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

The county’s two incumbent Members, Foljambe and Duncombe, were both ready to take the field again, Foljambe being the candidate of the Whigs, and Duncombe the choice of the Yorkshire Association. In any normal contest, these two candidates would probably have been returned again without the need for an actual poll; such was the expense and difficulty of fighting a contested election in Yorkshire that only twice that century had the voters needed to go to the ballot box, and not at all for the previous forty-three years. But there was nothing normal about 1784, and Wilberforce knew it. Such was the strength of the pro-Pitt mood, and so strong was the impression that Wilberforce had made in the Castle Yard, that by the time the rival camps retired to their respective taverns for many hours of dinner and drinking Wilberforce was being openly touted as a running mate for Duncombe in a fight to unseat Foljambe and the Whigs altogether. As squabbling and drunkenness broke out, it was Wilberforce who helped Wyvill to restore order and secure a united front ‘by showing them the folly of giving up our common object … and by reminding them of the great constitutional principles which we all maintained. This confirmed the disposition to propose me for the county, an idea which had begun to be buzzed about at dinner, among all ranks.’75 By midnight, the cry from the York Tavern was ‘Wilberforce and Liberty!’ It had taken him precisely eight hours to move from being the shrimp on the table to the joint candidate to represent the great county of Yorkshire.

The next morning, 26 March, the Yorkshire Whigs tried to salvage what they could from the situation by suggesting the agreed election of their nominee, Foljambe, and whoever was preferred by the anticoalition forces. This would inevitably have meant Duncombe. But Wilberforce had succeeded in giving the Yorkshire Association and its allies the confidence to try for both seats. Although there were two factions, Associators and non-Associators, ‘they determined that everyone should go into his own neighbourhood and see whether he had sufficient strength to encounter the great body of the aristocracy that was arrayed against us … I appeared to be so Independent and to observe so strict a neutrality that they both joined in asking me.’76 Thus was the gauntlet flung down for a full-scale election. An immense organisational effort was immediately set in train, with the Association mounting a canvassing operation with the efficiency and thoroughness of any modern political party, but with the added burden of securing the necessities of an eighteenth-century election campaign. The fulltime clerk of the Association, William Gray, appointed agents for every wapentake* with the intention of canvassing over thirteen thousand freeholders spread all over the county in just ten days. He engaged horses, chaises and inns on the road to York so that freeholders could be assured of the necessary free transportation and lodging, and secured in advance two-thirds of all the public houses and stables in the city of York for the likely duration of the poll. Plans were made to bring up to 1,300 supportive freeholders into the city each day, organised into ‘companies’ and taken to vote according to a schedule, since ‘At the last election most of them were eating and drinking whilst they should have been waiting on the road and their number helped to swell the public house bills considerably.’77 The instructions to agents give some flavour of the effort that was expected to be involved when polling itself took place. They were enjoined to ‘poll all such voters as are in the enemy’s strong country and all dubious ones as early as possible’; to ensure that freeholders arrived ‘under the lead and direction of some principal gentleman within the district’; to provide for ‘some strong active and zealous persons’ to ‘facilitate the approach of the freeholders’; to bring freeholders into the polling booths as early as possible in the day in order to ‘excite a spirit of emulation and exertion’; and ‘to have a confidential corps de reserve always ready to poll in case of exigency’.78

Such organisation was a great advantage for the Association, it being noted at the same time that ‘The hurry and eagerness commonly attendant upon the opening of canvass are great hindrances to its regular arrangement.’79 With the Whigs struggling to match either the organisational scope of the Association or the popularity of Pittite candidates, there was now every chance that Wilberforce would be elected as one of the two Members for the county. Nevertheless, it was still a good way from being a certainty, and it was therefore necessary for him to do what was perfectly common in an uncertain electoral situation in the eighteenth century: to ensure that he was elected elsewhere. In the very same election, for instance, Charles James Fox was fighting an intense battle to retain his seat in the City of Westminster – so closely fought that the poll was kept open for nearly six weeks – but had already ensured that he would be returned by a tiny electorate in the Orkney Islands. Once elected in a prestigious but risky contest, an MP would simply abandon the less distinguished of his constituencies, with the result that eighteenth-century elections were invariably followed by a swathe of by-elections to fill seats immediately vacated. To treat a rotten borough in this manner was easy enough, but to risk insulting the pride of the freemen of Hull was a more perilous proposition; Wilberforce therefore set out from York to Hull on the evening of 26 March to carry out an energetic canvass in his existing constituency. After arriving there at 2 a.m. he embarked on a tour next day, and found ‘people not pleased at my not canvassing’80 earlier. By the thirtieth he was noting: ‘Canvass all day – extremely hard work – till night – tired to death,’81 and two days later snowballs and other projectiles were thrown at him. Some effective speaking and his local popularity pulled him through, and he once again came top of the poll, although with fewer votes than in his 1780 triumph: he polled 807 votes compared to 751 for Samuel Thornton, son of John Thornton, and only 357 for a defeated and dejected David Hartley.

Duly elected for Hull on 1 April, Wilberforce was back on the road to York that same evening to resume his battle for the bigger prize. If by now he lacked energy, having considered himself thoroughly tired for at least a month, and having spent the previous two weeks continually travelling or campaigning well into the night, the ambitious twenty-four-year-old candidate certainly did not want for determination. With the canvassing of Yorkshire at fever pitch before the opening of the poll on 7 April, Wilberforce and Duncombe embarked on a tour of the West Riding towns, illustrated by his diary notes of these hectic few days:

To Rotherham – drawn into town – public dinner. At night to Sheffield – vast support – meeting at Cutler’s Hall … off to Barnsley … then to Wakefield … then off to Halifax. Drawn into town … after dinner (drunken postboy) to Bradford. Drawn into town – vast support. Then on to Leeds …82

As he travelled, express letters were being sent from Westminster by Pitt, who had been triumphantly returned for Cambridge University and could now abandon his own tame constituency of Appleby, with lists of the requests he had sent out for votes and money for Wilberforce. As things turned out, Pitt need not have worried: while his re-election for Hull had cost Wilberforce £8,807, nearly all of which had to be drawn from his own fortune, the county campaign had already brought in subscriptions and donations exceeding £18,000, along with the expectation of a great deal more. And although Wilberforce and Duncombe had ‘passed many great houses’, and ‘not one did we see that was friendly to us’, the canvass returns coming in from the freeholders of Yorkshire were truly crushing. With towns such as Wakefield and Halifax reporting margins up to thirty votes to one, Gray’s canvass reported 10,812 freeholders supporting Duncombe and Wilberforce, with only 2,758 opposed or undecided. Lord Fitzwilliam and the Whigs, moaning they had been ‘beat by the ragamuffins’, had no better option remaining than to avert both the humiliation and the expense of going to the polls. Wilberforce and Duncombe had returned to York on the evening of 6 April when, at 8 p.m. at the York Tavern, a message was received from their opponents conceding defeat without a single vote having to be cast.

It was a moment for exultation. The ‘utterly improbable’ project that Wilberforce had kept to himself until only twelve days earlier had come to fruition, and he was now to be the Member for one of the most sought-after seats in Parliament. He sat down immediately to write several letters of delight, telling Edward Eliot:

I am or at least shall be tomorrow (our enemies having this evening declared their intentions of declining a Poll)

Knight of the Shire for the

County of York.83

The celebrations were busy and varied: ‘7th. Up early – breakfasted tavern – rode frisky horse to castle – elected – chaired – dined … 8th. Walked – called – air balloon – dined …’84 When news reached London two days later, Pitt would write: ‘I can never enough congratulate you on such glorious success.’85 Across the country Pitt had won a decisive victory, remarkable for both its quality and quantity: not only did the new government have a three-figure majority in the House of Commons, but they had also won a huge proportion of those constituencies where there had been serious electoral competition, with the victory of Wilberforce as one of the jewels in Pitt’s electoral crown.

Cynical observers thought that Pitt would now be certain to include Wilberforce in the ministerial ranks. It was even thought that Wilberforce had switched constituencies with this uppermost in his mind, with Richard Sykes, from a prominent family in Hull, writing: ‘He has always lived above his income and it is certain he is now in expectation of a lucrative post from Government of which he is in the utmost need.’86 He went on to say that this would entail a by-election for the county, and ‘The accuracy of this intelligence may be depended upon,’87 showing that political gossip in the eighteenth century could be as wildly inaccurate as in any other age. Yet, however careless Wilberforce may have become about money, his election for Yorkshire made it even less likely than before that he would embark on a ministerial career. Pitt, preoccupied in the summer of 1784 with his own India Bill and his first budget, did not in any event carry out a major reshuffle of his government that year. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he had changed his opinion of Wilberforce’s suitability for high office. And from Wilberforce’s point of view, the burdens of representing and attending to his constituents had just been made vastly greater. He would now be expected to make tours of the county during the summer recess, and to represent all year round a vast range of interests, from the clothiers of Halifax to the manufacturers of Sheffield and the merchants of many small towns. An eighteenth-century county constituency did not fit well with a ministerial career: not only did it require a good deal of attention and representation, but the compulsory requirement to fight a by-election when accepting appointment as a minister could have been ruinously expensive. Contrary to the suspicions of Mr Sykes, it is likely therefore that, in Wilberforce’s own mind, his decision to stand for Yorkshire was consistent with political ambitions which were parliamentary rather than governmental. He had indeed sought greater power and prestige, but it was the prestige of an MP with elevated status and an independent power base, rather than as a minister rising in the ranks of the government of his friend.

Wilberforce was conscious from the beginning of the need to look after his new constituency. His first speech in the new Parliament, on 16 June 1784, was in favour of the principle of parliamentary reform, the much-cherished objective of the Yorkshire Association that had ensured his election. Once Parliament rose for the summer, he headed north to commune with his new constituents, becoming the ‘joy of York races’ and learning in detail about his new constituents – even years later he was still asking for lists of influential persons, graded according to their influence, ‘“Li” for little, – “Mi” for middling, – “Gr” for great, – and “V.Gr” for very great’,88 together with useful observations such as, ‘Whether he likes the leg or wing of a fowl best, that when one dines with him one may win his heart by helping him, and not be taken in by his “just which you please, sir.” ’89

After all the trials of the political season Wilberforce’s mind was once again set on travel, this time on a full-scale Continental tour. The old friend he initially asked to accompany him was unable to go, but holidaying at Scarborough later that summer Wilberforce found himself in the agreeable company of Isaac Milner, his school usher of sixteen years earlier and younger brother of Joseph. Wilberforce decided to ask Isaac to accompany him on a tour of several months with all expenses paid. It would turn out to be one of the most important decisions of his life.

* Fencing with a weapon designed for thrusting or lunging – but in this context meaning verbal fencing.

* Frances Crewe was a highly fashionable hostess and was regarded as one of the greatest beauties of her time, much admired by Fox, Burke and Sheridan.

* The counties of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and Lincolnshire were divided into wapentakes, just as most of the remainder of England was divided into hundreds.

4 Agony and Purpose

I must awake to my dangerous state, and never be at rest till I have made my peace with God.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 27 November 17851

Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.

WILLIAM PITT TO WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 2 December 17852

AFTER SUMMERING in York and Scarborough, Wilberforce set out over the Pennines in the early autumn of 1784 to visit his beloved Rayrigg, and ‘looked over all the old scenes again with vast pleasure’.3 His visit there had many frustrations: his eyes were in too poor a state for reading, no visitor of any interest passed through, and he failed to find a spot on which he could locate his ‘future residence’.4 By 20 October, after brief stops in London and Brighton, he had set out on his Continental tour and, in spite of the calm conditions, suffered from seasickness while sailing from Dover to Calais. His party travelled in two coaches. The first contained his mother, his sister and ‘a couple of sick cousins, very good girls, whose health we hope to re-establish by the change of air’.5 In the other were Wilberforce himself, a small mountain of neglected correspondence – ‘which, to my sore annoyance and discomfort, I have brought in my chaise to the heart of France’6 –and the even larger bulk of Isaac Milner.

Feeling threatened by the prospect of several months with only women of his own family for company, Wilberforce had resorted to inviting on the tour a man he did not then know very well. Yet soon he would be describing Milner as ‘a most intelligent and excellent friend of mine’.7 Milner had a broad Yorkshire accent and was physically enormous, being described in later years by Marianne Thornton as ‘a rough loud and rather coarse man’, and ‘the most enormous man it was ever my fate to see in a drawing-room’,8 but he had a gentle nature and a ready wit which Wilberforce found highly congenial. He also happened to be intellectually brilliant: shortly after Wilberforce had known him as a school usher, having been plucked away from being a Leeds weaver by his elder brother Joseph, he had entered Queens’ College Cambridge, where he revealed an extraordinary intelligence. Many years later, Cambridge dons were still discussing his triumphant progress: by 1774 his academic performance was considered ‘incomparabilis’, and two years later he was a Fellow of his college, going on to become a tutor, rector and, at the age of thirty-two, the first Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy. Some observers were even moved to believe that ‘The university, perhaps, never produced a man of more eminent abilities.’9

It says a lot for Wilberforce’s charm and reputation that such a man was happy to ask for leave of absence from his college and set off on a journey expected to last several months with the Wilberforce family in tow. Fortunately, Milner had always thought well of Wilberforce, and he presumably had the additional incentive of being able to visit foreign parts which, having never been wealthy himself, he did not expect to be able to visit on his own. Wilberforce found him ‘lively and dashing in his conversation’,10 and they were soon covering many subjects in the days and weeks they spent travelling south across France. On the journey they had much to enjoy: ‘the wines, Cote Rotie, Hermitage, &c. all strong’; along the Rhône to Avignon in a barge ‘without a cloud (in October)’; the Frenchmen ‘who always make you a bow where an Englishman would give you an oath’; the ‘large, quiet, sleepy’ town of Aix; Marseilles, ‘the most entertaining place I ever saw, all bustle and business’; and then the final journey towards Nice with ‘astonishing rocks hewn through, and ready to close over you’.11 Inside the carriage, religion was only an occasional talking point, although if it came up Milner always gave a hint of holding powerful convictions. Even back in Scarborough early that year, when Wilberforce had described an Evangelical rector as one who took things too far, Milner had replied, ‘No, how does he carry them too far?’ and continued the argument. Similarly in France, as Wilberforce ridiculed the Methodist views of his aunt and John Thornton, having ‘quite forgotten the beliefs I had when a child’,12 Milner eventually said to him, ‘Wilberforce, I don’t pretend to be a match for you in this sort of running fire. But if you really wish to discuss these topics in a serious and argumentative manner I should be most happy to enter on them with you.’13

Such a considered discussion did not take place immediately. Their arrival in Nice brought the usual round of dinners, card parties and gambling in the company of a fair slice of London society. They even experienced one of the intriguing fads of the time when an operator of animal magnetisers* ‘tried his skill upon Milner and myself but neither of us felt anything, owing perhaps to our incredulity’.14 While Mrs Wilberforce refused Sunday invitations, Milner had no such scruples: ‘he appeared in all respects like an ordinary man of the world, mixing like myself in all companies, and joining as readily as others in the prevalent Sunday parties. Indeed, when I engaged him as a companion in my tour I knew not that he had any deeper principles.’15

Yet those deeper principles would shortly emerge. It is unclear how long Wilberforce intended to stay in Nice, and even though the new session of Parliament was to begin on 25 January 1785, the happy party remained on the Riviera throughout that month. Wilberforce later remembered that ‘Many times during the month of January we carried our cold meat into some of the beautiful recesses of the mountains and rocks by which the place is surrounded on the land side and dined in the open air as we should here, in the summer.’16 Sometime that month, however, he would have received from Pitt a letter written on 19 December 1784 explaining that ‘as much as I wish you to bask on, under an Italian sun, I am perhaps likely to be the instrument of snatching you from your present paradise … A variety of circumstances concur to make it necessary to give notice immediately on the meeting of Parliament of the day on which I shall move the question of the Reform.’17 If Pitt as Prime Minister was making a major push for parliamentary reform, it was unthinkable for Wilberforce to be absent. Pitt had worked with Wyvill on a scheme which would abolish seventy-two seats in rotten boroughs and allocate them to newly populous towns and cities. Loyalty to Pitt and to Yorkshire demanded that Wilberforce be present to argue for such a proposal. As a result, it was decided that he and Milner would return to England, leaving the ladies where they were and coming back to join them in the summer. Just before leaving Nice on 5 February, Wilberforce asked Milner if a book he had happened to pick up, Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, was worth reading. Milner responded: ‘It is one of the best books ever written. Let us take it with us and read it on our journey.’18

In the whole course of Wilberforce’s life, no volume would be more influential in determining his conduct than the book he so casually selected from among the possessions of his cousin, Bessy Smith. He would write thirty-two years later to his daughter, ‘You cannot read a better book. I hope it was one of the means of turning my heart to God.’19 Philip Doddridge had published the book in 1745, six years before his death at the age of forty-nine. Doddridge’s version of ‘vital Christianity’ was itself built on the seventeenth-century work of Richard Baxter, an English Puritan minister who had become a leading Presbyterian non-conformist. Baxter had urged Christians to concentrate on the fundamental points on which the wide spread of Christian denominations should be able to reach a consensus. In his turn, Doddridge advocated Christian unity and religious toleration, along with a practical faith and a powerful vision of heaven. It was thus in the course of an uncomfortable midwinter journey across France that Wilberforce sat in his carriage absorbing many of the essentials of English Puritanism. For Doddridge set out in his book a complete framework for religious observation, and a philosophy of how to live, which initially merely caused Wilberforce to think, but which would eventually provide the framework for his whole life. The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul emphasised the importance of daily self-examination, prayer, early-morning devotions, diligence in business, prudence in recreation, the careful observation of Providence, the importance of solitude, and the value of time. It stressed the certainty of death and judgement, and the need for humankind to show its usefulness throughout a lifetime. The message of the book was designed first to be worrying: ‘Thousands are, no doubt, already in hell, whose guilt never equalled thine; and it is astonishing, that God hath spared thee to read this representation of thy case;’20 and then to be uplifting: ‘You will wish to commence a hero in the cause of Christ; opposing with a rigorous resolution the strongest efforts of the powers of darkness, the inward corruption of your own heart, and all the outward difficulties you may meet with in the way of your duty, while in the cause and in the strength of Christ you go on conquering and to conquer.’21 Doddridge’s enjoinders would subsequently become Wilberforce’s prescription for life: ‘Be an advocate for truth; be a counsellor of peace; be an example of candour; and do all you can to reconcile the hearts of men, especially of good men, to each other, however they may differ in their opinions about matters which it is impossible for good men to dispute.’22

The immediate effect on Wilberforce, no doubt encouraged by Milner, was that ‘he determined at some future season to examine the Scriptures for himself and see if things were stated there in the same manner’.23 For the moment, more immediate events would break back into his mind, for both the journey home and the political situation on his return were more difficult than he might have anticipated. The return journey involved bad roads, filthy inns and terrible food, without any of ‘those things which in England we should deem indispensable for our comfort and even our health’.24 In heavy snow in Burgundy, when Milner and Wilberforce were walking behind their chaise it slipped on the ice, and looked like toppling over a precipice with the horses, had Milner not used all his strength to hold it. The weight of Milner’s luggage might not have helped, since he was ‘invariably carrying about with him an assortment which, to most persons, appeared uselessly large, of implements of a heavy kind – such as scissors of various sizes, pincers, files, penknives, razors and even hammers’.25 After these adventures, it was 22 February before they arrived in London and Wilberforce ‘took up my quarters for a short time under the roof of Mr Pitt’,26 which literally meant lodging in 10 Downing Street, where the maid accidentally burned about fifty of his letters, many unopened: ‘I dreaded the effects on my reputation in Yorkshire but happily no bad consequence ensued.’27