John Wilkes

He moves to France initially, and then he goes off to London, lives in London.

And he arrives in London when London is gripped by the, the great controversy about the radical journalist and MP John Wilkes.

And Wilkes is a great sort of newspaperman who's always slacking off the British government and the establishment and corruption.

And this is a great influence on Marat.

Mob storms the Bastille, and this disorder escalates into what we would call the French Revolution.

And Marat seizes his chance.

He basically thinks back to John Wilkes in London when he was there all those years ago, 1770s or something, and he says, "Bang, this is what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna reinvent myself as a radical polemicist, set up my own newspaper, The People's Friend, L'Ami du Peuple."

Here Tod made him look into the mirror of the still pool below.

"Caliban and Ferdinand, Apollo and Vulcan, Count Dorsey and John Wilkes," growled Macandrew.

"Look at this picture and at that, you blighter." Almost choking, for Tod was powerful and none too gentle in his grip, Gerald humored his friend sufficiently to stare into the water glass, thinking meanwhile of a near revenge.

He saw his own handsome brown face with bronze-colored hair and mustache of the same hue curling under a straight Greek nose which divided two hazel eyes.

The history of, of, of dissent in England is full of people getting sent to the, to be beheaded, uh, [laughs] back into the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries.

And, um, the, the best example from the 1760s is John Wilkes.

I mean, he was a member of Parliament, and he criticized the king.

He published a newspaper called The North Briton.

Um, his, uh, all his papers were seized.

Uh, he served, I think, 22 months in prison.

Um, and, and John Wilkes became a hero, uh, in, in the colonies because this is during the time of, of, uh, increasing ferment and dissent, uh, against, uh, against Britain.

And so, I mean, John Wilkes was a hero.

And Stewart, allegedly burn sensitive records.

Radical journals and political politician John Wilkes.

Not John Wilkes Booth.

for everybody.

Painter William Hogarth, you know, maybe, is that the guy that painted this? Maybe.

And near the chapel, they were a few cells filled with cots where brothers would take women.

While

John Wilkes, not Wilkes Booth, a confirmed member brushed away rumors of sinister activities, saying, he said, no prof...

mocked.

The radical English politician John Wilkes was publishing daily diatribes against the Scots, characterizing them all as primitive tyrants and sycophantic slaves.

When Boswell finally secures an introduction to his idol, the great English writer Samuel Johnson, Boswell is so nervous about his background that he stammers out an apology.

He said, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.

Listen, you know way more than I do, and I'm happy to hear your thoughts on that.

But I was myself personally fascinated by the Whig movement and by John Wilkes in particular, who's one of the most entertaining figures.

I had to write about him.

He's just such an entertaining figure, such a hilarious character.

The core thing that the Fourth Amendment was supposed to protect was private diaries.

And the framers were especially excited by the case of John Wilkes, who was a British critic of the king, who wrote all sorts of pamphlets criticizing the king and one pamphlet called North Britain 45 that accused the foreign secretary, Lord Butte, of having an affair with the king's mother, really angered the king.

And he ordered his henchmen to go into everyone's house without any particularized suspicion and identify the author of this pamphlet.

They were dispatched by Lord Halifax.

So right now, the court has really been narrowing the degree to which statements even count as testimonial.

That's part of chipping away at the Fifth Amendment.

But we've gone upside down from a world where literally the American revolutionaries had parties to celebrate John Wilkes and would drink 45 steins of beer to celebrate North Britain 45 and named towns and people like Wilkes Bar, Pennsylvania and John Wilkes Booth after him.

In those days, our private papers were the quintessential example of things that you couldn't compel.