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

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,’70 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’.71 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’.72 Residents reported that ‘We have a very Gay Town with diversions of some or other kind.’73

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.’74 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.’75 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’.76 He was now ‘about 14 or 15 a boy of very high spirits’,77 and his circumstances ‘did not dispose me for exertion when I returned to school’.78

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

As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make any one else studious.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections1

Some time before when an uncle of mine had got into parliament, I recollect thinking it a very great thing.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections2

IN HIS OWN WORDS, Wilberforce was armed upon his arrival as an undergraduate at Cambridge with ‘a perfect command of money’.3 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.’4

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.’5 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’.6 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’,7 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.’8 Wilberforce considered he had been introduced to ‘some, I think of the very worse men that I ever met with in my life’.9

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’.10 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’.11

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?”’12 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.’13

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).14 But as to mathematics, which he later thought his mind ‘greatly needed’, he was ‘told that I was too clever to require them’.15

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’,16 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’,17 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’.18 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.’19

In later life Wilberforce would deeply regret the waste of time. When he ought to have been ‘under a strict and wholesome regimen’,20 he found that ‘As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make any one else studious.’21 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.’22 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.’23 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’.24 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.’25 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,’26 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’27 – but critical of some speakers in the House of Lords – ‘Paltry matter and a whiney delivery’.28 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 …’29 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.