William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner
William Hague
William Hague has written the life of William Wilberforce who was both a staunch conservative and a tireless campaigner against the slave trade.Hague shows how Wilberforce, after his agonising conversion to evangelical Christianity, was able to lead a powerful tide of opinion, as MP for Hull, against the slave trade, a process which was to take up to half a century to be fully realised. Indeed, he succeeded in rallying to his cause the support in the Commons Debates of some the finest orators in Parliament, having become one of the most respected speakers of those times.Hague examines twenty three crucial years in British political life during which Wilberforce met characters as varied as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Tsar Alexander of Russia, and the one year old future Queen Victoria who used to play at his feet. He was friend and confidant of Pitt, Spencer Perceval and George Canning. He saw these figures raised up or destroyed in twenty three years of war and revolution.Hague presents us with a man who teemed with contradictions: he took up a long list of humanitarian causes, yet on his home turf would show himself to be a firm supporter of the instincts, interests and conservatism of the Yorkshire freeholders who sent him to Parliament.William Hague's masterful study of this remarkable and pivotal figure in British politics brings to life the great triumphs and shattering disappointments he experienced in his campaign against the slave trade, and shows how immense economic, social and political forces came to join together under the tireless persistence of this unique man.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
WILLIAM
WILBERFORCE
The Life of
the Great Anti-Slave Trade
Campaigner
WILLIAM HAGUE
For Ffion
CONTENTS
Cover (#uc4fc32d3-4bae-5c86-ab4b-4cb0836f5ca7)
Title Page (#uacccae28-53a4-591e-8eaf-6483d3b13d6f)
Dedication (#ub86cc768-904d-50c3-a3af-009c5ad5f57f)
Prologue (#uf86aac8c-f802-544b-aa45-2eb883702e70)
1 One Boy, Two Paths (#uf2722ac7-9690-5bc6-9e76-e32752b66b35)
2 Ambition and Election (#u33bc535c-36c6-5b8a-b11d-3536f5321573)
3 The Devoted Acolyte (#u27b369dc-d840-5474-8f8f-812ae2c4af8e)
4 Agony and Purpose (#uf2fbb4f7-ec5b-505a-8a17-60112e143b53)
5 Diligence and New Causes (#u596ab9b7-ee9e-5a34-be74-de5de0eae938)
6 The Trade in Flesh and Blood (#ue84334a8-9ca5-5e2a-a47a-7f3dfe41d1aa)
7 Early Optimism (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Eloquence Without Victory (#litres_trial_promo)
9 ‘An Overflowing Mind’ (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The Independent (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Consuming Passions (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Darkness Before Dawn (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Abolition (#litres_trial_promo)
14 High Respect; Low Politics (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Struggle Renewed (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Under Attack (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Trials of Faith (#litres_trial_promo)
18 ‘An Increase of Enjoyments’ (#litres_trial_promo)
19 His Feet on the Rock (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
The Abolition of the Slave Trade (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_100b0599-76f5-56ea-8bbd-2bcec6e2c0ef)
An observer of the House of Commons that Monday afternoon, 23 February 1807, might have thought it a day like any other: the Members walking in and out in the middle of predictable speeches, others sitting facing each other on the tiered green benches, all giving off the hubbub of gossip which was a sure sign that they were waiting for something important and were not enthused by the proceedings before it.
There was, after all, no shortage of subjects for the Members to discuss as they watched and waited. The government of Lord Grenville was at such an impasse in its relations with King George III that its fall from power could be imminent, and the war with France, which over fourteen years had cost tens of thousands of lives and added £350 million to the national debt, seemed deadlocked. If national crisis and European conflict were not enough for them there was plenty of drama closer to home: that morning, at the hanging at Newgate of three convicted murderers, Messrs Holloway and Haggerty and Elizabeth Godfrey, the attendant crowd of twenty thousand had become so tightly packed that thirty spectators had died in the crush. No wonder the MPs that afternoon seemed to pay little attention to the tedious routine of their chamber: a complaint against the Sandwich Road Bill, a committee seeking to take evidence in Ireland, a short debate on the Poor Laws Bill, an alteration of the general election result in Chippenham, all typical of the daily fare of the House of Commons at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Only after all these matters had been considered did the Speaker call for the business that was keenly awaited on the floor of the House and in the public gallery, and ask the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Howick, to move the second reading of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill.
The slave trade had been debated in the same chamber and by many of the same people for nearly two decades. Year after year the evils of the trade, ‘founded in robbery, kidnapping and murder, and affording an incentive to the worst passions and crimes’,
as Lord Howick was soon to refer to it, had been brought before the attention of MPs. Year after year the Bills proposed had been rebuffed, delayed, abandoned amidst the lengthy taking of interminable evidence or brusquely thrown out in the House of Lords. Once again that Monday afternoon the arguments were deployed. The abolition of the trade would lead to the better treatment of slaves already in the West Indies; the great ports of Liverpool and Bristol were not remotely dependent on it; and most of all, the House of Commons could no longer accept the principle ‘that British subjects are allowed to tear by violence from their home their fellow creatures, to take them from their family, and from their friends, to convert them from free men into slaves, and to subject them for the remainder of their lives to the arbitrary will and wanton caprice of others’.
Once again, as afternoon wore on into evening and the candles were lit around the chamber for a sitting long into the night, the House had to endure the arguments to the contrary. There was General Gascoyne, the Member for Liverpool and ‘conservative to the backbone’, drawing attention to the capital invested in forty thousand tons of shipping and the employment of four thousand seamen. He warned of mass insurrection among the slaves if the Bill were carried. There was Mr Bathurst of Bristol calling for a tax on the importation of Negroes rather than total abolition, for ‘sufficient notification had not been given’.
There was George Hibbert of London, who had twenty-five years’ experience of investments in Jamaica, arguing that Africa had ‘invited’ the slave trade rather than ‘the slave trade seduced Africa’.
For those who had longed for Britain to take the lead in removing ‘one of the greatest sources of crimes and sufferings ever recorded in the annals of mankind’,
the arguments deployed were a heartrending reminder of the defeats and disappointments of the past.
Yet on this night there was one crucial difference, and everyone present knew it. The Bill would be passed, not merely by a small margin but by a huge one; not then passed into oblivion but this time enacted within a few weeks as the law of His Majesty’s Kingdom and all of his Islands, Colonies, Dominions, and Territories. A nation which had transported over three million Africans across the Atlantic and invested vast sums in doing so would, from 1 May that year, outlaw such a trade and declare any vessel fitted out for it to be forfeit. The Royal Navy, the most powerful on earth, which had henceforth protected that trade, would from that day enforce its annihilation.
This Bill would finally succeed in abolishing the practices of decades and changing the behaviour of an Empire, and the MPs, still in their seats as midnight came on, now knew it. For unlike its predecessors, it came with the full force of a united ministry behind it and had already been passed by the House of Lords, for all the fulminations of the future King, the Duke of Clarence. Its passage would be hailed by the Prime Minister himself as the ‘most glorious measure that had ever been adopted by any legislative body in the world’,
while the veteran campaigner Granville Sharp would drop to his knees in prayer and thanksgiving: the dam which had held back twenty years of anger, revulsion, education, petitioning, campaigning and parliamentary struggle had finally burst.
When four o’clock in the morning came the Members were still there in force, and in voting 283 for the Ayes and only sixteen for the Noes they would render the close or negative votes of earlier years hard to believe. Yet before they did so, speaker after speaker would single out one of their number as the architect of the victory to come; one who had found twenty years before that the trade was ‘so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable’ that he had ‘from this time determined that I would never rest till I had effected its abolition’;
one whose speech against the trade in 1789 was, according to the great Edmund Burke, ‘not excelled by anything to be met with in Demosthenes’;
and one who through all the dark years of war and revolution since then had persisted in the face of heavy defeats, gnawing and nagging his way to an objective he believed had been set before him by God.
Sir John Doyle referred to ‘the unwearied industry’ of this man, and ‘his indefatigable zeal … which washed out this foul stain from the pure ermine of the national character’. Lord Mahon said his ‘name will descend to the latest posterity, with never fading honour’, and Mr Walter Fawkes said he looked ‘with reverence and respect’ to a man who has ‘raised a monument to his fame, founded on the basis of universal benevolence’.
As the debate approached its climax, it was Sir Samuel Romilly, the Attorney General, who compared the same individual with the tyrant Napoleon across the Channel. The Emperor might seem ‘when he sat upon his throne to have reached the summit of human ambition and the pinnacle of earthly happiness’, but in his bed ‘his solitude must be tortured and his repose banished by the recollection of the blood he had spilled and the oppressions he had committed’. By contrast, a certain Member of the House of Commons would that night ‘retire into the bosom of his happy and delighted family’ and lie down on his bed ‘reflecting on the innumerable voices that would be raised in every quarter of the world to bless him; how much more pure and permanent felicity must he enjoy, in the consciousness of having preserved so many millions of his fellow creatures, than the man with whom he had compared him, on the thrones of which he had waded through slaughter and oppression’.
As Romilly closed, he was followed by an almost unheard-of event: the House of Commons rose as a body, cheering to the echo a man whom many of them had once ignored, opposed or abused. The object of their adulation found that the scene, as he later wrote, left him ‘completely overpowered by my feelings’,
and the tears streamed down his face. A slight and hunched figure amidst a sea of tributes, he would indeed attain that night one of ‘the two great objects’ which he had long believed should be the work of his life. To some a ‘sacred relic’, yet to others the ‘epitome of the devil’, he was one of the finest debaters in Parliament, even in its greatest age of eloquence. While he never held ministerial office, his extraordinary combination of humanity, evangelism, philanthropy and political skill made him one of the most influential Britons in history. For the man saluted by the Commons that night, tearful, emotional, but triumphant as the hated slave trade was voted into history, bore the name of William Wilberforce.
1 One Boy, Two Paths (#ulink_ebf308f4-334c-582c-b964-5c653764defd)
My Mother hearing I had become a Methodist, came up to London to ascertain the fact and finding it true took me down to Hull almost heartbroken.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Autobiographical Notes
No pious parent ever laboured more to impress a beloved child with sentiments of piety, than they did to give me a taste of the world and its diversions.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections
THE PEDIGREE OF WILLIAM Wilberforce was impeccably Yorkshire. His grandfather, another William Wilberforce, had come to Hull to make his fortune early in the eighteenth century, but he had not come far: for centuries the family known as Wilberfoss had lived and prospered around the Yorkshire Wolds. A William Wilberfoss had been Mayor of Beverley at the time of the Civil War. The family could trace its ancestral line with certainty back to the small town of Wilberfoss
near York in the reign of Henry II (1154–89), and with some imagination and a hint of legend to the great conflicts of 1066, in which a Wilberfoss was said to have fought at Hastings and to have slain the would-be king, Harold Hardrada, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
This was a family proud of its traditions: among them civic leadership, commercial acumen and the prominence of the names William and Robert, both of which had featured in most of their generations since the fourteenth century. When grandfather William Wilberforce came to Hull he was soon elected as Mayor, and his two sons were duly named William and Robert, products of a marriage with Sarah Thornton, daughter of another successful trading family. William Wilberforce the future politician was the third child of the second son, Robert, and he was to owe his great inheritance to the lack of competing male progeny in his generation: he was an only son, two of whose three sisters died at an early age, while his uncle William – who confusingly married his cousin Hannah Thornton – was childless. The Wilberforce family would thus provide in full to its most famous descendant one of the most powerful formative influences of his early years: wealth.
The source of the family wealth was the Baltic trade. As a port on the east coast of England, Hull was well positioned to take advantage of the eighteenth-century boom in trade with northern Europe. Acquired by King Edward I in the thirteenth century,
it had long been ‘a good trading town by means of the great river Humber that ebbs and flows like the sea’.
Its population of 7,500 in 1700 would almost quadruple in the following hundred years, with the town bursting out from medieval fortifications which were then erased, and a mass of warehouses, offices and fine homes being erected by the prospering merchants. London excepted, Hull became by far the busiest port on the east coast of England, with customs receipts over four times those of Newcastle. It was outstripped only by the great west coast ports of Bristol and Liverpool, with their access to the rich transatlantic trade, which included the trade in slaves. In the absence of any general quay, each merchant family needed its own private staiths for the loading and unloading of ships on the river Hull, just before its confluence with the great estuary of the Humber. The result was that the merchants’ houses nestled alongside each other on the High Street, which ran parallel to the river, with their gardens at the rear opening out directly onto the busy and sometimes chaotic scene of their private docks. Business and family life were thus conducted from a single site. An idea of the complexity of this arrangement was furnished in due course by Robert Wilberforce’s will: ‘My house in the High Street in Kingston upon Hull wherein I now dwell with all the Outhouses, Warehouses, Cellars, Staiths, Staith Chambers, Granaries, Scales, Scale beams, Scale weights, Gardens, Pumps, Pipes of Wood or Lead and other appurtenances thereto.’
One such property, no. 25 High Street, was inherited by Alderman Wilberforce on the death of his father-in-law in 1732. A smart and spacious red-brick house, built in the 1660s but substantially altered by the Wilberforce family, it was to be the headquarters for the management of further additions to the Wilberforce fortune in subsequent decades. It must have been a bustling and noisy place, with many powerful and lingering smells. The congestion caused by carts, wagons and carriages crowding into the narrow streets required the authorities to bring in new regulations in the 1750s to ensure ‘THAT no cart, waggon, truck or other wheel carriage, with or without horses or other cattle, shall be permitted to remain in any of the public streets, squares, lanes or passages in the said town, longer than is or shall be necessary for loading or unloading the same …’
Such a scene outside the front door of the house was only a hint of what would be happening at the bottom of the garden to the rear: ships were moored to each other as they waited, sometimes for weeks, for customs officers to give permission to unload; when they did so the staiths would groan beneath the weight of imported goods – timber, iron ore, yarn, hemp, flax and animal hides from Scandinavia, manufactured goods and dyes from Germany and Holland, and, as the century wore on and a growing population took to importing its food, large quantities of wheat, rye, barley, beans, peas, beef, pork and butter, all to be washed down with thousands of gallons of Rheinish Hoch. While goods for export, such as lead, and in later years a growing weight of cotton, tools, and cutlery, piled up waiting to be loaded, the whole atmosphere would hang heavily with the stench of the whale blubber refineries, joining with the smells of oilseed mills and tar yards in a particularly foul combination.
It was into this crowded scene that William Wilberforce was born, in the family home on the High Street, on 24 August 1759. His father had taken over the house four years before, when old Alderman Wilberforce retired to the quieter atmosphere of a country home at Ferriby, seven miles upstream on the Humber. Robert Wilberforce had married Elizabeth Bird and had taken over the management of the family business in the absence of his elder brother, who had evidently decided to make the most of the family’s prosperity and move to London. Robert and Elizabeth were to have four children. The first and the fourth, Elizabeth and Anne, would die at the ages of fourteen and eight respectively: even in a well-to-do household childhood mortality in the eighteenth century was high. The second daughter, Sarah, was eighteen months old when the baby William was born. He was a discouragingly small and fragile child, with weak eyesight to compound the gloom, and he is said to have expressed thankfulness in later life ‘that I was not born in less civilised times, when it would have been thought impossible to rear so delicate a child’,
and such a frail little thing could have been abandoned. Very little is recorded of his earliest years, but it was soon obvious that despite his physical infirmities he was intelligent and personable. The Wilberforce family presumably hoped that if he lived he would become the latest in their line of successful merchants, part of the ‘property, trade and profits’ which were the ‘dominant terms’ of eighteenth-century England.
Those looking for clues to his later choices in life will not find them in his infant years. While his great future friend William Pitt, born only twelve weeks before him, was already resolved at the age of seven to serve in the House of Commons, the young William Wilberforce spent his first eight years in a household dominated by the business world. His immediate family had no strong connection with national politics, and showed no special zeal for religion. For all the fact that their son was born in the great ‘year of victories’, in which Canada and India were falling under British dominion, and Horace Walpole was writing, ‘One is forced to ask every morning what victory there is, for fear of missing one,’
it seems that the horizons of Robert and Elizabeth Wilberforce were predominantly local and financial.
If family wealth was a first crucial ingredient in the later career of William Wilberforce, then the experience of learning from a teacher he liked and respected was a second. While the Wilberforces were rich, they did not adopt the practice of the nobility and landed gentry by sending their son to a private school such as Eton. It is fair to assume that the bustling nature of their household and the family’s strong participation in local affairs turned them against the other educational option for the wealthy of the eighteenth century, educating a child at home. Consequently, William joined the sons of other Hull merchants in attending Hull Grammar School, a short walk from 25 High Street down the cobbled Bishop Lane, through the teeming marketplace and past the Holy Trinity church. He later recalled walking there ‘with satchel on my shoulder’
and having his meals at home.
Eighteenth-century grammar schools varied enormously in the quality of education they provided. Often dependent on a single teacher, their fortunes thereby fluctuated along with the standards of that teacher. The subjects taught could amount to anything from a strict classical curriculum to the inclusion of more ‘practical’ subjects such as arithmetic, navigation, science or French. William was lucky, because the departure of the incumbent headmaster within a few months of the new pupil’s arrival brought onto the scene a new teacher, Joseph Milner, with whom he would enjoy a lifelong friendship.
Joseph Milner was brought up in Leeds, the son of a journeyman weaver who placed a high priority on his sons’ education despite his poverty, and who recalled that ‘Once, on a Saturday evening, I surprised my wife, by sending home a Greek book for my son Joseph, instead of a joint of meat for the succeeding Sunday’s dinner. It was too true that I could not send home both.’
Sent to Leeds Grammar School despite his father’s lack of formal education, he rapidly emerged as a prodigy, with verses published in the local newspaper and his teacher declaring that ‘Milner is more easily consulted than the dictionaries … and he is quite as much to be relied on.’
Having been dispatched to Cambridge with the financial support of ‘several liberal gentlemen’ of Leeds, he was twenty-three years old when he was interviewed for the job of headmaster at Hull, and duly appointed with the influential support of Alderman Wilberforce. With him he brought his younger brother Isaac, who had been taken out of school when he was twelve because of his father’s death. Isaac too showed exceptional intelligence, and now briefly performed the role of school usher, helping to teach the younger boys.
Under Milner’s leadership, it was not long before Hull Grammar School had become a popular and educational success. One of his pupils later recalled: ‘He appeared as if he knew all the different authors by heart; entered at once into their meaning, genius, taste, history … His mind shone every day with the utmost brightness and splendour … His whole school loved, revered, adored him for his wonderful abilities, for his simplicity, and for his easiness and readiness in communicating knowledge.’
Others recollected that ‘he rarely latterly inflicted corporal punishment’, and remembered ‘the caustic yet temperate ridicule with which he remarked on the custom of getting by heart the Latin syntax before some progress was made in the language … When some proficiency in the Latin language was obtained, he directed us simply to read a book, so as to be able to answer questions on the substance of it.’
Milner thus brought an innovative touch to the teaching of the traditional curriculum, and his pupils also loved mathematics and algebra, and had the benefit of the town having spent seven guineas on a pair of globes, the first recorded in the school. A large and apparently ungainly man, Milner ‘generally came in about nine in the morning: at eleven the school was dismissed: the scholars went to learn writing and arithmetic elsewhere. The afternoon school hours are from two til five in the summer, and until four in the winter months.’
Within two years the schoolroom was ‘crowded’, with plentiful fees bringing Milner’s income to ‘upwards of two-hundred pounds per annum’
rather than the salary of thirty guineas which had originally been envisaged.
While William might easily have been bullied or lacking in confidence on account of his fragility, his experiences at Hull Grammar School evidently fortified his natural abilities. He was bright, engaging and confident; Isaac Milner would later recall that William’s elocution ‘was so remarkable that we used to set him upon a table, and make him read aloud as an example to the other boys’.
It must have been a happy time for a seven-year-old boy: a good teacher, many friends, a caring family, and a large house enjoying an endless procession of visitors, traders and activities. In the summer months he was able to go out to his grandfather’s house at Ferriby and enjoy the sights and sounds of the English countryside. Then tragedy struck. In the late spring of 1768, when William was almost nine, his family was torn apart. Only months after celebrating the birth of his fourth child, Anne, and around the same time as the death of the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Robert Wilberforce died at the age of thirty-nine. This tragic sequence was to bring about the first of two wrenching upheavals in William’s early life.
Elizabeth Wilberforce struggled to cope after the death of her husband. Wilberforce would later write, ‘Some months after [his father’s death] my Mother had a most long and dangerous fever.’
It was decided that he would be moved to London, into the care of his father’s elder brother William and his wife Hannah. Arriving in London in the autumn of 1768 after a week’s stay with his cousins in Nottingham, William made his first acquaintance with what would become very familiar territory: his aunt and uncle owned a spacious villa in Wimbledon, then a village of just under a thousand residents separated by several miles of countryside from the capital, as well as a house in St James’s Place, yards from London’s fashionable clubs. For all their resources, his aunt and uncle did not find for him a school to measure up to the education he had been used to at Hull. He was sent to a boarding school at Putney, which he later remembered as ‘one of those little schools where a little of everything reading, writing, arithmetic etc is taught: a most wretched little place. I remember to this day the Scotch usher we had: a dirty disagreeable man.’
Charity boys were crammed into the upstairs; William and other pupils from better-off families, including a number of sons of West Indian plantation-owners, lived downstairs. He considered it ‘a very indifferent school’, a rather generous judgement given the mediocre education it gave him and the necessity of coping with ‘the things which we had for breakfast, which were so nasty, that I could not swallow them without sickening’.
The consolation was spending his vacations at Wimbledon, described by Jonathan Swift in 1713 as ‘much the finest place’ near London. He grew fond of his aunt and uncle, and settled in happily at their tranquil villa, Lauriston House. This would be an eight- or nine-bedroom house once its garrets were converted into bedrooms a few years later, with its own extensive grounds. Lauriston House was on the south side of Wimbledon Common, where the mansions were described in a guide book as ‘an assemblage of gentleman’s houses, most delightfully situated’, with ‘good gardens from whence is a pleasant prospect over the luxuriant vale beneath’.
William must have felt at home here; years later this would be the place where he would entertain his closest friends, and what would in later life become an insatiable appetite for rural air may well have been fostered in the fields and woods around Wimbledon. Before long, the move to London had turned into a happy one after all. Despite the miseries of attending school, William had a new home he liked and a loving relationship with his relatives. And of far greater significance to his later beliefs, he was about to acquire something else; something which his mother had certainly not intended for him when she sent him away, but which would become another vital ingredient in the personality of the young William Wilberforce. That something was religion; and not merely religion, but religion with enthusiasm.
The Christianity which William had encountered with his immediate family in Hull had been of the classic Church of England variety: a necessary and formal requirement for active and respectable citizens, but not usually intrusive or demanding. His mother ‘always went to church prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, but at this time had no true conception of the spiritual nature and aim of Christianity’.
He would later write that ‘her piety was rather of that standard to which the Church of England had then so generally declined … She had a better opinion of the world than she should have had and was not aware of its wickedness.’
The approach of his uncle William and aunt Hannah was wholly different, for they were adherents of a relatively new movement which asked much more of its followers and challenged the complacency of the established Church. This was Methodism, a view of Christianity which John Wesley and George Whitefield were preaching energetically to vast and growing crowds. Their challenge to the Church was stark, and the controversy and passions they aroused were intense.
Methodism was one of a number of movements which had arisen early in the eighteenth century in reaction to the diluted nature of the Christianity preached by the Church of England and the hypocritical and lacklustre way in which it was practised. It had begun with a group of students clustered around John and Charles Wesley at Oxford in 1729. Rising early each morning to practise their devotions, and spending several evenings a week reading the New Testament to each other, they regarded religion seriously, and adopted a programme of charitable work, self-examination and fixed times for the study of the scriptures reinforced by mutual oversight. Variously described as ‘Methodists’, ‘Enthusiasts’, ‘Bible Moths’ or the ‘Holy Club’, their determination ‘to observe with strict formality the method of study and practice laid down in the statutes of the University’
was the crucial characteristic which allowed the term ‘Methodism’ to stick.
The desire of these men to reform the Church, reinforced by the preachings of Whitefield from the late 1730s, found a ready audience in England and in the American colonies. It is not surprising that many people were willing to hear the message that Christianity should be practised with a stronger sense of purpose, stricter rules and more pressing obligations. The abuse of ecclesiastical offices and the neglect of religious purpose in the Church of the eighteenth century had fully invited such a reaction, for it was mired in a period of place-seeking, money-grabbing and moral irrelevance. It was not just the Methodists who denounced the state of the Church. Jonathan Swift would make harsh and terrible claims about the deans and bishops he knew, while other observers spoke of the eighteenth-century Church as ‘one of the most corrupt in its administration’, or as ‘the biggest den of thieves in the whole world’.
As Voltaire put it, ‘There is only just enough religion in England to distinguish Tories who have a little from Whigs who have none.’
Many observers considered that Christianity was largely absent from much of the Church’s preaching. The renowned lawyer Sir William Blackstone did the rounds of the best preachers in London before declaring that ‘Not one of the sermons contained more Christianity than the writings of Cicero.’
The vicar Henry Venn considered, after listening to sermons in York, that ‘excepting a single phrase or two, they might be preached in a synagogue or mosque without offence’.
It was common for apathetic clergy simply to buy sermons from each other, saving themselves the thought or effort required to come up with their own words. William’s Hull Grammar School teacher Joseph Milner would assert in the 1780s, ‘That sermons should be sold to them by a person advertising the newspapers, is a flaming proof of the low state of their religious views and studies.’
This was not surprising in an age when many of the clergy ceased to perform religious duties at all. Having been appointed to a lucrative parish, it was common practice for clergymen to become absentees, keeping the living obtained from the parish and delegating curates to carry out their duties at a much lower rate of pay. In 1771 the Reverend Dr John Trustler started a business ‘abridging the Sermons of eminent divines, and printing them in the form of manuscripts, so as not only to save clergymen the trouble of composing their discourses, but even of transcribing them’.
One commentator wrote that ‘Country towns abound with curates who never see the parishes they serve but when they are absolutely forced to it by duty: that several parishes are often served by the same person, who, in order to double or treble his curacy, hurries through the service in a manner perfectly indecent; strides from the pulpit to his horse and gallops away as if pursuing a fox.’
Indeed, the hunting parson became the caricature of the eighteenth-century Church. One clergyman in Suffolk ‘kept an excellent hunter, rode well up to the hounds, drank very hard … he sang an excellent song, danced remarkably well, so that the young ladies considered no party complete without him’.
Hard drinking was common, Wesley writing from St Ives in 1747 that two clergymen ‘were led home at one or two in the morning in such a condition as I care not to describe’.
Above all, it was the ruthless competition for the most lucrative parishes and dioceses that made the eighteenth-century Church a place of touting and toadying ambition, and caused understandable anger amongst a general population whose tithe payments funded the generous livings and evident abuses. There seemed no end to the number of positions a bishop might occupy: ‘The bishops are frequently archdeacons and deans, rectors, vicars and curates, besides holding professorships, Clerkships, prebends, precentorships, and other offices in cathedrals.’
One observer recorded that ‘the late Bishop of Salisbury is said to have died worth upwards of £150,000 … I can hardly think it probable that he could amass so much wealth … I never heard him accused of avarice: nor did I ever hear that he had any great fortune with any of his four wives.’
Nepotism only made matters worse. It was said of one family alone, the Beresfords, that one of them had cumulatively received over £350,000 from his Church living, another just under £300,000, a third £250,000 and a fourth, with four livings simultaneously, earned £58,000. In total, through eight clerics this family obtained £1.5 million from the Irish Church. Families with political connections were proud of their ability to obtain Church livings. The tombstone of one lady of the Stanhope family proudly declared: ‘She had the merit to obtain for her husband and children, twelve several appointments in Church and State.’
Lord Hugh Percy, Bishop of Carlisle, received over £250,000 from the Church, and ensured a steady supply of canonries, prebends and rectories for his sons and sons-in-law.
With such rewards available, the Church was converted into a branch of the aristocracy. To cap it all, political patronage was decisive in most of the senior appointments. ‘No man,’ complained Dr Johnson, ‘can now be made a Bishop for his learning and piety: his only chance of promotion is his being connected with someone who has parliamentary interest.’
One relative of Lord North, Prime Minister in the 1770s, became a bishop at thirty, was later promoted to the highly lucrative see of Winchester, and is said to have gained around £1,500,000 from Church funds over his life, while additionally securing thirty livings for other members of his family. Such sums are the equivalent of many tens of millions of pounds in today’s money. Meanwhile, low-paid curates struggled to do the work for which the clergy were paid, often receiving only a shilling a day and turning to farming or weaving for part of the week in order to supplement their income. Neglected Anglican congregations declined sharply during the eighteenth century, and the Church failed to establish itself in the new industrial towns. By 1750 Manchester had a population of twenty thousand, but only one parish church.
Of course there were still bishops and vicars who lived more frugally or honestly, but it was not difficult to make the case that parts of the English Church in the eighteenth century were in a state of virtual paganism, and that a radical new approach was required. To John Wesley, it was not necessary to change the doctrines or liturgy of the Church, but it was essential for both its clergy and its followers to adopt a purer and more devout approach in their public and private conduct. Since the Church appeared so uncontrollably corrupt and licentious, and set such a poor example to the population at large, Methodists believed that strict rules should be adopted for the regulation of daily life. Methodists were required to attend weekly class meetings and permit probing enquiries into their daily conduct. Their General Rules forbade ‘the profaning of the day of the Lord by either doing ordinary work thereon, or by buying or selling’, as well as ‘drunkenness, buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them, less in cases of extreme necessity’, along with ‘uncharitable or unprofitable conversation’ and ‘the putting on of gold or costly apparel’.
They were also told to avoid ‘the singing of songs, or reading those books, which do not tend to the knowledge or love of God; softness or needless self-indulgence’.
Wesley told them too that they should ‘take no more food than nature required’, to ‘sleep early and rise early’, and to wear cheap and plain dress.
The adoption of such a lifestyle was meant to follow the conversion of the individual, in which a period of despair about his or her sins would be followed by a sense of forgiveness, and it would ultimately bring its reward in salvation in the eyes of God. Those who did not seek it would have much to fear from ‘the wrath to come’.
The Methodist message, and the bold and emotional style in which it was preached, soon came up against the hostility of the Church. By 1740 Whitefield found churches closed to his preaching, but this simply caused him to take up the still more adventurous initiative of preaching to huge numbers of people in the open air. Crowds of fifty thousand at a time were known at such events: vast, silent gatherings which gave way after the preaching to dramatic conversions amidst much crying and emotion. Horace Walpole commented in 1749, ‘This sect increases as fast as almost ever any religious nonsense did.’
Whitefield became such a celebrated figure that David Garrick, the best-known actor of the time, was reputed to have said that he would give £100 to be able to say ‘Oh’ in the way Whitefield said it.
By the late 1760s Wesley and Whitefield had travelled hundreds of thousands of miles, claiming twenty-five thousand people as strict Methodists but influencing the opinions of far more.
Among Whitefield’s converts in the 1750s was John Thornton, a rich man ‘in great credit and esteem’,
known for his charity and generosity, who owned a country estate at Clapham, a village to the south of London and only a few miles from the Wimbledon of his half-sister Hannah, William’s aunt. She, apparently, ‘was a great admirer of White-field’s preaching, and kept up a friendly connection with the early Methodists’.
Now she took her nine-year-old charge to church to hear Evangelical preachers, including the great John Newton. Newton was in his mid-forties at the time, and had led a dramatic and extraordinary life: press-ganged into the navy in his teens, shipwrecked off Africa, abandoned as a slave to a planter’s black mistress, he eventually returned home to marry his sweetheart and become master of a slaving ship, writing in the 1750s diaries which were among the most intimate and detailed accounts of the purchasing of slaves off the coast of Africa. By the 1760s he had turned to religion, started writing hymns and become curate at the village of Olney in Buckinghamshire. He was a man of great presence, and his preaching made a deep impact on the young Wilberforce, who remembered ‘reverencing him as a parent when I was a child’.
Not every child of nine or ten would have responded to such preaching, but for whatever reason of personality or inclination, the ear of the young William Wilberforce was sensitive from the outset to the beat of a religious drum. ‘Under these influences,’ he later wrote, ‘my mind was interested by religious subjects. How far these impressions were genuine I can hardly determine, but at least I may venture to say that I was sincere.’
Listening to Newton and admiring the devotion and sincerity of his aunt and uncle, he adopted Methodism as his creed. In his own words, ‘My uncle and aunt were truly good people, and were in fact disciples of Mr Whitefield. At that time when the church of England had so much declined I really believe that Mr Whitefield and Wesley were the restorers of genuine religion.’
What happened next would, thirty years later, be ascribed by Wilberforce to the intervention of Providence. Whatever the truth of that, the event took the physical form of the arrival of a very insistent and angry mother who removed him from London forthwith. For however strong the convictions of Hannah and Uncle William, they were not shared by most members of church-going society, or by the rest of the Wilberforce family at Hull. ‘When my poor mother heard that I was disposed to join the Methodists,’ Wilberforce recalled, ‘she was perfectly shocked.’
In 1771 a determined Elizabeth Wilberforce took a coach to London and descended on Wimbledon. William would later recall that ‘After consultation with my grandfather [she] determined to remove me from my uncle’s, fearful lest I should imbibe what she considered as little less than poison which indeed I at that time had done.’
He was torn from Wimbledon and put on a coach to Hull amidst much emotion and unhappiness: ‘being thus removed from my uncle and aunt affected me most seriously. It almost broke my heart.’
Once returned to Hull he would write to his uncle, ‘I can never forget you as long as I live.’ The confrontation between mother and aunt had evidently been quite a spectacle, with Elizabeth Wilberforce making neat use of the Methodist belief that God was present in the smallest action: ‘If it be the work of grace you know it cannot fail.’
Uncle and aunt were apparently ‘also inconsolable for the loss of me’.
William’s grandfather was adamant that he should be detached from Methodist influence, saying, ‘If Billy turns Methodist he shall not have a sixpence of mine.’
The family must have felt under siege, since to the astonishment of the local community the previously respected Joseph Milner had turned Methodist as well. William could not, in the light of this, even be returned to his former school. In the more ecumenical climate of the twenty-first century it is difficult to imagine the horror and suspicion occasioned in the late eighteenth century by flirtation with Methodist teaching. It is a measure of such suspicion that for all Milner’s effectiveness and popularity, the effect of his adherence to Methodism was to cause an exodus from the school, a sharp reduction in his income, and virtual ostracism in the town: ‘Few persons who wore a tolerably good coat would take notice of him when they met him in the street.’
Wesley and Whitefield could attract and rouse huge crowds, but they seemed threatening, intrusive or ridiculous to many others. The Anglican hierarchy attacked their claims to superiority as well as their doctrines of salvation by faith and the idea of conversion or new birth. In particular, Methodists’ earnestness and enthusiasm came in for much mockery. The Cornish actor, dramatist and theatre manager Samuel Foote wrote of Whitefield: ‘If he is bit by Fleas, he is buffeted by Satan. If he has the good Fortune to catch them, God will subdue his Enemies under his Feet.’
Sydney Smith attacked the Methodists because they ‘hate pleasure and amusements; no theatre, no cards, no dancing, no punchinello, no dancing dogs, no blind fiddlers – all the amusements of the rich and of the poor must disappear wherever these gloomy people get a footing’.
Accusations of hypocrisy on the part of Methodist preachers were mingled with suspicion of their hostility to alcohol, as in this verse from She Stoops to Conquer (1773) by the popular playwright Oliver Goldsmith:
When Methodist preachers come down,
A preaching that drinking is sinful,
I’ll wager the rascals a crown,
They always preach best with a skinful.
More seriously, there were occasional riots against Methodist preachers, whose appeal to the poor and conversion of women and young people could disrupt family life and cause divisions in a parish. Their classes and so-called ‘love feasts’ were sometimes viewed as a cover for suspicious or even obscene practices. Others simply objected to being lectured by them. As the Duchess of Buckingham put it, ‘It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.’
Such scorn would not succeed: there would be over seventy thousand practising Methodists by the 1790s, and perhaps over 400,000 by 1830.
Cut off from the age of twelve from the aunt and uncle he adored, and not even returned to the teacher he had liked, William was now sent to board at Pocklington School, his grandfather’s old school thirteen miles from York. This kept him safely within reach of his family and entirely separated from Methodist teaching under the watchful eye of the master, the Reverend Kingsman Baskett. Pocklington, an endowed grammar school, could accommodate about fifty pupils, but was going through a difficult patch in 1771, with only about thirty in attendance. Baskett did not require his pupils to work hard; Wilberforce remembered him as ‘an elegant though not deep scholar and of gentlemanly mind and manners’.
The school was paid the generous sum of £400 a year to take William and to give him certain privileges –considerable ones, in view of the fact that a normal fee at most schools for a year’s boarding was a mere £10. These included ‘a very good room to myself’,
dining with the headmaster and being specially tutored by him. Here he stayed for five years, ‘going in the holydays to my Mother’s at Hull and occasionally going to visit my grandfather’.
Even in this sanitised environment, it would take several years for William’s attachment to Methodist teaching and to his distant aunt and uncle to fade. A letter to his uncle in November 1771 ends:
May the blessing of the living God keep you and preserve you in this world and may he bring you unto his Kingdom of bliss and joy. I am your, dearest, dearest son, W Wilberforce
ps. I cannot write more because it is seen where the letter is to.
Later in the same month he wrote: ‘I own I would give anything in the world to be with you again yet I trust that everything is ordered for the best and if we put our whole trust and confidence in Him we shall never be confounded.’
In August 1772 he complained to his aunt that ‘one of the greatest misfortunes I had whilst at Hull was not being able to hear the blessed word of God, as my mama would not let me go to High Church on a Sunday afternoon’.
And the following month, he took the opportunity of writing ‘by the maid who goes away tomorrow; thinking it a better way than sending it to my uncle, since grandpa might perhaps see the letter’.
Yet in his essays, overseen by Baskett, Methodist sentiments were absent. Those that have survived suggest a serious, thoughtful young man who could express himself clearly. Too much should not be made of the significance of school essays, which then, as now, were principally written with the reader and marker in mind, but it is striking how many of Wilberforce’s opinions in later life seem to have already been formed before the age of fifteen. ‘Since there is so much to be begot by the society of a good companion and as much to be lost by that of a bad one we ought to take the greatest care not to form any improper connections,’ he wrote in March 1772. ‘We never ought to admit anyone into that class till we are perfectly acquainted both with his Morals and Abilities.’
In 1773 he ventured the opinion that ‘Those who bend their thoughts upon gaining popularity, will find themselves most egregiously mistaken, if they expect to find it so desirable as is represented by some … When a man once aims at popular applause he must part with everything though ever so near and dear to him at the least nod of a giddy multitude.’
In 1774 he produced this: ‘Life is a very uncertain thing at best, therefore we ought not to rely upon any good Fortune, since perhaps this moment we may enjoy the greatest Worldly Happiness; the next be plunged into the Deepest Abyss of unutterable Misery.’
Whether or not William felt he had been ‘plunged into the deepest abyss’ when uprooted from Wimbledon, he now showed a teenager’s resilience in recovering from it. His own feelings about this period of his life would change over the years. Twenty-five years later he wrote in his journal that ‘My mother’s taking me from my uncle’s when about twelve or thirteen and then completely a Methodist, probably has been the means of my becoming useful in life, connected with political men. If I had staid with my uncle I should probably have become a bigoted, despised Methodist.’
As he would later see it, he had been rescued from a life devoted wholly to religion and given the opportunity to put his beliefs into practice. For if wealth, an early glimpse of knowledge and a temporary immersion in religion were the governing influences of Wilberforce’s early years, a final and crucial factor was his busy social life as a teenager, which amplified the ease, grace and charm he would always show in society, and make it possible for him to succeed in public life.
Nothing could have been more antithetical to Methodist attitudes than the social life of the Hull merchant class into which his family now ensured that William was plunged. Methodists thoroughly disapproved of theatres, and a local preacher would say in 1792 that ‘Everyone who entered a playhouse was, with the players, equally certain of eternal damnation,’
but Hull’s new Theatre Royal, completed in 1770, was central to the social life of the town. Proceedings would commence as early as six in the evening with a play, followed by a musical or a comic opera, and then by dancers, jugglers, and sometimes performing dogs. Tate Wilkinson, actor-manager of the Theatre Royal, called Hull ‘the Dublin of England’ on account of its hearty welcome, and reported ‘the many acts of kindness I received in that friendly seat, occasions my being oftener in bad health in Hull than at any other place in my yearly round’.
Balls were held which ‘continued with unremitting gaiety to a late hour … and gave such a zest to hilarity, that numbers were left at four o’clock in the morning enjoying the united pleasures of the enlivening dance’.
Residents reported that ‘We have a very Gay Town with diversions of some or other kind.’
William at first resisted these pleasures; when he was first taken to a play it was almost by force. As he wrote himself, Hull ‘was then as gay a place as could be found out of London. The theatre, balls, great suppers, and card parties, were the delight of the principal families in the town. The usual dinner hour was two o’clock, and at six they met at sumptuous suppers. This mode of life was at first distressing to me, but by degrees I acquired a relish for it, and became as thoughtless as the rest. As grandson to one of the principal inhabitants, I was everywhere invited and caressed: my voice and love of music made me still more acceptable. The religious impressions which I had gained at Wimbledon continued for a considerable time after my return to Hull, but my friends spared no pains to stifle them. I might almost say, that no pious parent ever laboured more to impress a beloved child with sentiments of piety, than they did to give me a taste of the world and its diversions.’
His vacations were therefore an endless round of social events; every self-respecting family in Hull would have wanted to meet the young man with a lively mind, a kind disposition, a melodious voice and a fortune in the offing. His growing enjoyment of gambling, card parties, theatre-going and socialising long into the night would have outraged his aunt and uncle: ‘After tea we played cards till nine; then there was a great supper, game, turkey etc … In this idle way did they make me live; giving me a taste for cards, introducing me to pretty young women etc.’
In later years he would similarly report ‘utter idleness and dissipation … cards, assemblies, concerts, plays; and for two last years with the girls all the morning – religion gradually wearing away till quite gone’.
He was now ‘about 14 or 15 a boy of very high spirits’,
and his circumstances ‘did not dispose me for exertion when I returned to school’.
The Methodism had been drawn out of him. In 1774, with his mind no longer on his aunt and uncle, the religious sentiments expressed in his letters to them ceased. As he contemplated his next move, to Cambridge University, his many attributes and advantages in life were clear: sociability, wealth, thoughtfulness and an easy command of language. No one, including him, yet had any idea how he would use them.
Wilberfoss was at the edge of what was once the forest of Galtres, from whose herds of wild boar it took the name of ‘Wild-Boar-Foss’, and hence Wilberfoss.
Hence it was called the King’s town, producing its correct modern name of Kingston upon Hull.
2 Ambition and Election (#ulink_5b6f6129-d76c-596d-8288-40ff021f03b3)
As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make any one else studious.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections
Some time before when an uncle of mine had got into parliament, I recollect thinking it a very great thing.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections
IN HIS OWN WORDS, Wilberforce was armed upon his arrival as an undergraduate at Cambridge with ‘a perfect command of money’.
The death of both the other living William Wilberforces, his grandfather in 1776 and his uncle in 1777, left him as the sole male heir of the Wilberforce line. This meant that he was now in possession of a considerable fortune, and without the distraction of having to run the family business from which that fortune had been derived. Since his father’s death eight years earlier it had been Abel Smith, a scion of the rising Nottingham banking family who had married his mother’s sister, who had presided over the enterprise at Hull, now renamed Wilberforce and Smith.
The precise dimensions of Wilberforce’s fortune are unclear. He was not one of the super-rich of those days, the great landed families like the Fitzwilliams who owned colossal mansions and tens of thousands of acres, or the ‘nabobs’ who had returned from India with the wealth to set themselves up with land and pocket boroughs. It seems likely, given what is known about his assets and what can be calculated from the size of the losses which dissipated his family’s wealth half a century later, that he could lay claim to a personal fortune in the low hundreds of thousands of pounds, with £100,000 at that time roughly corresponding to £10 million today. He was, therefore, by no means able to set up a great country house, even had he wished to, but he easily had enough to live comfortably as a gentleman for the rest of his life.
This was a dangerous position for a seventeen-year-old arriving at Cambridge to be in. It was at St John’s College, alma mater of Kingsman Baskett, that his name was entered in the admissions book on 31 May 1776 (with ‘Wilberfoss’ crossed out and replaced with ‘Wilberforce’ as the college authorities belatedly caught up with the development of the family name), and he arrived there in October of that year. ‘I was introduced on the very first night of my arrival,’ he wrote, ‘to as licentious a set of men as can well be conceived. They drank hard, and their conversation was even worse than their lives … often indeed I was horror-struck at their conduct.’
This might be thought, by anyone who has attended Oxford or Cambridge at any point in history, to be the entirely normal reaction of a provincial innocent on his first night in college. Yet Cambridge does seem to have been particularly open to a dissolute lifestyle at that time. A sermon preached in the university church a few years later bemoaned ‘the scandalous neglect of order and discipline throughout the University’, and one observer complained that ‘It disgusts me to go through Cambridge … where one meets nothing academic or like a place of study, regularity or example.’
In the very year of Wilberforce’s arrival, Dr Ewin, a local Justice of the Peace, was hoping, forlornly it seems, that ‘young men see the folly of intemperance … vice and disorderly conduct … we never were at a greater pitch of extravagance in living, not dining in the halls, neglect of chapel … and not without women are our present misfortunes’.
Even by the normal standards of a boisterous university, rioting and the breaking down of other students’ doors were particularly prevalent. One St John’s freshman wrote to his father about a series of riots, complaining that ‘they had broke my door to pieces before I could get hold of my trusty poker’,
and the Master of the College felt it necessary in 1782 to denounce ‘scandalous outrages’ and to make clear that ‘Whoever shall be detected in breaking down the door of any person in college … shall be rusticated without hope of ever being recalled.’
Wilberforce considered he had been introduced to ‘some, I think of the very worse men that I ever met with in my life’.
To any teenager of a purely pleasure-loving or disruptive disposition, then, there was much to look forward to alongside several years of academic indolence. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge was a great centre of intellectual ferment at this point: the numbers of students had declined mid-century, and the dons were ‘decent easy men’ who ‘from the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing … had absolved their conscience’.
Medical students preferred to study in Holland; religious dissenters went to Edinburgh; the old English universities had become sleepy, conservative, and ‘the starting line in the race for Church livings’.
A further temptation to academic inactivity for Wilberforce arose from his being a Fellow Commoner, less exalted than a nobleman in the class-conscious eyes of those times, but enjoying many privileges over the pensioners and sizars, who paid lower fees and were generally on their way to a career in the Church. Fellow Commoners paid extra fees to ‘common’ (i.e. dine) at the Fellows’ table, and were exempt from many lectures and studies, although St John’s had recently introduced new rules requiring them to be publicly examined twice a year. Even so, the tutors told Wilberforce he really need not bother with work: ‘Their object seemed to be, to make and keep me idle. If ever I appeared studious, they would say to me, “Why in the world should a man of your fortune trouble himself with fagging?”’
The result was that he did a certain amount to get through the exams, but, while shaking off within a year or so his initial and shocking companions, spent the rest of the time socialising: ‘I used to play at cards a great deal and do nothing else and my tutor who ought to have repressed this disposition, if not by his authority at least by his advice, rather encouraged it: he never urged me to attend lectures and I never did. And I should have had nothing, all the time I was at college but for a natural love of classical learning and that it was necessary for a man who was to be publicly examined to prevent his being disgraced.’
The resulting academic record was undistinguished: in the college exams of December 1776, his performance ‘would have been mentioned sooner if he had prepared himself in the whole of Stanyan’ (Greek history); in 1777 he was said to be due ‘some praise’, and later in the year ‘was good in the Classic’ and in 1778 ‘did well in Butler’ (Analogy of Religion).
But as to mathematics, which he later thought his mind ‘greatly needed’, he was ‘told that I was too clever to require them’.
Undeniably, however, he had a good time, without the truly excessive drinking, womanising and violence of some of his contemporaries, but falling happily into the category of ‘sober dissipation’,
as he described it himself. He was already ‘so far from what the world calls licentious, that I was rather complimented on being better than young men in general’,
but he was very quickly a popular figure, showing to full effect all the abilities of singing, conversation and hospitality which the years of Hull society had honed in him. Unprepossessing as he must have been in appearance, only five feet four inches tall, with an eyeglass on a ribbon, his life at Cambridge soon became a foretaste of his future residence at Westminster, with people always clustering around him and filling his rooms. Thomas Gisborne, who was to become a renowned writer, poet, moralist and natural philosopher, had the rooms next door to Wilberforce but was much more studious, remembering him in the streets ‘encircled by young men of talent’. Wilberforce apparently kept a great Yorkshire pie in his rooms (an unlikely journey for a pie before the days of refrigeration), and ‘whatever else the good things was, to console the hungry visitor’.
He lived, according to Gisborne, ‘far too much for self-indulgence in habits of idleness and amusement. By his talents, his wit, his kindness, his social powers, his universal accessibility, and his love of society, he speedily became the centre of attraction to all the clever and the idle of his own college and of other colleges. He soon swarmed with them from the time when he arose, generally very late, like he went to bed. He talked and he laughed and he sang, and he amused and interested everyone.’
In later life Wilberforce would deeply regret the waste of time. When he ought to have been ‘under a strict and wholesome regimen’,
he found that ‘As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make any one else studious.’
If he gained anything specific from his Cambridge years it was certain friendships which further broadened his horizons: William Cookson, the uncle of Wordsworth, who took him during vacations to the Lake District and gave him a lifelong adoration of that part of England, soon to become his regular fresh-air retreat; Gerard Edwards, an entertaining young landowner who would one day make one of the most important introductions of Wilberforce’s life; and Edward Christian, whose brother Fletcher would soon enjoy the lasting fame of leading the mutiny on the Bounty. Three whole years of card parties and late-night drinking went by until, as these friends began to leave Cambridge in 1779, Wilberforce turned his mind to what to do with the rest of his life.
Many of the options available were presumably fairly easily dismissed. He had no wish to go into the family business, now in the capable hands of Abel Smith, and in any case probably was not attracted to spending the rest of his life in Hull. While others in search of a career would have gone into practising law, he had no record of the necessary studious application and no need of the money either. The majority of his fellow Cambridge graduates would have gone into the Church, but at this stage in his life this would not have offered a remotely desirable lifestyle, and his early Methodism had left him with serious doubts about the established Church – his sons reported in their biography of him that while at Cambridge he briefly refused to declare his assent to the Articles of the Church. He could, of course, have been a gentleman of pure leisure, but to a man of twenty who so much enjoyed being a centre of attention and part of a lively community that would have been an unlikely and premature retirement.
Instead, he had resolved to be a Member of Parliament. There is no record of how he arrived at this ambition, or of the reaction of his friends and family to the news that he wished to enter politics, except his own statement that ‘At this time I knew there was a general election coming on and at Hull the conversation often turned to politics and rooted me to ambition.’
His family may well have been surprised: they had a tradition of civic, but not parliamentary, leadership; and his friends did not at this stage include the great swathe of would-be rulers of Britain with whom he would soon be acquainted. Yet there were present in his personality many of the essential components of a young political aspirant: ability to perform for an audience, an easy popularity, and an interest in the world beyond his own town or college. As for paying the expenses of an election, that was what that inheritance was for.
On top of these factors was something else which may have been decisive: the time through which the young Wilberforce was living was one of the most arresting for decades in demanding the attention of those remotely interested in national affairs. A critical ingredient of youthful commitment to politics was present: that great events and dramatic change were in the offing. For Britain was at war, a war that was rapidly widening, and the increasingly ill-tempered debates of the House of Commons were testimony to the fact that at present the country was not winning it.
It was in 1775, while Wilberforce was still partying in Hull and studying at Pocklington School, that the gunfire at Lexington signalled the start of the American War of Independence. In 1776, while he was falling in with the gamblers at St John’s College, Britain had waved farewell to an armada of hundreds of ships and a force of thirty-two thousand troops which, it was widely assumed, would soon bring the recalcitrant colonies to heel. Yet the war in America was never as simple as a conflict between Americans and Britons.
Just as there were many loyalist ‘Tories’ in the colonies who wished to remain under the rule of their mother country, so there was no shortage of spokesmen among the opposition in Britain who had favoured a policy of conciliation rather than confrontation, and now opposed the war. Among them were some of the greatest orators of the age, or indeed of any age, including the foremost opponents of the government of Lord North: Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke. As the colonies declared themselves independent in 1776, Fox was arguing that it would be better to abandon America than to oppress it, and denouncing the ‘diabolical measures’ of the government: ‘How cruel and intolerable a thing it is to sacrifice thousands of lives almost without prospect of advantage.’
He attacked the ‘boasts, blunders, and disgraces of the Administration’, and the following year was launching onslaughts on the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord George Germain, as ‘that ill-auspicious and ill-omened character’ who was guilty of ‘arrogance and presumption … ignorance and inability’.
To add to the drama, the Elder Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, thundered out of retirement to rock the House of Lords with denunciations of the war. Most dramatically of all, Chatham’s final onslaught on the mismanagement of the war in April 1778 was cut short by his own collapse and subsequent death, ending for good speculation that he would again be called upon to rescue his country. ‘We shall be forced,’ he told the government at the beginning of the American War, ‘ultimately to retract: let us retract while we can not when we must.’
By 1778 these critics of the entire notion of fighting a war in the American colonies were being proved right, with the army of General Burgoyne capitulating at Saratoga and France and Spain gleefully joining in the war to make the most of their chance of crippling the British Empire. 1779 saw the Royal Navy stretched to breaking point as French and Spanish warships cruised unmolested in the English Channel. The assumption of four years earlier that British forces could soon compel the colonists to pay their taxes and accept continued rule from London had been shattered.
By any standards, therefore, the late 1770s were a time of intensifying partisanship, stridency and bitterness in domestic politics. As the government of Lord North looked steadily shakier and as Germain came under increasingly furious attack, the morale of the political opposition rose correspondingly. In February 1779 there was exultation among the opposition following the acquittal of Admiral Keppel, whose court martial after a badly-managed encounter with the French fleet resulted in the revelation that the inadequate arming of the Royal Navy was the direct result of the government’s own incompetence. Crowds took to the streets and broke the windows of government ministers in celebration of the huge embarrassment. For there was more to the political atmosphere of the time than arguments over a war that had gone wrong: there was also a feeling that the mismanagement and lack of coordination of the war effort pointed to systemic failings in the British state, and that the absence of any responsiveness to hostile public opinion on such a vital issue was a sign of corruption and excessive place-seeking. It was thus not just the ministry but the entire system of government which came under attack, and not just the ministers but the powers of King George III himself. Almost a third of the House of Commons and much of the House of Lords held titles, sinecures or pensions in the gift of the King and his ministers; almost half of the House of Commons sat for ‘pocket boroughs’ which were controlled by a small number of men, and sometimes literally bought by the Treasury itself. Failure in war opened the way for these practices to be attacked. The Whig aristocracy feared that the powers of the Crown had grown to the extent that the balance of the constitutional settlement arrived at in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had been upset, and now Edmund Burke led their calls for ‘economical reform’, involving the abolition of swathes of sinecures and of the expensive additions to the royal household.
Outside Parliament, movements such as the Yorkshire Association of the Reverend Christopher Wyvill arose, campaigning for the reform of parliamentary representation and the holding of elections every three years instead of seven. There was a feeling that great change was in the air, and would soon be conceded. In April 1780 the opposition MP John Dunning succeeded in carrying his famous motion ‘That the powers of the Crown have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished’ on the floor of the House of Commons. In London there was a feeling of political crisis; overseas the war went on unabated. If any time in the eighteenth century was likely to draw a thoughtful and ambitious young man into politics, then this was it.
It was in the highly charged political atmosphere of the winter of 1779–80 that Wilberforce, finding little need to stay in permanent residence in Cambridge when so few academic demands were made of him, began paying regular visits to London and venturing into the public gallery of the House of Commons. At that time the public gallery was only fifteen feet above the floor of the Commons, supported by pillars reaching down among the benches. The entire chamber measured only fifty-seven feet by thirty-three, and had been uncomfortably crowded on busy days ever since the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 had swelled the number of MPs to 558. A visitor to the gallery was thus readily enveloped in an often hot and boisterous atmosphere, all the more so as the debates about the American War and the nature of the constitution raged only yards from where he was sitting. As he looked beneath him, Wilberforce would have seen the great figures of late-eighteenth-century British politics locked in oratorical combat. But it was alongside him in the gallery that winter that he was to find a friend who, for the next five years at least, would be one of the greatest influences on his life. For also sitting in the gallery, with an attitude of earnest studiousness which Wilberforce would have found hard to match, was William Pitt, son of the great Chatham, and ultimately known to history as William Pitt the Younger.
Pitt and Wilberforce must have looked and seemed a strange couple as they sat observing the debates. For one thing, Pitt must have been nearly a foot taller than Wilberforce. He also had, even at that age, an aloof manner towards people he did not know well, suggestive of his always being conscious of being his father’s son, but also the product of his natural diffidence: ‘I am the shyest man alive,’
he would say to Wilberforce once their friendship had developed. Such shyness evidently soon evaporated in the warmth of Wilberforce’s friendly disposition. They had been barely acquainted at Cambridge, Pitt having been largely confined within the walls of Pembroke College by a more demanding tutor and an eagerness for classics and mathematics. Yet soon Wilberforce, the unknown son of a Hull merchant, and Pitt, the son of the most revered British statesman of the eighteenth century, were firm friends.
It would be obvious from the events of later years that there was a genuine warmth in the friendship between Pitt and Wilberforce. As it happened, there was also a happily complementary nature to the advantages each of them possessed if they wished to become active in politics: Pitt had plentiful connections, widespread recognition and a famous name, but no money; Wilberforce had exactly the opposite. In years to come, Pitt would enjoy Wilberforce’s generous hospitality. For now, it was Wilberforce who found in Pitt an additional enticement to the world of politics. Pitt had firm views, being strongly in favour of the prevailing fashions of economical and parliamentary reform, and he followed his deceased father in his opposition to the American War. He had an appreciation of great oratory, being thrilled to hear a formidable speech by Burke that winter – ‘I had no idea until now of his excellence’
– but critical of some speakers in the House of Lords – ‘Paltry matter and a whiney delivery’.
He also had impressive and immediate connections, with Fox himself coming into the gallery to join this young observer in analysing the debates – ‘But surely, Mr Fox, that might be met thus …’
The extent to which this friendship and such conversations persuaded Wilberforce of the attractions of entering Parliament cannot be known, but it is clear that by the time he went down from Cambridge in the spring of 1780 he was resolved, like his friend, to enter Parliament at the forthcoming general election if he could.
Neither Pitt nor Wilberforce could countenance delay. Great events were at hand. The outcome of the war was in the balance, the House of Commons was becoming harder to control, and a general election was due by 1781 at the latest – one in which the North administration might lose a significant number of seats. Pitt was training at the Bar because he needed a source of income; Wilberforce had no need of such trifles. Both of them wanted to get into Parliament, and fast. Where and how could two young men approaching twenty-one years of age go about it?
Their age, which would seem precocious for a political career in later centuries, was no barrier. In the House of Commons about to be elected there would be fully a hundred Members under the age of thirty.
Since MPs were entirely unpaid and were generally able to live on a private income, most of them had no need of an alternative career beforehand, and since most electorates were small and buyable there was no need to spend many years building up support and recognition, as would become necessary in the days of a universal franchise. Two individuals as famous as Pitt and as wealthy as Wilberforce were highly likely to be able to get into the Commons, but that still required the careful selection and handling of an appropriate constituency; since neither of them belonged to the main parties of government or opposition, nor to the great landed families that controlled many of the seats, the exercise would require a certain amount of ingenuity or personal expense.
Unable to incur great expense, Pitt went for ingenuity. Neither he nor Wilberforce was able to contemplate standing for one of the great county seats at this stage. These supplied the eighty Members who represented forty counties, among which the most prestigious were Yorkshire and Middlesex. They were generally under the control of the aristocracy and country gentry, often divided by agreement between government and opposition, and their size and relatively large electorates meant that they were inordinately expensive to fight if they were contested: one candidate had spent £40,000 (the equivalent of more than £5 million today) contesting Oxfordshire in 1754, but had still not been successful. It would not have been too difficult for Pitt, with his many connections, to obtain a pocket borough, but, fired by an idealistic belief in rooting out corruption and pursuing parliamentary reform, he wished to be elected in his own right, and in a more open contest. He therefore decided to stand for the one place he knew well, Cambridge University, which elected two MPs and which also had a relatively democratic electorate of several hundred members of the University Senate. As it turned out he was heavily defeated there, and ended up temporarily accepting a pocket borough after all, albeit on a ‘liberal, Independent footing’,
from the northern borough-monger Sir James Lowther.
Wilberforce, by contrast, could indulge in simple expense. Although he could have bought an average pocket borough for about £4,000 and never needed to visit it in his life, his continuing affection for Hull, and a possible affinity with Pitt’s belief that it was better to arrive at the House of Commons through at least the semblance of a real election, led him in an obvious direction. Hull was a respected and ancient borough, with two Members of Parliament, but with approaching 1,500 voters it was certainly not a rotten one, nor permanently residing in anyone’s pocket. As things stood, the two seats were divided, as was so often the case, between government and opposition. The government’s supporter was Lord Robert Manners, a General who backed Lord North and had now been an MP for thirty-three years. The opposition representative was David Hartley, who was a distinguished opponent of the American War and a talented inventor of fireproofing for buildings and ships, but who suffered from giving such boring speeches that in the Commons ‘his rising always operated like a dinner-bell’.
Wilberforce decided, with good reason, that his local popularity, myriad family connections and abundant funds would allow him to break the long-established grip of the main political groupings and become Member of Parliament for Hull without being dependent on anyone.
All of these factors were important in Wilberforce’s election campaign. In some constituencies only the members of the corporation (the local council) or owners of certain properties or burgages possessed the vote, with the result that there were sometimes only a handful of voters; in others, like the city of Westminster and the counties, the franchise extended to all forty-shilling freeholders, and would generally include a good few thousand males with property above that rental value. In the case of Hull, it was the freemen of the town (those formally honoured by being given its ‘freedom’) who possessed the franchise, with the interesting complication that they did so by hereditary descent, and were therefore neither necessarily the richest inhabitants of the town, or even inhabitants at all. Several hundred of them were to be found living in London, and Wilberforce entertained them ‘at suppers in the different public houses of Wapping’.
In common with voters throughout the rest of the country, the Hull freemen regarded their votes as financially precious, and expected to be paid for using them, the going rate being two guineas in return for one of their two votes, and four guineas in return for a ‘plumper’, a vote for that candidate and no one else. Those who needed to travel to Hull would expect to be paid their expenses, which might average £10.
A few decades later the freemen of Hull would be described as ‘generally persons in a low station of life, and the manner in which they are bribed shows how little worthy they are of being entrusted with a privilege from which so many of the respectable inhabitants of the town are excluded’.
The intervention of Wilberforce would have been hugely welcome to the freemen in 1780, because it meant that there would be three candidates for the two seats, and therefore a contested election with expenses to be paid. Few things were more unwelcome to them than an uncontested election, as demonstrated by this account of the withdrawal of a candidate for Hull ten years later:
The plump jocund risibility, that an hour before enlightened all countenances, was gradually drawn down into a longitudinal dejection, which pervaded every face, even the friends of the opposition, shrunk with the consciousness of their own approaching unimportance, sensible that their consequence was then (for want of a protracted canvass) sunk to nought, and that nothing could restore it but a THIRD MAN; the cry of which resounded in all parts, while scoured through the streets of HULL the disappointed crowds; and a Bell was sent forth to the adjacent towns, to ring out an invitation to a third CANDIDATE FOR HULL.
While the freemen happily sold their votes, this did not mean they auctioned them to the highest bidder. They simply expected any candidate they voted for to pay the going rate, and since there was no secret ballot at that time, and the vote of every freeman could be observed, each candidate was duly able to pay for the votes he received, and generally did so two weeks after the close of the poll – since allegations of bribery had to be brought forward before that time. Possession of money did not of itself, therefore, guarantee success, although it certainly inspired confidence that the appropriate payments would be made in due course. It also enabled a candidate to treat his potential supporters in other ways, most commonly through the provision of alcohol, food and accommodation. In some campaigns, tickets were issued to proven or promised supporters entitling them to claim a certain amount of drink and food, and even a bed at a particular supportive inn. The quantities consumed could be enormous: the £8,500 spent by the Grosvenor family at Chester towards inn-keepers’ bills in one election paid for 1,187 barrels of ale, 3,756 gallons of rum and brandy, and over twenty-seven thousand bottles of wine.
This was in a city of a similar size to Hull, with 1,500 electors. To refuse to treat the voters was regarded as an insult, and in a freeman borough such as Hull would certainly have led to electoral disaster, and quite possibly disorder. Everyone understood that the best way to avoid chaos at election times was properly conducted treating ‘to humour the voters and to reward the faithful’.
On top of all this, a good deal of money was spent on ancillary trades. Groceries, linen and meat purchased for use in the election were carefully and locally sourced, bands were employed at considerable expense, and carpenters and rosette-makers made a good profit. Yet since such employment could be had from more than one candidate, and payments for votes were made at a standard rate, it was still necessary to bring other means of persuasion to bear on the electorate. It was common for a Hull candidate or his agent to write to every inland merchant and manufacturer with any connection to Hull, to add to the pressure on local merchants to vote the right way. A candidate who had good connections with the government of the day could also dispense jobs in the customs service, obviously a major source of employment in a port.
What was very much unnecessary, astonishingly so by the standards of later centuries, was for a candidate to have policy positions, a manifesto or any kind of programme for government. National political organisations had not been developed. Since national newspapers were also in their infancy, there was usually little sense of the voters taking part in a single election along with their compatriots elsewhere in the country. A general election was more normally a multitude of disparate contests, and was not generally expected to lead to any change of government: when governments did change it was because of a shift in coalitions or royal favour rather than any discernible ‘swing’ among the voters. National issues could intrude into a constituency, and the opposition of David Hartley to the American War led to him being disowned by the Hull corporation, and very probably cost him votes in this particular election since the town, with a wartime garrison and a large customs service, had many loyal instincts. Such matters, however, did not predominate. The freemen were more interested in electing a candidate who would pay them a great deal of attention and ably handle their interests in Parliament. The Members for Hull were expected to speak up for the interest of the merchants and keep in touch with the local corporation – or bench, as it was called locally – and to present to ministers the various letters and grievances sent their way. A former Member for Hull, William Weddell, an associate of the main opposition party, the Rockingham Whigs, had lost his seat at the previous election as a result of his ‘want of activity’.
A good candidate would engage in a comprehensive canvass of the freemen – one in 1790 canvassed every single one of them – and show them considerable deference. As the Earl of Sefton was told when he contested Liverpool some years later, ‘You have no conception how great a personage every Freeman conceives himself to be on the eve of a contest.’
Wilberforce was well equipped for such a contest. He already knew all the principal families of Hull, and they knew that his pockets were deep. From May 1780, although still not twenty-one, he set about canvassing and writing to the freemen in expectation of an election within the following year. One surviving response of a freeman living in Reading said that he would not come to Hull unless his expenses were paid, and hoped that Wilberforce would support ‘the rights, liberties, and commercial interests of the people’. Another insisted that he would persist ‘in voting as Lord Rockingham shall direct’.
Throughout the energetic canvassing there was little record of Wilberforce expressing decided opinions. One of his opponents, David Hartley, was an early opponent of slavery, and Wilberforce would later recall that ‘I expressed my hope to him that the time would come when I should be able to do something on behalf of the slaves,’
the first recorded instance of his interest in this subject, which had yet to come to the attention of the public at large. The only positions Wilberforce had to take up in this first campaign were rather more local and personal: a stone was thrown at him during the hustings on election day, following which he was approached by the local butcher, Johnny Bell, who said, ‘I have found out who threw the stone at you, and I’ll kill him tonight.’
This brought forth Wilberforce’s first appeal for patience and restraint in politics. He told the no doubt disappointed butcher that ‘You must only frighten him,’
but it was an illustration that violence was never far beneath the surface of eighteenth-century politics.
June 1780 brought the Gordon Riots, the most serious outbreak of disorder in London for many decades, which illustrated the immense power of religion in general, and the fear of Catholic and thereby foreign influence in particular, among the general population of eighteenth-century Britain. A gathering of tens of thousands of members of the Protestant Association marched to Westminster under the leadership of Lord George Gordon to demand the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act, an attempt to recruit more soldiers by removing the practice of requiring recruits to take an oath denying the supremacy of the Pope. In a country where the Stuart kings of the seventeenth century had plotted with Catholic powers against their own subjects until they were driven out once and for all in 1688, and which had seen Jacobite attempts to seize the throne in 1715 and 1745, anti-Catholic feeling could still very easily reach boiling point. When Gordon lost control of the crowds, there were five days and nights of rioting in which dozens of buildings were burnt down and hundreds of people were killed, until the King himself took to the streets with troops to disperse the mob. In Hull, a smaller mob joined in the frenzy by burning down a new Roman Catholic chapel. As a friend to Catholic relief, as well as an opponent of the war, David Hartley was a doubly wounded candidate, quite apart from being up against the undoubted local popularity of both Lord Robert Manners and Wilberforce.
All that remained was for Wilberforce to conduct a vigorous campaign and for the election itself to be called. The first reached a climax with a famous ox-roast on his twenty-first birthday, accompanied by many hogsheads of ale for the electors and merchants of Hull. The second obligingly followed within days, although had it been a little earlier he would have been too young to take his seat. On 1 September 1780 a general election was called. The polling took place in Hull on the eleventh, with a truly dramatic result. David Hartley had received 453 votes and had lost his seat, with Lord Robert Manners polling 673. But William Wilberforce, at the age of twenty-one years and eighteen days, had received exactly as many votes as the two of them put together, 1,126. In an election where each voter could cast two votes, this meant that the vast majority must have cast one of their votes for him. It also meant a very large bill. Wilberforce noted ‘the election cost me 8 or 9,000 £
– great riot – D. Hartley and Sir G. Savilles lodgings broke open in the night and they escaping over the roof’.
His charm, sociability, obvious intelligence and wealth had won through decisively. Now he would take these advantages into the far bigger world of Westminster.
Wilberforce took the oath as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons on 31 October 1780, and took his seat on the backbenches opposite Lord North and the other ministers. One of his first impressions was: ‘When I first came into parliament you could not go to the opposition side of the house without hearing the most shocking swearing &c. It was not so bad on the ministerial side tho’ not I’m afraid from their being much better than their opponents.’
North’s ministry had survived the general election, having taken the opposition by surprise with its timing, and could expect a reasonable majority in the House provided it retained the support of the ‘King’s friends’, who would support whoever George III wished to have as First Lord of the Treasury, and a reasonable proportion of the independent Members. Wilberforce, elected at Hull entirely as his own man, certainly regarded himself as one of the latter. He resolved within hours of his election ‘to be no party man’,
indicating from the outset an absence of appetite for ministerial office and a detachment from the main political groupings which would resurface much more strongly in his later years. As such, he was in good company. Probably around a third of the House at that time regarded themselves as independent to some degree, at a time when British political parties were rather weaker than they had been fifty years earlier, and dramatically weaker than they would become fifty years later.
Wilberforce’s own election was a good illustration of why many seats were not within the control of any one faction. The terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ had lost much of the meaning which, decades earlier, divisions over the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession had given them; ‘Tory’ had become a pejorative and generally rejected label, while the label ‘Whig’ had been so widely adopted by the successful politicians of the mid-eighteenth century that it had become a commonplace. As William Pitt put it at this time, the name Whig ‘in words is hardly a distinction, as everyone alike pretends to it’.
At the beginning of the Parliament of 1780 it was thought that Lord North’s government could rely on the votes of at least 220 MPs, some of whom could be termed Tories, but who could more specifically be categorised as around eighty supporters of North and around 140 ‘King’s friends’. About a hundred MPs could be identified as firmly in the opposition camp, most of them in the ‘Whig’ opposition led by Fox and Burke in the Commons and Rockingham in the Lords, but others in a smaller grouping loyal to the memory of Chatham and led from the House of Lords by the Earl of Shelburne. The whole notion of faction or ‘party’ was thought by many to be wrong and unpatriotic: for an independent MP to arrive at the House of Commons, speak up for his constituency, vary his vote and mix with all of the parties was therefore perfectly normal. Wilberforce set out on his Westminster career as just such an MP.
Wilberforce’s beginnings as a parliamentary debater were relatively slow and undistinguished. From what can be discerned from the far from comprehensive records of the debates at the time, he first spoke on 17 May 1781 on a Bill for the Prevention of Smuggling, arguing that ‘It would not only be severe, but unjust to confiscate the vessel: a master of a ship might take in the necessary quantity of spirits for three months’ voyage; and by fortunately having a fair and brisk wind, perform the voyage in six weeks; the custom house visit his ship and finding in it a greater quantity of spirits etc. than the law allows, insist that the vessel should be confiscated.’
His dutiful spokesmanship on behalf of the interests of Hull continued with what appears to be a second speech on 5 December 1781, in which he expressed both patriotism – it made ‘every Englishman’s breast glow with the noblest ardour whenever he heard of Great Britain being involved in a contest with France and Spain’ – and a request for government contracts for Hull: ‘A ship of the line called the Temple had been built some years since at the town he had the honour to represent, Kingston-upon-Hull; and ships might be procured from the same yard regularly if encouragement was given.’
Unfortunately this brought forth a rather withering retort from the minister, Lord Mulgrave, who reported that ‘The Temple, after having been at sea only three years, on a fine Summer’s day, in weather perfectly calm, went down and was lost,’
but the young Member was nevertheless doing his best for his constituents.
While he was assiduous in attending the House of Commons, Wilberforce found himself welcomed with open arms into wider London society. He took rooms in the St James’s area, placing him only a few hundred yards from the House of Commons and squarely in the middle of London’s thriving clubland. The late eighteenth century was the heyday of the gentlemen’s clubs: White’s, which was exclusive and aristocratic; Boodle’s, full of the hunting and country squire set; and Brooks’s, founded only two years before Wilberforce’s arrival in London but rapidly becoming the playground of the opposition Whigs. These and other clubs were descended from the chocolate and coffee houses of earlier decades. Such places had steadily turned into centres for drinking and gambling, and eventually they were turned by wealthy people into private clubs so that such activities could be enjoyed in seclusion from the lower orders. It is testimony to Wilberforce’s social popularity and political independence that it was not long before he was a member of all three of the most celebrated clubs, along with a string of others such as Goostree’s, and Miles and Evans.
It was in the clubs of St James’s Street and Pall Mall that Wilberforce would witness at first hand one of the most licentious and decadent times in London’s social history. The extravagance, immorality and sheer abandon of that era would do much to contribute to the stricter morals of Victorian times which were a natural reaction to them. Wilberforce’s own later views would be partly shaped by his experiences in London in the early 1780s, as he joined in with activities which he enjoyed at the time but which would later appal him. Gambling and heavy drinking could be pursued around the clock, notwithstanding the seniority and responsibilities of those involved. Horace Walpole’s description of three days in the life of Charles James Fox in 1772 give a flavour of the habits of the time:
He had sat up at playing at hazard at Almack’s from Tuesday evening 4th, till five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 5th. An hour before he had recovered £12,000 that he had lost, and by dinner, which was at five o’clock, he had ended losing £11,000. On the Thursday, he spoke in [a Commons debate]; went to dinner at past eleven that night; from thence to White’s, where he drank till seven the next morning; thence to Almack’s, where he won £6,000; and between three and four in the afternoon he set out for Newmarket. His brother Stephen lost £11,000 two nights after, and Charles £10,000 more on 13th; so that in three nights, the two brothers, the eldest not twenty-five, lost £32,000.
By this age Fox is thought to have lost £140,000, approximately comprising his whole fortune. Young aristocrats lost their entire estates, with White’s described as ‘the bane of half the English nobility’
because of the terrible consequences of ‘that destructive fury, the spirit of play’.
Huge sums of money were bet at hazard, faro, piquet, backgammon and even whist. Walpole wrote: ‘The young men lose five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds in an evening. Lord Stavordale, not one-and-twenty, lost eleven thousand last Tuesday, but recovered it by one great hand at Hazard. He swore a great oath – “Now, if I had been playing deep, I might have won millions!”’
When games were not available, there was much betting on events. Each club had a betting book in which its members would wager against each other as to who would be Prime Minister by the end of the year, or even when the King would die. When George II had gone off to the European war in 1743, the going rate against his being killed was 4:1. On another occasion ‘A man dropped down at the door of White’s; he was carried into the house. Was he dead or not? The odds were immediately given and taken for and against. It was proposed to bleed him. Those who had taken the odds the man was dead, protested that the use of a lancet would affect the fairness of the bet.’
The addiction to gambling was not confined to the aristocracy. A state-run lottery had been established in 1709 which collected a good deal of money from the poor and helped fund a whole range of fine projects, from the British Museum to Westminster Bridge, as well as helping to finance the American War. As he ventured to the gaming tables of St James’s in the winter of 1780–81, Wilberforce could easily have lost most or all of his inheritance. He had the encouragement of winning money from the Duke of Norfolk in Boodle’s at an early stage, and knew that, as he later wrote, ‘They considered me a fine, fat pigeon whom they might pluck.’
When he first played faro at Brooks’s and a friend tried to interrupt, the well-known wit and rake George Selwyn responded greedily, ‘Oh sir, don’t interrupt him, he is very well employed.’
But Wilberforce was careful not to play for ruinous stakes. His diary records the occasional loss of £100, yet it seems to be his winnings rather than his losses which began to give him an aversion to gambling. Asked to play the part of the bank one night at Goostree’s he ‘rose the winner of £600. Much of this was lost by those who were only heirs to future fortunes, and could not therefore meet such a call without inconvenience.’
Such experiences nurtured in him a feeling of guilt which would be a powerful influence on his future, very different, behaviour.
Gambling was only one aspect of this time of excess. It was fashionable to drink heavily, particularly claret and port wine, and to eat greedily, with huge steaks and scores of turtles being the favourite dinners of the London clubs. Prince George, Prince of Wales, who was rapidly becoming the despair of King George III and Queen Charlotte through his disloyalty, decadence, extravagance and indebtedness, fully represented in his own person the barely controlled behaviour of the time. Holding fêtes and balls which would carry on from noon of one day into the morning of the next, and becoming so drunk that at one party he fell over while dancing and was sick in front of his guests, he also made the most of a string of mistresses, and was sometimes happy to share them with Charles James Fox. His brother, the Duke of Clarence and future King William IV, kept a mistress to whom he paid two hundred guineas every quarter for twenty years, and was so open about it that the first negotiations about her terms were actually reported in the press.
In such society, the possession by a married man of a mistress was regarded not only as a necessity, but her position was little short of official, understood and acknowledged by the rest of the establishment. In addition, the gentlemen walking from their gambling in one club to drinking in another could easily avail themselves of some of more than ten thousand prostitutes who plied their trade on the streets of London, who were ‘more numerous than at Paris, and have more liberty and effrontery than at Rome itself. About nightfall they arrange themselves in a file in the footpaths of all the great streets.’
In Pall Mall itself, nestling among the gentlemen’s clubs was Mrs Hazer’s Establishment of Pleasure, where there was ‘naked dancing, and the floorshow included a Tahitian love feast’ involving twelve nymphs and twelve youths. Whether Wilberforce yielded to such temptations is not known. Years after his death, his son Samuel told the Bishop of Oxford that ‘his father when young used to drink tea every evening in a brothel’, although this was said to be ‘not … from any licentious purpose – his health alone would then have prevented that’.
On the contrary, his ill health appeared to be no barrier to any social activity at this time: he was gambling, drinking, eating heartily, and singing beautifully – the Prince of Wales is meant to have told the Duchess of Devonshire that he would go anywhere to hear Wilberforce sing. But it does seem that, even at this stage, Wilberforce lived with more care and thoughtfulness than most of his social companions. He readily took advice from wise old birds such as the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden, who told him to desist from using his wonderful powers of mimicry because ‘It is but a vulgar accomplishment.’
This did not quite put paid to the habit, particularly since he was in much demand for his impression of Lord North, but the relationship illustrated his need for genuine discussion rather than mere social frivolity: Camden ‘took a great fancy to me because, I believe, when all the others were wasting their time at cards or piquet we would come and talk with him and hear his stories of the old Lord Chatham’.
Wilberforce was already displaying an extraordinary facility, which he would maintain throughout his life, of being careful about his own behaviour yet simultaneously sought-after for his good company and humour. As his Cambridge friend Gerard Edwards, who remained a close companion in London, put it even at this time, ‘I thank the Gods that I live in the age of Wilberforce and that I know one man at least who is both moral and entertaining.’
His circle of friends naturally widened, now including many young politicians such as Pitt, Lord Euston, Edward Eliot and Henry Bankes, but still encompassing his old companions from Hull. To one of the latter, a B.B. Thompson, he wrote from London on 9 June 1781:
My Dear Thompson,
We have a blessed prospect of sitting till the end of next month. Judge how agreeable this must be to me, who was in the hope ere now to be indulging myself amongst the lakes of Westmoreland. As soon as ever I am released from my parliamentary attendance I mean to betake myself thither … Between business in the morning and pleasure at night my time is pretty well filled up. Whatever you … used to say of my idleness, one is, I assure you, as much attended to as the other.
The papers will have informed you how Mr William Pitt, second son of the late Lord Chatham, has distinguished himself; he comes out as his father did a ready-made orator, and I doubt not but that I shall one day or other see him the first man in the country. His famous speech, however, delivered the other night, did not convince me, and I staid in with the old fat fellow: by the way he grows every day fatter, so where he will end I know not.
My business requires to be transacted at places very distant from each other, and I am now going to call on Lord R.M. [Robert Manners] thence to Hoxton, and next to Tower Hill; so you may judge how much leisure I have left for letter writing …
This single letter sums up Wilberforce’s predilections and personality as a young MP approaching the age of twenty-two. His eagerness to spend the summer in Windermere – he had rented a house, Rayrigg, with views over the lake – illustrates his determination to enjoy the hills and countryside; his assiduousness in attending Parliament and constant travelling around London to meetings demonstrate his seriousness amidst the continuing enjoyment of London nightlife; his political independence is displayed, since staying in with ‘the old fat fellow’ is a reference to voting with Lord North against the opposition; but his simultaneous and growing admiration for his friend and vocal member of the opposition, William Pitt, shines through.
Such admiration would soon draw him into more serious participation in national affairs. For as Wilberforce dreamt of rural pleasures that summer, on the other side of the Atlantic the armies of Washington and Lafayette were manoeuvring to bring the final hopes of British victory to ashes. British politics was on the edge of a series of convulsions which would bring the youthful William Pitt to power and place Wilberforce in the thick of parliamentary and electoral battle.
Compared to only three MPs under the age of thirty elected in 2005.
The equivalent of more than £1 million today. The highest expenditure by a single candidate in the 2005 election was £13,212.
3 The Devoted Acolyte (#ulink_1f691343-b3b3-57d7-b6f8-82ac5b717ae1)
Who but madmen would enter a contest for such a county, or indeed for any county?
PHILIP FRANCIS TO CHRISTOPHER WYVILL,
on the subject of an election for the county of Yorkshire, 1794
Tear the enemy to pieces.
WILLIAM PITT TO WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 24 March 1784
HOWEVER QUIET the scene when a tired messenger rode his horse up to Lord George Germain’s house in Pall Mall on the morning of Sunday, 25 November 1781, the contents of the message he carried would lead to two and a half years of upheaval and crisis in the government and politics of Britain. All night long the relays of horses from the port of Falmouth in Cornwall had borne towards London the news that Lord North and his embattled ministers must have dreaded: at Yorktown in Virginia, an entire British army under General Cornwallis had capitulated. While military commanders might calculate that the war could be continued from the British stronghold of New York, others knew that this disaster would ‘occasion the loss of all the Southern colonies very speedily’,
and that British possessions in the West Indies, including Jamaica, could be ‘in imminent danger’.
Germain, the dogged but hapless Secretary of State, would soon produce a plan for struggling on with the war, trying to hold New York, Charleston and Savannah while mounting amphibious raids and courting American loyalists. But Lord North, possessed as usual with a sure feel for parliamentary opinion, knew that in domestic politics the game was up. ‘Oh God it is all over!’
he exclaimed when the news of Yorktown reached Downing Street that fateful Sunday morning.
Caught between the implacable George III on the one side and the growing view among MPs that further fighting would bring ruin at the hands of France and Spain in addition to the now inevitable loss of the American colonies, the North administration staggered uncertainly on through the winter of 1781–82, sacrificing Germain that January but still failing to win the confidence of Parliament or the nation. The attacks mounted on the enfeebled administration by Fox, Burke, Pitt and other opposition Members were merciless and scathing, while at the same time a growing number of independent MPs concluded that North must be ousted and the war ended. Wilberforce was among them, delivering a speech on 22 February 1782 which was his first major display of political partisanship in the Commons. While the year before he might have ‘staid in with the old fat fellow’, Wilberforce now turned on the same portly figure of Lord North. He declared that ‘while the present Ministry existed there were no prospects of either peace or happiness to this Kingdom’. It was clear that the government intended to pursue the ruinous war in a cruel, bloody and impracticable manner; the actions of ministers more ‘resembled the career of furious madmen than the necessarily vigorous and prudent exertions of able statesmen’.
He voted solidly with the opposition in the close-fought divisions of late February and early March 1782. On 20 March he would have witnessed the resignation of North after twelve years in office, the snow falling outside the House of Commons as British politicians turned their minds to how to construct a fresh government while rescuing a tottering Empire. Nominally still an independent Member, Wilberforce had clearly aligned himself with the opposition, and was invited to their meetings. That he should have taken such a strong stand against the North government and the American War is not surprising. He had befriended Pitt, for whom opposition to the war was second nature; he admired Fox, whom he found ‘very pleasant and unaffected’
at a number of dinners and who had masterminded the tactics of the opposition; he was also alert to the political mood and alive to the simple reality of the time, namely that the only way in which the British could mitigate their defeat was to turf out the ministers who could be blamed for it.
While ‘no party man’, Wilberforce would find himself for the next four years very much categorised as belonging to a party. The common thread which would run through all his political dispositions until 1786 was loyalty to his great friend Pitt. Pitt was not a member of the new government formed from among the opposition groupings in March 1782, having rather haughtily declared in advance that he could ‘never accept a subordinate situation’,
and not having been offered a senior one. Nevertheless, he and Wilberforce were firm supporters of this new Whig-led government, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham, who was as munificent in his wealth and aristocratic grandeur as he was inadequate as a political leader or manager. Fox, the new Secretary of State and ministerial leader in the Commons, seethed with indignation that the King had seen fit only to conduct negotiations with the lesser of the opposition groupings, that led by Shelburne. Wilberforce was included in the discussions held about the formation of the government, and remembered ‘Fox awkwardly bringing out that Lord Shelburne only had seen the King, in short jealousy between Foxites and Shelburneites manifested, tho’ for a long time suppressed’.
The wily George III, in a ‘masterpiece of Royal skill’,
had ensured that the Rockingham administration would be poisoned from the outset with a rich dose of resentment and suspicion. He did not intend that those who had opposed the American War would stay in office for long.
The Rockingham administration did indeed turn out to be one of the most ill-fated in British history. Within weeks Fox and Shelburne were at furious loggerheads over the terms of the peace treaty being negotiated in Paris, and within three months of entering office Rockingham was dead. Wilberforce had been much courted by Rockingham during his final months. The formerly unknown Member for Hull was by now identified as an active MP who could think more clearly and speak more forcefully than most of his colleagues. With Rockingham keen to secure the loyalty of an able Yorkshireman, and the Whigs looking forward to creating new peers who could strengthen their position in the House of Lords, there were even rumours that Wilberforce would soon be ennobled. Eager suppliers of ermine robes were in touch with him to try to secure his business in the event of this happy elevation taking place.
It seems unlikely that Wilberforce would have accepted a peerage at the age of twenty-two, even though peerages in the eighteenth century were far scarcer than they have since become, and at that time carried the automatic guarantee of being passed on through the generations. Like Pitt, he saw the Commons as the only place for a young man of ambition and energy. At this stage of his life Wilberforce certainly harboured some ambitions for office, but in July 1782 he could only watch loyally as yet another new government took office, this time with Shelburne as First Lord of the Treasury and the twenty-three-year-old Pitt as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
There is no trace of jealousy in Wilberforce’s attitude towards the spectacular promotion of his friend. Indeed, it was in the summer of 1782 that these two young men began to form a bond of companionship sufficiently strong that it could never be completely ruptured even by the sharpest of disagreements in later years. They were both key members of the group of twenty-five Cambridge graduates who formed Goostree’s club in Pall Mall, dining, drinking and gambling there every night when Parliament was sitting. There, with Lord Euston, Pepper Arden, Henry Bankes and Edward Eliot, ‘all youngsters just entering into life’,
they enjoyed themselves to the full, going on to the House of Commons where George Selwyn could find them ‘singing and laughing à gorge déployée’, making him ‘wish for one day to be twenty’.
Some evenings or in the recess Pitt would ride out to Wimbledon to spend the night at Lauriston House, which Wilberforce had now inherited, and ‘for near three month slept almost every night there’.
Despite the political responsibilities they now enjoyed, their letters and diary entries of this period suggest an atmosphere of almost carefree youth. Pitt would write to Wilberforce from the Commons in the afternoon, ‘Eliot, Arden and I will be with you before curfew and expect an early meal of peas and strawberries.’
Wilberforce’s diary entries in the summers of 1782 and 1783 include: ‘Delicious day – lounged morning at Wimbledon with friends, foyning
at night, and run about the garden for an hour or two,’ or ‘To Wimbledon with Pitt and Eliot, at their persuasion,’ or ‘Fine hot day, went on water with Pitt and Eliot fishing, came back, dined, walked evening. Eliot went home, Pitt stayed.’
There was evidently much boisterous activity, with reports of neighbours being ‘alarmed with noises at their door’
and of Pitt having cut up the silk hat of another visitor, a future Foreign Secretary, one night and strewn the remnants around the flowerbeds. Not only did Wilberforce admire Pitt’s political abilities, he also loved his company, thinking him ‘the most truly witty man he had ever met’,
and later recording, ‘Mr Pitt was systematically witty … the others were often run away with by their wit. Mr Pitt was always master of his. He could turn it to any end or object he desired.’
Pitt, in turn, cherished Wilberforce’s good humour and political support.
At Easter 1782, the two Williams had holidayed together in Bath and Brighthelmstone (modern-day Brighton). But with Pitt in office as Chancellor, Wilberforce was unable to take his friend with him later that year on the extended summer tour that would become his perennial habit over the next few years. Abandoning plans for a trip to the Continent because of a sudden by-election in Hull (Lord Robert Manners had died and was in due course succeeded, unopposed, by the previously defeated David Hartley), Wilberforce made once again for Rayrigg on Windermere before visiting Weymouth in the autumn. He simply could not do without country air, explaining to his sister in the summer of 1783 that the House of Commons was unable ‘to compensate to me for the loss of air, pleasant walks, and what Milton calls “each rural sight, each rural sound”’.
‘I never leave this poor villa,’ he wrote from Wimbledon, ‘without feeling my virtuous affections confirmed and strengthened; and I’m afraid it would be to some degree true if I were to add that I never remain long in London without their being somewhat injured and diminished.’
To Rayrigg he would take an assortment of books, including ‘classics, statutes at large and history’,
and welcome a succession of friends.
In the Lakes he found solitude through riding, walking and boating, but also lifelong friendship, in particular with Colonel John Pennington, more than a quarter of a century older than Wilberforce and another admirer of Pitt, who as Lord Muncaster would become the recipient of a vast proportion of Wilberforce’s letters on public affairs. Other visitors included Pitt’s future political hostess the Duchess of Gordon, and a procession of Hull family friends, one of whom found Wilberforce to be ‘riotous and noisy’.
Once ensconced at Weymouth in the middle of October, he was writing to Edward Eliot to say that ‘So mild is the climate and so calm and clear is the sea that on this very fifteenth day of October I am sitting with my window open on its side and am every moment wishing myself up to the chin in it.’
It was an abiding characteristic that he would seek out the long summer periods of rest and contemplation which his wealth permitted and his inclination and constitution required. Where Pitt was happy to spend many of his summers dealing with the grind of dispatches and correspondence and darting a short distance out of London for a brief respite, Wilberforce drew strength and inspiration from a more balanced existence. It was a difference of temperament which helped to make one of them suitable for high office, and the other designed for high ideals.
Pitt’s aptitude for high office was soon tested. His boss, the Earl of Shelburne, proved unable or unwilling to broaden the political base of his ministry during the long summer recess, leaving Pitt as a principal spokesman in the House of Commons for a government which had only minority support. By the time the preliminaries of the peace agreement with France, Spain and the new United States of America were ready to be put to Parliament for approval in February 1783, the Shelburne ministry was vulnerable to parliamentary ambush. The proposed peace treaties represented a reasonable settlement under all the circumstances, with Britain’s negotiating position having been strengthened by a crucial naval victory in the West Indies in April 1782. Britain would give up the Floridas and Minorca to Spain, St Lucia and some other islands to France, and the huge tracts of territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi were awarded to America at the same time as her independence was recognised. Shelburne had simultaneously taken great care to negotiate an extensive commercial treaty with America. While these proposals were wholly realistic, and even far-sighted, Fox took the opportunity to attack them as a means of removing his hated rival from power. In one of the great unholy alliances of British political history, the supporters of Fox, who had always opposed the war, and the party of North, which had prosecuted it, now came together to drive Shelburne from office, and Pitt with him.
Pitt asked Wilberforce to give one of the leading speeches in a crucial debate on the peace treaty on 17 February 1783. Clearly he believed that the voice of Wilberforce was already influential and eloquent; for his part Wilberforce was ready to do anything for his friend. Wilberforce was tense as he prepared for his most important speech to that date. He spent a weekend with ‘his sleep disturbed at the thoughts of a full House of Commons’,
walked for several hours on the Sunday afternoon, and made a plea for the necessity of peace in his speech on the Monday afternoon, arguing that if the Fox-North coalition defeated the ministry on this issue, ‘no Minister would in future dare to make such a peace as the necessity of the country might require’.
Wilberforce’s speech was well regarded, although he recorded the events of that day in his diary in a very matter-of-fact way:
17th. Walked down morning to House to get Milner into gallery. Seconded the address. Lost the motion by 16. Did not leave House till about eight in the morning, and bed about nine.
It must have been a deflating experience. Pitt’s own speech was regarded indifferently, and the government defeat by sixteen votes meant that the Shelburne ministry was virtually finished. In the climactic debate of four days later, Pitt pulled himself together to deliver a stirring defence of his colleague’s policy and his own conduct which established him as a major political force. Wilberforce again spoke up for his friend, and wrote down what has become a celebrated note of Pitt’s physical sickness at the time: ‘Pitt’s famous speech on second day’s debate – first day’s not so good. Spoke three hours, till four in the morning. Stomach disordered, and actually holding Solomon’s porch door opened with one hand, while vomiting during Fox’s speech to whom he was to reply.’
The combination of Pitt’s oratorical performances, the shortage of weighty figures in the Commons and the desperation of George III to find a parliamentary figure who could prevent the Fox-North coalition from coming to power catapulted William Pitt into the front rank of political life as a potential Prime Minister. Shelburne resigned on 24 February, but for the whole of March Pitt remained in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in a government without a leader while the King thrashed about in an increasingly desperate search for a Prime Minister he did not hate. Twice during the five-week crisis Pitt came close to accepting office as Prime Minister while still only twenty-three years old, but twice he had the good sense to recognise that he would have had no defence against a hostile House of Commons moving quickly to vote him out. The irascible King varied for five weeks between trying to insist that Pitt take office, begging other ex-ministers to do so, sending for Pitt’s uncle, Thomas Pitt, as a desperate resort -’Mr Thomas Pitt or Mr Thomas anybody’,
threatening to abdicate and finally, in late March, accepting the Fox-North coalition into power with the Duke of Portland as its nominal head. He did this with the worst possible grace, accompanied by a fixed resolution to create no peerages or honours at their request and a secret determination to eject them from office whenever a convenient pretext arose: ‘I trust the eyes of the Nation will soon be opened as my sorrow may prove fatal to my health if I remain long in this thraldom.’
Throughout the chaos Wilberforce remained closely connected to Pitt, both socially and politically. If he felt any jealousy about the spectacular rise to prominence of his friend he was good at hiding it, although on the day Pitt was first offered the premiership he noted: ‘24th. Dined Pitt’s – heard of the very surprising propositions.’
When Pitt resigned at the end of March, he gravitated immediately to the happy society of Goostree’s and Wilberforce’s villa: ‘31st. Pitt resigned today. Dined Pitt’s then Goostree’s where supped. Bed almost three o’clock. April 3rd. Wimbledon, where Pitt &c. dined and slept. Evening walk – bed a little past two.’
Released from the cares of office, Pitt started to plan a summer of travel, including a visit to France, involving Wilberforce and their close mutual friend Edward Eliot. Knowing that conspiratorial meetings were taking place between George III, Earl Temple, and the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, with the intention of putting Pitt into office in more favourable circumstances than those available in March, they kept an eye on political events, but when Parliament rose in July Fox and North were still in office, while the King chafed. Pitt wrote to Wilberforce from Brighton on 6 August: ‘I have only to tell you that I have no news, which I consider as making it pretty certain that there will be none now before the meeting of Parliament [in November]. The party to Rheims holds of course, at least as far as depends upon me.’
Most of Pitt’s letters to Wilberforce from this time reveal two principal concerns about his friend: the first that he was having serious trouble with his eyesight, and the second that his punctuality and travel plans could not be relied upon. Pitt would end letters with: ‘I am very glad to see you write without the assistance of a secretary. Perhaps, however, you will not be able to read without the assistance of a decypherer. At least in compassion to your eyesight it is as well for me to try it no further,’
and Wilberforce’s diaries in 1783 have many entries such as ‘My eyes bad. Bed early,’
and ‘Bad day. Eyes indifferent.’
In Pitt’s concern about Wilberforce’s timekeeping there is a friendly hint of a more widespread opinion which had taken shape about him, that, as the first Lord Carrington was later to put it, ‘As to his fitting office his careless and inaccurate method of doing business rendered him wholly unfit for it.’
Pitt’s letter of 6 August enjoins Wilberforce to ‘recollect that you have to deal with punctual men, who would not risk their characters by being an hour too late for any appointment’.
By 22 August, with the trip to France imminent, Pitt was writing to Wilberforce:
Dear Wilberforce,
I hope you have found benefit enough from your inland rambling, to be in perfect order now for crossing the seas. Eliot and I meet punctually at Bankes’s the 1st September, and in two days after shall be in London. Pray let us see you, or hear from you by that time, and do not verify my prophecy of detaining us a fortnight and jilting us at the end of it. We shall really not have a day to lose, which makes me pursue you with this hasty admonition.
Adieu ever yours, W Pitt.
Pitt need not have worried on this occasion about Wilberforce’s reliability, for he duly turned up at Bankes’s house in Dorset in early September after a visit to his family and constituency in Hull. Pitt should, however, have been even more concerned about Wilberforce’s eyesight, because he nearly shot him while taking aim at a partridge. Wilberforce was sceptical about whether he had come so close to wiping out the nation’s political future, but, ‘So at least,’ he later recorded, ‘my companions affirmed, with a roguish wish, to make the most of my short-sightedness and inexperience in field sports.’
With the naïvety of young men who had never set foot outside their own country before, Wilberforce, Pitt and Eliot sailed for Calais in early September without the preparation and documents which were necessary for comfortable travel overseas in the eighteenth century. Having arrived in France with only a letter of introduction to a M. Coustier of Rheims, who was assumed to be a senior businessman or banker, Wilberforce described what happened next in a letter to Henry Bankes:
From Calais we made directly for Rheims, and the day after our arrival dressed ourselves unusually well, and proceeded to the house of Mons. Coustier to present, with not a little awe, our only letters of recommendation. It was with some surprise that we found Mons. Coustier behind a counter distributing figs and raisins. I had heard that it was very usual for gentlemen on the continent to practise some handicraft trade or other for their amusement, and therefore for my own part I concluded that his taste was in the fig way, and that he was only playing at grocer for his diversion; and viewing the matter in this light, I could not help admiring the excellence of his imitation; but we soon found that Mons. Coustier was a ‘véritable epicier,’ and that not a very eminent one.
Not only was M. Coustier not one of the local gentry, he could not even effect an introduction to them. The disorganised trio spent over a week at an inn, ‘without making any great progress in the French language, which could not indeed be expected of us, as we spoke to no human being but each other and our Irish courier’.
But eventually they persuaded their grocer ‘to put on a bag and sword and carry us to the intendant of the police, whom he supplied with groceries’.
The astonished police officer initially found their story incredible, and told the Abbé de Lageard, who under the Archbishop of Rheims wielded civic as well as religious authority, that ‘There are three Englishmen here of very suspicious character. They are in a wretched lodging, they have no attendants, yet their courier says that they are “grands seigneurs” and that one of them is the son of the great Chatham; but it must be impossible, they must be “des intrigants”.’
Having thus come close to being arrested for spying, the three now found their luck changed dramatically: the Abbé was a generous man who provided huge meals, long conversations and ‘the best wine the country can afford’.
After a week of such indulgence they were presented to the Archbishop, whose accessibility and normality made a very positive impression on Wilberforce: ‘N.B. Archbishops in England are not like Archevêques in France; these last are jolly fellows of about forty years of age, who play at billiards, &c. like other people.’
Having turned themselves from suspicious strangers into local celebrities in Rheims, the travellers were able to proceed to Paris, where even the Queen, Marie Antoinette, had heard about their time with the grocer and teased them about it. Joining the French court at its hunting retreat of Fontainebleau, they embarked on a whirlwind of meals, opera, cards, backgammon and billiards, and were often in the company of Marie Antoinette, whom Wilberforce found ‘a monarch of most engaging manners and appearance’.
He wrote on his return that ‘they all, men and women, crowded round Pitt in shoals’.
Such scenes must have been an enduring reminder to Wilberforce and Eliot that their friend already carried with him immense fame and prestige. The world of European politics was thrown open to them; they met Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin, and while Pitt was stag-hunting, Eliot and Wilberforce were taken to see Louis XVI himself, a ‘clumsy, strange figure in immense boots’.
Eating, drinking and gambling were their vices for the trip, and there are no accounts of the three young men becoming intimate with the local women. Pitt had no hesitation in refusing the offer of marriage to the daughter of the vastly wealthy and powerful Jacques Necker – she would subsequently almost rival him as an antagonist of Napoleon as Madame de Staël. At this stage of their lives, none of the three had marriage in mind. Wilberforce had already rejected one overture himself, saying that he preferred to remain ‘that isolated unproductive and stigmatised thing, a Bachelor’.
They just had time to see the sights of Paris, ‘going every night to a play, of which we were not able to make out a syllable’,
before their six-week visit to France was ended abruptly. On 22 October 1783 a special messenger arrived for Pitt, summoning him back to England with all possible speed. By the twenty-fourth they were on the road from Dover to London. One of the greatest constitutional crises of British history was imminent. However great their attachment and friendship, Pitt, Wilberforce and Eliot would never enjoy such carefree travels together again.
Wilberforce noted that he returned ‘to England … and secret plottings – the King groaning under the Ministry that had been imposed on him’.
He was back to the familiar life of Wimbledon, Goostree’s and late-night dinners. Pitt, Eliot and Pitt’s elder brother, Lord Chatham, were his most frequent dining companions, but he was still sufficient of an independent, at least nominally, to be invited to dinner at Downing Street by the Duchess of Portland with Charles James Fox in attendance. Even so, there could be little doubt where Wilberforce would stand in the great confrontation between Pitt and Fox which was about to grip the nation.
After seven months in government, Fox, the inveterate gambler, decided to risk all on his East India Bill in the House of Commons. More than two centuries later, it is sometimes difficult to grasp the huge importance of India in eighteenth-century British politics. British business in India was conducted under the auspices of the East India Company, but the scale of the fortunes to be made and the importance of the decisions taken within the Company, which could affect the lives of millions of people and determine the course of a war or the duration of peace, meant that East India business was increasingly the business of the British government. In the 1770s Lord North had attempted to put the affairs of the East India Company on an acceptable political footing, introducing a Governor General, a Council and a Supreme Court. These reforms were now seen as failing, partly because of the intense loathing for each other evidenced by the Governor General, Warren Hastings, on the one hand and the members of the Council, such as Philip Francis, on the other. In the early 1780s Fox’s great ally Edmund Burke had led the denunciations of Hastings and the parliamentary assault on the alleged mismanagement of Indian affairs. Now they were in power, Fox and Burke intended to bring true political accountability to the Company’s decisions. Their Bill, presented to Parliament on 18 November 1783, included a proposal to create a Board of seven Commissioners, appointed by Parliament and with extensive powers over the officers and business of the East India Company, thus providing political authority over the Company’s management.
This was no innocent proposal. So extensive were the riches to be acquired in India that the power of the seven Commissioners to make key appointments within the East India Company would make them very powerful men. Furthermore, their appointment for fixed terms by parliamentary vote meant that the Fox-North majority would be able to determine all seven Commissioners to begin with, that they could not be immediately dismissed by a new administration, and that the King was shut out of a vital area of patronage and influence. Such would be the patronage accruing to the Fox-North coalition once they carried the Bill that it would materially consolidate their hold on power at Westminster. Well-intentioned as it may also have been, the East India Bill was therefore a direct challenge to the opposition and to George III to do their worst.
Fox intended to rush the Bill through within weeks as Pitt sought frantically to bring MPs to Westminster and denounced it as ‘one of the most boldest, most unprecedented, most desperate and alarming attempts at the exercise of tyranny that ever disgraced the annals of this or any other country’.
Wilberforce was there to help his friend. In a debate on 20 November he spoke ‘with humour and ability’ and said that ‘If the present Bill passed we might see the government of Great Britain set up in India, instead of that of India in Great Britain.’
That Wilberforce was speaking at Pitt’s behest rather than in any way representing the wider views of the independent MPs became clear when Fox carried the Bill through the Commons with three-figure majorities and, in early December, proudly carried it to the House of Lords for approval.
It was a gamble too far. Earl Temple warned the King that the Bill was ‘a plan to take more than half the royal power, and by that means to disable His Majesty for the rest of the reign’.
After quietly consulting Pitt through an intermediary, George III took the unprecedented step of secretly asking members of the House of Lords to vote against the Bill, and then dismissed the Fox-North coalition from office on the grounds that their measure had been defeated in Parliament. On 19 December 1783, George III appointed Pitt as Prime Minister, even though Fox and North clearly continued to command majority support in the House of Commons. Few events in the entire history of the British constitution have roused such intense passions as this brutal exercise of royal power. To supporters of the King, he had been justified in ridding himself of ministers ‘who held him in bondage, and who meditated to render that bondage perpetual’.
But to opponents, the dismissal by the King of a government with a clear majority in the House of Commons, and the handing out of royal instructions to members of the House of Lords on how to vote, were utterly unconstitutional and a total violation of the constitutional settlement of 1688. As an enraged Charles James Fox put it to the House of Commons, it was an issue which would decide ‘whether we are henceforward free men or slaves; whether this House is the palladium of liberty or the engine of despotism’.
Pitt, at twenty-four by far the youngest Prime Minister in British history, would take office in the most difficult conceivable circumstances, on the back of a constitutional manoeuvre which was dubious at best and with a majority of MPs determined to remove him.
Seasoned observers believed Pitt to have little chance of surviving in office. Wilberforce himself recorded one of the most famous descriptions of the fledgling government in his diary on 22 December as Earl Temple, one of the few senior politicians prepared to join Pitt in the cabinet, resigned after only three days in office:
22nd. Lord Temple Resigned. No dissolution. Drove about for Pitt. Sat at home. Then Goostrees. ‘So your friend Mr Pitt means to come in,’ said Mrs Crewe;
‘Well, he may do what he likes during the holidays, but it will only be a mince-pie administration depend on it.’
The mince-pie administration, it was believed, would not last far into January 1784, but Pitt spent the period forming his government and winning over some MPs as best he could. Wilberforce was present throughout many key decisions – ‘23rd. Morning Pitt’s … Pitt nobly firm. Evening Pitt’s. Cabinet formed.’
Pitt managed to bring in the relatively undistinguished Lord Sydney as Home Secretary and Earl Carmarthen as Foreign Secretary, but it was scornfully noted in many quarters that the only distinguishing feature of his government was their collective capacity for drink. For junior ministerial positions Pitt was able to look to some of his friends and personal allies, but at no stage does he appear to have contemplated asking Wilberforce, perhaps his closest friend and companion, to join the ranks of the ministers. Wilberforce could have been forgiven for having been puzzled by this. Leaving Downing Street on the evening of 23 December he said to Tom Steele, another MP and close friend of Pitt, ‘Pitt must take care whom he makes Secretary of the Treasury,’ only to receive the reply, ‘Mind what you say, for I am Secretary of the Treasury.’
There is no record of Pitt offering office to Wilberforce and him refusing it. The subject seems simply not to have come up, either then or on any subsequent occasion.
Why would Pitt not offer a position to a friend he particularly trusted and liked, and who had already proved his parliamentary ability? Wilberforce was still only a junior MP, but so were several of the new ministers, including the Prime Minister himself. He needed more experience in debate, but so did many others, including Steele. He was popular, and could have held some sway over the Independent MPs whose votes would be desperately needed in the weeks ahead. The answer may be that Wilberforce was determined, even at this stage, to retain his nominal independence and to resist taking on a ministerial office which would have put an end to his travels to his beloved Lake District and elsewhere. He may even have made this clear to Pitt during their many long evenings at Wimbledon or in France, without making any record of it. Perhaps more likely, Pitt knew Wilberforce well enough, or thought he did, not to offer him a position which required skills of management and administration. His friends clearly thought of him as often being disorganised or late, not much of a recommendation in the days when ministers did most of their own work, with very few officials to assist them. And could a man who wrote to Henry Bankes earlier that year to say that his eyes had been so weak that he had been unable to write a letter for two or three weeks, carry out any function which involved the reading and writing of scores of letters each day? It would not have been difficult for Pitt to come to the conclusion that Wilberforce, however valuable as a personal friend and political ally, was neither physically nor temperamentally suited to ministerial office. If he had thought otherwise, Wilberforce’s life could well have run a very different course.
The passionate Commons debates of January to March 1784, as Fox inflicted one defeat after another on the infant administration while Pitt stoically refused to resign, were exhausting to many of the participants. Wilberforce was continually active on Pitt’s behalf, keeping in touch with the Independents, who at one stage made a serious move to bring about a grand coalition as a mediated solution to the constitutional impasse, voting regularly in the Commons and giving Pitt moral support. On the night of 28 February he called at White’s to see Pitt after he had been rescued from a violent affray in St James’s Street, and stayed up as so often until three in the morning. Two days later he spoke in the debate which became the climactic confrontation of the crisis, asserting that the conduct of Pitt ‘was dictated by a laudable ambition, which he would always be proud to cherish, as it tended to the salvation of the country’.
He noted that night that he was ‘extremely tired’.
As it happened, the debate of 1 March 1784 opened the way to Pitt’s triumph. Two months previously, Fox had been defeating him by majorities of more than fifty on the floor of the House of Commons. That night the majority against Pitt fell to only one. In the meantime loyal addresses had poured in from all over the nation acclaiming the appointment of Pitt and the actions of the King. Pitt now had the necessary support and the justification for a dissolution of Parliament. The most tumultuous general election of the eighteenth century was about to take place. It was a contest for which Wilberforce harboured a private hope, one so secret he had shared it with no one else.
The events of late March 1784 would lead Wilberforce to display to the full his ability to combine clear support for a cause with a mastery of the practical minutiae of politics. They would prove that his eloquence and determination were major forces to be reckoned with, and they would elevate him, against all expectations except his own, into being one of the most prestigious Members of Parliament in the land.
With a general election imminent, Wilberforce set out initially not to Hull, where he would be expected to run for re-election, but to the city of York, where a major meeting of freeholders from across Yorkshire was due to take place on 25 March. He did this even though ‘he knew … nobody in York but Mr Mason the poet’.
Such a meeting, in this case called to consider a loyal address to the King approving his recent actions, was of sufficient importance to carry national weight, for Yorkshire was generally considered to be a county of the highest political importance. This was partly on account of its size, in terms of both geography and electorate, with over twenty thousand freeholders eligible to vote: these were residents in towns and villages from all over Yorkshire, except those who returned MPs from their own boroughs. A successful election for the county of Yorkshire required a candidate to have recourse to either great popularity or enormous expense. Furthermore, the politics of the county in 1784 provided a major test for some of the principal political interests of the nation. It was in Yorkshire that some of the great Whig families particularly expected to hold sway, including the Fitzwilliams (Earl Fitzwilliam had succeeded his uncle, the Marquis of Rockingham, as one of the great landed magnates of the north) and Cavendishes. It was also the domain of the Yorkshire Association, formed by the Reverend Christopher Wyvill five years earlier to campaign for parliamentary reform, and now using its established organisation to campaign against the Fox-North coalition. The scene was thus set for a major confrontation at York, with both sides striving to bring their supporters to the city for 25 March in order to carry or defeat the address to the King, with the added expectation of this being immediately followed by a trial of strength as to who would be returned as the county’s two MPs.
The influence of the Whig Lords was so great in the county that Wilberforce doubted that it would be possible to ‘get up an opposition in Yorkshire’.
He arrived in York on 22 March, met Wyvill, helped to draw up the address to the King, and prepared for the meeting on the twenty-fifth, which was a ‘cold hailing day’
with a huge crowd assembled in the Castle Yard from ten o’clock in the morning to half-past four in the afternoon. There, in a ‘wonderful meeting for order and fair hearing’,
the proposers of the address came up against the full firepower of the Yorkshire Whigs: Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord John Cavendish (the former Chancellor of the Exchequer), Lord Carlisle and Lord Surrey (the future Duke of Norfolk) were assembled to denounce the Pitt ministry. As Wilberforce prepared to speak late into the meeting he had two powerful forces working in his favour: the first was that a national tide of opinion was running in Pitt’s favour, creating, perhaps uniquely in the eighteenth century, a countrywide ‘swing’ of opinion in favour of the new government, irrespective of local factors. Across the country, county meetings had voted loyal addresses, and in the coming days would voice such vociferous hostility to candidates representing Fox and North that many would stand down rather than meet the expense of a doomed contest. The combined impact of the unprincipled nature of the coalition, affection for the King, support for the apparently incorruptible nature of Pitt and the distribution by a burgeoning newspaper industry of far more political information and caricature than had ever been seen before, was about to unseat scores of opposition MPs and give Pitt a huge majority.
The second factor working in Wilberforce’s favour was his own native ability to command a huge meeting despite his tiny physical stature. Many of the crowd of four thousand had been unable to hear properly, amidst bad weather and weak speeches. An eyewitness thought, as Wilberforce mounted the platform, that the weather was so bad ‘that it seemed as if his slight frame would be unable to make head against its violence’.
As it turned out, other observers would consider it ‘impossible, though at the distance of so many years to forget his speech, or the effect which it produced’.
James Boswell told Henry Dundas that ‘I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but, as I listened, he grew and grew until the shrimp became a whale.’
Newspapers considered that his speech showed ‘such an exquisite choice of expression, and pronounced with such rapidity, that we are unable to do it justice in any account we can give of it’,
that it included both an effective answering of the arguments of the Whigs and the successful spreading of fear among the suddenly attentive audience: ‘He dwelt long on the odious East India Bill; read several clauses of it … he alarmed the Freeholders, by shewing that it might have been a Precedent for exercising the same tyranny over the property of every Man in the Kingdom.’
This was a masterly politician and orator at work. To complete the effect, his speech was interrupted after an hour by the arrival of a King’s messenger, who pushed through the crowd and handed up to him a letter from Pitt himself. As the first sentence of the letter gave him the information that Parliament would be dissolved that very day, he was able to announce this immediately to the steadily more supportive crowd, drawing attention to his own powerful connections and provoking a new wave of enthusiasm. He took care not to read out a later section of the letter which had instructed him to ‘tear the enemy to pieces’, and certainly did not reveal Pitt’s comment that ‘I am told Sir Robert Hildyard is the right candidate for the county.’
That was a matter on which Wilberforce had other ideas.
As Wilberforce would later confide in a letter to a friend: ‘I had formed within my own heart the project of standing for the county. To anyone besides myself I was aware that it must appear so mad a scheme that I never mentioned it to Mr Pitt, or any of my political connexions. It was undoubtedly a bold idea but I was then very ambitious.’
He knew that since he was not acquainted with the nobility and gentry of the county he would be considered, as the son of a merchant rather than an aristocrat, to be rather unsuitable for county representation. Having never previously been thought of as the candidate, with the general election already announced, he knew it would be thought an ‘utterly improbable’ proposition.
He considered that ‘It was very unlikely that the son of a merchant and with only my property could come in to represent Yorkshire, where the Members had always been persons of the oldest family, and the largest fortune. However I knew that such things had some times happened but I thought it foolish to talk about what was so unlikely and therefore I did not mention it to anyone.’
Yet he now supplied the burst of intense activity and skill which was necessary to bring it to fruition.
The county’s two incumbent Members, Foljambe and Duncombe, were both ready to take the field again, Foljambe being the candidate of the Whigs, and Duncombe the choice of the Yorkshire Association. In any normal contest, these two candidates would probably have been returned again without the need for an actual poll; such was the expense and difficulty of fighting a contested election in Yorkshire that only twice that century had the voters needed to go to the ballot box, and not at all for the previous forty-three years. But there was nothing normal about 1784, and Wilberforce knew it. Such was the strength of the pro-Pitt mood, and so strong was the impression that Wilberforce had made in the Castle Yard, that by the time the rival camps retired to their respective taverns for many hours of dinner and drinking Wilberforce was being openly touted as a running mate for Duncombe in a fight to unseat Foljambe and the Whigs altogether. As squabbling and drunkenness broke out, it was Wilberforce who helped Wyvill to restore order and secure a united front ‘by showing them the folly of giving up our common object … and by reminding them of the great constitutional principles which we all maintained. This confirmed the disposition to propose me for the county, an idea which had begun to be buzzed about at dinner, among all ranks.’
By midnight, the cry from the York Tavern was ‘Wilberforce and Liberty!’ It had taken him precisely eight hours to move from being the shrimp on the table to the joint candidate to represent the great county of Yorkshire.
The next morning, 26 March, the Yorkshire Whigs tried to salvage what they could from the situation by suggesting the agreed election of their nominee, Foljambe, and whoever was preferred by the anticoalition forces. This would inevitably have meant Duncombe. But Wilberforce had succeeded in giving the Yorkshire Association and its allies the confidence to try for both seats. Although there were two factions, Associators and non-Associators, ‘they determined that everyone should go into his own neighbourhood and see whether he had sufficient strength to encounter the great body of the aristocracy that was arrayed against us … I appeared to be so Independent and to observe so strict a neutrality that they both joined in asking me.’
Thus was the gauntlet flung down for a full-scale election. An immense organisational effort was immediately set in train, with the Association mounting a canvassing operation with the efficiency and thoroughness of any modern political party, but with the added burden of securing the necessities of an eighteenth-century election campaign. The fulltime clerk of the Association, William Gray, appointed agents for every wapentake
with the intention of canvassing over thirteen thousand freeholders spread all over the county in just ten days. He engaged horses, chaises and inns on the road to York so that freeholders could be assured of the necessary free transportation and lodging, and secured in advance two-thirds of all the public houses and stables in the city of York for the likely duration of the poll. Plans were made to bring up to 1,300 supportive freeholders into the city each day, organised into ‘companies’ and taken to vote according to a schedule, since ‘At the last election most of them were eating and drinking whilst they should have been waiting on the road and their number helped to swell the public house bills considerably.’
The instructions to agents give some flavour of the effort that was expected to be involved when polling itself took place. They were enjoined to ‘poll all such voters as are in the enemy’s strong country and all dubious ones as early as possible’; to ensure that freeholders arrived ‘under the lead and direction of some principal gentleman within the district’; to provide for ‘some strong active and zealous persons’ to ‘facilitate the approach of the freeholders’; to bring freeholders into the polling booths as early as possible in the day in order to ‘excite a spirit of emulation and exertion’; and ‘to have a confidential corps de reserve always ready to poll in case of exigency’.
Such organisation was a great advantage for the Association, it being noted at the same time that ‘The hurry and eagerness commonly attendant upon the opening of canvass are great hindrances to its regular arrangement.’
With the Whigs struggling to match either the organisational scope of the Association or the popularity of Pittite candidates, there was now every chance that Wilberforce would be elected as one of the two Members for the county. Nevertheless, it was still a good way from being a certainty, and it was therefore necessary for him to do what was perfectly common in an uncertain electoral situation in the eighteenth century: to ensure that he was elected elsewhere. In the very same election, for instance, Charles James Fox was fighting an intense battle to retain his seat in the City of Westminster – so closely fought that the poll was kept open for nearly six weeks – but had already ensured that he would be returned by a tiny electorate in the Orkney Islands. Once elected in a prestigious but risky contest, an MP would simply abandon the less distinguished of his constituencies, with the result that eighteenth-century elections were invariably followed by a swathe of by-elections to fill seats immediately vacated. To treat a rotten borough in this manner was easy enough, but to risk insulting the pride of the freemen of Hull was a more perilous proposition; Wilberforce therefore set out from York to Hull on the evening of 26 March to carry out an energetic canvass in his existing constituency. After arriving there at 2 a.m. he embarked on a tour next day, and found ‘people not pleased at my not canvassing’
earlier. By the thirtieth he was noting: ‘Canvass all day – extremely hard work – till night – tired to death,’
and two days later snowballs and other projectiles were thrown at him. Some effective speaking and his local popularity pulled him through, and he once again came top of the poll, although with fewer votes than in his 1780 triumph: he polled 807 votes compared to 751 for Samuel Thornton, son of John Thornton, and only 357 for a defeated and dejected David Hartley.
Duly elected for Hull on 1 April, Wilberforce was back on the road to York that same evening to resume his battle for the bigger prize. If by now he lacked energy, having considered himself thoroughly tired for at least a month, and having spent the previous two weeks continually travelling or campaigning well into the night, the ambitious twenty-four-year-old candidate certainly did not want for determination. With the canvassing of Yorkshire at fever pitch before the opening of the poll on 7 April, Wilberforce and Duncombe embarked on a tour of the West Riding towns, illustrated by his diary notes of these hectic few days:
To Rotherham – drawn into town – public dinner. At night to Sheffield – vast support – meeting at Cutler’s Hall … off to Barnsley … then to Wakefield … then off to Halifax. Drawn into town … after dinner (drunken postboy) to Bradford. Drawn into town – vast support. Then on to Leeds …
As he travelled, express letters were being sent from Westminster by Pitt, who had been triumphantly returned for Cambridge University and could now abandon his own tame constituency of Appleby, with lists of the requests he had sent out for votes and money for Wilberforce. As things turned out, Pitt need not have worried: while his re-election for Hull had cost Wilberforce £8,807, nearly all of which had to be drawn from his own fortune, the county campaign had already brought in subscriptions and donations exceeding £18,000, along with the expectation of a great deal more. And although Wilberforce and Duncombe had ‘passed many great houses’, and ‘not one did we see that was friendly to us’, the canvass returns coming in from the freeholders of Yorkshire were truly crushing. With towns such as Wakefield and Halifax reporting margins up to thirty votes to one, Gray’s canvass reported 10,812 freeholders supporting Duncombe and Wilberforce, with only 2,758 opposed or undecided. Lord Fitzwilliam and the Whigs, moaning they had been ‘beat by the ragamuffins’, had no better option remaining than to avert both the humiliation and the expense of going to the polls. Wilberforce and Duncombe had returned to York on the evening of 6 April when, at 8 p.m. at the York Tavern, a message was received from their opponents conceding defeat without a single vote having to be cast.
It was a moment for exultation. The ‘utterly improbable’ project that Wilberforce had kept to himself until only twelve days earlier had come to fruition, and he was now to be the Member for one of the most sought-after seats in Parliament. He sat down immediately to write several letters of delight, telling Edward Eliot:
I am or at least shall be tomorrow (our enemies having this evening declared their intentions of declining a Poll)
Knight of the Shire for the
County of York.
The celebrations were busy and varied: ‘7th. Up early – breakfasted tavern – rode frisky horse to castle – elected – chaired – dined … 8th. Walked – called – air balloon – dined …’
When news reached London two days later, Pitt would write: ‘I can never enough congratulate you on such glorious success.’
Across the country Pitt had won a decisive victory, remarkable for both its quality and quantity: not only did the new government have a three-figure majority in the House of Commons, but they had also won a huge proportion of those constituencies where there had been serious electoral competition, with the victory of Wilberforce as one of the jewels in Pitt’s electoral crown.
Cynical observers thought that Pitt would now be certain to include Wilberforce in the ministerial ranks. It was even thought that Wilberforce had switched constituencies with this uppermost in his mind, with Richard Sykes, from a prominent family in Hull, writing: ‘He has always lived above his income and it is certain he is now in expectation of a lucrative post from Government of which he is in the utmost need.’
He went on to say that this would entail a by-election for the county, and ‘The accuracy of this intelligence may be depended upon,’
showing that political gossip in the eighteenth century could be as wildly inaccurate as in any other age. Yet, however careless Wilberforce may have become about money, his election for Yorkshire made it even less likely than before that he would embark on a ministerial career. Pitt, preoccupied in the summer of 1784 with his own India Bill and his first budget, did not in any event carry out a major reshuffle of his government that year. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he had changed his opinion of Wilberforce’s suitability for high office. And from Wilberforce’s point of view, the burdens of representing and attending to his constituents had just been made vastly greater. He would now be expected to make tours of the county during the summer recess, and to represent all year round a vast range of interests, from the clothiers of Halifax to the manufacturers of Sheffield and the merchants of many small towns. An eighteenth-century county constituency did not fit well with a ministerial career: not only did it require a good deal of attention and representation, but the compulsory requirement to fight a by-election when accepting appointment as a minister could have been ruinously expensive. Contrary to the suspicions of Mr Sykes, it is likely therefore that, in Wilberforce’s own mind, his decision to stand for Yorkshire was consistent with political ambitions which were parliamentary rather than governmental. He had indeed sought greater power and prestige, but it was the prestige of an MP with elevated status and an independent power base, rather than as a minister rising in the ranks of the government of his friend.
Wilberforce was conscious from the beginning of the need to look after his new constituency. His first speech in the new Parliament, on 16 June 1784, was in favour of the principle of parliamentary reform, the much-cherished objective of the Yorkshire Association that had ensured his election. Once Parliament rose for the summer, he headed north to commune with his new constituents, becoming the ‘joy of York races’ and learning in detail about his new constituents – even years later he was still asking for lists of influential persons, graded according to their influence, ‘“Li” for little, – “Mi” for middling, – “Gr” for great, – and “V.Gr” for very great’,
together with useful observations such as, ‘Whether he likes the leg or wing of a fowl best, that when one dines with him one may win his heart by helping him, and not be taken in by his “just which you please, sir.” ’
After all the trials of the political season Wilberforce’s mind was once again set on travel, this time on a full-scale Continental tour. The old friend he initially asked to accompany him was unable to go, but holidaying at Scarborough later that summer Wilberforce found himself in the agreeable company of Isaac Milner, his school usher of sixteen years earlier and younger brother of Joseph. Wilberforce decided to ask Isaac to accompany him on a tour of several months with all expenses paid. It would turn out to be one of the most important decisions of his life.
Fencing with a weapon designed for thrusting or lunging – but in this context meaning verbal fencing.
Frances Crewe was a highly fashionable hostess and was regarded as one of the greatest beauties of her time, much admired by Fox, Burke and Sheridan.
The counties of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and Lincolnshire were divided into wapentakes, just as most of the remainder of England was divided into hundreds.
4 Agony and Purpose (#ulink_af43c973-acaa-56c7-8976-ab31089ff93a)
I must awake to my dangerous state, and never be at rest till I have made my peace with God.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 27 November 1785
Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.
WILLIAM PITT TO WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 2 December 1785
AFTER SUMMERING in York and Scarborough, Wilberforce set out over the Pennines in the early autumn of 1784 to visit his beloved Rayrigg, and ‘looked over all the old scenes again with vast pleasure’.
His visit there had many frustrations: his eyes were in too poor a state for reading, no visitor of any interest passed through, and he failed to find a spot on which he could locate his ‘future residence’.
By 20 October, after brief stops in London and Brighton, he had set out on his Continental tour and, in spite of the calm conditions, suffered from seasickness while sailing from Dover to Calais. His party travelled in two coaches. The first contained his mother, his sister and ‘a couple of sick cousins, very good girls, whose health we hope to re-establish by the change of air’.
In the other were Wilberforce himself, a small mountain of neglected correspondence – ‘which, to my sore annoyance and discomfort, I have brought in my chaise to the heart of France’
–and the even larger bulk of Isaac Milner.
Feeling threatened by the prospect of several months with only women of his own family for company, Wilberforce had resorted to inviting on the tour a man he did not then know very well. Yet soon he would be describing Milner as ‘a most intelligent and excellent friend of mine’.
Milner had a broad Yorkshire accent and was physically enormous, being described in later years by Marianne Thornton as ‘a rough loud and rather coarse man’, and ‘the most enormous man it was ever my fate to see in a drawing-room’,
but he had a gentle nature and a ready wit which Wilberforce found highly congenial. He also happened to be intellectually brilliant: shortly after Wilberforce had known him as a school usher, having been plucked away from being a Leeds weaver by his elder brother Joseph, he had entered Queens’ College Cambridge, where he revealed an extraordinary intelligence. Many years later, Cambridge dons were still discussing his triumphant progress: by 1774 his academic performance was considered ‘incomparabilis’, and two years later he was a Fellow of his college, going on to become a tutor, rector and, at the age of thirty-two, the first Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy. Some observers were even moved to believe that ‘The university, perhaps, never produced a man of more eminent abilities.’
It says a lot for Wilberforce’s charm and reputation that such a man was happy to ask for leave of absence from his college and set off on a journey expected to last several months with the Wilberforce family in tow. Fortunately, Milner had always thought well of Wilberforce, and he presumably had the additional incentive of being able to visit foreign parts which, having never been wealthy himself, he did not expect to be able to visit on his own. Wilberforce found him ‘lively and dashing in his conversation’,
and they were soon covering many subjects in the days and weeks they spent travelling south across France. On the journey they had much to enjoy: ‘the wines, Cote Rotie, Hermitage, &c. all strong’; along the Rhône to Avignon in a barge ‘without a cloud (in October)’; the Frenchmen ‘who always make you a bow where an Englishman would give you an oath’; the ‘large, quiet, sleepy’ town of Aix; Marseilles, ‘the most entertaining place I ever saw, all bustle and business’; and then the final journey towards Nice with ‘astonishing rocks hewn through, and ready to close over you’.
Inside the carriage, religion was only an occasional talking point, although if it came up Milner always gave a hint of holding powerful convictions. Even back in Scarborough early that year, when Wilberforce had described an Evangelical rector as one who took things too far, Milner had replied, ‘No, how does he carry them too far?’ and continued the argument. Similarly in France, as Wilberforce ridiculed the Methodist views of his aunt and John Thornton, having ‘quite forgotten the beliefs I had when a child’,
Milner eventually said to him, ‘Wilberforce, I don’t pretend to be a match for you in this sort of running fire. But if you really wish to discuss these topics in a serious and argumentative manner I should be most happy to enter on them with you.’
Such a considered discussion did not take place immediately. Their arrival in Nice brought the usual round of dinners, card parties and gambling in the company of a fair slice of London society. They even experienced one of the intriguing fads of the time when an operator of animal magnetisers
‘tried his skill upon Milner and myself but neither of us felt anything, owing perhaps to our incredulity’.
While Mrs Wilberforce refused Sunday invitations, Milner had no such scruples: ‘he appeared in all respects like an ordinary man of the world, mixing like myself in all companies, and joining as readily as others in the prevalent Sunday parties. Indeed, when I engaged him as a companion in my tour I knew not that he had any deeper principles.’
Yet those deeper principles would shortly emerge. It is unclear how long Wilberforce intended to stay in Nice, and even though the new session of Parliament was to begin on 25 January 1785, the happy party remained on the Riviera throughout that month. Wilberforce later remembered that ‘Many times during the month of January we carried our cold meat into some of the beautiful recesses of the mountains and rocks by which the place is surrounded on the land side and dined in the open air as we should here, in the summer.’
Sometime that month, however, he would have received from Pitt a letter written on 19 December 1784 explaining that ‘as much as I wish you to bask on, under an Italian sun, I am perhaps likely to be the instrument of snatching you from your present paradise … A variety of circumstances concur to make it necessary to give notice immediately on the meeting of Parliament of the day on which I shall move the question of the Reform.’
If Pitt as Prime Minister was making a major push for parliamentary reform, it was unthinkable for Wilberforce to be absent. Pitt had worked with Wyvill on a scheme which would abolish seventy-two seats in rotten boroughs and allocate them to newly populous towns and cities. Loyalty to Pitt and to Yorkshire demanded that Wilberforce be present to argue for such a proposal. As a result, it was decided that he and Milner would return to England, leaving the ladies where they were and coming back to join them in the summer. Just before leaving Nice on 5 February, Wilberforce asked Milner if a book he had happened to pick up, Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, was worth reading. Milner responded: ‘It is one of the best books ever written. Let us take it with us and read it on our journey.’
In the whole course of Wilberforce’s life, no volume would be more influential in determining his conduct than the book he so casually selected from among the possessions of his cousin, Bessy Smith. He would write thirty-two years later to his daughter, ‘You cannot read a better book. I hope it was one of the means of turning my heart to God.’
Philip Doddridge had published the book in 1745, six years before his death at the age of forty-nine. Doddridge’s version of ‘vital Christianity’ was itself built on the seventeenth-century work of Richard Baxter, an English Puritan minister who had become a leading Presbyterian non-conformist. Baxter had urged Christians to concentrate on the fundamental points on which the wide spread of Christian denominations should be able to reach a consensus. In his turn, Doddridge advocated Christian unity and religious toleration, along with a practical faith and a powerful vision of heaven. It was thus in the course of an uncomfortable midwinter journey across France that Wilberforce sat in his carriage absorbing many of the essentials of English Puritanism. For Doddridge set out in his book a complete framework for religious observation, and a philosophy of how to live, which initially merely caused Wilberforce to think, but which would eventually provide the framework for his whole life. The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul emphasised the importance of daily self-examination, prayer, early-morning devotions, diligence in business, prudence in recreation, the careful observation of Providence, the importance of solitude, and the value of time. It stressed the certainty of death and judgement, and the need for humankind to show its usefulness throughout a lifetime. The message of the book was designed first to be worrying: ‘Thousands are, no doubt, already in hell, whose guilt never equalled thine; and it is astonishing, that God hath spared thee to read this representation of thy case;’
and then to be uplifting: ‘You will wish to commence a hero in the cause of Christ; opposing with a rigorous resolution the strongest efforts of the powers of darkness, the inward corruption of your own heart, and all the outward difficulties you may meet with in the way of your duty, while in the cause and in the strength of Christ you go on conquering and to conquer.’
Doddridge’s enjoinders would subsequently become Wilberforce’s prescription for life: ‘Be an advocate for truth; be a counsellor of peace; be an example of candour; and do all you can to reconcile the hearts of men, especially of good men, to each other, however they may differ in their opinions about matters which it is impossible for good men to dispute.’
The immediate effect on Wilberforce, no doubt encouraged by Milner, was that ‘he determined at some future season to examine the Scriptures for himself and see if things were stated there in the same manner’.
For the moment, more immediate events would break back into his mind, for both the journey home and the political situation on his return were more difficult than he might have anticipated. The return journey involved bad roads, filthy inns and terrible food, without any of ‘those things which in England we should deem indispensable for our comfort and even our health’.
In heavy snow in Burgundy, when Milner and Wilberforce were walking behind their chaise it slipped on the ice, and looked like toppling over a precipice with the horses, had Milner not used all his strength to hold it. The weight of Milner’s luggage might not have helped, since he was ‘invariably carrying about with him an assortment which, to most persons, appeared uselessly large, of implements of a heavy kind – such as scissors of various sizes, pincers, files, penknives, razors and even hammers’.
After these adventures, it was 22 February before they arrived in London and Wilberforce ‘took up my quarters for a short time under the roof of Mr Pitt’,
which literally meant lodging in 10 Downing Street, where the maid accidentally burned about fifty of his letters, many unopened: ‘I dreaded the effects on my reputation in Yorkshire but happily no bad consequence ensued.’
Wilberforce showed no resentment that the haste of his return proved unnecessary when the great debate on Reform was put off until late March, and then again until 18 April. He threw himself back into London’s political and social whirl, and was soon noting in his diary that he was ‘sitting up all night singing’, and had ‘danced till five in the morning’.
When the Reform debate finally took place Wilberforce was in his place to support Pitt and to speak up for Yorkshire, but his speech, however much it accorded with his own views and ideals, was not calculated to win over sceptical MPs. Showing his disdain for political parties, he argued that the abolition of rotten boroughs would ‘tend to diminish the progress of party and cohesion in this country from which … our greatest misfortunes arose … By destroying them the freedom of opinion would be restored, and party connexions in a great measure vanish.’
MPs with less secure parliamentary seats than Wilberforce might well have considered as they listened to him that if party connections vanished, they might well vanish themselves. Even this modest measure of reform was thrown out, by 248 votes to 174, and one of Pitt’s most cherished projects among ‘his good hopes of the country, and noble, patriotic heart’,
in Wilberforce’s words of that time, went down to defeat. Wilberforce’s diary for that day said it all: ‘To town – Pitt’s – house – Parliamentary Reform – terribly disappointed and beat – extremely fatigued – spoke extremely ill, but commended. – Called at Pitt’s – met poor Wyvill.’
The following month he was again on his feet in the House of Commons supporting Pitt, this time even against the wishes of some of his constituents. Pitt’s so-called ‘Irish Propositions’ were designed to create freer trade between Ireland and England, with the object of reducing discontent in Ireland and strengthening England’s security. They were opposed, however, by many manufacturers, including the woollen businesses of the Yorkshire West Riding. It was either his efforts to reconcile these conflicting views or his general lifestyle which caused Wilberforce physical discomfort and even disorientation in the debate of 12 May. He noted that he ‘cannot preserve the train as some could do, and too hot and violent’,
and it was reported that ‘overcome with sensibility, the fatigue of having sat in the House so many hours, and with the pressure of infirmity, he sunk upon his seat’.
It was not an easy session for him. As he wrote to one dissatisfied constituent, ‘The situation of a Representative disagreeing with his constituents on a matter of importance must ever be a situation of pain and embarrassment,’
but he continued to admire Pitt, who he thought ‘spoke wonderfully’ on the same subject, and to be loyal to his old friend. Yet there were also the first signs of a developing dissatisfaction with the political and social scene. A letter from Pitt later in the year refers to Wilberforce’s ‘constant call for Something out of the Common Way’.
At the same time, his disapproval of a variety of public habits was becoming evident in his diary. He found the laughing at a christening ‘very indecent’, considered a dance at the opera ‘shocking’, and after talking with one wealthy friend thought it ‘strange that the most generous men and religious, do not see that their duties increase with their fortune, and that they will be punished for spending it in eating, etc’.
The change in his sentiments was to gather pace when he and Milner resumed their travels once Parliament had risen at the end of June. Heading first for Genoa for a reunion with the ladies, they then travelled to Switzerland, where Wilberforce was overcome by the beauty of the mountains: ‘I have never since ceased to recur with peculiar delight to its enchanting scenery, especially to that of Interlaken, which is a vast garden of the loveliest fertility and beauty stretched out at the base of the giant Alps.’
He wrote to Muncaster on 14 August that ‘I have never been in any other part of the world, for which I could quit a residence in England with so little regret,’ but while retaining his normal good humour – ‘If you read on thus far, I am sure your patience will hold out no longer, and my letter goes into the fire, which in your cold part of the world you will certainly be sitting over when my packet arrives’ – he said he was in despair at ‘the universal corruption and profligacy of the times’, which had now ‘extended its baneful influence and spread its destructive poison through the whole body of the people. When the mass of blood is corrupt, there is no remedy but amputation.’
While in Geneva he happily entertained the many contacts and friends, such as de Lageard, Wyvill and Earl Spencer, who turned up there; but others were evidently noticing a distinct change in his behaviour. When they reached Spa in the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium), he noted: ‘Mrs Crewe cannot believe that I think it wrong to go to the play. – Surprised at hearing that halting on the Sunday was my wish and not my mother’s.’
When he wrote to congratulate Eliot on his marriage to Pitt’s sister Harriot, he expressed his growing contempt for the pursuit of money, saying that if a man had enough, then ‘to torment himself for fresh acquisitions as delusive in this enjoyment and uncertain in their possession as these are, seems to me a perfect madness’.
Closeted in his carriage with Milner and the Greek version of the New Testament, to the point that the ladies complained of him paying them insufficient attention, Wilberforce was becoming gradually convinced of the Evangelical Christian case. He always liked to examine a question before pronouncing his view on it; now Milner’s arguments left him intellectually convinced by, but not yet emotionally committed to, the need for a new approach to life. Much later he would recall: ‘I got a clear idea of the doctrines of Religion, perhaps clearer than I have had since, but it was quite in my head. Well, I now fully believed the Gospel and was persuaded that if I died at any time I should perish everlastingly. And yet, such is man, I went on cheerful and gay.’
Very soon, however, he was to be overwhelmed by the force of what he now believed to be true. ‘What madness is all this,’ he began to think, ‘to continue easy in a state in which a sudden call out of the world would consign me to everlasting misery, and that, when eternal happiness is within my grasp!!’ By the time he was preparing to return to England in late October 1785, ‘the deep guilt and black ingratitude of my past life forced itself upon me in the strongest colours, and I condemned myself for having wasted my precious time, and opportunities, and talents’.
The ‘great change’ was upon him.
In the autumn of 1785 Wilberforce experienced a classic conversion to Christian evangelicalism, a mental and spiritual experience of enormous power. When it came, the climax of his conversion was neither as dramatic nor as seemingly supernatural as in many other documented cases of the eighteenth century. Charles Wesley had experienced his conversion in 1738 when his sleep was interrupted by someone entering his room and saying, ‘In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise, and believe …’, the speaker turning out to be a friend’s sister who had dreamt that Christ had knocked at her door and told her to do this.
The celebrated Colonel James Gardiner, who was killed in battle with the Jacobites in 1745 but immortalised in a biography written by Doddridge, experienced his conversion when a ‘blaze of light’
fell upon a book he was reading and he lifted up his eyes to see a vision of Christ on the Cross, causing him ‘unutterable astonishment and agony of heart’,
with the result that ‘the whole frame and disposition of his soul was new-modelled and changed; so that he became, and continued to the last day of his exemplary and truly Christian life, the very reverse of what he had been before’.
Many other famous conversions can be pinpointed to a single day. John Wesley could trace his own such moment to 8.45 p.m. on 14 May 1738, when ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that he had taken my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’
John Newton’s conversion followed a near shipwreck in which he ‘dreaded death now, and my heart foreboded the worst, if the Scriptures which I had long since opposed, were indeed true’.
His survival and recovery from a subsequent fever led him ‘from that time’ to be ‘delivered from the power and dominion of sin … I now began to wait upon the Lord.’
William Huntington, whose conversion led to him building his own chapel in London after a dissolute youth, also had a sudden conversion – one day, he became intensely conscious of sin: ‘I leapt up, with my eyes ready to start out of my head, my hair standing erect, and my countenance stained with all the horrible gloom and dismay of the damned. I cried out to my wife, and said, “Molly, I am undone for ever; I am lost and gone; there is no hope or mercy for me; you know not what a sinner I am; you know not where I am, nor what I feel!”’ He later saw a vision of the Holy Ghost and ‘heard a voice from Heaven, saying unto me in plain words, “Lay by your forms of prayers, and go pray to Jesus Christ; do you not see how pitifully he speaks to Sinners.”’
It is not possible to pinpoint Wilberforce’s own conversion to a single day, nor did he report the intervention of an other-worldly vision or voice. Yet the time which elapsed between him going about his normal business in the late spring of 1785 and the adoption of an entirely new and rigorous approach to life that December was unusually short. Many such conversions followed years of intellectual doubt and agonising. Gardiner had kept his religious side subordinate for eleven years before his conversion burst through; the ‘awakening’ of the Wesleys also took place over many years; Newton endured periods of internal conflict spread over twelve years; and the great George Whitefield experienced his conversion crisis six years after being deeply affected by listening to a sermon. In another documented case, that of William Grimshaw, the son of a poor farmer from Lancashire who became second only to the Wesleys in Methodist authority, his final conversion took place eight years after he had first been ‘powerfully awakened and alarmed’.
Wilberforce was clear in later life that true religious conviction could only emerge after a period of self-examination, doubt, and often agony. Writing of his son Samuel’s expectation of his own ‘great change’, he said: ‘I come again and again to look to see if it really be begun, just as a gardener walks up again and again to his fruit trees to see if his peaches are set; if they are swelling and becoming larger, finally they are becoming ripe and rosy.’
Away from the daily cares of Westminster that summer, and with a companion in Milner who had ‘doctrines of religion in his head though not then I think in his heart’,
Wilberforce found that his own period of doubt and awakening was relatively short.
A role model of the kind Isaac Milner provided for Wilberforce could be crucial in providing reassurance that conversion was both attainable and desirable. Wilberforce had always been struck by Milner’s intellect, coherence and equanimity; he had a quiet strength to which it is not surprising that the sometimes erratic and overheated young Member of Parliament aspired. There are clear parallels with the cases of others: the conversion of the great Scottish preacher Ebenezer Erskine followed on from ‘his realisation that others have found an experience which he lacked’,
and that of Lady Huntingdon, founder of a radical Calvinistic movement within Methodism, apparently came about because ‘the happiness of her sister-in-law induced a longing for the same condition’.
Wilberforce had this factor and many others in common with those who underwent a similar religious experience. For instance, many of them had been exposed to strong religious influences in childhood. Gardiner, Whitefield, the Wesleys and Newton all had mothers with strong personalities who managed to give their children a religious inclination even if it did not become apparent until much later in life. Wilberforce’s own acceptance of religious teaching from his aunt and uncle at the age of nine is a different but comparable case. Yet it is also true that those who experienced conversion were not ‘weak-minded’ or ‘over-suggestible’,
but tended to be particularly thoughtful, as well as eloquent, individuals: John Berridge, vicar of Everton, was a prolific hymn-writer; William Cowper became one of the most popular poets of his time; John Fletcher became a foremost theologian and Methodist leader; Thomas Halyburton was a Professor of Divinity; the Countess of Huntingdon was a formidable figure who founded sixty-four chapels and a training college for Methodist ministers; Legh Richmond was a curate, later influenced by Wilberforce, who became a prolific author, with works translated into nineteen languages;
Thomas Scott was a biblical scholar who wrote widely read books such as The Force of Truth; and Henry Venn was a highly active vicar who wrote The Complete Duty of Man. Isaac Milner was, of course, an outstanding academic who was to become Master of Queens’ College Cambridge.
Since Wilberforce’s life followed or overlapped with those of these and comparable figures, he knew at the time of his conversion that he was in good company. Those who had embraced varying forms of Methodism and evangelicalism and experienced a crisis of religious conversion were often persuasive, well connected and, as in the case of his kinsman John Thornton, a leading figure in the Evangelical revival of the time, comfortingly rich. Nevertheless, they were a small minority, still open to the strong suspicions and hostility which Wilberforce had witnessed in his mother in earlier years, and in most cases they saw their newly crystallised religious duty as being to spread the word of God through preaching and missions rather than to try to pursue Christian principles through the political world. The tumult going on in Wilberforce’s mind that summer would therefore have embraced serious doubts about the viability of the political career he had recently done so much to advance.
In spite of these considerations, Wilberforce clearly felt an ineluctable pull towards an enthusiasm for Christianity which would guide and dictate all his future actions in every aspect of life. While he attributed his new feelings to the intervention of Providence, in common with the experience across faiths of nearly all kinds of religious conversion, with a sense of being controlled from above and accepting Divine Grace, there were many personal factors which could have affected him. His effortless possession of great wealth, and the long period of relative leisure which it had permitted, may have helped to create in him a feeling of guilt towards other people. Certainly, one of his early resolutions as he adopted a new regimen of life was to live more frugally. His diary for 25 November recorded, ‘Walked, and stagecoach, to save the expense of a chaise,’
and he would become increasingly generous towards a wide range of charitable causes. In addition, there are signs that he was suffering a twinge of disillusionment with conventional politics by the middle of 1785. His call to Pitt for ‘something out of the common way’ almost certainly reflects his disappointment that Pitt’s triumph of the earlier year had failed to elevate the conduct of politics as a whole. Reform had been defeated, rotten boroughs remained, idealism on Ireland had been frustrated, the culture of place-seeking, patronage and parties remained. As time and travel separated him from the intense partisanship of the 1784 election, his disdain for fixed party loyalties may already have been resurfacing. He had always idealised the exercising of independent judgement, and a fresh philosophical framework for such judgement must have had its appeal.
It is impossible to know what other subconscious forces pushed William Wilberforce that November into the agony of his conversion crisis. Such was the effect, he later wrote, of the ‘sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Saviour … that for months I was in a state of the deepest depression … nothing which I have ever read in the accounts of others exceeded what I then felt’.
Having attained the great heights of becoming a Member for Yorkshire, but having no expectation of becoming a minister, did he reflect, at the age of twenty-six, that his personal ambitions had already reached their limit? Was it that the excesses of the London clubland he inhabited, with its gambling, womanising, gluttony and prostitution, had finally revolted him? Had the enormous amount of time he had spent travelling, and the futility of his recent efforts in the Commons, given him a stronger than usual sense of waste and lack of purpose? Or was it that having discovered that attaining his ambitions and satisfying all his material needs did not lead to satisfaction, he was predisposed to search for something which could represent for him the highest ambition of them all? By November 1785 some mixture of these influences, added to his early receptiveness towards religion, the guidance of Doddridge’s writing, and the force of Milner’s arguments, produced in William Wilberforce a true conversion crisis.
In his book The Psychology of Religion, published at the end of the nineteenth century, E.D. Starbuck identified the mental attributes of a full-blown conversion crisis: ‘struggle after the new-life: prayer, calling on God; sense of estrangement from God; doubts and questioning: tendency to resist conviction; depression and sadness; restlessness, anxiety, and uncertainty; helplessness and humility; earnestness and seriousness … The central fact in it all is the sense of sin.’
For a time, such a crisis could produce a state of deep dissatisfaction and a divided personality, the individual concerned oscillating between aiming for new ideals and believing that he cannot attain them. The more the prospective convert struggled to be free of sin, the more he would become conscious of his past sins and his unworthiness. The stricter he tried to become about religious devotion, observances and prayer, the more likely he was to be tempted away by the various attractions of human society, and to feel that he was trying to adopt a standard which could not be maintained. Such internal conflict, well documented by John Wesley, Whitefield, Fletcher and Henry Venn, eventually produces a mental breaking point, resulting in conversion, retreat or collapse. The honesty and thoroughness of Wilberforce’s diary-keeping meant that he left behind him a clear and revealing account of this agony:
25th. Up at six – private devotions half an hour – Pascal three quarters
– to town on business. I feel quite giddy and distracted by the tumult, except when in situations of which I am rather ashamed, as in the stage coach: the shame, pride; but a useful lesson …
Sunday 27th. Up at six – devotions half an hour – Pascal three quarters – Butler
three quarters – church – read the Bible, too ramblingly, for an hour – heard Butler, but not attentively, two hours – meditated twenty minutes – hope I was more attentive at church than usual, but serious thoughts vanished the moment I went out of it, and very insensible and cold in the evening service – some very strong feelings when I went to bed; God turn them to account, and in any way bring me to himself. I have been thinking I have been doing well by living alone, and reading generally on religious subjects; I must awake to my dangerous state, and never be at rest till I have made my peace with God.
My heart is so hard, my blindness so great, that I cannot get a due hatred of sin, though I see I am all corrupt, and blinded to the perception of spiritual things.
28th. I hope as long as I live to be the better for the meditation of this evening; it was on the sinfulness of my own heart, and its blindness and weakness. True, Lord, I am wretched, and miserable and naked. What infinite love, that Christ should die to save such a sinner and how necessary is it He should save us altogether that we may appear before God with nothing of our own! God grant I may not deceive myself, in thinking I feel the beginnings of gospel comfort. Began this night constantly family prayer, and resolved to have it every morning and evening, and to read a chapter when time.
Tuesday 29th. I bless God I enjoyed comfort in prayer this evening. I must keep my own unworthiness ever in view. Pride is my greatest stumbling block; and there is danger in it in two ways – lest it should make me desist from a Christian life, through fear of the world, my friends, &c.; or if I persevere, lest it should make me vain of so doing. In all disputes on religion, I must be particularly on my guard to distinguish it from a zeal for God and his cause. I must consider and set down the marks whereby they may be known from each other. I will form a plan of my particular duty, praying God to enable me to do it properly, and set it before me as a chart of the country, and map of the road I must travel …
November 30th. Was very fervent in prayer this morning, and thought these warm impressions would never go off. Yet in vain endeavoured in the evening to rouse myself. God grant it may not all prove vain; oh if it does, how will my punishment be deservedly increased! The only way I find of moving myself, is by thinking of my great transgressions, weakness, blindness, and of God’s having promised to supply these defects. But though I firmly believe them, yet I read of future judgement, and think of God’s wrath against sinners with no great emotions …
It was all there: doubt, shame, and sometimes near despair, all in an atmosphere of agonising introspection. He would always regard this as the most difficult experience of his life: ‘I was filled with sorrow. I am sure that no human creature could suffer more than I did for some months. It seems indeed it quite affected my reason; not so as others would observe, for all this time I kept out of company. They might see I was out of spirits.’
Astonishingly, when he did appear in public he gave no sign of his inner torment, Pitt’s sister writing on 10 November that she had been ‘agreeably surprised by a visit from Mr Wilberforce who has come home remarkably well’.
But although he complained to his diary that ‘all religious thoughts go off in London’,
he was finding that he could no longer see the great men of the political world in the same light as before. Dining with the cabinet at Downing Street, he ‘was often thinking that pompous Thurlow [the Lord Chancellor] and elegant Carmarthen would soon appear in the same row with the poor fellow who waited behind their chairs’.
By the end of November he felt he had to explain to his closest friends what was happening to him, but on a confidential basis so as to avoid any public reaction. The letter in which he explained himself to Pitt has not survived, but he later recalled that ‘I told him that though I should ever feel a strong affection for him, and had every reason to feel that I should be in general able to support him, yet I could no more be so much a Party man as I had been before.’
Pitt’s reply, written from Downing Street on 2 December 1785, suggests that Wilberforce had raised the idea of withdrawing from general society and possibly from the political world. His immediate response was to affirm his friendship, begin to argue, and seek a discussion, in a letter which was all the more remarkable for having been written by a busy Prime Minister. He began by saying that he was ‘too deeply interested in whatever concerns you not to be very sensibly affected by what has the appearance of a new era in your life, and so important in its consequences for yourself and your friends. As to any public conduct which your opinions may ever lead you to, I will not disguise to you that few things could go nearer my heart than to find myself differing from you essentially on any great principle.’
He went on to say that whatever happened, ‘it is impossible that it should shake the sentiments of affection and friendship which I bear towards you … They are sentiments engraved in my heart and will never be effaced or weakened.’
But he followed this up with the first gentle advice to Wilberforce from any quarter to use his religious convictions for wider purposes:
… but forgive me if I cannot help expressing my fear that you are nevertheless deluding yourself into principles which have but too much tendency to counteract your own object, and to render your virtues and your talents useless both to yourself and mankind. I am not, however, without hopes that my anxiety paints this too strongly. For you confess that the character of religion is not a gloomy one, and that it is not that of an enthusiast. But why then this preparation of solitude, which can hardly avoid tincturing the mind either with melancholy or superstition? If a Christian may act in the several relations in life, must he seclude himself from them all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.
Concerned that Wilberforce was about to isolate himself and make an irrevocable breach with public life, Pitt went on to ask for an urgent discussion:
What I would ask of you, as a mark both of your friendship and of the candour which belongs to your mind, is to open yourself fully and without reserve to one, who, believe me, does not know how to separate your happiness from his own. You do not explain either the degree or the duration of the retirement which you have prescribed to yourself; you do not tell me how the future course of your life is to be directed, when you think the same privacy no longer necessary; nor, in short, what idea you have formed of the duties which you are from this time to practise … I will not importune you with fruitless discussion on any opinion which you have deliberately formed … name any hour at which I can call upon you tomorrow. I am going to Kent, and can take Wimbledon in my way. Reflect, I beg of you, that no principles are the worse for being discussed, and believe me that at all events the full knowledge of the nature and extent of your opinions and intentions will be to me a lasting satisfaction.
Believe me, affectionately and unalterably yours,
W. Pitt.
The next day Pitt did indeed call at Wimbledon. In the same house in which they had eaten, drunk and played so much, the two friends engaged in two hours of earnest discussion. Wilberforce recalled that ‘he tried to reason me out of my convictions but soon found himself unable to combat their correctness, if Christianity was true. The fact is, he was so absorbed with politics, that he had never given himself time for due reflection on religion.’
Yet Pitt’s plea to Wilberforce that a Christian life should produce action rather than mere meditation was well considered, and may have made its mark. Wilberforce had clearly toyed with the idea of at least a period of retreat and isolation, and many other cases of religious conversion had led the individual concerned towards a life of preaching, concentration on religion, and often a lack of interest in worldly affairs. Whether Pitt influenced Wilberforce away from such a path cannot be known, but fortunately for history the next person to whom he turned in his agony was able to influence his future life with every advantage of long experience and deep religious conviction.
It was on 30 November that Wilberforce first ‘thought seriously this evening with going to converse with Mr Newton – waked in the night – obliged to compel myself to think of God’. With Milner experiencing his own conversion crisis, Wilberforce needed to draw on the strength of someone with long-established beliefs. By 2 December, the day before his conversation with Pitt, Wilberforce noted: ‘resolved again about Mr Newton. It may do good; he will pray for me his experience may enable him to direct me to new grounds of humiliation … It can do no harm … Kept debating in that unsettled way to which I have used myself, whether to go to London or not, and then how – wishing to save expense, I hope with a good motive, went at last in the stage to town – inquired for old Newton; but found he lived too far off for me to see him …’
Now possessed of sufficient courage to discuss his beliefs with the great John Newton, the very man he had ‘reverenced as a parent’ in his youthful days at Clapham, he made his way into London from Wimbledon again on Sunday, 4 December, and delivered a letter to Newton’s church asking for a meeting. The letter showed his dread of his evangelicalism being publicly revealed before he was ready for it: ‘I am sure you will hold yourself bound to let no-one living know of this application, or of my visit till I release you from the obligation. p.s. Remember that I must be secret, and that the gallery of the House is now so universally attended, that the face of a Member of Parliament is pretty well-known.’
Newton, the former slave trader, was now sixty years old, rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London and the author of many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. He had wise counsel for Wilberforce, such as telling him not to become cut off from his friends. Meeting Wilberforce three days after the delivery of the letter, ‘he told me he always had entertained hopes and confidence that God would sometime bring me to him’, and produced ‘a calm, tranquil state’ in Wilberforce’s tortured mind.
It was Newton who not only calmed and soothed Wilberforce but, from that time and for a good decade afterwards, fortified him in combining his religious beliefs with a continued political career. In 1786 he would write of Wilberforce to the poet William Cowper: ‘I hope the Lord will make him a blessing both as a Christian and a statesman. How seldom do these characters coincide!! But they are not incompatible.’
Two years later he wrote to Wilberforce: ‘It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of his Church, and for the good of the nation,’
and in 1796: ‘I believe you are the Lord’s servant, and are in the post which He has assigned you; and though it appears to me more arduous, and requiring more self-denial than my own, I know that He who has called you to it can afford you strength according to your day.’
And it was Newton who gradually widened the circle of friends in the Evangelical community to whom he could turn for advice. By Christmas Eve 1785 John Thornton was writing to Wilberforce: ‘you may easier conceive than I can express the satisfaction I had from a few minutes’ converse with Mr Newton yesterday afternoon. As in nature, so in Grace, what comes very quickly forward rarely abides long: I am aware of your difficulties which call for great prudence and caution. Those that believe, must not make haste, but be content to go God’s pace and watch the leadings of his providence.’
Thornton advised Wilberforce not to make haste, and to accept that such a change took time. Through December and into the new year Wilberforce’s many doubts about his own worthiness and ability to uphold his new beliefs did indeed continue. His diary is peppered with such statements as: ‘I am colder and more insensible than I was – I ramble – oh God, protect me from myself’; ‘colder than ever – very unhappy – called at Newton’s and bitterly moved; he comforted me’; and ‘was strengthened in prayer, and first I shall be able to live more to God, which determined to do – much affected by Doddridge’s directions for spending time, and hoped to conform to them in some degree: it must be by force at first, for I find I perpetually wander from serious thoughts when I am off my guard’.
Steadily, as the weeks went by, his willpower and new convictions prevailed. He resigned from the clubs at which he had passed so many happy evenings, spent many hours each day studying the Bible, and took new lodgings in London ‘at one of the Adelphi hotels’,
which gave him easier access to Evangelical preaching. He wrote earnestly to his sister about his beliefs, and reassuringly to his mother about his continuance in public life: he would not ‘fly from the post where Providence has placed me’.
He continued to visit Downing Street and attend the House of Commons, his mind more at peace as he realised he could live up to the standards he had set himself without forsaking the world he had always known.
One study of religious conversion contends that once conversion is complete ‘there is the sensation of liberation and victory, which the convert displays by a powerful and integral joy of the spirit’. The convert also has a ‘sense more or less like the sense of vision or touch of nearness to God’, and of ‘an answering touch which thrills and recreates him’.
By Easter 1786 Wilberforce was writing to his sister from Stock in Essex on a beautiful day: ‘the day has been delightful. I was out before six … I think my own devotions become more fervent when offered in this way amidst the general chorus with which all nature seems to be swelling the song of praise and thanksgiving; and accept the time which has been spent at church and at dinner … and neither in the sanctuary nor at table I trust, had I a heart unwarmed with gratitude to the giver of all good things.’
William Wilberforce had found his faith.
Wilberforce would later describe his emergence as an Evangelical convert as being akin to wakening from a dream and recovering ‘the use of my reason after a delirium’.
His governing motives had been ‘emulation, and a desire of distinction … ardent after the applause of my fellow creatures, I quite forgot that I was an accountable being; that I was hereafter to appear at the bar of God’.
Now he believed ‘that if Christianity were not a fable, it was infinitely important to study its precepts, and when known to obey them’,
and resolved to regulate his political conduct according to a new golden rule, ‘to do as I would be done by’.
He was clear that he would stay in politics, but from now on his political activity would be directed and armed by the philosophy of Christian evangelicalism, of which he was now an adherent and would eventually become a leader.
Most people found it hard to distinguish between the Evangelicals and Methodists. As Sydney Smith wrote in 1808: ‘Arminian and Calvinistic Methodists and the Evangelical clergymen of the Church of England … We shall use the general term of Methodism to designate those three classes of fanatics, not troubling ourselves to point out the finer shades and nicer discriminations of lunacy, but treating them all as in one general conspiracy against common sense and rational orthodox Christianity.’
Another observer had written in 1772: ‘As soon as a person begins to show any symptoms of seriousness and strictness more than the fashion of the age allows he is called a Methodist, though he may happen to have no sort of connection with them; and when once this stigma is fixed upon him, he becomes like a deer whom the sportsmen have marked out for a chase.’
Evangelicals such as Newton also blurred matters by insisting that religious experience was more important than ‘nice distinctions’ between different categories of Christians. Methodism and evangelicalism were indeed part of the same religious movement. They both had their intellectual origins in German Pietism and English Puritanism, which had stressed ‘a reformation or purification in worship as well in life’. They both contended that every person was lost in sin and could only be rescued and achieve personal salvation through faith in Christ. They had both moved on from the seventeenth-century Puritans of Civil War times by determinedly staying within the Church of England (although the Methodists broke away in 1795), and giving complete loyalty to the Crown. The general themes of Methodists and Evangelicals were indistinguishable, and Methodists would generally have regarded themselves as Evangelicals: it was not sufficient merely to observe the forms of being a Christian; eternal damnation could only be avoided by allowing Christian beliefs to guide all the habits and actions of daily life. Their theology was no different from that of the established Church, but the seriousness with which they practised it most certainly was.
Any doctrinal differences between Methodists and Evangelicals were blurred by the cross-currents of beliefs within each grouping: some Evangelicals, such as Newton, held to the Calvinistic concept of predestination favoured by some Methodists; others were in accord with Wesley himself in believing in unlimited atonement and the free will of human beings. The crucial differences between Methodists and Evangelicals were therefore largely of nuance and organisation, but these led to important differences in the type of person likely to join each group. Methodists were organised around their own Societies and Conferences, with a national and eventually international network and hierarchy, while Evangelicals were entirely outside such machinery. Evangelicals tended to be more in tune with prevailing English culture, less likely to separate themselves from society, less austere in their attitudes to simple sports and leisure, more likely to encourage a broad education, and readier to involve themselves in public life. Such differences of view partly stemmed from, and in turn strengthened, the general tendency for leading Evangelicals to be drawn from the more highly educated and business-orientated classes, while the tens of thousands of converts to Methodism were drawn heavily from lower income groups. Wilberforce was therefore a natural Evangelical, and would in due course find no shortage of people with a similar background to his own who could share his habits and thinking.
If Evangelicalism was more an attitude towards Christianity than a separate branch of the faith, what were its defining attributes, as now adopted by Wilberforce? One was certainly a belief in the all-encompassing role of Providence: God’s hand could be detected in events great and small. It was Providence, he believed, that had enabled him to win his seat in Parliament by methods he would later have found unacceptable, thus launching him on a political life when an earlier conversion would have kept him away from it. If he escaped without injury from an accident, as he did when the linchpin on his coach fell out, he saw Providence at work; when Napoleon dominated Europe, Wilberforce considered him ‘manifestly an instrument in the hands of Providence’, and ‘When God has done with him he will probably show how easily he can get rid of him.’
That anything would happen entirely accidentally was now alien to Wilberforce’s thinking: ‘How I abhor that word, fortunate; as if things happen by chance!’
A second fundamental aspect of Evangelical beliefs was that Christian principles should be applied to all areas of life. They should guide every aspect of human life, not merely be added on to other beliefs or conflicting activities. As a result, drunkenness, gambling, duelling, the unfairness of the penal system, every form of immorality and the lack of observation of the Sabbath were all targets of Evangelical attack. Evangelicals considered themselves as ambassadors of God on earth, and to be at all times, an example of his godliness, holiness and compassion. Such activities as card-playing, public dancing and horse-racing were a distraction from devotion to God. Worldly indulgence was to be avoided, and leisure was seen as an opportunity for renewal rather than an end in itself. By contrast, prayer and devotion were essential: ‘There is nothing more fatal to the life and power of religion; nothing which makes God more certainly withdraw his grace’, than neglect of prayer.
And it was not sufficient for that prayer to be calculating, or to signify mere intellectual acceptance of Christian truth: an Evangelical needed to show that his ‘whole heart is engaged’,
as Wilberforce approvingly noted of Newton.
Above all, the Evangelicals felt an overpowering sense of accountability, and a responsibility to God, for their actions. As one commentator would later note of them: ‘I recall an abiding sense of religious responsibility, a self-sacrificing energy and works of mercy, an Evangelistic zeal, an aloofness from the world, and a level of saintliness in daily life such as I do not expect again to see realised on earth. Everything down to the minutest detail of action and speech were considered with reference to eternity.’
Although he had always been good at documenting his actions, Wilberforce would now do so with all the more rigour, as humble preparation for a day of judgement. His money, abilities and power had been given to him by God, and he considered himself accountable in the smallest detail for how he would now use them. His mission now was to apply Christian principles as he understood them to the world as he saw it around him. He would say later that ‘I was strongly impressed with a sense of it being incumbent on me to perform my Parliamentary duties with increased diligence and conscientiousness.’
As Newton wrote to him in March 1786, they had ‘great subjects to discuss, great plans to promote, great prospects to contemplate’.
Now Wilberforce would turn his own mind to what those subjects and plans would be.
‘Animal magnetism’ was meant to have great healing powers, released by powerful magnets or other devices. For a time it was taken seriously by the French Academy of Science.
Richmond is credited with the idea of using boards with movable numbers to inform congregations about which hymns they would be singing. He was the author of The Dairyman’s Daughter.
Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French philosopher whose book Pensées included a section on ‘The Misery of Man Without God’.
Joseph Butler was famous for his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736).
5 Diligence and New Causes (#ulink_56f4e456-1643-5d8c-bdaf-4b5e45ea8c29)
What madness I said to myself, is this! Here have I been throwing away my time all my life past!
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, autumn 1786
There is a prospect of his being a very useful member of society if his life is preserved.
CATHERINE KING TO GEORGE KING, November 1786
THE WILLIAM WILBERFORCE who resumed his attendance at the House of Commons in the spring of 1786 was a changed man, yet this would not have been immediately apparent to an observer in the public gallery who happened to study his parliamentary behaviour. In time, his conversion to Evangelical Christianity would give him the moral force and unshakeable will to become one of the greatest campaigners, and liberators, in the whole course of British history. In old age, Wilberforce would write to his son Samuel, ‘The best preparation for being a good politician, as well as a superior man in every other line, is to be a truly religious man. For this includes in it all those qualities which fit men to pass through life with benefit to others and with reputation to ourselves.’
Yet the immediate impact on his performance as a Member of Parliament was subtle rather than sharp, underlining the fact that his conversion reinforced many of his existing traits more than it created in him a new personality. Determined to apply himself with diligence to the post in which Providence had placed him, and writing to Wyvill that he now had a ‘higher sense of the duties of my station, and a firmer resolution to discharge them with fidelity and zeal’,
Wilberforce had always been an assiduous MP by the standards of the eighteenth century, in attending both to the chamber of the House of Commons and to the needs of his Yorkshire constituents. Resolved now, as he had told Pitt, ‘to be no Party man’, he had always remained nominally an Independent, and had from his first election to the Commons styled himself as a man who would pursue his own views. For some years his theoretical profession of independence but practical loyalty to Pitt had given him an ambiguous political stance; his new approach to life led to a shift of emphasis within that ambiguity rather than a departure from it. And while he would now take up a variety of well-intentioned causes, many of them were, at least initially, taken up at the behest of his constituents, as they might have been before, with his speeches on the main issues of the day indicating no change in his wider political philosophy.
April 1786 saw the beginning of a series of highly charged debates on the floor of the House of Commons about the conduct of Warren Hastings as Governor General of India. When Hastings had returned to Britain the previous year, he had expected the plaudits of the nation for a period of rule which had seen him use every military and economic means to extend and confirm British power in India; he had been a victor in war, and a guarantor of great profits. In the process, however, he had created two powerful groups of enemies within the British body politic. The first consisted of those who had been his political rivals in India, such as Philip Francis, who also returned to Britain and entered the House of Commons to pursue him. The second group was led by Edmund Burke, for whom the ruthless and arbitrary nature of Hastings’ governing of India was in conflict with their sense of British justice and law, and who, perhaps significantly for Wilberforce’s future work, demonstrated a new level of concern about the colonial mistreatment of native peoples.
As Burke thundered out his accusations of tyrannical conduct against Hastings that April, Wilberforce had no problem as a backbencher in joining in with Pitt’s official line: he accused Burke of an excess of passion, and in a speech on 1 June argued that it was too late now to blame Hastings for actions taken many years earlier under the government of Lord North: ‘To punish Mr Hastings now was like eating the mutton of the sheep which we have previously shorn of its fleece. Certainly we ought to have recalled him when he committed the fault; but having suffered him to wear out his constitution in our service, it was wrong to try him when he could be of no farther use.’
Wilberforce therefore joined Pitt in voting down the initial charges against Hastings. When he did turn against Hastings, it was once again in conjunction with Pitt, and seemingly at his behest. Pitt’s celebrated volte face followed him beckoning to Wilberforce to join him behind the Speaker’s chair and saying, ‘Does not this look very ill to you?’, with Wilberforce replying, ‘Very bad indeed.’
Pitt then went to the dispatch box to declare that the latest charge against Hastings did indeed concern behaviour which was ‘beyond all proportion exorbitant, unjust, and tyrannical’,
and that it could merit his impeachment. This bombshell paved the way for a dramatic but undistinguished chapter in British history: the trial of Warren Hastings would eventually commence amidst huge excitement in Westminster Hall in 1788, consume great political energy and substantial resources, and after seven long years of proceedings would end in his acquittal in 1795, a ruined and embittered man. Wilberforce would always maintain that Pitt’s judgement on Hastings was based on nothing other than the evidence: ‘He paid as much impartial attention as if were a jury-man,’
yet in thinking this Wilberforce may have been a little naïve, since Pitt was probably looking for a reason to abandon Hastings as a means of disarming his own opponents.
Wilberforce was still essentially loyal to Pitt, and recorded that ‘I was surprised to find how generally we agreed.’
The following session would see him giving energetic support to one of Pitt’s earliest achievements, the concluding of a commercial treaty with France. This treaty, which opened up many domestic markets to trade, did not create the alarm occasioned by the ill-fated Irish Propositions two years earlier, and Wilberforce could support it without any qualms whatsoever: it accorded with his previous views, was championed by his friend, and ‘It gave him a particular pleasure to be able to say that whilst he was acting in conformity with the dictates of his own conscience, he was voting agreeably to the general wishes of his constituents.’
Such support for the Pitt ministry, coming from a man with such close personal connections with the Prime Minister, would have gone unremarked at Westminster. It confirmed Wilberforce as an active and valued debater of the great questions of the day. But ironically it was when he struck out on his own in this period that he ran not only into greater political obstacles, but into a degree of self-doubt; and not only adopted worthwhile measures of reform, but supported others which appeared rather bizarre. The first measure he attempted to take through the Commons in 1786 was a Registration Bill, a cherished project of parliamentary reformers such as Wyvill and Lord Mahon, Pitt’s brother-in-law. Introduced into the Commons by the two Yorkshire Members, Wilberforce and Duncombe, on 15 May, it was an attempt to bring about some positive change in the electoral system after the heavy defeat of wider reform the previous month. The plan was to improve the conduct of county elections by requiring voters to be registered in advance, the polling to take place in a single day but at a variety of locations. It was, therefore, a precursor of modern electoral arrangements, but it was opposed by many of Wilberforce’s own constituents, leading him to think that he had made a mistake in introducing it, that it had been a ‘very ill-advised measure’, and that it would be better that it were defeated in the House of Lords in case ‘the odium we have incurred by it will … be quite decisive of our fate at the next general election’.
The Bill was indeed too much for their Lordships, and was never passed; this was possibly the last time in his life that Wilberforce had cause to be grateful for the entrenched and unyielding conservatism of the House of Lords.
The next proposal Wilberforce adopted was again at the instigation of a Yorkshire constituent, in this case, a prominent surgeon and devout Methodist from Leeds who was to be a lifelong correspondent, William Hey. Hey persuaded Wilberforce that the rule by which only the bodies of executed murderers could be made available for dissection was encouraging body-snatching and inhibiting anatomical research. Wilberforce therefore found himself coming forward with a proposal that the bodies of executed criminals who had not committed murder but were guilty of other capital offences, should be sold for dissection in the same way as those of murderers. This would have greatly enlarged the number of such bodies: a typical issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1787 would list a sizeable number of people executed on a single day for crimes other than murder:
Wednesday 14 March. The following malefactors convicted in December were executed according to their sentence: Frederic Daniel Lucas for robbing Wm Pawlett on the highway on the Edgeware road, of a watch and a few shillings; Samuel Phipps, for robbing his master’s house of a gold watch and many other valuables; James Brown for robbing James Williamson, of his money; Dennis Sullivan, for breaking into the house of Henry Ringing, and stealing goods; William Adams, for robbing the house of William Briggs and stealing goods; Wm. Jones, Henry Staples, and John Innrer, for robbing James Pollard on Constitution hill; Robert Horsley, for robbing Jane Bearblock of her watch; and James Dubson, the letter carrier, for feloniously secreting a certain packet containing notes to the amount of £1000 …
As Hey put it: ‘Such bodies are the most fit for anatomical investigation, as the subjects generally die in health, the bodies are sound and the parts are distinct. Why should not those be made to serve a valuable purpose when dead, who were a universal nuisance when living?’
While the legislative proposal which resulted may seem strange in later centuries, it was nevertheless a sound and well-argued case. Wilberforce prepared thoroughly, putting the drawing-up of the Bill into the hands of senior lawyers and working for the first time with Samuel Romilly, a lawyer with humanitarian concerns. Romilly persuaded him of the merits of another proposal, which Wilberforce incorporated into his Bill: the abolition of the law that a woman committed of high and petty treason (which in those days included murdering her husband) be sentenced to be burnt as well as hanged. In practice the hanging was carried out first in such cases, as this account of an execution in 1769 demonstrates:
A post about seven feet high, was fixed in the ground; it had a peg near the top, to which Mrs Lott, standing on a stool, was fastened by the neck. When the stool was taken away, she hung about a quarter of an hour, till she was quite dead; a chain was then turned round her body, and properly fastened by staples to the post, when a large quantity of faggots being placed round her, and set on fire, the body was consumed to ashes … It is computed there were 5,000 persons attending the execution.
Wilberforce’s Bill for ‘Regulating the Disposal after Execution of the Bodies of Criminals Executed for Certain Offences, and for Changing the Sentence pronounced upon Female Convicts in certain cases of High and Petty Treason’
did indeed pass through the House of Commons without much discussion, but once again the House of Lords was far more sceptical of change of any kind. There, the leading Whig lawyer Lord Loughborough was able to gain the satisfaction of not only venting his views but of obstructing the projects of young MPs associated with Pitt. He denounced these ‘raw, jejune, ill-advised and impracticable’ ideas,
argued that the incorporation of burning into a death sentence made it more severe ‘than mere hanging’, and that dissection was such a strong deterrent, given the prevailing belief that it prevented the resurrection of the deceased, that unless it was reserved for capital crimes, burglars would be more likely to commit murders. Wilberforce’s first attempt at humanitarian reform therefore ended rather ignominiously and with another defeat in the House of Lords, a result with which he would one day become even more horribly familiar. For a great reformer, it had not been an auspicious start.
As soon as the session of 1786 was over in early July, Wilberforce set off to the north to see his family, taking several days to travel through Grantham and Hull to Scarborough. Soon afterwards he was established, with his mother and sister, at the country home of his cousin, Samuel Smith, at Wilford near Nottingham. If his mother had been worried by reports of his new religious enthusiasm she soon discovered she need not have been, for in personality as in politics, much of the effect of Wilberforce’s conversion was the reinforcement of some of his better habits rather than a complete change in their nature. He wished, as he recorded in his notes that summer, to ‘be cheerful without being dissipated’,
and in advance of joining his mother he made a note to be ‘more kind and affectionate than ever … show respect for her judgement, and manifest rather humility in myself than dissatisfaction concerning others’.
Allied to his natural cheerfulness and interest in all subjects, the result was a most acceptable combination when it came to conversation, inducing Mrs Sykes to remark as he left Scarborough: ‘If this is madness, I hope that he will bite us all.’
Now, and for the rest of his life, religion was never to make Wilberforce dreary, melancholy or intolerant. Years later he was to write to Bob Smith: ‘My grand objection to the religious system still held by many who declare them orthodox Churchmen … is, that it tends to render Xtianity so much a system of prohibitions rather than of privilege and hopes, and thus the injunction to rejoice so strongly enforced in the New Testament is practically neglected, and Religion is made to wear a forbidding and gloomy air and not one of peace and hope and joy.’
It was an attitude which meant that he was never shunned, socially or politically, but could combine what had always been an appealing personality with the force of steadfast belief.
Even so, he struggled a great deal behind the scenes throughout 1786, constantly setting targets and resolutions for himself in line with his new beliefs, and then disapproving of his inadequacies when he failed to live up to them. Evangelicals followed Puritans and Methodists in keeping a diary ‘not as a means of recording events, but of self-examination of the recent past and adjustment to the future; it was the Evangelical equivalent of the confessional’.
The Wesleys and White-field had kept such journals, and Doddridge, whose writings had such influence on Wilberforce, had recommended serious reflection each day on such topics as ‘What temptations am I likely to be assaulted with? … In what instances have I lately failed? …’
Wilberforce had always been a keen diarist and note-taker, and his scribbles now became the means by which he recorded and fortified his intentions and tested his performance against them. He became steadily more systematic in doing so as the years went by. Thus on 21 June he was noting, ‘to endeavour from this moment to amend my plan for time, and to take account of it – to begin to-morrow’.
On 22 June it was, ‘did not think enough of God. Did not actually waste much time, but too dissipated when I should have had my thoughts secretly bent on God.’
‘June 25th … I do not think I have a sufficiently strong conviction of sin: yet I see plainly that I am an ungrateful, stupid, guilty creature … July 2nd I take up my pen because it is my rule; but I have not been examining myself with that seriousness with which we ought to look into ourselves from time to time. That wandering spirit and indolent way of doing business are little if at all defeated, and my rules, resolved on with thought and prayer, are forgotten.’
Sometimes, as in one case that November after he had dined with Pitt at Downing Street, he reproached himself for falling victim to ‘temptations of the table’, which he thought ‘disqualified me for every useful purpose in life, waste my time, impair my health, fill my mind with thoughts of resistance before and self-condemnation afterwards’. As a result he created fresh rules for himself about dining: ‘No dessert, no tastings, one thing in first, one in second course. Simplicity. In quantity moderate … Never more than six glasses of wine; my common allowance two or three … To be in bed always if possible by eleven and be up by six o’clock. In general to reform in accordance with my so often repeated resolutions … I will every night note down whether have been so or not …’
Wilberforce’s determination not to waste time, and his conviction that he had frittered away most of his time hitherto – ‘What madness I said to myself, is this! Here have I been throwing away my time all my life past!’
– led him to make a huge effort that summer to catch up on the education he thought he should have received in his youth. Lamenting his ‘idleness at college’, he now made it his object ‘to improve my faculties and add to my slender stock of knowledge. Acting on this principle for many subsequent years, I spent the greater part of my Parliamentary recess at the House of one friend or another, where I could have the command of my time and enjoy just as much society as would be desirable for maintaining my spirits and enabling me to continue my labours with cheerfulness and comfort.’
He spent nine or ten hours a day studying by himself, very often reading the Bible, but also devouring recent works of literature, philosophy and economics: Locke, Pope, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire and Dr Johnson, committing to memory many verses by Shakespeare and Cowper. Continuing with this through the whole of August and September afforded few breaks to visit his constituents and meant he avoided the traditional summer progress around Yorkshire, but with both the country and the county in a state of reasonable political contentment, he was able to get away with just a brief trip to the great annual Cutlers’ feast at Sheffield on 7 September, that city having become the centre of cutlery-making in the seventeenth century. His comparative abstinence certainly altered his appearance, with one Hull resident writing that autumn: ‘I was much shocked to see him, he looks so emaciated and altered,’ although she also thought that ‘he spoke in a very pretty and feeling manner. There is a prospect of his being a very useful member of society if his life is preserved.’
Wilberforce’s main complaint was that his eyes seemed even worse, a situation all the more frustrating to him now that he had become keen on so many daily hours of reading. In a letter to Muncaster in late October he refers to himself as ‘half-blind’, and reports that he had been to see William Hey about his eyes and general health.
On Hey’s advice, he dawdled only briefly in London when he returned that November, and set off instead to take the waters of Bath.
Since Wilberforce did not bore his friends with his beliefs, he was able to retain the wide circle of friendships he had already developed, and was always welcome in the houses of MPs and other acquaintances as he travelled. He made lists of friends who he thought needed help or prayer, but tended to try to nudge them towards religion rather than impose it on them. He expressed great concern that autumn about the state in which he might find ‘poor Eliot and Pitt’
– the first having lost his wife and the second his sister when she died suddenly that September, five days after giving birth. Eliot would indeed shortly become a close companion in evangelicalism, while remaining a strong link between Wilberforce and Pitt. In future years they would pray for each other and attend chapel together: ‘We can render each other no more effectual service.’
If friends seemed open to religion, then Wilberforce would indeed set about persuading them, urging regular prayer or even reading Doddridge aloud to them. Some, like Lord Belgrave and Matthew Montagu MP, would succumb to him, but others gave playful rebuffs. His long-standing friend and fellow parliamentarian Pepper Arden explained to Wilberforce, ‘I hope things are not quite as bad as you say. I think a little whipping would do for me, not with any severity, I assure you.’
Above all, Wilberforce would always regret that he could never persuade Pitt to treat religion with the seriousness he thought it deserved. Prevailing upon Pitt eventually to join him in listening to a sermon from a noted Evangelical preacher, Richard Cecil, he was deeply disappointed when on the way out of the church Pitt said, ‘You know, Wilberforce, I have not the slightest idea what that man has been talking about.’
Wilberforce had never been very materialistic. When he visited his Yorkshire estate in 1786 he remarked only on ‘my land, just like anyone else’s land’.
And although he had stayed at Wimbledon a good deal in 1786, albeit in a quieter way than during the boisterous summers a few years before, he now decided to sell Lauriston House, since travelling there wasted his time and owning it consumed money he thought he could spend to better effect. Instead, he would shortly set himself up in 4 Old Palace Yard, directly opposite the House of Commons and Westminster Hall, and as near to the centre of political action as a private residence could ever be.
For in Wilberforce’s mind, the learning and opinions he was accumulating from his books and his travels had a clear and overriding purpose: to turn Christian principles into political action.
The voracious reading on which Wilberforce had embarked soon brought him into contact with the writings of Dr Josiah Woodward, who in 1701 had written An Account of the Progress of the Reformation of Manners. Woodward had written about the ‘very great success’ of efforts made towards ‘the suppressing of profane swearing and cursing, drunkenness and prophanation of the Lord’s Day, and the giving a great check to the open lewdness that was acted in many of our streets’ in the late seventeenth century, following a Proclamation by William and Mary in 1692 issued ‘for the encouragement of piety and virtue; and for the preventing of vice, prophaneness and immorality’.
Such Proclamations were issued routinely on the accession of a new sovereign, but the difference in this case was that it had actually been followed up: local ‘Societies for the Reformation of Manners’ had been formed to assist in the detection of crime and to ensure that prosecutions were brought in circumstances when a lone individual would hesitate to act. The work of such societies continued into the early eighteenth century: a summary of the action they had taken in the year 1718, for instance, included 1,253 prosecutions for lewd and disorderly practices, 492 for exercising trades or callings on the Lord’s Day, 228 for profane swearing and cursing, thirty-one for the keeping of bawdy and disorderly houses, seventeen for drunkenness and eight for keeping common gaming houses. Nevertheless, as the eighteenth century wore on, the efforts of such societies were overwhelmed by the riot of gambling, drunkenness, prostitution and petty crime which became commonplace in Hanoverian England. By 1759, the London Society was reduced to thanking a donor for a gift of ten guineas and giving ‘notice to all grocers, chandlers, butchers, publicans, pastry-cooks, and others whom it may concern’ that they were resolved to launch indictments concerning the ‘great and growing evil’ of trading on the Lord’s Day, but such threats appear no longer to have been taken seriously.
In a remarkably short space of time, and with an energy which illustrated the idealism and determination to act with which he was now possessed, Wilberforce became the driving force behind the issuing of a fresh Royal Proclamation and the attempted mobilisation of the country’s moral and social leaders in a nationwide struggle against vice. His vision was straightforward: ‘In my opinion the strength of a country is most increased by its moral improvement, and by the moral and religious instruction of its people. Only think what a country that would be, where every one acted upon Xtian principles.’
He was convinced that crimes and misdemeanours could not be combated successfully in a piecemeal fashion; what was necessary was the transformation of the moral climate of the times. As he wrote to Wyvill, ‘the barbarous custom of hanging has been tried too long, and with the success which might have been expected from it. The most effectual way of preventing the greater crimes is by punishing the smaller, and by endeavouring to repress that general spirit of licentiousness, which is the parent of every species of vice. I know that by regulating the external conduct we do not at first change the hearts of men, but even they are ultimately to be wrought upon by these means, and we should at least so far remove the obtrusiveness of the temptation, that it may not provoke the appetite, which might otherwise be dormant and inactive.’
In the spring of 1787 Wilberforce took up this plan according to another new friend, the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, recently appointed Bishop of London, ‘with indefatigability and perseverance’ and ‘made private application to such of his friends of the Nobility and other men of consequence’.
In Wilberforce’s mind, the reforming of the entire moral framework of society was the perfect as well as the ultimate issue. If carried out successfully, it would make more difference to daily life and save more souls when they came to account for their lives before God than any number of well-intentioned Acts of Parliament. ‘God has set before me as my object,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘the reformation of manners.’
To William Hey he wrote that this cause ‘is of the utmost consequence, and worthy of the labours of a whole life’.
Such an all-encompassing campaign was certainly likely to require the labours of a whole life. England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was rife with every activity of which Wilberforce now disapproved. In London, brothels had become fashionable and acceptable, and ‘prostitution is so profitable a business, and conducted so openly, that hundreds of persons keep houses of ill-fame, for the reception of girls not more than twelve or thirteen years of age, without a blush upon their integrity’.
According to Sydney Smith, ‘Everyone is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.’
In the Gordon Riots of 1780, many deaths had been caused when a distillery had been broken into and people had drunk unrefined gin from the gutters. A commentator earlier in the century had written:
What an intolerable Pitch that Vice is arriv’d at in this Kingdom, together with the astonishing NUMBER OF TAVERNS, COFFEEHOUSES, ALEHOUSES, BRANDY-SHOPS, &c. now extant in London, the like not to be paralleled by any other City in the Christian world … If this drinking spirit does not soon abate, all our Arts, Sciences, Trade, and Manufacturers will be entirely lost, and the Island become nothing but a Brewery or Distillery, and the Inhabitants all Drunkards.
A House of Lords debate in the 1740s had heard that ‘You can hardly pass along any street in this great city, at any hour of the day, but you may see some poor creatures, mad drunk with this liquor [gin], and committing outrages in the street, or lying dead asleep upon bulks, or at the doors of empty houses.’
Ministers and Members of Parliament seemed to be as bad as anyone, with George Rose, the Secretary to the Treasury, writing to Wilberforce on one occasion: ‘I have actually been drunk ever since ten o’clock this morning, and have not yet quite the use of my reason, but I am, Yours most faithfully and cordially, George Rose.’
As to crime, ‘The most barefaced villains, swindlers, and thieves walk about the streets in the day-time, committing their various depredations, with as much confidence as men of unblemished reputation and honesty.’
A comprehensive analysis of crime in London in 1796 produced ‘a shocking catalogue of human depravity’, along with the calculation that 115,000 (out of a population of little more than a million) supported themselves ‘in and near the metropolis by pursuits either criminal, illegal, or immoral’. Nearly half of these were thought to be ‘unfortunate females of all descriptions, who support themselves chiefly or wholly by prostitution’, but the other categories mentioned in the remarkably detailed and oddly precise calculations included eight thousand ‘Thieves, Pilferers, and Embezzlers’, 7,440 ‘Swindlers, Cheats, and low Gamblers’ who lived ‘chiefly by fraudulent transactions in the Lottery’, three thousand ‘Spendthrifts, Rakes, Giddy Young Men, inexperienced and in the pursuit of criminal pleasures’, two thousand ‘Professed Thieves, Burglars, Highway Robbers, Pick-pockets and River Pirates’, a thousand ‘Fraudulent, and dissolute Publicans who are connected with Criminal People’ and ‘allow their houses to be rendezvous for Thieves, Swindlers and Dealers in Base Money’ – all the way down to sixty ‘Professed and known Receivers of Stolen Goods of whom 8 or 10 are opulent’.
It was against this daunting background that Wilberforce unfolded his plan to Porteus, who considered that ‘the design appeared to me in the highest degree laudable, and the object of the greatest importance and necessity; but I foresaw great difficulties in the execution of it unless conducted with great judgement and discretion … My advice therefore was to proceed in the beginning cautiously and privately, to mention the Plan in confidence, first of all to the leading men in Church and State, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr Pitt to engage their concurrence … and then by degrees to … obtain if possible the assistance of the principal and most respectable characters among the nobility, clergy and gentry in and about London and afterwards throughout the Kingdom.’
Wilberforce proceeded precisely along these lines, winning the ‘entire approbation’ of the Prime Minister and the Archbishop,
and, via the Archbishop, the approval of the King and Queen. By the end of May, he could hope that ‘The persons with whom I have concerted my measures, are so trusty, temperate, and unobnoxious, that I think I am not indulging a vain expectation in persuading myself that something considerable may be done.’
It was thus largely at Wilberforce’s behest that on 1 June 1787 King George III issued a new Proclamation, observing ‘with inexpressible concern, the rapid progress of impiety and licentiousness and that deluge of prophaneness, immorality, and every kind of vice which, to the scandal of our holy religion, and to the evil example of our loving subjects, have broken in upon this nation’, and commanding the ‘Judges, Mayors, Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace and all our other subjects’ to set about the prosecution of all persons guilty of ‘excessive drinking, Blasphemy, profane Swearing and Cursing lewdness, Profanation of the Lord’s Day, or other dissolute, immoral, or disorderly Practices; and that they take Care also effectually to suppress all publick Gaming Houses and other loose and disorderly Houses, and also all unlicensed Publick Shews, Interludes, and Places of Entertainment’.
While the population at large greeted the Proclamation with the customary indifference, Wilberforce’s objective was to mobilise leading figures to pursue the aims expressed in it over time rather than to achieve instant results. Throughout the late spring and summer of 1787 he was to be found circulating his plan to people of influence, persuading the Duke of Montagu to become President of the ‘Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality’ and visiting Bishops as far afield as Worcester, Hereford, Norwich, Lincoln, York and Lichfield. He met with much approval and sympathy, some of the aristocracy seeing his plan, as he did, as something which could ultimately lead to more humane and proportionate punishments; the Duke of Manchester wrote, ‘if you and other young men who are rising in the political sphere would undertake the arduous task of revising our code of criminal law … I mean largely the number of capital punishments, I am satisfied it would go far towards bettering the people of this country’.
But others were more cynical or mistrustful. When Wilberforce was bold enough to visit Earl Fitzwilliam, who had tried to prevent his election for Yorkshire in 1784, Fitzwilliam laughed in his face and argued that the only way to avoid immorality was to become poor – ‘I promised him a speedy return of purity of morals in our own homes, if none of us had a shilling to spend in debauchery out of doors.’
Involving outwardly respectable people in pressing on with such ideas, according to Fitzwilliam, would only expose their hypocrisy in due course. Another nobleman apparently expressed similar scepticism, responding to Wilberforce’s proposals by pointing to a painting of the crucifixion as an example of how idealistic young reformers met their end.
Nevertheless, when the names of the forty-nine founding members of the Society were published, they included four Members of Parliament (including the Prime Minister), ten peers, six Dukes and a Marquis, along with seventeen Bishops and the Archbishops of both Canterbury and York. While such impressive leadership had the advantage of showing that this was a powerful movement in which leading figures in society intended to display both activity and example, the disadvantage was that critics could easily point out that it was mainly poorer people who would have to change their behaviour if the great swathe of restrictions mentioned in the Proclamation were enforced. In the words of Hannah More: ‘Will not the common people think it a little inequitable that they are abridged of the diversions of the public-house and the gaming-yard on Sunday evening, when they shall hear that many houses of the first nobility are on that evening crowded with company, and such amusements carried on as are prohibited by human laws even on common days?’
Years later, when the work of the Proclamation Society had been overtaken by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Sydney Smith would characterise them as having the aim of ‘suppressing the vices of persons whose income does not exceed £500 per annum’.
It is certainly true that, while Wilberforce had by now withdrawn himself from the pleasures and gaming tables of gentlemen’s clubs, he avoided making a direct assault on their members’ habits, writing to Dudley Ryder in September 1789, ‘Don’t imagine I am about to run amuck and tilt at all I meet. You know that on many grounds I am a sworn foe to the Clubs, but I don’t think of opening my trenches against them and commencing open war on such potent adversaries. But then I honestly confess to you that I am restrained only by the conviction that by such desperate measure I should injure rather than serve the cause I have in view; and when ever prudential motives do not repress my “noble rage” I would willingly hunt down vice whether at St James’s or St Giles’s.’
In making this judgement, Wilberforce was demonstrating what would become an obvious attribute: his idealistic objectives were always pursued by means which took into account practical and political constraints. Rather than denounce the activities of the better-off, but conscious of the possible charge of hypocrisy, he set out to involve senior national figures in order to change the prevailing fashion and habits of the times, at all social levels including their own. He believed that those who could set an example had adopted an inverted pride in which they claimed their behaviour to be worse than it actually was: ‘We have now an hypocrisy of an opposite sort, and I believe many affect to be worse in principle [than] they really are, out of deference to the licentious moral [sic] of the fashionable world.’
The founding of the Proclamation Society was thus a forerunner of the many projects and causes Wilberforce would pursue throughout his life: in his methods, objectives and weaknesses, the same pattern would emerge again and again. His method was to win over leading figures in politics and society by the force of persuasion and the power of example, never failing to show due respect to their rank and to take enormous trouble over assuaging their doubts and fortifying their consciences. His objectives would always centre on using spiritual improvement to ameliorate the human condition by practical steps rather than dramatic transformation; in this case he was seeking a higher moral climate for the betterment of rich and poor, law-abiding and law-breaking alike, but not the social and political revolution which others would soon be advocating. He wanted to improve society rather than render it unrecognisable. Such methods and objectives would always have the weakness of being open to charges of excessive caution or conservatism, and be easily subject to mockery. In his book The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt would write: ‘Mr Wilberforce’s humanity will go to all lengths that it can with safety and discretion, but it is not to be supposed that it should lose him his seat for Yorkshire, the smile of Majesty, or the countenance of the loyal and pious.’
His proposals were easily seen as being either puritanical or hypocritical. When the great playwright and opposition MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan was found years later lying drunk in a gutter and was asked to give his name, he famously replied, ‘Wilberforce!’
Yet Wilberforce would also display, in his efforts to reform the nation’s manners, other attributes which would become lifelong characteristics of a great campaigner: steady persistence and a step-by-step accumulation of small additions towards his goal. The Proclamation Society duly succeeded in broadening its membership and support among the magistracy and gentry, and disseminating a great deal of instruction and guidance on enforcement – as in this attempt to help judge the state of intoxication:
Particularly as to drunkenness to use caution and prudence in judging whether a man is drunk. Though a man that cannot stand upon his legs, or that reels or staggers when he goes along the streets and is heard to falter remarkably in speech, unless in the cause of some known infirmity or defeat, may ordinarily be presumed to be drunk.
In the later view of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Proclamation Society ‘set going a national movement’ which actually produced a marked lull in rioting, disorderly conduct and brutal amusements, and became ‘an important contributory cause of the remarkable advance of “respectability” made by the English working man during the first two decades of the nineteenth century’.
Such a ‘lull’ is difficult to validate statistically, although it appears from the records of convictions for murder in London throughout the eighteenth century that violent crime was certainly on a downward trend which continued through this period. It may well be that British society was becoming less drunk, less violent and less disrespectful after a bout of mid-century excess, but it is also hard to deny that the Proclamation Society achieved practical results: convening conferences of magistrates to try to improve prison government and the regulation of vagrancy, and obtaining court judgements or Acts of Parliament which allowed brothels to be closed or the special nature of Sundays to be observed. As Britain began to move from Hanoverian excess to Victorian self-discipline, Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society would become one of the many forces propelling it on its way.
Busy as Wilberforce had been in conceiving of and launching the Proclamation Society, it was by no means his sole preoccupation in late 1786 and throughout 1787. For most of the rest of his life he would simultaneously pursue several issues in parallel, flitting between the mountains of correspondence and long lines of visitors which each issue aroused. Continually finding outlets for his public philanthropy, he was often also busily attending to the spiritual or financial condition of friends and relatives. Still close to Pitt, he became an intermediary to Robert Smith, later Lord Carrington, who had offered to sort out Pitt’s chaotic domestic finances. This would prove to be an impossible task at any stage in the next two decades, and would often call for Wilberforce’s intervention. ‘Indifferently as I thought of our friend’s domestic management,’ Smith wrote to him in 1786, ‘I was not prepared for such an account as the box contained … the necessity, however, of bringing his affairs into some better order is now so apparent, that no man who is attached to his person, or values his reputation, can be easy while he knows it is undone.’
The following year Wilberforce received a series of entreaties from his sister in Hull, usually demanding an answer by return of post, requesting advice on Christian conversion or his judgement about what entertainments she was permitted to be involved in. Asked to determine whether his family should attend the theatre, he confessed in his reply to agonising over the pain he would cause his mother, a consciousness that he would have to ‘account for my answer to it at the bar of the great Judge of quick and dead’, and concluded: ‘in one word, then, I think the tendency of the theatre most pernicious … You talk of going only to one or two plays, and of not staying the farce … how will the generality of those who see you there know your motives for not being as frequent an attendant as formerly, and for not remaining during the whole performance? … Will not, then, your presence at the amusements of the theatre sanction them in the minds of all who see you there?’
The need to combine political action, Evangelical principles and personal example meant that Wilberforce always had to fight on many fronts. And even as he wrote such letters, the greatest concern and most central campaign of his life was opening up.
While Wilberforce was with his family in Yorkshire in 1786 he had received a letter from Sir Charles Middleton MP which led him to promise to visit the Middleton family home, Barham Court at Teston in Kent, that autumn. He had many reasons for going. He already knew Middleton well, and had a high regard for him: Middleton was the father-in-law of Wilberforce’s friend Gerard Edwards, and was at that stage one of the few other Evangelical Members of Parliament. He was also serving as the highly effective Comptroller of the Navy and Head of the Navy Board, implementing the much-needed reforms demanded by Pitt to strengthen the Royal Navy and root out corruption in the dockyards after the failures of the American War. Furthermore, Middleton’s indomitable wife Margaret was an early Evangelical, a friend of Hannah More, Dr Johnson and Garrick, whose mind was ‘so constantly on the stretch in seeking out opportunities of promoting in every possible way the ease, the comfort, the prosperity, the happiness temporal and eternal, of all within her reach that she seems to have no time left for anything else and scarce ever appeared to bestow a single thought upon herself’.
Their combination of naval experience and Evangelical beliefs had given the Middletons emphatic views about what they considered to be the greatest outrage of the eighteenth-century world. Those views were fully shared by another man who Wilberforce would have seen when he stayed at Teston, and who he had met before, James Ramsay, who had served in the navy, become a rector, and was now serving as vicar of the local parish. Two years earlier, Ramsay had written his seminal Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. Wilberforce knew from Middleton’s letter that this would be the subject of the discussion when he stayed at Teston. For his hosts had in mind for him a simply stated but vastly complicated task: to lead in Parliament a campaign to abolish the slave trade.
The site of this house is now a grassed area with a statue of George V opposite St Stephen’s entrance to the Houses of Parliament.
6 The Trade in Flesh and Blood (#ulink_b659f7bf-6d3d-5da1-862b-2e004dcb122d)
From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.
ARISTOTLE, Politics (350BC)
The Negro-Trade and the natural Consequences resulting from it, may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation.
MALACHY POSTLETHWAYT, 1746
SLAVERY HAS NEVER BEEN ABSENT from the record of human civilisation.
The ancient Egyptians owned and traded in black slaves; the armies of Persia’s great king Xerxes contained slaves from Ethiopia; and Greek and Roman civilisations were characterised by the ownership of slaves on a vast scale. Athens boasted sixty thousand slaves in its prime; Rome perhaps two million at the end of the Republic: these included black slaves such as the one depicted serving at a banquet in a mosaic at Pompeii, but also Celts and Saxons from the northern fringes of the Empire. For the whole of the first millennium AD slavery was an accepted part of northern European life, with the slave markets at Verdun and elsewhere doing a busy trade in the empire of Charlemagne, and only the arrival of an effective system of serfdom putting an end to slavery around the eleventh century.
It was in the countries of southern Europe and northern Africa that slavery continued to flourish in the Middle Ages. While the Christians held Spain they used Muslim slaves; after the conquest of Spain by the Moors tens of thousands of Christians were in turn enslaved, with as many as thirty thousand Christian slaves working in the kingdom of Granada as late as the fourteenth century. At the same time, slavery remained common in the Arab world, fed largely by the trans-Saharan trade in black slaves taken from West Africa. There, African kings collected slaves for the lucrative export market but also employed thousands of their own as palace servants or soldiers.
Against such a background, it is not surprising that as the Portuguese ventured down the west coast of Africa and Columbus made his celebrated voyages across the Atlantic in the fifteenth century, a new form of slave trade sprang up simultaneously. By 1444, slaves from West Africa were on sale in the Algarve. Slaves joined gold and ivory among the rich pickings that could be obtained on voyages to the south, the leader of one early expedition reporting: ‘I herded them as if they had been cattle towards the boats. And we all did the same, and we captured on that day … nearly 650 people, and we went back to Portugal, to Lagos in the Algarve, where the Prince was, and he rejoiced with us.’
The first transatlantic slave voyage was sent on its way by none other than Columbus himself, although, strangely in view of what would later transpire, it was in a west-to-east direction, and consisted of Caribbean natives sent for sale in Europe. It was evident almost immediately that such a trade would not be a success. Half of the second consignment died when they entered Spanish waters due to ‘the unaccustomed cold’, and a Genoese observer reported: ‘They are not people suited to hard work, they suffer from the cold, and they do not have a long life.’
Not only did South Americans turn out to be unsuitable for export to Europe, but their numbers in their own lands were about to be devastated by the diseases which the Spanish and Portuguese brought with them across the Atlantic.
By 1510, King Ferdinand II of Spain was giving permission for four hundred slaves to be taken from Africa to the New World: he could not have known it was to be the beginning of one of the greatest involuntary migrations in human history. Goldmines soon created a demand for tough and expendable labourers, but it was the discovery in the early sixteenth century that sugarcane could be grown as easily in the Caribbean as any indigenous crop that would create, over time, an insatiable demand for African slaves. With Europeans unwilling to perform the backbreaking drudgery involved in tending and growing sugarcane, and the native population still reeling from disease and in any case less physically strong than their African counterparts, the solution was obvious. In the first half of the sixteenth century, what was to become the familiar triangular slave trade thus began: ships from Portugal would carry manufactured goods to the Guinea coast or the Congo, sell them in return for slaves, and carry their new captive cargo across the Atlantic. The third leg of the journey was completed with a cargo of hides, ginger, pearls and, increasingly, sugar for the home market.
It was not long before buccaneering Englishmen wanted to try their hand at the same game. In 1562 Captain John Hawkins, ‘being, among other particulars, assured that Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that [a] store of Negroes might easily be had upon the Coast of Guinea’, decided ‘to make trial thereof’.
Although Queen Elizabeth I combined her approval for the expedition with the hope that slaves would not be taken against their will –something ‘which would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers’
– it was certainly not possible to take them in any other way, although the three hundred slaves taken on board by Hawkins on his first voyage had already been rounded up by the Portuguese. Hawkins ‘made a good profit’ for his investors on this and later voyages,
despite a series of bloody encounters with the Spanish. And behind the English came the Dutch, who, having decided that it was morally unacceptable to sell slaves in Rotterdam or Amsterdam, nevertheless also sent expeditions to buy slaves in West Africa and sell them in the Caribbean. This was to become the hallmark of British and European attitudes to slavery for the following two hundred years: while it could not be sanctioned at home, it was an acceptable institution overseas, out of sight of governments and the general population alike.
In the early seventeenth century, Portuguese ships were still the main carriers of slaves, but with British colonies being developed in the Americas the British slave trade developed steadily alongside them. In the 1620s, black slaves were taken by British ships to North America, where they were ‘bartered in Virginia for tobacco’.
With African slaves costing up to £20 a head, they seemed a better investment than the £10–15 cost of an indentured labourer from Europe, since they were capable of harder work and more tolerant of tropical diseases. Even so, the Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the seventeenth century was still small in scale, involving the transporting of about eight thousand slaves a year across the Atlantic. It was the surge in European demand for sugar which transformed slavery and the slave trade from the scale of small enterprise to that of a massive industry. In Barbados between 1645 and 1667, land prices increased nearly thirty times over as small tobacco farms were replaced by large sugar plantations, and the number of slaves on the island was increased from six thousand to over eighty thousand. As coffee, tea and chocolate became part of the staple diet in London, Paris and Madrid, so the plantations boomed. For the owners this meant profits akin to finding goldmines, but for the slaves it meant that whatever trace of normality or family life they had previously been allowed disappeared into barrack-style accommodation and the endless grind of mass production. Even at the beginning of this period, in 1645, the Reverend George Downing,
chaplain of a merchant ship, had written: ‘If you go to Barbados, you shall see a flourishing island, [with] many able men. I believe that they are bought this year no less than a thousand Negroes and, the more they buy, the better able are they to buy for, in a year and a half, they will earn (with God’s blessing) as much as they cost.’
The slave trade was becoming an integral part of the growth in British trade and wealth. In 1672 King Charles II granted a charter to the Royal African Company:
We hereby for us, our heirs and successors grant unto the same Royal African Company of England … that it shall and may be lawful to … set to sea such as many ships, pinnaces and barks as should be thought fitting … for the buying, selling, bartering and exchanging of, for or with any gold, silver, Negroes, slaves, goods, wares and manufactures …
With the escalating demand for sugar, combined with the gold rush which began in Brazil in the late 1690s, the beginning of the eighteenth century saw the slave trade growing rapidly: perhaps 150,000 slaves were carried to Brazil alone in the first decade of the century. Furthermore, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, signed at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, Spain ceded to Britain not only the strategic possessions of Gibraltar and Minorca, but also the much-prized Asiento – the contract to import slaves and other goods to the Spanish Indies. The fact that this contract was sold on by the British government to the South Sea Company for the truly vast sum of £7.5 million is evidence of the commercial excitement it generated, and the confidence that enormous profits were at hand. Such confidence was somewhat misplaced, since many slaving voyages made losses and the trade would become less profitable later in the century, but there was no doubt that lucky or skilful traders could make a spectacular return. In the 1720s British ships carried well over 100,000 slaves to the Americas, mainly to Jamaica and Barbados, with 150 ships, principally based in Bristol and London, fully engaged in the trade. In the 1730s British ships carried around 170,000 slaves, overtaking the Portuguese for the first time. This was the decade that saw a great increase in slave traffic to North America: in 1732 South Carolina became the first English colony on the American mainland to register a black majority. It was also the decade that saw the rise of Liverpool as Britain’s foremost slaving port. Well positioned on England’s west coast for Atlantic traffic, Liverpool also had the advantages of being well away from the French navy in time of war, paying crews lower rates than competing ports and being able to evade duty on the goods carried on the homeward voyage by landing them on the Isle of Man (which became ‘a vast warehouse of smuggled goods’
). Several Liverpool families who plunged heavily into the trade were able to fund commercial dynasties partly as a result, ploughing their profits into banking and manufacturing as the slave trade continued to grow.
In the 1740s, British ships transported no fewer than 200,000 African slaves. Furthermore, the triangular trade this facilitated was fuelling the rapid growth of domestic manufacturing. Some 85 per cent of English textile exports went to Africa at this stage, helping the export trade of cities such as Manchester to soar, while the demand for slaving ships in Liverpool made it a world leader in shipbuilding. With the vast profits coming back from the sugar plantations, cotton exports soaring, and the slave trade itself usually yielding a profit, it is no wonder that it could be written in 1772 that the African slave trade was ‘the foundation of our commerce, the support of our colonies, the life of our navigation, and first cause of our national industry and riches’.
On taking office in 1783, William Pitt would estimate that profits from the trade with the West Indies accounted for 80 per cent of the income reaching Britain from across the seas. And such was the expansion of colonial production and demand for slaves that in the 1780s, as Wilberforce and Pitt began their political careers, slave traders would carry the truly colossal total of three-quarters of a million people across the Atlantic against their will, with around 325,000 being carried in British ships. Massive in its scale and long-established in its habits, the Atlantic slave trade seemed to many to be crucial to Britain’s prosperity and an indispensable component of her Caribbean empire.
While the statistical record of the slave trade is impressive or horrifying enough, reaching a cumulative total of eleven million people imprisoned and transported across the ocean between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, few people in Europe at the time could have made an accurate guess as to the scale of the trade their nations fostered. More importantly, they would have been entirely unaware of the nature of the human tragedy which every single one of those millions represented. Each one was a child torn from a family, a sister separated from a brother, a husband from a wife or a family removed from the only place in the world they knew or loved. It is only when the slave trade is examined in its individual human consequences that it moves from a study in economic history to a tale of indefensible barbarity.
A glimpse of the heartrending circumstances in which slaves were taken is afforded by the autobiographical writings of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–97), a slave who was captured as a child in the 1740s in what is now Nigeria, but who subsequently earned his freedom and wrote his story in the English language. His first-hand account of the brutalities of the slave trade played a major role in informing and influencing popular opinion and became a roaring success, with nine editions printed during his lifetime alone.
One day, when all our people were gone out to their work as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both; and without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us to the nearest wood. Here they tied our hands, and continued to carry us as far as they could, till night came on, when we reached a small house, where the robbers halted for refreshment and spent the night … The next morning we left the house, and continued travelling all the day. For a long time we had kept to the woods, but at last we came into a road which I believed I knew. I had now some hopes of being delivered; for we had advanced but a little way before I discovered some people at a distance, on which I began to cry out for their assistance: but my cries had no other effect than to make them tie me faster and stop my mouth; they then put me into a large sack. They also stopped my sister’s mouth, and tied her hands; and in this manner we proceeded till we were out of the sight of those people … The next day proved a day of greater sorrow than I had yet experienced; for my sister and I were then separated, while we lay clasped in each other’s arms. It was in vain that we besought them not to part us; she was torn from me, and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not to be described.
Such kidnapping was common. A nineteenth-century study of the origins of subsequently freed slaves suggested that 30 per cent of them had been kidnapped (by other Africans), while 11 per cent had been sold after being condemned by a judicial process (for adultery, for example), 7 per cent had been sold to pay debts and a further 7 per cent had been sold by relations or friends.
The largest proportion of all, 34 per cent, had been taken in war, but John Newton was probably being too sanguine when he argued that ‘I verily believe, that the far greater part of the wars, in Africa, would cease, if the Europeans would cease to tempt them, by offering goods for slaves.’
African kingdoms fought wars against each other and enslaved each other’s people long before the Europeans arrived to make matters worse, but there seems little doubt that the lure of the slave trade sometimes contributed to the outbreak of conflict. One observer of the time wrote: ‘The wars which the inhabitants of the interior part of the country … carry on with each other are chiefly of a predatory nature, and owe their origin to the yearly number of slaves which [they] … suppose will be wanted by the vessels which arrive on the coast.’
On the other hand, a Royal Navy captain, John Matthews, argued that ‘the nations which inhabit the interior parts of Africa … profess the Mahometan religion; and, following the means prescribed by their prophet, are perpetually at war with the surrounding nations who refuse to embrace their religious doctrines … The prisoners made in these religious wars furnish a great part of the slaves which are sold to the Europeans; and would … be put to death if they had not the means of disposing of them.’
At minimum, the feeding of the slave trade became a way of life for tens of thousands of Africans and a source of power and wealth for trading networks which stretched deep into the interior of the continent, such as that of the Aro traders, and kingdoms which supplied huge numbers of slaves, such as the Lunda empire. It was the supplying of slaves which gave such people access to large quantities of copper, iron and, perhaps above all, guns. One cargo list of a ship setting out to purchase 250 slaves in 1733 included a certain amount of textile products, but showed that the vessel carried most of its estimated value in metals and arms, including four hundred ‘musquets’, forty pairs of ‘Common large Pistols’ and forty ‘blunderbuses’, along with fourteen tons of iron, one thousand copper rods and eighty bottles of brandy.
Whatever benefit the African tribes derived from the sale of slaves, it was most unlikely to make them more peaceable.
Since most slaves originated far from the coast, perhaps hundreds of miles inland, the first part of their journey involved a long trek on foot, usually yoked together and underfed, with a consequently high rate of mortality. The original kidnappers might have received only a small fraction of the final price of the slave by the time they had paid tolls and duties in the course of a journey and sold on their captives to intermediary traders, at large fairs held specifically for that purpose. In the words of Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon aboard slave ships who would later give evidence to Parliament:
The unhappy wretches thus disposed of are bought by the black traders at fairs, which are held for that purpose, at the distance of upwards of two hundred miles from the sea coast; and these fairs are said to be supplied from an interior part of the country. Many Negroes, upon being questioned relative to the places of their nativity, have asserted that they have travelled during the revolution of several moons (their usual method of calculating time) before they have reached the places where they were purchased by the black traders … From forty to two hundred Negroes are generally purchased at a time by the black traders, according to the opulence of the buyer, and consist of all ages, from a month to sixty years and upwards. Scarcely any age or situation is deemed an exception, the price being proportionable. Women sometimes form a part of them, who happen to be so far advanced in their pregnancy as to be delivered during their journey from the fairs to the coast; and I have frequently seen instances of deliveries on board ship.
Despite the constant supply of slaves thus proceeding to the coast, such was the competition among European traders that they often had to anchor for many weeks while slowly filling their decks with slaves amidst much haggling. John Newton’s diary for the year 1750 gives some flavour of what was involved.
Wednesday 9th January … the traders came onboard with the owner of the slave; paid the excessive price of 86 bars which is near 12£ sterling, or must have let him gone on shoar again, which I was unwilling to do, as being the first that was brought on board the ship, and had I not bought him should have hardly seen another. But a fine man slave, now there are so many competitors, is near double the price it was formerly. There are such numbers of french vessels and most of them determined to give any price they are asked, rather than trade should fall into our hands, that it seems as if they are fitted out not so much for their own advantage, as with a view of ruining our purchases. This day buried a fine woman slave, number eleven, having been ailing sometime, but never thought her in danger till within these two days; she was taken with a lethargick disorder, which they seldom recover from …
Thursday 17th January … William Freeman came onboard with a woman girl slave. Having acquitted himself tolerably, entrusted him with goods for 2 more.Yellow Will sent me word had bought me a man, but wanted another musquet to compleat the bargain, which sent him.
Wednesday 23rd January … Yellow Will brought me off a boy slave, 3 foot 10 inches which I was obliged to take or get nothing. Fryday 25th January … Yellow Will brought me a woman slave, but being long breasted and ill-made refused her, and made him take her onshoar …
Sometimes the traders resorted to simple trickery to fill their cargoes, as in this eyewitness account of Falconbridge:
A black trader invited a negroe, who resided a little way up the country, to come and see him. After the entertainment was over, the trader proposed to his guest, to treat him with a sight of one of the ships lying in the river. The unsuspicious countryman readily consented, and accompanied the trader in a canoe to the side of the ship, which he viewed with pleasure and astonishment. While he was thus employed, some black traders on board, who appeared to be in the secret, leaped into the canoe, seized the unfortunate man, and dragging him into the ship, immediately sold him.
For most slaves, the moment of being taken on board a ship was one of utter terror. Very often they were convinced they were to be eaten – Equiano recalled that when he saw ‘a large furnace of copper boiling and a multitude of black people, of every description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate’.
Newton remembered how the women and girls were taken on board ‘naked, trembling terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue and hunger’, only to be exposed to ‘the wanton rudeness of White savages’. Before long they would be raped: ‘The prey is divided upon the spot, and only reserved till opportunity offers.’
It was said that a slave ship was usually ‘part bedlam and part brothel’. Newton recorded that while he was on shore one afternoon one of his crew ‘seduced a women slave down into the room and lay with her brute like in view of the whole quarterdeck, for which I put him in irons. If anything happens to the woman I shall impute it to him, for she was big with child. Her number is 83.’
Not surprisingly, it was at this point that many slaves made desperate attempts to escape or to kill themselves, something which their captors were unable to comprehend. As another British captain recorded:
the men were all put in irons, two and two shackled together, to prevent their mutiny or swimming ashore. The Negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of canoes, boat and ship into the sea, and kept under water until they were drowned to avoid being taken up and saved … they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbados than we have of hell though, in reality they live much better there than in their own country; but home is home.
If the slaves did indeed have a premonition of hell, then they were not far wide of the mark, for, unbelievably, the worst part of their ordeal was yet to come. The economics of the slave trade required the maximum number of slaves to be carried in the smallest possible space, with the result that they were forced into a hold, usually shackled together and often without space to turn round, in which some of their number would have already resided for several weeks. Equiano recalled that:
the stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time … now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number of the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
Of course, it was in the interests of slave traders to keep their slaves in some degree of health, and during the day they would be taken up above decks and encouraged to ‘dance’, which generally meant jumping up and down with the encouragement of a whip. But in rough weather they would be confined below decks, with the portholes closed, in a scene of sometimes unimaginable horror. Falconbridge explained that the movement of the ship would cause the wooden planks to rub the skin off shoulders, elbows and hips, ‘so as to render the bones in those parts quite bare’.
The result was that they not only suffered from excessive heat and the rapid spread of fevers, but that ‘the deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination, to picture a situation to itself more dreadful or disgusting.’
At this stage only the Portuguese had made any effort to regulate the conditions in which slaves could be carried. Amidst the terrible overcrowding and putrid stenches of the slave ships, an average of around one in ten of all the slaves carried on the ‘middle passage’ across the Atlantic during the eighteenth century died before reaching the Americas, but on ships which were hit by bad weather or severe fevers the death toll was far higher. The journey across the ocean normally took at least five weeks, but it could take many months, with disastrous consequences: the captain of one French ship which lost 496 of its 594 slaves in 1717 blamed his appalling rate of loss on the ‘length of the voyage’ as well as ‘the badness of the weather’.
It is not surprising that many of those confined in these circumstances lost the will to live: ‘Some throw themselves into the sea, others hit their heads against the ship, others hold their breath to try and smother themselves, others still try to die of hunger from not eating …’
Consequently, force-feeding was added to the list of brutal treatments. Falconbridge reported that ‘upon the negroes refusing to take sustenance, I have seen coals of fire, glowing hot put on a shovel and placed near to their lips, as to scorch and burn them. And this has been accompanied with threats of forcing them to swallow the coals, if they any longer persisted in refusing to eat.’
While there were certainly slaving captains who tried to be humane, others behaved brutally and lost their temper with the slaves in their charge, as in this eyewitness account of a ship’s captain trying to force a child of less than a year old to eat:
the last time he took the child up and flogged it, and let it drop out of his hands, ‘Damn you (says he) I will make you eat, or I will be death of you;’ and in three quarters of an hour after that the child died. He would not suffer any of the people that were on the quarterdeck to heave the child overboard, but he called the mother of the child to heave it overboard. She was not willing to do so, and I think he flogged her; but I am sure that he beat her in some way for refusing to throw the child overboard; at last he made her take the child up, and she took it in her hand and went to the ship’s side, holding her head on one side, because she would not see the child go out of her hand and she dropped the child overboard. She seemed to be very sorry, and cried for several hours.
There were many instances of the slaves fighting back and rising against their captors if the opportunity arose, particularly if they were still within sight of Africa. On rare occasions such mutinies were successful, and led to the murder of the entire crew; more usually they were brutally put down and the ringleaders treated with pitiless harshness. Newton recalled seeing rebellious slaves ‘sentenced to unmerciful whippings, continued till the poor creatures have not had power to groan under their misery’, and others ‘agonising for hours, I believe for days together, under the torture of the thumbscrews’.
Those who survived the grotesque horrors of the middle passage were by no means at the end of their torment. They still had to experience the process of being sold in the markets of Jamaica, Barbados or Rio de Janeiro. A visitor to Rio described how ‘There are Shops full of these Wretches, who are exposed there stark naked, and bought like Cattle.’
Others were sold by ‘scramble’, with several hundred of them placed in a yard together and available at an equal price to whoever could get to them first when the gates were opened. Falconbridge noted: ‘It is scarcely possible to describe the confusion of which this mode of selling is productive,’
and Equiano, who was himself sold by this method in Barbados, recalled that ‘the noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of the terrified Africans … In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see one another again.’
This was the Atlantic slave trade: brutal, mercenary and inhumane from its beginning to its end. Yet in British politics the assumption had always been that its abolition was inconceivable. Even Edmund Burke, as he thundered out his denunciations of colonial misrule in India and called for the radical reform of the British state, concluded in 1780 that a rough plan for the immediate mitigation and ultimate suppression of the trade could not succeed, as the West Indian lobby would prove too powerful in Parliament. Three years earlier, another MP, Thomas Temple Luttrell, had given voice to the received wisdom of the times when he said, ‘Some gentleman may … object to the slave trade as inhuman and impious; let us consider that, if our colonies are to be maintained and cultivated, which can only be done by African Negroes, it is surely better to supply ourselves … in British bottoms.’
This, until the mid-178os, was the general and settled presumption. But no MP of that time could fully perceive the power of the new ideas that were beginning to take hold in many minds, or that those ideas would shortly become the inspiration of some remarkable and brilliant individuals.
Even while the slaves were being forced into ships on the African coast in record numbers in the second half of the eighteenth century, a major shift was taking place in moral and political philosophy which would open the door to the slave trade being questioned and attacked. For the eighteenth century saw the arrival of what has subsequently been termed the ‘Age of Enlightenment’: a rapid growth in human knowledge and capabilities, accompanied by new beliefs concerning the relationship of individuals to the state and to each other, coming together to create a sense of progress and modernity which in turn allowed traditional views and hierarchies to be challenged. The scientific and mathematical revolution precipitated by Sir Isaac Newton earlier in the century gave huge momentum to the development of new thinking based on rational deductions and ‘natural law’. Soon, political philosophers would be arguing for a rational new basis to the understanding of ethics, aesthetics and knowledge, setting out the concept of a free individual, denouncing the alleged superstition and tyranny of medieval times, and paving the way for modern notions of liberalism, freedom and democracy. This gathering change in philosophical outlook came alongside a quickening pace of economic and social change: the dawn of the Industrial Revolution saw the arrival of new manufacturing techniques, such as the ‘spinning jenny’, which revolutionised the production of cotton goods in Britain from the 1760s onwards, and allowed newly prosperous merchants and industrialists to compete with the aristocracy for political power; a rapid growth in population in urban settings, comprising people who were less willing than their rural predecessors to accept old notions of class and authority; a huge expansion in the availability of newspapers and pamphlets, which allowed political ideas to be communicated to a vastly greater number of people than ever before; and a maturing of imperial possessions and conquests which brought greater debate about the appropriate treatment of native peoples who had become colonial subjects.
It was changes such as these that would release intellectual movements which would underpin some of the epoch-changing events of the late eighteenth century, including the French and American Revolutions and the independence movement in Latin America; but an important offshoot of Enlightenment thinking was the belief that in a rational world, institutionalised slavery could not be defended. In his celebrated L’Esprit des lois, published in 1748, Montesquieu brilliantly summed up what would become the Enlightenment case against slavery:
Slavery in its proper sense is the establishment of a right which makes one man so much the owner of another man that he is the absolute master of his life and of his goods. It is not good by its nature; it is useful neither to the master nor to the slave: not to the slave, because he can do nothing from virtue; not to the master, because he contracts all sorts of bad habits from his slaves, because he imperceptibly grows accustomed to failing in all the moral virtues, because he grows proud, curt, harsh, angry, voluptuous, and cruel.
It was not long before other French thinkers, whose work would be fundamental to the upheavals of the subsequent Revolution, would go further, with Rousseau arguing in 1762 in Le Contrat social that men were born with the right to be free and equal, and that ‘The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive.’
It was not only the view of radical and revolutionary writers that slavery stood condemned. The Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson argued in 1769 that ‘No one is born a slave; because everyone is born with all his original rights … no one can become a slave; because no one, from being a person, can … become a thing or subject of property.’
He was following in the tradition of a previous professor of philosophy in Scotland, the Irishman Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who had argued in A System of Moral Philosophy that ‘All men … have strong desires of liberty and property,’ and that ‘No damage done or crime committed can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all right.’
Yet another Glaswegian professor who would subsequently add massively to the intellectual case against slavery was Adam Smith, whose words carried all the more significance because they were part of his general justification for capitalism and market economics. He argued that slavery was inefficient economically because it was an artificial constraint on individuals acting in their own self-interest, and was thus an obstruction to maximum economic efficiency. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) he argued that
the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only and not be any interest of his own.
Other hugely influential British writers followed in Smith’s wake, with William Paley mocking slavery in Moral Philosophy (1785), which was widely circulated as a textbook:
But necessity is pretended; the name under which every enormity is attempted to be justified. And after all, what is the necessity? It has never been proved that the land could not be cultivated there, as it is here, by hired servants. It is said, that it could not be cultivated with quite the same conveniency and cheapness, as by the labour of slaves; by which means, a pound of sugar, which the planter now sells for sixpence could not be afforded under sixpence halfpenny; – and this is the necessity!
The views of such figures as Smith and Paley are of huge significance since they meant, in more modern terms, that the intellectual attack on slavery came from the right as well as the left; it was not necessary to believe in an entirely new social order or in inalienable rights of man in order to accept that slavery could not be economically justified or pragmatically accepted. For young, conservative-minded British politicians such as Pitt and Wilberforce, the works of Adam Smith and William Paley were high on their list of reading materials.
The changing intellectual climate of the late eighteenth century helped to awaken a Christian concern about slavery which had occasionally surfaced in earlier centuries, to little effect. Vatican rulings against the keeping of slaves in the seventeenth century had been understood to refer to natives of the Americas rather than to African Negroes, and the call for ‘an end to slavery’ by Pope Clement XI early in the eighteenth century was greeted with total indifference in Lisbon and Madrid. Yet while established Churches, whether in Rome or Canterbury, were too politically constrained and philosophically complacent to mount a serious challenge to such a widely accepted institution as slavery, the subject was a natural one for Christians of a more reforming or Evangelical disposition. As early as 1671 George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, had called on slave-owners not to use cruelty towards Negroes, and ‘that after certain years of servitude they should set them free’.
By the late eighteenth century, as the scale and growth of slavery became more widely acknowledged and the moral climate of the times moved against it, it became a natural target for Evangelicals and Methodists. Moreover, their beliefs in applying Christian principles to the whole of life, in the importance of Providence and their accountability to God, gave many of them a sense of unavoidable responsibility to combat slavery, rather than a choice of whether or not to do so. By 1774 John Wesley was railing against the slave trade and all who took part in it, threatening slave traders with a worse fate than Sodom and Gomorrah and reminding them that ‘He shall have Judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy.’ He told plantation-owners that ‘Men-buyers are exactly on a level with Men-stealers,’ and merchants that their money was being used ‘to steal, rob, murder men, women and children without number’; ‘Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature.’
It was on the basis of such thinking that in due course British Evangelicals would eventually become an indispensable component of the campaign against the slave trade.
It was, however, the Quakers who would lead the way in setting out the Christian case against slavery and the slave trade, bringing to bear an influence far beyond their numbers, partly because they included highly active and respected individuals, and partly because they constituted a genuinely transatlantic community. The Quakers included many influential traders and merchants, and when the annual meeting of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia in 1754 came to the conclusion that ‘to live in ease and plenty by the toil of those who violence and cruelty have put in our power’ was incompatible with Christianity, it was a decision of more than token significance.
The decisions of the Philadelphia Society of Friends led within a short time to their London counterparts coming to the same conclusion. Similarly, when the Quaker Anthony Benezet’s anti-slave-trade tract Observations on the Enslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes was published in America in the 1760s the London Quakers responded by ordering 1,500 copies and distributing them to every member of both Houses of Parliament. Benezet’s powerful arguments against slavery not only rested on Christian principles but were wholly in tune with Enlightenment ideas: ‘Nothing,’ he wrote in 1767, ‘can more clearly and positively militate against the slavery of the Negroes than the several declarations lately published that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”’
The arguments of the Quakers were one of several powerful forces at work in North America in the 1760s and 1770s which would contribute to opening up the debate over the slave trade in Britain. A second factor was the growing fear in some of the North American colonies that the continued importation of large numbers of slaves would create an uncontrollable population prone to revolution in the future. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, ‘Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the State, and there is therefore some difference between them and sheep; sheep will never make insurrections.’
This concern led some states, such as New Jersey in 1769, to impose a prohibitive level of duty on the import of slaves. Once the American Revolution was underway, the second Continental Congress passed a resolution opposing slave imports in 1776, and many of the northern states went on to act against slavery itself – Pennsylvania, for instance, passed a law in 1780 ensuring that all future born slaves would become free at the age of twenty-eight. Within a year of the end of the American War of Independence, all of the New England states had made legal provision for the abolition of slavery on their territory.
The British reaction to the American Revolution was a third factor which may have helped to inculcate the idea that the institution of slavery was no longer immutable. While Samuel Johnson taunted the Americans with the question, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’,
British generals seeking every possible weapon to use against the colonists made extensive promises of freedom to slaves held in North America. In 1775 the Governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, offered freedom to all slaves who would bear arms against the rebellion: the subsequent years of war saw tens of thousands of slaves desert their owners, and some of them did indeed serve alongside the British Army. Sometimes the population of entire plantations managed to run away, with some states losing over half their slaves. At the end of the war, these desertions would leave the defeated British with the problem of what to do with large numbers of former slaves who had come under their protection, many of them congregated in still-loyal New York, with the eventual result that thousands of them would be unsatisfactorily resettled in Nova Scotia.
One of the effects of the American Revolution was, therefore, to create a significant free black population in the nascent United States, but it also left behind it a sharp political disagreement over the future of slavery and the slave trade, which would divide the United States and influence debate in the rest of the English-speaking world. While northern states responded to American Independence by emancipating slaves, southern states, which were much more heavily economically dependent on slave labour, responded to the end of the war with a surge of slave imports to make up for the large numbers of deserters. Within a remarkably short time the future battle lines of the American Civil War of eighty years later were drawn, facilitated by the historic compromise at the constitutional convention which declared that: ‘The importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited prior to the year eighteen hundred and eight.’
The future President James Madison would defend the compromise as ‘a great point gained in favour of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever within these States a traffic which is so long and so loudly upbraided as the barbarism of modern policy’,
but the result was that the period from 1787 to 1807 saw more slaves sold into the United States than any other two decades in history. By the end of the century, opinion in the southern states had turned firmly against the anti-slavery assumptions of the Founding Fathers, and abolitionist sentiment was once again largely confined to the ranks of the valiant Quakers.
In the meantime, Quaker campaigners such as Anthony Benezet had been discovering useful allies across the Atlantic. In his work specifically directed at a British audience A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies (1766), Benezet asked British Christians:
Do we indeed believe the truths declared in the Gospel? Are we persuaded that the threatenings, as well as the promises therein contained, will have their accomplishment? If indeed we do, must we not tremble to think what a load of guilt lies upon our Nation generally, and individually so far as we in any degree abet or countenance this aggravated inequity?
1773 saw Benezet bring his arguments to London, followed soon afterwards by his pupil William Dillwyn, whose declared purpose was to help the English Quakers organise a campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. There they were introduced to another figure who shared their steadfast persistence and beliefs, and who would come to occupy a central role in the forthcoming campaign against the trade: Granville Sharp.
The grandson of an Archbishop of York, Sharp had become involved in the issue of slavery in 1765, when he had befriended a slave in London and tried to rescue him from being re-sold and returned to the West Indies. His views were reinforced by his contact with Benezet, and were similarly based on strong religious convictions. He was the first in a series of extraordinarily determined and talented individuals in Britain who were to give their time and energy to the anti-slavery cause over the following decades. He was said to have ‘a settled conviction of the wickedness of our race … tempered by an infantile credulity in the virtue in each separate member of it’,
but his chief quality was indefatigable perseverance in any cause he adopted. Told when he was working as an apprentice to a linen draper that his ignorance of Greek made it impossible for him to understand a theological argument, he went on to gain such a mastery of Greek that he was able to correct previously unnoticed errors in the translation of the New Testament. When a tradesman whom he knew found that his claim to be the rightful heir to a peerage was scornfully dismissed, Sharp pursued the matter until his friend was duly seated in the House of Lords. For seven years from 1765 he applied this quality of determination to trying to prevent plantation-owners from forcibly removing their slaves from England. This work culminated in 1772 with the case of James Somerset, an escaped slave who had been recaptured and was being held on board a ship in London preparing to sail for Jamaica. Since there was no dispute that a Virginia slave-owner held legal title to Somerset, Sharp now had the test case he had been looking for, which could show that slave-ownership was incompatible with the laws of England, irrespective of any legal claim valid elsewhere.
It was a legal point which the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, had struggled for years to avoid. Now, despite a series of adjournments and efforts to settle the matter out of court, Sharp pursued the case until Mansfield was forced to give a definitive judgement. That judgement was that a slave-owner had no right to compel a slave to leave England for a foreign country. Slavery, Mansfield found, was not provided for in English law, and was something ‘so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law’. Such a ruling was, partly inadvertently, a death blow to slavery within the British Isles themselves, where it is thought some thousands of slaves were being held or maintained at the time. Sharp would be disappointed if he thought the ruling would have legal ramifications in British colonies, but he had chalked up an important victory which had the practical effect of ending slavery on British soil. Working with Benezet, he continued his opposition to slavery. In The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God (1776) he presented his argument in biblical terms, arguing that the Israelites were ‘reminded of their Bondage in Egypt: for so the almighty Deliverer from Slavery warned his people to limit and moderate the bondage … by the remembrance of their own former bondage in a foreign land, and by a remembrance also of his great mercy in delivering them from that bondage’.
As he did so, the circle of committed Christians who agreed with him and were prepared to act was quietly growing.
It is an irony of history that David Hartley, one of the very few MPs to attack the slave trade in the House of Commons in the course of the 1770s, was the very man unseated by William Wilberforce when he stormed to victory at Hull in 1780. In defeating him, Wilberforce later recalled that ‘I expressed my hope to him that the time would come when I should be able to do something on behalf of slaves.’
In the same year he apparently asked a friend travelling to Antigua to collect information for him, and again expressed ‘my hope, that some time or other I should redress the wrongs of those wretched and degraded beings’.
While there is no reason to doubt that his interest was genuine, the slave trade did not become a topic of parliamentary debate in the early 1780s, and Wilberforce did not attempt to raise it. Yet as Wilberforce turned to devouring books in the summer of 1786, he would have found among many of his chosen authors – Montesquieu, Adam Smith, William Paley – a universal condemnation of slavery. And in the preceding two or three years he would certainly have read a number of new publications which stated the case against the slave trade more effectively and authoritatively than ever before.
One such publication was likely to have been the record of the court proceedings in 1783 concerning the slave ship Zong, circulated by Granville Sharp. The Zong, owned by Liverpool merchants, had sailed from São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea in 1781 with more than four hundred slaves on board. Poor navigation by the captain, Luke Collingwood, led to them overshooting their destination and water on board becoming scarce, with many of the slaves dying or falling ill. Calculating that if the slaves died on board the loss would be borne by the owners, but that should there be a sufficiently sound pretext of the crew being in danger, ‘If the drowned were to be paid for by the insurers, they still constituted a part of the value of the cargo, and the master retained his whole profits,’
Collingwood decided to throw 133 slaves overboard. They were thrown over the side in three groups. The third group of twenty-six, realising what was happening to them, fought back and were consequently thrown into the sea with their arms still in shackles. Only one of the 133 survived, climbing back on board when no one was looking and stowing himself away.
The efforts of the owners to sue the underwriters were a failure, since the shortage of water was not satisfactorily proved, but Lord Mansfield made clear at the time that in legal terms ‘the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard’.
Equally, the efforts of Granville Sharp to launch a prosecution against the owners met with no success: there was no law against a master drowning slaves if he wished to do so. While Sharp suffered a legal defeat, the effect was a moral victory: the terrible story of the Zong became widely known in Britain, and fed a growing sense of outrage.
The same year that the case of the Zong came to court saw the creation of the London Quaker Abolition Committee, and the publication of a flurry of poems and pamphlets denouncing the slave trade. The following year, 1784, the Reverend James Ramsay published two powerful pamphlets – An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies and An Inquiry into the Effects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The importance of Ramsay’s work was that it was based on twenty-two years’ actual experience of living in the West Indies, at a time when hard facts about slavery and the slave trade were difficult to establish and British people with first-hand knowledge were unwilling to speak out. Brought up in Aberdeen, Ramsay had been a surgeon during the Seven Years’ War on the British warship Arundel, captained by Sir Charles Middleton. Ordered by Middleton to go aboard a slave ship recaptured from the French, Ramsay would never forget the desperate scenes he found there, with diseased and plague-ridden slaves dying in the hold. Going on to become a clergyman on the island of St Kitts, where he stayed until 1781, he developed a revulsion for the slave markets and the punishment meted out to slaves which made him into an enemy of the entire system. Unpopular with the whites of the West Indies as a result, but always held in high esteem by the Middletons, he was given the living of Teston in Kent by a wealthy friend of Lady Middleton, and settled down to live alongside his old friends in a more peaceful setting.
Ramsay’s publications developed many of the arguments which would be used by the abolitionists in the years ahead, reasoning that slavery could be dispensed with gradually, and be replaced by the immigration of free people, with a beneficial effect on the businesses and profits of the plantations. In particular, he called for an immediate end to the slave trade, since this would force slave-owners to treat their existing slaves better, and to refrain from the brutalities he had witnessed on St Kitts. Africa too would benefit from the end of the slave trade, perhaps able to develop sugar plantations itself, and ‘The improvement of Africa is a compensation which we owe for the horrid barbarities we have been instrumental in procuring to be exercised on her sons.’
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