William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner

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 …12

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?’13 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.14

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’15 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,16 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’,17 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’.18 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.’19 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.’20 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’.21 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? …’22 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’.23 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.’24 ‘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.’25 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 …’26

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!’27 – 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.’28 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.’29 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.30 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’31 – 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.’32 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.’33 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.’34

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’.35 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’.36 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.’37 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.’38

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’.39 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.’40 To William Hey he wrote that this cause ‘is of the utmost consequence, and worthy of the labours of a whole life’.41

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’.42 According to Sydney Smith, ‘Everyone is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.’43 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.44

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.’45 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.’46

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.’47 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’.48

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.’49 Wilberforce proceeded precisely along these lines, winning the ‘entire approbation’ of the Prime Minister and the Archbishop,50 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.’51 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’.52

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’.53 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.’54 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.