Not many political martyrs are born to the part; more often they are cast in it by government officials who are stupid or self-righteous or both. Take John Wilkes: a reckless, ambitious parvenu who became involved in the cause of liberty quite accidentally and emerged the champion of London’s mobs and the darling of America’s rebels—thanks to King George in’s intolerance for dissent.
Born in 1727 to a prosperous distiller and his wife, Wilkes was intelligent, spoiled, and uncommonly ugly. Endowed with wild good humor, he spent his youth with rich, dissolute companions, became a profligate spender and womanizer, but despite it all was a creditable scholar. When he returned from the grand tour of the Continent then obligatory for sons of the well-to-do, he found that his parents had chosen a wife for him—a woman twelve years his senior, neither attractive nor amusing, but possessed of a comfortable fortune. Predictably, the marriage was a disaster (Wilkes claimed that he stumbled as he entered the temple of Hymen), but it enabled him to live for several years in the style he relished; and before he and his wife separated, she produced the one true love of his life—a daughter named Polly. Until he was thirty he steadfastly devoted himself to the pursuit of women (who were highly susceptible to his ugly charm and energy) and to other, more dubious company, such as the notorious Mad Monks of Medmenham—an unsavory band that celebrated rites resembling the black mass, held orgies, it was said, and once administered Communion to an ape.
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