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

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.’17 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.’18 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’.19

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’.20 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’.21 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.’22 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’23 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’.24 As Voltaire put it, ‘There is only just enough religion in England to distinguish Tories who have a little from Whigs who have none.’25

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.’26 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’.27 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.’28 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’.29 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.’30 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’.31 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’.32

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.’33 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.’34 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.’35 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.’36 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’.37 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’.38 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.39 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’.40

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.’41 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.42 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’,43 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’.44 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’.45

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.’46 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.’47

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.’48 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.’49 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.’50 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.’51 Uncle and aunt were apparently ‘also inconsolable for the loss of me’.52

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.’53 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.’54

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.’55 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’.56 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.57

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.’58 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’.59 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’,60 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’.61

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.62

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.’63 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’.64 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’.65 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.’66 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.’67 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.’68

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.’69 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.