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A political history of Britain in the places where it happened: parliament and palace, courts and counting houses, and the streets where people pushed back.
The rabble-rouser who won the right to report Parliament, cast cross-eyed as he really was.
Protest & dissentLaw & justiceFree to enter
John Wilkes was expelled from the Commons, outlawed, imprisoned and re-elected by voters who kept sending him back, and 'Wilkes and Liberty' was a riot chant in the 1760s. Two things he forced through outlast him. General warrants - blank authority to search and arrest whoever the government disliked - were ruled unlawful after he was arrested under one. And in 1771 he engineered the collapse of the ban on printing what MPs said in Parliament, which is the only reason debates can be reported at all. James Butler's bronze of 1988 calls him a champion of English freedom and declines to flatter him: Wilkes was strikingly cross-eyed, and it is said to be the only cross-eyed statue in London.
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