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

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’,30 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’.31 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’.32 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’.33 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.34

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.35 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’.36

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’.37 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.’38

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’.39 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,’40 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.’41 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,’42 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’.43 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.’44 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’,45 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’.46 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.’47 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.’48 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,’49 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 £32,000.50

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’51 because of the terrible consequences of ‘that destructive fury, the spirit of play’.52 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!”’53 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.’54

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.’55 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.’56 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.’57 Such experiences nurtured in him a feeling of guilt which would be a powerful influence on his future, very different, behaviour.