 Serres also said that Wilmot knew the novelist Laurence Sterne and influenced leading liberal political figures including John Wilkes and Edmund Burke.According to Serres, Wilmot fell out with Burke over his treatment of Wilkes, and when Burke demanded that Wilmot burn all their correspondence, Wilmot scrupulously complied.Indeed, Wilmot was so concerned to preserve confidences and his own anonymity that he burned all his papers just before his death, leaving no evidence of his literary and scholarly achievements.