John Horne Tooke was one of the most effective English agitators for parliamentary reform and freedom of dissent in the late 18th century.
Background
John Horne Tooke was born in Newport Street, Long Acre, Westminster, United Kingdomon the 25th of June 1736. He was third son of John Horne, a poulterer in Newport Market, whose business the boy when at Eton happily veiled under the title of a " Turkey merchant. "
Education
On the 12th of January 1754 he was admitted as sizar at St John's College, Cambridge, and took his degree of B. A. in 1758, as last but one of the senior optimes, Richard Beadon, his lifelong friend, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells, being a wrangler in the same year.
Horne had been admitted on the 9th of November 1756, as student at the Inner Temple, making the friendship of John Dunning and Lloyd Kenyon, but his father wished him to take orders in the English Church, and he was ordained deacon on the 23rd of September 1759 and priest on the 23rd of November 1760.
On the 16t of July 1771 Herne obtained at Cambridge, though not without some opposition from members of both the political parties, his degree of M. A.
Career
In 1769 he helped the embattled radical John Wilkes found the Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, but two years later he broke with Wilkes and created his own Constitutional Society to agitate for parliamentary reform and self-government for the American colonies.
Horne’s outspoken support of the colonists led to his conviction and imprisonment (1778) for seditious libel. From 1782 to 1785 he rallied public support behind William Pitt’s unsuccessful attempts to obtain reforms of Parliament. When the revolutionary events in France prompted the British government to suppress radicals, Horne Tooke was arrested in May 1794 and charged with high treason. Six months later he was acquitted by a London jury. The radical movement was dispersed by the end of the century, but Horne Tooke gained a seat in Parliament in 1801.
An enthusiastic philologist, he was among the first to regard language as a product of historical development rather than as a fixed structure.
Religion
He became (1760) an Anglican priest but soon abandoned his clerical duties for politics.
He was a strong supporter of John Wilkes until 1771, when he broke with him and founded the Constitutional Society to promote parliamentary reform and support for the American colonists.
Politics
With Fox he was never on terms of friendship, and Samuel Rogers, in his Table Talk, asserts that their antipathy was so pronounced that at a dinner party given by a prominent Whig not the slightest notice was taken by Fox of the.
Meantime the excesses of the French republicans had provoked reaction in England, and the Tory ministry adopted a policy of repression.