When Insults Were an Art Form

Modern political discourse has the wit of a dial tone.  Scroll through any comments section, and you will find insults built from profanity, capital letters, and a worrying confidence in the user’s own intelligence.  Compare that to the eighteenth century, where two enemies of the British political establishment turned contempt into literature.  The exchange is worth excavating, not merely for the joke, but for what it reveals about the men who delivered it.

The Players

John Montagu, 4^th Earl of Sandwich, held the office of First Lord of the Admiralty on three separate occasions, the last stretching from 1771 to 1782.  Historians largely blame his administration for Britain’s naval unreadiness at the outbreak of the American War of Independence, a charge with real teeth, given the Royal Navy’s humiliating failures against the French fleet at the 1781 Battle of the Chesapeake, a defeat that sealed Lord Charles Cornwallis, 1^st Marquess Cornwallis’s fate at Yorktown.  Sandwich also sat on the governing council of the Hellfire Club, a society built around gambling, drinking, and the kind of debauchery that gave eighteenth-century satirists endless material.  His nickname in Parliament was “Jemmy Twitcher,” lifted straight from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, in which the character Jemmy Twitcher betrays his own friend to the gallows.  The label stuck because Sandwich earned it.

John Wilkes, Member of Parliament for Middlesex, built his career on provoking the kind of men Sandwich represented.  In 1763, Wilkes published North Briton No. 45, an article accusing King George III of lying to Parliament about the Treaty of Paris.  The Crown issued a general warrant for the arrest of everyone connected with the publication; forty-nine people were detained without individually named charges, a legal overreach so blatant that Wilkes later won a court judgement against it, a ruling that helped establish the modern principle against general warrants in English law.  Wilkes was expelled from the House of Commons, re-elected by Middlesex voters three times between 1768 and 1769, and expelled three times in retaliation.  The government’s refusal to seat him sparked the Wilkes and Liberty movement and the 1768 St George’s Fields Massacre, in which troops fired on a crowd supporting him, killing at least seven people.

The Insult

Sandwich tells Wilkes: “Upon my soul, Wilkes, I don’t know whether you will die upon the gallows or of the pox.”

Wilkes replies, “That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.”

This exchange has no reliable eighteenth-century primary source.  It appears in nineteenth-century anecdote collections, decades after both men were dead, with no contemporary diary, letter, or parliamentary record backing it up.  That does not make it impossible; Wilkes was famous for this calibre of retort, and his biographer, Horace Bleackley, recorded similar lines from him on good authority.  It does, however, make it unverified.

What makes the exchange worth repeating, verified or not, is that it fits both men’s documented records with uncomfortable precision.  Wilkes did contract venereal disease; his biographers confirm a documented history of it, consistent with a reputation for womanising that was never in dispute.  Sandwich’s own hypocrisy was equally well established.  In 1763, he stood in the House of Lords and read aloud Wilkes’s privately circulated and obscene poem An Essay on Woman, condemning it as blasphemous filth, despite having been Wilkes’s fellow member of the Hellfire Club and no stranger to the same company and the same vices himself.  The public saw straight through it.  Sandwich’s betrayal earned him the Jemmy Twitcher label that followed him for the rest of his career.

Wilkes’s line stung not because it was clever, but because it was accurate.  Sandwich had spent years indulging the behaviour he then prosecuted Wilkes for, in public, for political gain.  An insult built on documented hypocrisy outlives one built on cruelty alone, which is a harder discipline than most of what passes for political rhetoric today, verified exchange or not.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters