Colonel Mark Wilks (1759-1831) was born at Kirk Michael Vicarage, the son of the Reverend James Wilks. He served in the Madras army and was Political Resident at the Court of Mysore before being appointed Governor of St Helena by the East India Company in 1813. He was governor when Napoleon arrived in exile in 1815, and the two men developed a mutual respect. Napoleon later lamented his replacement by the rough and tactless Sir Hudson Lowe. Wilks was also a member of the House of Keys and Speaker, and a distinguished oriental scholar and historian.

He came home to the Island and took up its business. He lived at Kirby near Douglas. On 16 October 1817, when the House of Keys inspected its own building and found it not only unfit but imminently unsafe, the members resolved that Mark Wilks and John Christian should form the deputation to wait on the Lieutenant-Governor and impress on him the urgent necessity of soliciting the Secretary of State for an immediate order to rebuild it. He was still in public life in December 1826, when he appears in the list of magistrates for Braddan.

He wrote on Manx history too, and the Manx did not thank him for it. He is taken to be the author of the anonymous tract on the characters in Peveril of the Peak, privately printed and very sparingly circulated, and afterwards reprinted in an appendix to the introduction of the last edition of that novel and in Forsyth's Antiquary's Portfolio of 1825, along with the Lament for Illiam Dhone and the Privy Council's order of 5 August 1663. One editor remarks that Sir Walter Scott took all its statements upon trust and entirely mistook some of the principal characters. The Manx Society's editors were sharper: Colonel Wilks, they wrote, was neither a stranger nor unacquainted with the laws and customs of his native country, and so could not have been induced from any motive to pen the erroneous statements the pamphlet contains.

The family produced other men of note. His sister Margaret married the Rev. Thomas Cubbon, and their seventh child was Sir Mark Cubbon, born at the vicarage of Maughold on 23 August 1775, who served sixty years in India. Sir Mark Wilks Collet, Governor of the Bank of England, was a Manxman by descent connected with this family and, it was believed, with the Corletts of Loughan-y-yei in Lezayre.