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

Gambling was only one aspect of this time of excess. It was fashionable to drink heavily, particularly claret and port wine, and to eat greedily, with huge steaks and scores of turtles being the favourite dinners of the London clubs. Prince George, Prince of Wales, who was rapidly becoming the despair of King George III and Queen Charlotte through his disloyalty, decadence, extravagance and indebtedness, fully represented in his own person the barely controlled behaviour of the time. Holding fêtes and balls which would carry on from noon of one day into the morning of the next, and becoming so drunk that at one party he fell over while dancing and was sick in front of his guests, he also made the most of a string of mistresses, and was sometimes happy to share them with Charles James Fox. His brother, the Duke of Clarence and future King William IV, kept a mistress to whom he paid two hundred guineas every quarter for twenty years, and was so open about it that the first negotiations about her terms were actually reported in the press.

In such society, the possession by a married man of a mistress was regarded not only as a necessity, but her position was little short of official, understood and acknowledged by the rest of the establishment. In addition, the gentlemen walking from their gambling in one club to drinking in another could easily avail themselves of some of more than ten thousand prostitutes who plied their trade on the streets of London, who were ‘more numerous than at Paris, and have more liberty and effrontery than at Rome itself. About nightfall they arrange themselves in a file in the footpaths of all the great streets.’58 In Pall Mall itself, nestling among the gentlemen’s clubs was Mrs Hazer’s Establishment of Pleasure, where there was ‘naked dancing, and the floorshow included a Tahitian love feast’ involving twelve nymphs and twelve youths. Whether Wilberforce yielded to such temptations is not known. Years after his death, his son Samuel told the Bishop of Oxford that ‘his father when young used to drink tea every evening in a brothel’, although this was said to be ‘not … from any licentious purpose – his health alone would then have prevented that’.59 On the contrary, his ill health appeared to be no barrier to any social activity at this time: he was gambling, drinking, eating heartily, and singing beautifully – the Prince of Wales is meant to have told the Duchess of Devonshire that he would go anywhere to hear Wilberforce sing. But it does seem that, even at this stage, Wilberforce lived with more care and thoughtfulness than most of his social companions. He readily took advice from wise old birds such as the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden, who told him to desist from using his wonderful powers of mimicry because ‘It is but a vulgar accomplishment.’60 This did not quite put paid to the habit, particularly since he was in much demand for his impression of Lord North, but the relationship illustrated his need for genuine discussion rather than mere social frivolity: Camden ‘took a great fancy to me because, I believe, when all the others were wasting their time at cards or piquet we would come and talk with him and hear his stories of the old Lord Chatham’.61

Wilberforce was already displaying an extraordinary facility, which he would maintain throughout his life, of being careful about his own behaviour yet simultaneously sought-after for his good company and humour. As his Cambridge friend Gerard Edwards, who remained a close companion in London, put it even at this time, ‘I thank the Gods that I live in the age of Wilberforce and that I know one man at least who is both moral and entertaining.’62 His circle of friends naturally widened, now including many young politicians such as Pitt, Lord Euston, Edward Eliot and Henry Bankes, but still encompassing his old companions from Hull. To one of the latter, a B.B. Thompson, he wrote from London on 9 June 1781:

My Dear Thompson,

We have a blessed prospect of sitting till the end of next month. Judge how agreeable this must be to me, who was in the hope ere now to be indulging myself amongst the lakes of Westmoreland. As soon as ever I am released from my parliamentary attendance I mean to betake myself thither … Between business in the morning and pleasure at night my time is pretty well filled up. Whatever you … used to say of my idleness, one is, I assure you, as much attended to as the other.

The papers will have informed you how Mr William Pitt, second son of the late Lord Chatham, has distinguished himself; he comes out as his father did a ready-made orator, and I doubt not but that I shall one day or other see him the first man in the country. His famous speech, however, delivered the other night, did not convince me, and I staid in with the old fat fellow: by the way he grows every day fatter, so where he will end I know not.

My business requires to be transacted at places very distant from each other, and I am now going to call on Lord R.M. [Robert Manners] thence to Hoxton, and next to Tower Hill; so you may judge how much leisure I have left for letter writing …63

This single letter sums up Wilberforce’s predilections and personality as a young MP approaching the age of twenty-two. His eagerness to spend the summer in Windermere – he had rented a house, Rayrigg, with views over the lake – illustrates his determination to enjoy the hills and countryside; his assiduousness in attending Parliament and constant travelling around London to meetings demonstrate his seriousness amidst the continuing enjoyment of London nightlife; his political independence is displayed, since staying in with ‘the old fat fellow’ is a reference to voting with Lord North against the opposition; but his simultaneous and growing admiration for his friend and vocal member of the opposition, William Pitt, shines through.

Such admiration would soon draw him into more serious participation in national affairs. For as Wilberforce dreamt of rural pleasures that summer, on the other side of the Atlantic the armies of Washington and Lafayette were manoeuvring to bring the final hopes of British victory to ashes. British politics was on the edge of a series of convulsions which would bring the youthful William Pitt to power and place Wilberforce in the thick of parliamentary and electoral battle.

* Compared to only three MPs under the age of thirty elected in 2005.

* The equivalent of more than £1 million today. The highest expenditure by a single candidate in the 2005 election was £13,212.

3 The Devoted Acolyte

Who but madmen would enter a contest for such a county, or indeed for any county?

PHILIP FRANCIS TO CHRISTOPHER WYVILL,

on the subject of an election for the county of Yorkshire, 17941

Tear the enemy to pieces.

WILLIAM PITT TO WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 24 March 17842

HOWEVER QUIET the scene when a tired messenger rode his horse up to Lord George Germain’s house in Pall Mall on the morning of Sunday, 25 November 1781, the contents of the message he carried would lead to two and a half years of upheaval and crisis in the government and politics of Britain. All night long the relays of horses from the port of Falmouth in Cornwall had borne towards London the news that Lord North and his embattled ministers must have dreaded: at Yorktown in Virginia, an entire British army under General Cornwallis had capitulated. While military commanders might calculate that the war could be continued from the British stronghold of New York, others knew that this disaster would ‘occasion the loss of all the Southern colonies very speedily’,3 and that British possessions in the West Indies, including Jamaica, could be ‘in imminent danger’.4 Germain, the dogged but hapless Secretary of State, would soon produce a plan for struggling on with the war, trying to hold New York, Charleston and Savannah while mounting amphibious raids and courting American loyalists. But Lord North, possessed as usual with a sure feel for parliamentary opinion, knew that in domestic politics the game was up. ‘Oh God it is all over!’5 he exclaimed when the news of Yorktown reached Downing Street that fateful Sunday morning.

Caught between the implacable George III on the one side and the growing view among MPs that further fighting would bring ruin at the hands of France and Spain in addition to the now inevitable loss of the American colonies, the North administration staggered uncertainly on through the winter of 1781–82, sacrificing Germain that January but still failing to win the confidence of Parliament or the nation. The attacks mounted on the enfeebled administration by Fox, Burke, Pitt and other opposition Members were merciless and scathing, while at the same time a growing number of independent MPs concluded that North must be ousted and the war ended. Wilberforce was among them, delivering a speech on 22 February 1782 which was his first major display of political partisanship in the Commons. While the year before he might have ‘staid in with the old fat fellow’, Wilberforce now turned on the same portly figure of Lord North. He declared that ‘while the present Ministry existed there were no prospects of either peace or happiness to this Kingdom’. It was clear that the government intended to pursue the ruinous war in a cruel, bloody and impracticable manner; the actions of ministers more ‘resembled the career of furious madmen than the necessarily vigorous and prudent exertions of able statesmen’.6 He voted solidly with the opposition in the close-fought divisions of late February and early March 1782. On 20 March he would have witnessed the resignation of North after twelve years in office, the snow falling outside the House of Commons as British politicians turned their minds to how to construct a fresh government while rescuing a tottering Empire. Nominally still an independent Member, Wilberforce had clearly aligned himself with the opposition, and was invited to their meetings. That he should have taken such a strong stand against the North government and the American War is not surprising. He had befriended Pitt, for whom opposition to the war was second nature; he admired Fox, whom he found ‘very pleasant and unaffected’7 at a number of dinners and who had masterminded the tactics of the opposition; he was also alert to the political mood and alive to the simple reality of the time, namely that the only way in which the British could mitigate their defeat was to turf out the ministers who could be blamed for it.

While ‘no party man’, Wilberforce would find himself for the next four years very much categorised as belonging to a party. The common thread which would run through all his political dispositions until 1786 was loyalty to his great friend Pitt. Pitt was not a member of the new government formed from among the opposition groupings in March 1782, having rather haughtily declared in advance that he could ‘never accept a subordinate situation’,8 and not having been offered a senior one. Nevertheless, he and Wilberforce were firm supporters of this new Whig-led government, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham, who was as munificent in his wealth and aristocratic grandeur as he was inadequate as a political leader or manager. Fox, the new Secretary of State and ministerial leader in the Commons, seethed with indignation that the King had seen fit only to conduct negotiations with the lesser of the opposition groupings, that led by Shelburne. Wilberforce was included in the discussions held about the formation of the government, and remembered ‘Fox awkwardly bringing out that Lord Shelburne only had seen the King, in short jealousy between Foxites and Shelburneites manifested, tho’ for a long time suppressed’.9 The wily George III, in a ‘masterpiece of Royal skill’,10 had ensured that the Rockingham administration would be poisoned from the outset with a rich dose of resentment and suspicion. He did not intend that those who had opposed the American War would stay in office for long.

The Rockingham administration did indeed turn out to be one of the most ill-fated in British history. Within weeks Fox and Shelburne were at furious loggerheads over the terms of the peace treaty being negotiated in Paris, and within three months of entering office Rockingham was dead. Wilberforce had been much courted by Rockingham during his final months. The formerly unknown Member for Hull was by now identified as an active MP who could think more clearly and speak more forcefully than most of his colleagues. With Rockingham keen to secure the loyalty of an able Yorkshireman, and the Whigs looking forward to creating new peers who could strengthen their position in the House of Lords, there were even rumours that Wilberforce would soon be ennobled. Eager suppliers of ermine robes were in touch with him to try to secure his business in the event of this happy elevation taking place.

It seems unlikely that Wilberforce would have accepted a peerage at the age of twenty-two, even though peerages in the eighteenth century were far scarcer than they have since become, and at that time carried the automatic guarantee of being passed on through the generations. Like Pitt, he saw the Commons as the only place for a young man of ambition and energy. At this stage of his life Wilberforce certainly harboured some ambitions for office, but in July 1782 he could only watch loyally as yet another new government took office, this time with Shelburne as First Lord of the Treasury and the twenty-three-year-old Pitt as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

There is no trace of jealousy in Wilberforce’s attitude towards the spectacular promotion of his friend. Indeed, it was in the summer of 1782 that these two young men began to form a bond of companionship sufficiently strong that it could never be completely ruptured even by the sharpest of disagreements in later years. They were both key members of the group of twenty-five Cambridge graduates who formed Goostree’s club in Pall Mall, dining, drinking and gambling there every night when Parliament was sitting. There, with Lord Euston, Pepper Arden, Henry Bankes and Edward Eliot, ‘all youngsters just entering into life’,11 they enjoyed themselves to the full, going on to the House of Commons where George Selwyn could find them ‘singing and laughing à gorge déployée’, making him ‘wish for one day to be twenty’.12 Some evenings or in the recess Pitt would ride out to Wimbledon to spend the night at Lauriston House, which Wilberforce had now inherited, and ‘for near three month slept almost every night there’.13 Despite the political responsibilities they now enjoyed, their letters and diary entries of this period suggest an atmosphere of almost carefree youth. Pitt would write to Wilberforce from the Commons in the afternoon, ‘Eliot, Arden and I will be with you before curfew and expect an early meal of peas and strawberries.’14 Wilberforce’s diary entries in the summers of 1782 and 1783 include: ‘Delicious day – lounged morning at Wimbledon with friends, foyning* at night, and run about the garden for an hour or two,’ or ‘To Wimbledon with Pitt and Eliot, at their persuasion,’ or ‘Fine hot day, went on water with Pitt and Eliot fishing, came back, dined, walked evening. Eliot went home, Pitt stayed.’15 There was evidently much boisterous activity, with reports of neighbours being ‘alarmed with noises at their door’16 and of Pitt having cut up the silk hat of another visitor, a future Foreign Secretary, one night and strewn the remnants around the flowerbeds. Not only did Wilberforce admire Pitt’s political abilities, he also loved his company, thinking him ‘the most truly witty man he had ever met’,17 and later recording, ‘Mr Pitt was systematically witty … the others were often run away with by their wit. Mr Pitt was always master of his. He could turn it to any end or object he desired.’18 Pitt, in turn, cherished Wilberforce’s good humour and political support.

At Easter 1782, the two Williams had holidayed together in Bath and Brighthelmstone (modern-day Brighton). But with Pitt in office as Chancellor, Wilberforce was unable to take his friend with him later that year on the extended summer tour that would become his perennial habit over the next few years. Abandoning plans for a trip to the Continent because of a sudden by-election in Hull (Lord Robert Manners had died and was in due course succeeded, unopposed, by the previously defeated David Hartley), Wilberforce made once again for Rayrigg on Windermere before visiting Weymouth in the autumn. He simply could not do without country air, explaining to his sister in the summer of 1783 that the House of Commons was unable ‘to compensate to me for the loss of air, pleasant walks, and what Milton calls “each rural sight, each rural sound”’.19 ‘I never leave this poor villa,’ he wrote from Wimbledon, ‘without feeling my virtuous affections confirmed and strengthened; and I’m afraid it would be to some degree true if I were to add that I never remain long in London without their being somewhat injured and diminished.’20 To Rayrigg he would take an assortment of books, including ‘classics, statutes at large and history’,21 and welcome a succession of friends.

In the Lakes he found solitude through riding, walking and boating, but also lifelong friendship, in particular with Colonel John Pennington, more than a quarter of a century older than Wilberforce and another admirer of Pitt, who as Lord Muncaster would become the recipient of a vast proportion of Wilberforce’s letters on public affairs. Other visitors included Pitt’s future political hostess the Duchess of Gordon, and a procession of Hull family friends, one of whom found Wilberforce to be ‘riotous and noisy’.22 Once ensconced at Weymouth in the middle of October, he was writing to Edward Eliot to say that ‘So mild is the climate and so calm and clear is the sea that on this very fifteenth day of October I am sitting with my window open on its side and am every moment wishing myself up to the chin in it.’23 It was an abiding characteristic that he would seek out the long summer periods of rest and contemplation which his wealth permitted and his inclination and constitution required. Where Pitt was happy to spend many of his summers dealing with the grind of dispatches and correspondence and darting a short distance out of London for a brief respite, Wilberforce drew strength and inspiration from a more balanced existence. It was a difference of temperament which helped to make one of them suitable for high office, and the other designed for high ideals.

Pitt’s aptitude for high office was soon tested. His boss, the Earl of Shelburne, proved unable or unwilling to broaden the political base of his ministry during the long summer recess, leaving Pitt as a principal spokesman in the House of Commons for a government which had only minority support. By the time the preliminaries of the peace agreement with France, Spain and the new United States of America were ready to be put to Parliament for approval in February 1783, the Shelburne ministry was vulnerable to parliamentary ambush. The proposed peace treaties represented a reasonable settlement under all the circumstances, with Britain’s negotiating position having been strengthened by a crucial naval victory in the West Indies in April 1782. Britain would give up the Floridas and Minorca to Spain, St Lucia and some other islands to France, and the huge tracts of territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi were awarded to America at the same time as her independence was recognised. Shelburne had simultaneously taken great care to negotiate an extensive commercial treaty with America. While these proposals were wholly realistic, and even far-sighted, Fox took the opportunity to attack them as a means of removing his hated rival from power. In one of the great unholy alliances of British political history, the supporters of Fox, who had always opposed the war, and the party of North, which had prosecuted it, now came together to drive Shelburne from office, and Pitt with him.

Pitt asked Wilberforce to give one of the leading speeches in a crucial debate on the peace treaty on 17 February 1783. Clearly he believed that the voice of Wilberforce was already influential and eloquent; for his part Wilberforce was ready to do anything for his friend. Wilberforce was tense as he prepared for his most important speech to that date. He spent a weekend with ‘his sleep disturbed at the thoughts of a full House of Commons’,24 walked for several hours on the Sunday afternoon, and made a plea for the necessity of peace in his speech on the Monday afternoon, arguing that if the Fox-North coalition defeated the ministry on this issue, ‘no Minister would in future dare to make such a peace as the necessity of the country might require’.25 Wilberforce’s speech was well regarded, although he recorded the events of that day in his diary in a very matter-of-fact way:

17th. Walked down morning to House to get Milner into gallery. Seconded the address. Lost the motion by 16. Did not leave House till about eight in the morning, and bed about nine.26

It must have been a deflating experience. Pitt’s own speech was regarded indifferently, and the government defeat by sixteen votes meant that the Shelburne ministry was virtually finished. In the climactic debate of four days later, Pitt pulled himself together to deliver a stirring defence of his colleague’s policy and his own conduct which established him as a major political force. Wilberforce again spoke up for his friend, and wrote down what has become a celebrated note of Pitt’s physical sickness at the time: ‘Pitt’s famous speech on second day’s debate – first day’s not so good. Spoke three hours, till four in the morning. Stomach disordered, and actually holding Solomon’s porch door opened with one hand, while vomiting during Fox’s speech to whom he was to reply.’27

The combination of Pitt’s oratorical performances, the shortage of weighty figures in the Commons and the desperation of George III to find a parliamentary figure who could prevent the Fox-North coalition from coming to power catapulted William Pitt into the front rank of political life as a potential Prime Minister. Shelburne resigned on 24 February, but for the whole of March Pitt remained in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in a government without a leader while the King thrashed about in an increasingly desperate search for a Prime Minister he did not hate. Twice during the five-week crisis Pitt came close to accepting office as Prime Minister while still only twenty-three years old, but twice he had the good sense to recognise that he would have had no defence against a hostile House of Commons moving quickly to vote him out. The irascible King varied for five weeks between trying to insist that Pitt take office, begging other ex-ministers to do so, sending for Pitt’s uncle, Thomas Pitt, as a desperate resort -’Mr Thomas Pitt or Mr Thomas anybody’,28 threatening to abdicate and finally, in late March, accepting the Fox-North coalition into power with the Duke of Portland as its nominal head. He did this with the worst possible grace, accompanied by a fixed resolution to create no peerages or honours at their request and a secret determination to eject them from office whenever a convenient pretext arose: ‘I trust the eyes of the Nation will soon be opened as my sorrow may prove fatal to my health if I remain long in this thraldom.’29

Throughout the chaos Wilberforce remained closely connected to Pitt, both socially and politically. If he felt any jealousy about the spectacular rise to prominence of his friend he was good at hiding it, although on the day Pitt was first offered the premiership he noted: ‘24th. Dined Pitt’s – heard of the very surprising propositions.’30 When Pitt resigned at the end of March, he gravitated immediately to the happy society of Goostree’s and Wilberforce’s villa: ‘31st. Pitt resigned today. Dined Pitt’s then Goostree’s where supped. Bed almost three o’clock. April 3rd. Wimbledon, where Pitt &c. dined and slept. Evening walk – bed a little past two.’31 Released from the cares of office, Pitt started to plan a summer of travel, including a visit to France, involving Wilberforce and their close mutual friend Edward Eliot. Knowing that conspiratorial meetings were taking place between George III, Earl Temple, and the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, with the intention of putting Pitt into office in more favourable circumstances than those available in March, they kept an eye on political events, but when Parliament rose in July Fox and North were still in office, while the King chafed. Pitt wrote to Wilberforce from Brighton on 6 August: ‘I have only to tell you that I have no news, which I consider as making it pretty certain that there will be none now before the meeting of Parliament [in November]. The party to Rheims holds of course, at least as far as depends upon me.’32