‘Faire le Wilkes’: The Chevalier D'Eon and the Wilkites ...



‘Faire le Wilkes’: The Chevalier D'Eon and the Wilkites, 1762-1775

Jonathan Conlin

In August 1763 the Chief Secretary to the French Foreign Ministry complained to the Chevalier D’Eon that he was making a spectacle of himself and of France. Only a few months had passed since D’Eon’s arrival in London, where he was to serve as deputy ambassador in France’s most important diplomatic legation. In the wake of her resounding defeat by Britain in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), France was eager to learn the secret of her rival’s power. This secret somehow enabled her to triumph over her larger, more populous enemies abroad, even while her massive debt, factional politics and licentious populace threatened her with bankruptcy and revolution.

D’Eon had a secret of his own. In addition to his official instructions he carried secret orders from his patron, the Comte de Broglie, to organize the reconnoissance of the English coast for a future French invasion.[i] He was helping Louis XV prepare for his war of revenge on perfidious Albion. Yet by August D’Eon was already in trouble. He had pushed his demands for repayment of debts owed him for his prior Russian service so fiercely that the aforementioned Chief Secretary, St Foy, accused him of having gone native, of adopting an ‘English’ stridency that was mal à propos. ‘It is neither wise nor fair of you to presume that, when in London, one should think like a Londoner’, St Foy wrote. ‘A Frenchman should think like a Frenchman even in the middle of London, and if you have any understanding you would realize that one should not rear up at the first sign of difficulty. For fortune does not smile on the Wilkes in the world I live in, the world you will have to return to one day.’ [‘Il n’est pas si beau, ni si juste que vous le pensez de pretendre qu’à Londres, il faille penser comme à Londres. Quand on est François, il faut penser comme tel au milieu de la cité de Londres; et quand on a de l’esprit, il ne faut pas se cabrer sur des misères, parceque les Wilkes ne sont pas fortuné dans le monde que j’habite, et que vous devez aussi un jour habiter.'][ii]

D’Eon replied that he had no desire to ‘do a Wilkes' (faire le Wilkes).[iii] Yet the similarities with the antics of the radical English journalist and MP John Wilkes became more striking as the crisis deepened and D’Eon began blackmailing his Secret du roi handlers with publication of his secret instructions. If he did so, D’Eon claimed, the resulting outcry would return Pitt to office, which whould in turn restart the war.[iv] Like Wilkes, D’Eon claimed to be the victim of ‘ministerial despots’ who were abusing the King’s trust and delegated authority to serve their own ends, using unconstitutional means to prosecute an innocent man. Like Wilkes, D’Eon called on the British public to judge whether he was guilty of any wrongdoing. Like Wilkes, D’Eon breathed fealty to his King, but defiance to his court.

The Chevalier’s pamphlets and especially his Lettres, mémoires et négotiations of 1764 brought him European fame, one that came close to rivalling that which Wilkes had gained the previous year, thanks to the ministry's attempts to prosecute him for writing and publishing The North Briton number 45. There may have been a tinge of jealousy, therefore, when Wilkes discussed D’Eon in an April 1764 letter written from his Parisian exile. The ‘infamous’ D’Eon was spoken of everywhere, he noted. ‘His affair is always mentioned as bearing some relation to mine, though there is not the least resemblance.’[v] Wilkes was happy in Paris – St Foy had written to him relaying the King’s permission to stay as long as he liked.[vi] His case had successfully challenged the English ministers’ right to use general warrants to trample over the individual’s right to privacy. Although he had enjoyed the support of both the mob and the aristocratic leaders of the opposition, Wilkes did not see either as a firm basis for any future action on his part.

With all the fine things said and wrote of me, have not the

public to this moment left me in the lurch, as to the expence of

so great a variety of law-suits? I will serve them to the last

moment of my life; but I will make use of the understanding

God has given me, and will owe neither my security nor indemnity

to them. Can I trust likewise a rascally court, who bribe my own

servants to steal out of my house? Which of the opposition,

likewise, can call on me, and expect my services? ... I know

that many of the opposition are, to the full, as much embarrassed

about my business as the administration, and detest it as much.

I believe, both parties will rejoice at my being here. Too many

personalities, likewise, have been mixed with my business; and

the king himself has taken too great, not to say too indecent,

a share in it, to recede.[vii]

The last thing Wilkes wanted was some French diplomat off in London trying to mimick him, pointlessly stirring up old quarrels and potentially leading the French King to reconsider his decision to grant Wilkes such a pleasant asylum.

To what extent did D’Eon ‘do a Wilkes’ during his second stay in Britain (1763-1777)? This activity can be divided into two phases: D’Eon’s attempt to use Wilkite weapons of legal challenge, pamphlets and mob violence in his quarrel with Guerchy (1763-5) and his secret proposal to use Wilkes to foment political unrest (1772). The former was more successful than the latter. Although D’Eon’s plan to put Guerchy on trial for attempted murder failed when the ministry stopped the case with a nole prosequi (a device they also used against Wilkes), D’Eon certainly caused the ambassador great embarrassment, which in turn may have brought on the illness which killed him. He also got the British newspapers and a Wilkite mob on his side, foiling attempts by Guerchy and the French ministry to have him extradited or kidnapped.

His 1772 scheme to sponsor Wilkite unrest was not implemented. As we shall see, this decision probably had as much to do with D’Eon’s own reservations as with any scruples on the French ministry’s part. Direct cooperation with Wilkes and the opposition would in any case have been limited by D’Eon’s poor command of English and his occasionally comic misunderstandings of English law.[viii] For all his portentous dropping of Lord Temple’s name in his letters to his superiors back in France, there is no evidence in Temple’s surviving correspondence that D’Eon was in regular contact with him or any other opposition party leaders.[ix] Knowledge of D'Eon's scheme does, however, provide an interesting context for subsequent attempts by the French government to lobby British ministers in favour of a tighter law on libel and blackmail. The French ministry's intermediary, Beaumarchais, was also an agent of the Secret and was negotiating D'Eon's return to France at the same time as discussing such ideas with a minister, Lord Rochford.

But this essay has another goal, with wider implications for our understanding of Anglo-French politics in this period. In appealing to the British public, in challenging ministerial authority and exploiting the freedom of the press D’Eon was not just reacting passively to circumstances, not simply grabbing hold of the most convenient means of prosecuting a personal feud. By considering his English activities in light of his earlier vision of a patriot politics we can begin to appreciate D’Eon’s subversive activities in London less as a case of a foreigner 'doing a Wilkes' and more as ‘a good Patriot’ trying to imagine how France could be reformed. Inspired by the Utopian visions of Fénélon and Bolingbroke, ‘Patriot’ politics was pro-free trade, technophile, and tolerant. Absolutist in spirit, it nonetheless accorded the King a tightly circumscribed role: arch-administrator, rather than ruler.

Here my approach is based on the excellent work of the late Derek Jarrett, whose Begetters of Revolution offers an excellent introduction to the Anglo-French ‘patriot dream’ in this period. In his book Jarrett notes the strong similarities between Prime Ministers Choiseul and Pitt:

They both claimed to represent the hitherto unrepresented, the great

mass of their fellow-countrymen whose interests were neglected by a

narrow and corrupt political establishment; they had both been brought

to power as a result of the Seven Years War, which had exposed the

weaknesses of the establishment they challenged; and they had both

been divided, by the effects of the same war, into the political Patriots

and the administrative Patriots, the strikers of attitudes and the solvers

of problems.[x]

This last distinction is a crucial one. As Edmond Dziembowski’s study of French theatrical and political publications in the period has shown, patriotism did indeed celebrate spontaneous, unscripted acts of heroism by political outsiders.[xi] Yet it also sought to replace corrupt governmental institutions with new administrative machinery, to build a new state from within, to achieve what Adam Smith called ‘the perfection of police’.[xii] As we shall see, D’Eon’s attempt to ‘do a Wilkes’ show that he was pulled both ways. He reveals the limitations of patriotism as a political ideology.

D’Eon saw reporting on English politics as a key element of both his official and secret duties. Even when relations with both sets of superiors were seemingly strained past breaking point, D’Eon kept providing them with what he claimed was privileged insider information on the state of play. In addition to the aforementioned links to Temple, he also claimed to have contacts close to Bute, the King’s Favourite and Wilkes’ arch enemy.[xiii] As late as 1775 Foreign Minister Vergennes was still advising his ambassador that D’Eon’s close links to the opposition made him a privileged source of information. 'His heart remains French,' Vergennes noted, 'even if his dreadful antics have led him astray now and then in the past. He has friends in the opposition party and there are worse ways of finding out what's going on.' [‘...son coeur est toujours francais, quoique ses malheurs et ses emportemens aient paru l’egarer quelquefois. Il a des amis dans le parti de l’opposition et ce n’est pas le plus mauvais canal pour être bien instruit’][xiv] A closer look at the content of D’Eon’s despatches shows that his intelligence was hardly reliable.

Though he evaded the snares of the French police constables [exempts] sent over to kidnap him, these reports home show the extent to which he had been taken hostage by Wilkite rhetoric in 1763. He claimed, for example, that despite having left office Bute was still pulling the strings, deliberately luring a succession of nobles into ministerial office in order to discredit them with the public.[xv] Bute supposedly meant for the resulting wave of disgust to sweep the Hanoverians away in favour of the Pretender.[xvi] Although Wilkes’ North Briton happily played with such theories in 1763, publishing letters purportedly written to Bute by the Stuart Pretender. But nobody seriously believed they were scheming together – least of all Wilkes himself.[xvii] George III was rather trying to follow a policy of ‘the king his own minister’, refusing to let his ministers set the policy agenda as his grandfather George II had done. Though this was indeed a threat to the oligarchic political ballet of ‘ins’ and ‘outs’, it was not the Jacobite plot D’Eon claimed it was.[xviii]

D’Eon was also guilty of exaggerating the political significance of the Earl of Chatham, the gout-ridden and aloof politician formerly known as William Pitt, the ‘Patriot Minister’. Wilkes and his allies had all started out in the early 1760s as Pittites, and in 1763 Wilkites attacked Bute and his ministerial allies for giving away too many of the territories won by British forces under the disinterested, manly leadership of Pitt. The fear caused by the merest whiff of Pitt’s return to ministerial office among French officials was largely unjustified, in so far as Pitt did not in fact wish, as they supposed, to restart the war.[xix] Pitt’s acceptance of the peerage which made him Earl of Chatham in 1766 led to widespread feelings of betrayal, especially among Wilkites. When he did return to power that same year, it was as at the head of an eclectic and divided ministry. It almost seemed as if Pitt had inherited George III’s doomed project of putting an end to ‘factional’ party politics.[xx]

Thus the political analysis D’Eon offered up to his superiors as the ‘inside track’ was hardly accurate. His economic analysis was also unreflective, surprisingly so for a man who had published a well-regarded history of French taxation in 1753, his Essai historique sur les différentes situations de la France par rapport aux finances sous le règne de Louis XIV et sous la régence de M. le duc d'Orléans. D’Eon saw bankruptcy as the only way in which the British government could ever get out from under its war debt, which was three times larger per capita than that of France.[xxi] He thus failed to see how this debt was becoming an opportunity rather than a threat, a way of tying citizens to the regime. As investors in the ‘funds’ (who never expected to see their capital again) they became stakeholders in a polity which otherwise privileged land as the only true claim on political power. Seen in this light, the national debt was a counter-revolutionary force. We must be careful not to judge D’Eon too harshly, however. Lambasting ‘the monied interest’ (stockjobbers, loan-contractors, brokers) as parasites in the body politic had long been part of ‘Country’ or Tory political thought, underpinning their attempts at 'economic reforms' intended to deny such men political influence. In so far as the Wilkites were part of that tradition D’Eon’s analysis was Wilkite.

D’Eon’s wholesale adoption of Wilkite propaganda might indeed be seen as evidence of his credulity or lack of critical awareness. A more flattering reading would see this as a deliberate attempt to 'sex up' his reports, making himself appear to be at the centre of high-stakes backstairs intrigue. But we must be careful not to ascribe too much skill to D'Eon, who was arguably out of his depth and self-obsessed for much of his diplomatic career. There is no gainsaying that he could be remarkably stubborn and slow-witted at times. The frank Burgundian, the Rousseauian ‘man of nature’ and the straight-shooting Dragoon: each pose provided an alibi for such weaknesses, and could even make them appear to be strengths. But his 1759 Année Littéraire essay on ‘Les Esperances d’un vrai Patriote’ suggests that he had in fact been in sympathy with Wilkite views several years before he arrived in England.[xxii] In the essay D’Eon blames France’s military and economic woes on four groups: ‘Financiers’ ['financiers'] and tax farmers; 'this terrible army of assessors and collectors' [‘cette terrible armée de Commis’]; priests, who encourage celibacy; and finally authors, who he charges with wasting their energies on ‘dictionaries and almanacs’ and ‘this miserable, dangerous genre of obscene novels and indecent parodies’ [‘Dictionnaires et...Almanachs’ and ‘ce genre misérable et dangereux de Romans obscènes et de Parodies indécentes’].[xxiii] Instead of serving 'their country' [‘leur patrie’] or the nation [‘la nation’], these groups were busy immiserating, depopulating and corrupting D'Eon’s 'fellow citizens' [‘concitoyens’].[xxiv]

If 'human reason and Philosophy' [‘la raison humaine et la Philosophie’] could take such strides against prejudice, D’Eon argued, it should be possible to reform the administration of the King’s revenue, which, he claimed, was larger than that enjoyed by any other head of state.[xxv] Yet D’Eon’s short essay also betrays a rather less philosophical dislike for the ‘new’ aristocracy: an unholy alliance of financiers and 'freshly-minted lords' [‘Seigneurs de nouvelle fabrique’] who have bought up all the estates whose very names appeal to a truer, older aristocracy of 'heroes and generals' [‘Héros et de Généraux d’Armée’].[xxvi] Instead of parading wealth siphoned off from the King in Paris the nobility should be sent back to the land. D’Eon’s desire for a return to a simpler order of estates and emphasis on population and morality as the source of national strength invites comparison with slightly earlier English works by Henry Fielding and John Brown condemning the luxurious emulation which drove the economic prosperity we now hail as ‘the consumer revolution’.[xxvii] Its hostility to court corruption and patriotic rhetoric suggests that D’Eon was a Wilkite before he even stepped on English soil. He feared Pitt because he himself knew the power behind the idea of patriotism and the patrie. As he wrote to Choiseul in 1764, ‘where there is no patrie, there is no citoyen.’ [‘là ou il n’y a point de patrie, il n’est plus de citoien.’][xxviii]

But even the best of patriots writing in France in 1759 had little idea to whom or what he should address his hopes. D’Eon’s essay is not addressed to the patrie, nor to the King, his ‘concitoyens’ or the nation. When he insists on the importance of Finance Minister Silhouette remaining in office to carry through reform, D’Eon writes that ‘the whole nation ought to pray to heaven for his continued employment’ [‘toute la nation doit addresser au Ciel des voeux pour la conservation’][xxix] He does not mention the parlements at all, although they were patently claiming to fill that intermediary role which Montesquieu had held to be so vital to the well-being of states in his L’esprit des lois (1748).[xxx] The early 1760s saw these bodies claim to represent or rather incarnate the nation, as the sole body authorized to speak frankly to the King and to stand up to his ministers whenever they attempted to ‘surprise’ the King into committing unconstitutional acts. D’Eon’s silence on the parlementaire crisis he lived through is almost audible.

Once in London and caught up in his conflict with his own personal ‘ministerial despots’, however, D’Eon found something more satisfying than the sky to appeal to: the British public. The British public, he regularly claimed, were forthright, dispassionate, fair, curious, even 'enlightened' [‘éclairé’].[xxxi] ‘The Englishman’, he wrote, ‘rendered superior to the majestic Roman by his happy constitution, by his love for truth and passion for justice, wants to know all things, to judge all things for himself.’ [‘L’Anglois, superieur à la Majesté du peuple Romain par sa heureuse constitution, par son amour pour la verité, par sa passion pour ja justice, veut tout savoir et tout juger par lui-même.’][xxxii] The Englishman refused to hold back from supporting the cause of the just, or to allow distinctions in rank to affect him. This was the ‘London thinking’ St Foy reproached D’Eon with in August 1763. In The Intelligencer Extraordinary, the anti-Guerchy broadside he published on 23 June 1764, D’Eon even mimicked Wilkes’ appeal to the ‘middling’ and lower classes of Englishmen. In it he accused Guerchy of using the French embassy as a cover for smuggling and to lure skilled English ‘mechanics’ abroad.[xxxiii] Fear of French luxury imports discouraging native industry had led to the creation of the Society of Anti-Gallicans a few years before, a society which gave prizes for those inventors able to create ersatz English goods.[xxxiv] The broadside clearly worked, securing D’Eon the services of a Wilkite mob. This not only helped him defend himself from kidnap by French agents, but even allowed him to go on the offensive, surrounding Guerchy’s house, smashing windows and intimidating the French ministry. D’Eon himself wrote that 'several leaders of the opposition daily send someone to check that nothing has happened to me; at the first sign of any move against me the embassy and everything in it will be smashed up by what they call the "hob", the sailors and City rabble, which are under the opposition's orders.' [‘quelques chefs de parti de l’opposition envoient tous les jours chez moi pour voir s’il ne m’est rien arrivé; et a la première entreprise qui serait faite contre moi, l’hotel de l’ambassadeur et tout ce qui sera dedans sera mis en pièces par ce qu’on appelle ici les hob [sic], les matelots et autres canailles de la Cité, qui sont aux ordres de l’opposition.’][xxxv] Back in Paris a few months later David Hume and Holdernesse also warned Broglie that if any violence was attempted against D’Eon the French embassy would be stormed.[xxxvi]

But how far did D’Eon’s ‘London thinking’ go with respect to this British public opinion? Was his apparent marriage to a Wilkite concept of ‘the sense of the people’ a love match, or just one of convenience?[xxxvii] Enjoying the protection of a mob is an ambiguous accolade. One of the types of writing his 1759 patriot article had wished to see stopped had been ‘this deluge of newspapers, which threatens periodically to inundate our poor France.’ [‘ce déluge de Journaux, dont notre pauvre France est périodiquement inondée.’][xxxviii] French observers were prone to see the lively press of England as a threat to its stability, and hence to its prosperity and freedom. A notion of a stable, dispassionate public opinion did not yet exist in England, nor France for that matter.[xxxix] It might be more accurate to say that D’Eon was appealing, not to a British public opinion, but to a set of characteristics (forthrightness, disregard for rank, justice) he saw as national ones.[xl] Significantly, on one of the few occasions when D’Eon does write of ‘l’opinion publique’ he is clearly conflating or confusing it with ‘les principes inflexibles de l’honneur’ – both being seen as passive bulwarks against mere ‘pouvoir’.[xli]

D’Eon’s 1772 secret scheme to undermine the British state was indeed founded on the belief that the British public was irredemiably riven by factional party cries that could never be harmonized. His plan relied on stoking this fire, ‘to occupy the minds of the court and the people, who never stop arguing with each other, the former harping on about the royal prerogative, the latter about Magna Charta and constitutional liberty’.[‘pour tenir les Esprits de la Cour et du peuple occupé et se disputant sans cesse les uns sur la Prerogative roïales et les autres sur la Magna Charta et la liberté constitutionale’] It would have involved the French pulling the classic Wilkite trick of using provocative publications to lure English ministers into a punitive overreaction. D’Eon would therefore plant libelles insulting to the French court in the London press, which would in turn lead the French ambassador to demand that George III ‘propose a bill to parliament limiting the liberty of the press’.[‘proposa un Bill à son Parlement pour faire passe un acte qui limite la liberté de la presse.’]

If His Britannic Majesty and his ministry fall into this trap and actually

propose such a bill to parliament I promise you that sedition will break

out among the people, setting them against parliament and the court;

I would therefore promise secretly to play Wilkes off against the Court.

He is one of the principal magistrates and is always on the lookout for

opportunities to revolt people against the court. He will spark off an

endless train of disputes, divisions and hatreds...there’s no lack of

suitable material in this country for an enterprising and daring heart

like his.

[Si sa Majesté Britannique et son ministere tombent dans ce piège et

qu’on propose un pareil bill à son parlement je vous promets qu’il

s’éleva ici une sedition entre le peuple, le parlement et la cour, je vous

promets qu’alors je ferais sourdement jouer à Wilkes un grand Role public dans la cité contre la cour. Il est un des principaux Magistrats et ne cherche que le occasions de révolter les esprits contre la Cour. Il en révoltera des querelles, des haines, des divisions sans fin...la matière ne manque pas

dans ce païs à un coeur entreprenant et hardi.’][xlii]

That D'Eon enjoyed close relations with Wilkes is beyond doubt. Back in 1764, after his King's Bench conviction for libelling Guerchy, D'Eon sought a safe place in the country where he could lie low - and found one in the Byfleet, Surrey home of Wilkes' ally, the opposition MP Humphry Cotes. Wilkes and the Chevalier dined together in London on many occasions, right up to June 1777, and resumed on D'Eon's return in 1785.

Broglie thought the 1772 plan worthy of Louis XV’s support.[xliii] Although rumours that Wilkes had been in French pay surfaced later, there is no hard evidence to suggest that this scheme was ever put into operation.[xliv] D’Eon’s heart may not have been in this scheme. He had already show a curious lack of nerve back in 1769, during the scandal caused by Samuel Musgrave. Musgrave alleged in a pamphlet published in September 1769 that D’Eon had evidence that three individuals high up in the British Establishment had taken bribes from the French during the negotiations leading up to the Peace of Paris.[xlv] D’Eon denied these charges in a letter Public Advertiser, and was on the verge of repeating his denial at the bar of the House of Commons when Musgrave was questioned there on 29 January 1770.[xlvi] He had clearly achieved a belated rapprochement with the same English ministers who had been so conspicuous in pursuing him through the courts back in 1764.[xlvii] Why D’Eon permitted himself to be ‘prevailed upon’ to do this by Bute’s representative is unclear.[xlviii] There is no doubt that he thereby lost face with his Wilkite allies. D’Eon wrote to Broglie in September 1769 enclosing a copy of his letter to the Public Advertiser. ‘Already the enemies of the court are printing a thousand things against me, saying that I am sold to the Court of St James, and that I have abandoned the cause of the public.’ [‘Deja les ennemies de la cour impriment mille choses contre moi, disent que je me suis vendu au palais S. James, et que j’ai abandonné la cause du public.’].[xlix] In 1772, therefore, D’Eon made his curious proposal having already missed a golden opportunity to provoke civil unrest.[l]

In July 1773 D'Eon was asked by Foreign Minister d’Aiguillon to contact the French libelliste Théveneau de Morande and discover how much it would cost to buy off the entire imprint of a poissonade Morande was threatening to sell, entitled Les Memoirs d'un femme publique. Morande offered the ideal opportunity to put the 1772 plan into operation.[li] He even hailed from the same part of Burgundy, and already knew D’Eon. Yet D’Eon ignored the opportunity and told d’Aiguillon of how he had tried to warn Morande off publishing his newspaper, the Gazetier cuirassé.[lii] He clearly found Morande’s scandal sheet and his Mémoires secrètes d’une femme publique highly distasteful.[liii]

Had he managed to overcome this distaste and put his scheme into operation, the British ministry might well have taken the bait. Between 1765 and 1770 Choiseul had brought about a political revolution in Sweden by funding a Swedish ‘Patriot’ party.[liv] D’Eon correctly surmised that George III deeply resented abusive pamphleteers.[lv] The Duke of Bedford had proposed a bill protecting foreign ambassadors from D’Eon-style libels back in 1763, only to find the Lord Chancellor unwilling.[lvi] In March 1774 the idea came up again when Beaumarchais met with Secretary of State Rochford during one of his many trips to England as a Secret agent. Beaumarchais found the English minister willing to consider a law making it harder to blackmail individuals with libellous pamphlets.[lvii]

William Henry van Nassau van Zuylestein, fourth Earl of Rochford had earlier served as British Ambassador in Madrid in the 1760s. He was there during Beaumarchais' visit, and the two had become close. In 1766 he had left Spain and moved to Paris, where he served as Ambassador until 1768. As Secretary of State for the Northern (1768-1770) and subsequently the Southern (1770-5) Departments Rochford was effectively Foreign Minister in Lord North's ministry, albeit with some domestic responsibilities. He played a crucial part in averting another war between Britain and the Bourbon powers during the Falkland Islands crisis of 1770, and was willing to go much further than his predecessors in ensuring good relations with France, so as to focus attention on Russia. Thus in 1768 he had taken the extraordinary step of advising Châtelet, the French ambassador, that the French might send a ship over and kidnap D'Eon in return for help in the affair of the Duke of Richmond.[lviii]

When Beaumarchais made his proposal in 1774 Rochford was, as French Foreign Minister Vergennes noted, ready to bend over backwards to oblige in suppressing a Morande's Memoirs. Rochford saw the famed London magistrate Sir John Fielding about it, who in turn carpeted Morande.[lix] Three years later the British government lent its assistance to its French counterparts' successful efforts to seize copies of another libelle, entitled La Guerlichon femelle. As Burrows notes, this represented a high-point in inter-governmental cooperation.[lx] A tougher libel law, however, was only brought in by Fox in 1792, by which point the entire question had become academic.

Whether D'Eon's idea might have worked is a difficult question. But D'Eon's antics in the previous decade had certainly provided a model followed by several other French libellistes who found London a profitable base from which to blackmail Versailles. There would have been no lack of volunteers willing to bait the trap by publishing libels against the French court. As Burrows observes, the high profile nature of London libelles and the debates surrounding ministerial efforts to arrest their authors had come to shape how the British and French perceived themselves. They helped make press freedom into something of a shibboleth for Britons.[lxi] Had the often indiscreet and occasionally imprudent Rochford taken the idea further it is certainly conceivable that such a bill would have roused a clamour such as D'Eon foresaw. As his hasty reaction to the Sayre plot the following year indicates, Rochford could over-react when faced with putative sedition.[lxii] For his part, Wilkes would come perilously close to sedition in his subsequent advocacy of the American colonies.

For D’Eon himself, however, there were limits to his willingness to ‘do a Wilkes’. To view his career as a whole is to reveal the serious limitations of patriot politics in the period between the Seven Years War and the mid-1770s. Chief of these was its inability to keep up with the growth of government necessitated by inter-continental trade and war, and in particular the development of the sophisticated fiscal instruments necessary to support government credit. This growth increased the need for efficient administration by dedicated officers like excisemen and Intendants, rather than the civilian amateurs who in England ran the magistracy, assessed taxes and filled jury-boxes.[lxiii] Indeed, D’Eon clearly saw the need for technical expertise, in the spirit of an age of enlightened experimentation. But there was a conflict between this ‘perfection of police’ and the traditional participatory citizenship founded on ideas of Republican virtue that he found equally appealing. D’Eon’s persecution by unaccountable ministers and hostility to state functionaries reflects a concern shared by both Wilkite and French parlementaires at the growth of government bureaucracy.[lxiv]

A final problem was that neither ‘the perfection of police’ nor the classical model could find a useful or legitimate role for either the press or party politics. Hence the tendency in patriots to see the press and party political wrangling as chaotic and unstable. As Marie Peters has observed ‘it was often a purely backward-looking reaction, at most a radicalism of the right, of nostalgic country gentlemen innocent of the realities of politics.’[lxv] Hence the inability to come up with a consensus on ministerial responsibility and the constitutional validity of the office of ‘Prime Minister’.[lxvi] Dziembowski has written in similar terms of how Anglophilic French publications evince a curiously de-institutionalized and politically disembodied view of the English political system.[lxvii] This explains D’Eon’s silence on the subject of parlements, as well as Wilkes’ own doubts about the fitness of parliament and its aristocrat-run parties to serve as a defender of liberty.[lxviii] It also explains how both could place such a strong emphasis on a free press without developing a concept of public opinion. In their eyes, the press was simply a way of bringing transparency to the workings of government.

At first sight both D’Eon and the Wilkites seem to be defending the voice of the people against the aristocratic order. Yet a closer inspection reveals that they operate with a concept of politics that claims to give an undistorted and immanent voice to the people, be it through the press, parliament or the king as an abstract person. They criticise institutional and administrative mediations (parliaments, bureaucrats) in the name of a consensual 'sense of the people'. To that extent neither sought a new order, but rather defended a simpler premodern order they saw as given. Modern forms that are necessary to administer the empire and mediate the voice of the people are criticised in the name of this premodern voice, which they claim to incarnate.[lxix] D’Eon claimed that he had been singled out for punishment ‘because I was foolish enough to wish to return this century’s politics to its proper principle.’[‘Parceque j’ai eu la sottise de vouloir ramener la politique égarée de ce siècle à son veritable principe’.][lxx] In reality, D’Eon’s decision to ‘do a Wilkes’ was a decision to engage in a patriot politics that was no politics at all.

-----------------------

[i] Archives de la Ministère de la Guerre, Paris. Memoires et reconnaissances, 1414, no. 11; Archives Nationales, Paris [hereafter 'AN']. Marine B4 297. ff. 14-23.

[ii] Sainte Foy, Premier commis des Affaires Etrangères, to D'Eon, 14 August 1763. D’Eon, Lettres, memoires et negociations (London, 1764), p. 17.

[iii] D’Eon to Sainte Foy, 19 August 1763. Ibid., p. 17.

[iv] D’Eon to Tercier, 23 March 1764. M.E. Boutaric, ed., Correspondance secrete inédite de Louis XV sur la politique etrangère (2 vols., Paris: Henri Plon, 1866), 1: 316.

[v] Wilkes to Cotes, 5 December 1764. John Almon (ed.), The correspondence of the late John Wilkes, with his friends (5 vols., London: Richard Phillips, 1805), 2:93-4.

[vi] Wilkes quotes St Foy’s letter in Wilkes to Cotes, 6 January 1764. Almon, Correspondence of Wilkes, 2: 54. For Louis XV’s interest in Wilkes see Wilkes to Temple, 2 August 1763. William James Smith, ed., The Grenville Papers (4 vols, London: John Murray, 1852-3), 2:83.

[vii] Wilkes to Cotes, 6 January 1764. Almon, Correspondence of Wilkes, 2: 50-2.

[viii] Hence his quasi-comical confusion when confronted with charges of ‘breach of the peace’, which he took as a reference to the treaty of 1763, rather than as a minor legal infraction. See also Countess Temple to Earl Temple, 19 April 1764. Grenville Papers, 2:299.

[ix] Temple’s papers are in the Huntington Library, San Marino. By 1766 Temple’s fickle temperament and complex relations with George Grenville (his brother) and Pitt (his brother in law) had led to a break with Wilkes and Pitt. Thus in March 1766 D’Eon feared that either Pitt or Temple might have him arrested 'to get at the other' [‘pour faire de la peine à l’autre’]. D’Eon, memo, 13 March 1766. Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris [hereafter 'MAE'], CP Angleterre, suppl. 13 (1762-70), f. 224.

[x] Derek Jarrett, The begetters of revolution: England’s involvement with France, 1759-1789 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), pp. 78-9.

[xi] Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme francais 1750-1770: la France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998).

[xii] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976), p. 185.

[xiii] This was a ‘M. Charles’, probably the G. Charles who served as chargé d’affaires at the British embassy in Turin (1750-4), under Rochford. D. B. Horn, British diplomatic representatives, 1689-1789 Camden Soc., 3rd ser., 46 (1932).

[xiv] Vergennes to Guines, 23 June 1775. Henri Doniol, Histoire de la participation de la France à l’établissement des États-Unis d’Amérique. Correspondance diplomatique et documents (5 vols., Paris, 1885-99), 1:107. See also Broglie to Louis XV, 29 June 1765. Didier Ozanam and Michel Antoine, eds, Correspondance Secrète du Comte de Broglie avec Louis XV (1756-1774) (2 vols. Paris, C. Klincksieck, 1956), 1: 192.

[xv] For the political context, see Frank O’Gorman, ‘The myth of Lord Bute’s secret influence’, in Karl W. Schweizer, ed., Lord Bute: essays in re-interpretation (Leicester: University Press, 1988), pp. 57-81.

[xvi] The Bute bogey was certainly long dead by 1772, except in D’Eon’s imagination. See D’Eon, ‘Notes pour servir d’éclaircissement au sujet suposé de mylord Bute’, 16 June 1772. MAE, CP Angleterre 498, ff. 257-65.

[xvii] For the fictitious letter, see North Briton 38 (19 February 1763). John Wilkes, The North Briton revised and corrected (2 vols., London, 1766), 2:220. This came just a week after Tobias Smollett, novelist and editor of Bute’s paper, The Briton, had printed an equally fictitious letter to Wilkes from the Pretender, making the same accusation. The Briton 38 (12 February 1763), 225.

[xviii] John Brewer, Party ideology and popular politics at the accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) , pp. 113-136. In 1775 D'Eon even claimed that news of the unsettled state of the American colonies would flatter the hopes of the 'secret Scottish party' for a Jacobite revolution. D'Eon to Vergennes, 12 June 1775. MAE, CP Angleterre 510, f. 242.

[xix] See Garnier to Vergennes, 16 June 1775. MAE, CP Angleterre 510, f. 278; Guines’ ‘Memoire sur l’Angleterre’, 30 July 1773, CP Angleterre 502, f. 197. But compare Guines to Vergennes, 10 July 1775. CP Angleterre 511, f. 8.

[xx] Dziembowski ably describes Pitt’s idiosyncratic 1766 ministry as 'a miraculous synthesis of monarchy, classical republicanism and burgeoning reform' [‘une synthèse miraculeuse de la monarchie, du républicanisme classique et du réformisme bourgeonnant.’] Edmond Dziembowski, Les Pitt: l’Angleterre face à la France (Paris: Perrin, 2006), p. 203.

[xxi] D’Eon, memo, [21 February 1769]. MAE, CP Angleterre 484, f.194.

[xxii] It should be noted that the title of D’Eon’s essay is Fréron’s. Edmond Dziembowski has discussed it in terms of a broader rehabilitation of ideas of patriotism and citizenship during the Seven Years War. Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme, pp. 365, 391.

[xxiii] D’Eon, ‘Les espérances d’un bon patriote’, in Fréron, ed., L’Année Littéraire (1759), 55-68 (57, 61, 64).

[xxiv] D’Eon, ‘Les espérances’, 67.

[xxv] D’Eon, ‘Les espérances’, 57.

[xxvi] D’Eon, ‘Les espérances’, 63-4.

[xxvii] John Brown, An Estimate of the manners and principles of the times (1757-8); Henry Fielding, Essay on the late increase in robbers (1751).

[xxviii] D’Eon to Choiseul, 15 February 1764, in D’Eon, Lettres, mémoires et négociations, p. 199.

[xxix] D’Eon, ‘Les espérances’, 59.

[xxx] This indifference to the parlement was in keeping with the views of Silhouette and his advisor, Moreau. Sadly for D’Eon, Silhouette only remained in office until November 1759. See Julian Swann, Politics and the parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754-74 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 183-5.

[xxxi] D’Eon, Lettres memoires et négociations, xvi (quote), 120.

[xxxii] D’Eon, Lettres, memoires et négociations, xxx.

[xxxiii] A copy of the Intelligencer is preserved in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. See also Pièces autentiques pour servir au proces criminnel intenté au tribunal du Roi d’Angleterre, par le Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont (London, 1765), p. 37. For reaction, see George Grenville to Hertford, 20 July 1764. Grenville Papers, 2:393-5.

[xxxiv] David G. C. Allan, ‘The laudable association of Antigallicans’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 137 (1989), 623-8.

[xxxv] D’Eon to Tercier, 27 March 1764. Boutaric, ed., Correspondance de Louis XV, 1: 319.

[xxxvi] Broglie to Louis XV, 27 June 1764. Ozanam and Antoine, eds., Correspondance secrète de Broglie, 1:251.

[xxxvii] For this important concept, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the people. politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[xxxviii] D’Eon, ‘Les espérances’, 64.

[xxxix] J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond liberty and property: the process of self-recognition in eighteenth-century political thought (Kingston, Ontario, 1983), pp. 260-77, 314.

[xl] D’Eon’s ease in identifying an English national character is in marked contrast to Hume’s difficulty, which famously led him to conclude that the English were the only nation without one, ‘unless this very singularity pass for such’. David Hume, ‘Of national characters’ in Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 86.

[xli] D’Eon, Lettres memoires et negociations, xxiv. For the parallel between honour and public opinion, see Conlin, ‘Dregs of liberty’, 1280-1.

[xlii] D’Eon, ‘Reponses aux questions du Substitut de l’avocat’, 16 June 1772. MAE, CP Angleterre 498, f.266.

[xliii] Broglie to Louis XV, 28 June 1772. Ozanam and Antoine, eds., Correspondance secrète de Broglie, 2:402. It should also be noted that relations between Broglie and Foreign Minister D’Aiguillon were highly strained. Lucien Laugier, Un ministère réformateur sous Louis XV. Le triumvirat (1770-4) (Paris: la Pensée Universelle, 1975), pp. 490, 499.

[xliv] Wilkes’ latest biographer does not take a clear position on this question. Derek Cash, John Wilkes: scandalous father of civil liberty (New Haven: Yale, 2006), p. 194. Horace Walpole wrote in 1769 that he had ‘no doubt of [Choiseul] having already tampered with Wilkes’. Walpole to Horace Mann, 8 October 1769. Paget Toynbee (ed.), The Letters of Horace Walpole (16 vols., Oxford: Clarendon, 1904).

6:322.

[xlv] Samuel Musgrave, The true intention of Dr. Musgrave’s address to the freeholders of Devonshire (London, 1769), British Library, 102.e.46; Dr. Musgrave’s reply to a letter published in the newspapers by the Chevalier d’ Eon (Plymouth: R. Weatherley, 1769). BL, 7540.b.28. I have tried unsuccessfully to find a copy of Musgrave's original Address to the Freeholders of Devonshire in the British, Bodleian and Yale University Libraries.

[xlvi] For a full account see D’Eon to Broglie 30 January 1770. MAE, CP Angleterre suppl. 16, f. 366.

[xlvii] Halifax in particular apologized in person to D’Eon in February 1770 for the English ministry’s attempts to prosecute him in 1764, and admitted having been taking in by Guerchy. He urged D’Eon not to trust his superiors, and to become a British subject. That D’Eon reported all this to Broglie, however, suggests that his loyalties remained firm. He was in urgent need of funds at this point, however, and may also have judged that a display of loyalty would help his case for financial subsidy from France. D’Eon to Broglie, 20 February 1770. MAE, CP Angleterre suppl. 16, f. 368.

[xlviii] Whately passed on to George Grenville Augustus Hervey’s report ‘that the letter from Dr. Musgrave runs like wildfire, but that he hears D’Eon has been prevailed on to prepare an answer to it.’ Whately to Grenville, 7 September 1769. Grenville Papers, 4:451. Latter that month Whately wrote again, noting Musgrave’s claim to have evidence from Lord Bristol that ministers had bribed D'Eon to keep him quiet. Whately to Grenville, 26 September 1769. Ibid., 4:464-5. Bute’s envoy to D’Eon, ‘M. Charles’, did indeed approach D’Eon asking him to quash the rumours. See D’Eon to Broglie (in cipher), 8 September 1769. MAE, CP Angleterre suppl. 16, f. 357. For ‘Charles’, see above (note 18).

[xlix] D’Eon to Broglie (in cipher), 8 September 1769. MAE, CP Angleterre suppl. 16, f. 357.

[l] The anonymous satire, of 12 August 1769 entitled The Chevalier d’-n producing his Evidence against certain Persons shows Musgrave administering an emetic to D'Eon (shown as a monkey), who in turn vomits over Bute and his fellow ministers. Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT. 769/11.0/1.

[li] See Simon Burrows, ‘A literary low-life reassessed: Charles Théveneau de Morande in London, 1769-1791’, Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998), 76-94. For Morande’s correspondence with D’Eon, see AN, 277AP/1, dossier 1.

[lii] D’Eon to d’Aiguillon, 13 July 1773. MAE, CP Angleterre 502, f. 177.

[liii] D’Eon to Morande, 6 July 1771. AN, 227AP/1, dossier 1.

[liv] Choiseul preferred to call the ‘Hats’ party by this nobler name. John Fraser Ramsey, Anglo-French relations, 1760-1770 A study of Choiseul’s foreign policy, University of California Publications in History 17.3 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1939), pp. 194-202.

[lv] See George Grenville’s diary for 28 March 1764. Grenville Papers, 2:501.

[lvi] See Lord Chancellor Henley to Grenville, 31 March 1764, George Grenville to Henley, 31 March 1764. Grenvlle Papers, 2:280-3.

[lvii] Both Bedford and Rochford were conspicuous within their respective ministries for their francophilia. This had occasionally led them to brief French officials against their own colleagues. For the ministry’s unenthusiastic response to Bedford’s proposal, see Grenville to Chancellor Henley, 31 March 1764. Grenville Papers, 2:282-3; for Rochford’s, see Brian C. Morton and Donald C. Spinelli, Beaumarchais and the American revolution (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 8-9.

[lviii] Châtelet to Choiseul, 21 March 1768. MAW, CP Angleterre, 477, f. 374. Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond had briefly served as Britain's Ambassador to France in 1765/6. Lennox held the title of Duke of Aubigny in the French peerage, but his Anglicanism had thrown up difficulties with regard to a legal suit being pursued against him in France. Châtelet decided not to follow up Rochford's suggestion, as D'Eon was behaving himself.

[lix] Vergennes to Garnier, 3 April 1774 (Rochford's attitude), Garnier to Vergennes, 12 April 1774 (Fielding). MAE, CP Angleterre 505, f. 113 and 134.

[lx] Simon Burrows, Blackmail, scandal and revolution: London's French libellistes, 1758-1792 (Manchester: MUP, 2006), p. 110.

[lxi] Burrows, ibid., p. 210.

[lxii] John Sainsbury, Disaffected patriots: London supporters of the Revolutionary America, 1769-1782 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), pp. 99-102.

[lxiii] For a rare attempt to use such arguments against the Patriot/Wilkite view of the constitution, see Anon., An essay on the constitution of England (2nd ed., London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1766), pp. 3, 80.

[lxiv] Compare John Brewer, ‘The Wilkites and the law, 1763-4: a study of radical notions of governance’ in John Brewer and John Styles, An ungovernable people: the English and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (London, 1980), pp. 128-171 (.), Julian Swann, ‘“Despotes cachés”: the parlementaire critique of despotism, bureaucracy and the administrative monarchy, 1748-1771’, #.

[lxv] This in a discussion of the most important Pittite newspaper of the period. Marie Peters, ‘The Monitor on the constitution, 1755-1765: new light on the ideological origins of English radicalism’, English Historical Review 86 (1971), 706-727 (723).

[lxvi] King, parliament and hacks like Wilkes each wanted such officers to be responsible to them. Yet whenever they felt themselves losing the fight they fell back on denying that such an executive any constitutional cover. See Marie Peters, ‘Pitt as a foil to Bute: the public debate over ministerial responsibility and the powers of the Crown’, in Schweizer, ed., Lord Bute, pp. 99-115.

[lxvii] Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme, pp. 297 (quote), 307.

[lxviii] Swann, ‘"Despotes cachés"’, p. #; Conlin, ‘Dregs of liberty’, pp. 1274-7.

[lxix] This analysis is partly based on that of Pierre Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopique. Histoire de l’idée de marché (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 160.

[lxx] D’Eon, Lettres, mémoires et negociations, xi.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download