press. Another imposture, ascribed on the title-page to ‘J. W. Senator’ (in the epilogue ‘Julio Wanlovi, Senator of Lucca’), appeared in London in 1763, 4to.

When parliament met (15 Nov.), the House of Lords, on the motion of Sandwich, included the essay and ‘Veni Creator’ in one censure as a breach of privilege (in attributing the notes to Warburton) and as an obscene and impious libel. On the same day the commons, in response to a royal message conveyed through George Grenville [q. v.], consigned the ‘North Briton’ (No. 45) to the hands of the common hangman to be burned as a seditious libel. Wilkes pleaded his privilege, which he offered to waive in the courts of law if it were acknowledged in parliament. The house rejected his offer, and resolved that seditious libel was not covered by privilege (23, 24 Nov.). The resolutions of the commons were endorsed by the lords (1 Dec.), Pitt in the one house, and Shelburne in the other, joining in the censure upon Wilkes, but maintaining his privilege. A strongly worded protest against the surrender of so important a security for freedom of speech was entered in the lords' journals by Temple and other peers (29 Nov.). A dangerous wound in the stomach received by Wilkes in a duel with Samuel Martin (16 Nov.) enabled him to avoid appearance to a citation by the House of Commons. During his convalescence he nailed his colours to the mast by issuing from his private press a collective reprint of the ‘North Briton.’ On the night of 6 Dec. a Scottish lieutenant of marines was arrested in the attempt to force an entrance into his house with the intention of assaulting him. About Christmas Wilkes slipped off for Paris. Thence he transmitted to the speaker, Sir John Cust, a medical certificate of ill-health (dated 11 Jan. 1764). The speaker read the certificate to the house, but observed that it was entirely unauthenticated, and Wilkes was thereupon expelled (19 Jan.). A copy of the certificate, duly authenticated by two notaries and the British ambassador at Paris, Lord Hertford, which Wilkes subsequently sent to the speaker, was ignored; but a motion affirming the illegality of general warrants, in support of which Pitt exerted his full strength, was only defeated by a narrow majority (17 Feb.). Wilkes expressed his gratitude to his supporters in ‘A Letter to a Noble Member [Temple] of the Club in Albemarle Street’ (London, 12 March 1764). Meanwhile, on 21 Feb., he had been convicted before Mansfield on both charges of libel—not as author, but as responsible for the printing and publication. These proceedings he reviewed in an ‘Address to the Electors of Aylesbury’ (dated Paris, 22 Oct. 1764), attributing the convictions (unjustly) to the partiality of the judge. He did not appear to receive judgment, and was outlawed (1 Nov.)

In Paris Wilkes was received by D'Holbach and Diderot as a brother in arms. He was also countenanced by the French court, and made a figure in the salons. He lodged at first at the Hôtel de Saxe, afterwards in the Rue St. Nicaise, where he lived during the greater part of 1764 with a courtesan named Corradini, in whom he discovered all the