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

… but forgive me if I cannot help expressing my fear that you are nevertheless deluding yourself into principles which have but too much tendency to counteract your own object, and to render your virtues and your talents useless both to yourself and mankind. I am not, however, without hopes that my anxiety paints this too strongly. For you confess that the character of religion is not a gloomy one, and that it is not that of an enthusiast. But why then this preparation of solitude, which can hardly avoid tincturing the mind either with melancholy or superstition? If a Christian may act in the several relations in life, must he seclude himself from them all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.68

Concerned that Wilberforce was about to isolate himself and make an irrevocable breach with public life, Pitt went on to ask for an urgent discussion:

What I would ask of you, as a mark both of your friendship and of the candour which belongs to your mind, is to open yourself fully and without reserve to one, who, believe me, does not know how to separate your happiness from his own. You do not explain either the degree or the duration of the retirement which you have prescribed to yourself; you do not tell me how the future course of your life is to be directed, when you think the same privacy no longer necessary; nor, in short, what idea you have formed of the duties which you are from this time to practise … I will not importune you with fruitless discussion on any opinion which you have deliberately formed … name any hour at which I can call upon you tomorrow. I am going to Kent, and can take Wimbledon in my way. Reflect, I beg of you, that no principles are the worse for being discussed, and believe me that at all events the full knowledge of the nature and extent of your opinions and intentions will be to me a lasting satisfaction.

Believe me, affectionately and unalterably yours,

W. Pitt.69

The next day Pitt did indeed call at Wimbledon. In the same house in which they had eaten, drunk and played so much, the two friends engaged in two hours of earnest discussion. Wilberforce recalled that ‘he tried to reason me out of my convictions but soon found himself unable to combat their correctness, if Christianity was true. The fact is, he was so absorbed with politics, that he had never given himself time for due reflection on religion.’70 Yet Pitt’s plea to Wilberforce that a Christian life should produce action rather than mere meditation was well considered, and may have made its mark. Wilberforce had clearly toyed with the idea of at least a period of retreat and isolation, and many other cases of religious conversion had led the individual concerned towards a life of preaching, concentration on religion, and often a lack of interest in worldly affairs. Whether Pitt influenced Wilberforce away from such a path cannot be known, but fortunately for history the next person to whom he turned in his agony was able to influence his future life with every advantage of long experience and deep religious conviction.

It was on 30 November that Wilberforce first ‘thought seriously this evening with going to converse with Mr Newton – waked in the night – obliged to compel myself to think of God’. With Milner experiencing his own conversion crisis, Wilberforce needed to draw on the strength of someone with long-established beliefs. By 2 December, the day before his conversation with Pitt, Wilberforce noted: ‘resolved again about Mr Newton. It may do good; he will pray for me his experience may enable him to direct me to new grounds of humiliation … It can do no harm … Kept debating in that unsettled way to which I have used myself, whether to go to London or not, and then how – wishing to save expense, I hope with a good motive, went at last in the stage to town – inquired for old Newton; but found he lived too far off for me to see him …’71 Now possessed of sufficient courage to discuss his beliefs with the great John Newton, the very man he had ‘reverenced as a parent’ in his youthful days at Clapham, he made his way into London from Wimbledon again on Sunday, 4 December, and delivered a letter to Newton’s church asking for a meeting. The letter showed his dread of his evangelicalism being publicly revealed before he was ready for it: ‘I am sure you will hold yourself bound to let no-one living know of this application, or of my visit till I release you from the obligation. p.s. Remember that I must be secret, and that the gallery of the House is now so universally attended, that the face of a Member of Parliament is pretty well-known.’72

Newton, the former slave trader, was now sixty years old, rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London and the author of many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. He had wise counsel for Wilberforce, such as telling him not to become cut off from his friends. Meeting Wilberforce three days after the delivery of the letter, ‘he told me he always had entertained hopes and confidence that God would sometime bring me to him’, and produced ‘a calm, tranquil state’ in Wilberforce’s tortured mind.73 It was Newton who not only calmed and soothed Wilberforce but, from that time and for a good decade afterwards, fortified him in combining his religious beliefs with a continued political career. In 1786 he would write of Wilberforce to the poet William Cowper: ‘I hope the Lord will make him a blessing both as a Christian and a statesman. How seldom do these characters coincide!! But they are not incompatible.’74 Two years later he wrote to Wilberforce: ‘It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of his Church, and for the good of the nation,’75 and in 1796: ‘I believe you are the Lord’s servant, and are in the post which He has assigned you; and though it appears to me more arduous, and requiring more self-denial than my own, I know that He who has called you to it can afford you strength according to your day.’76 And it was Newton who gradually widened the circle of friends in the Evangelical community to whom he could turn for advice. By Christmas Eve 1785 John Thornton was writing to Wilberforce: ‘you may easier conceive than I can express the satisfaction I had from a few minutes’ converse with Mr Newton yesterday afternoon. As in nature, so in Grace, what comes very quickly forward rarely abides long: I am aware of your difficulties which call for great prudence and caution. Those that believe, must not make haste, but be content to go God’s pace and watch the leadings of his providence.’77

Thornton advised Wilberforce not to make haste, and to accept that such a change took time. Through December and into the new year Wilberforce’s many doubts about his own worthiness and ability to uphold his new beliefs did indeed continue. His diary is peppered with such statements as: ‘I am colder and more insensible than I was – I ramble – oh God, protect me from myself’; ‘colder than ever – very unhappy – called at Newton’s and bitterly moved; he comforted me’; and ‘was strengthened in prayer, and first I shall be able to live more to God, which determined to do – much affected by Doddridge’s directions for spending time, and hoped to conform to them in some degree: it must be by force at first, for I find I perpetually wander from serious thoughts when I am off my guard’.78 Steadily, as the weeks went by, his willpower and new convictions prevailed. He resigned from the clubs at which he had passed so many happy evenings, spent many hours each day studying the Bible, and took new lodgings in London ‘at one of the Adelphi hotels’,79 which gave him easier access to Evangelical preaching. He wrote earnestly to his sister about his beliefs, and reassuringly to his mother about his continuance in public life: he would not ‘fly from the post where Providence has placed me’.80 He continued to visit Downing Street and attend the House of Commons, his mind more at peace as he realised he could live up to the standards he had set himself without forsaking the world he had always known.

One study of religious conversion contends that once conversion is complete ‘there is the sensation of liberation and victory, which the convert displays by a powerful and integral joy of the spirit’. The convert also has a ‘sense more or less like the sense of vision or touch of nearness to God’, and of ‘an answering touch which thrills and recreates him’.81 By Easter 1786 Wilberforce was writing to his sister from Stock in Essex on a beautiful day: ‘the day has been delightful. I was out before six … I think my own devotions become more fervent when offered in this way amidst the general chorus with which all nature seems to be swelling the song of praise and thanksgiving; and accept the time which has been spent at church and at dinner … and neither in the sanctuary nor at table I trust, had I a heart unwarmed with gratitude to the giver of all good things.’82 William Wilberforce had found his faith.

Wilberforce would later describe his emergence as an Evangelical convert as being akin to wakening from a dream and recovering ‘the use of my reason after a delirium’.83 His governing motives had been ‘emulation, and a desire of distinction … ardent after the applause of my fellow creatures, I quite forgot that I was an accountable being; that I was hereafter to appear at the bar of God’.84 Now he believed ‘that if Christianity were not a fable, it was infinitely important to study its precepts, and when known to obey them’,85 and resolved to regulate his political conduct according to a new golden rule, ‘to do as I would be done by’.86 He was clear that he would stay in politics, but from now on his political activity would be directed and armed by the philosophy of Christian evangelicalism, of which he was now an adherent and would eventually become a leader.

Most people found it hard to distinguish between the Evangelicals and Methodists. As Sydney Smith wrote in 1808: ‘Arminian and Calvinistic Methodists and the Evangelical clergymen of the Church of England … We shall use the general term of Methodism to designate those three classes of fanatics, not troubling ourselves to point out the finer shades and nicer discriminations of lunacy, but treating them all as in one general conspiracy against common sense and rational orthodox Christianity.’87 Another observer had written in 1772: ‘As soon as a person begins to show any symptoms of seriousness and strictness more than the fashion of the age allows he is called a Methodist, though he may happen to have no sort of connection with them; and when once this stigma is fixed upon him, he becomes like a deer whom the sportsmen have marked out for a chase.’88 Evangelicals such as Newton also blurred matters by insisting that religious experience was more important than ‘nice distinctions’ between different categories of Christians. Methodism and evangelicalism were indeed part of the same religious movement. They both had their intellectual origins in German Pietism and English Puritanism, which had stressed ‘a reformation or purification in worship as well in life’. They both contended that every person was lost in sin and could only be rescued and achieve personal salvation through faith in Christ. They had both moved on from the seventeenth-century Puritans of Civil War times by determinedly staying within the Church of England (although the Methodists broke away in 1795), and giving complete loyalty to the Crown. The general themes of Methodists and Evangelicals were indistinguishable, and Methodists would generally have regarded themselves as Evangelicals: it was not sufficient merely to observe the forms of being a Christian; eternal damnation could only be avoided by allowing Christian beliefs to guide all the habits and actions of daily life. Their theology was no different from that of the established Church, but the seriousness with which they practised it most certainly was.

Any doctrinal differences between Methodists and Evangelicals were blurred by the cross-currents of beliefs within each grouping: some Evangelicals, such as Newton, held to the Calvinistic concept of predestination favoured by some Methodists; others were in accord with Wesley himself in believing in unlimited atonement and the free will of human beings. The crucial differences between Methodists and Evangelicals were therefore largely of nuance and organisation, but these led to important differences in the type of person likely to join each group. Methodists were organised around their own Societies and Conferences, with a national and eventually international network and hierarchy, while Evangelicals were entirely outside such machinery. Evangelicals tended to be more in tune with prevailing English culture, less likely to separate themselves from society, less austere in their attitudes to simple sports and leisure, more likely to encourage a broad education, and readier to involve themselves in public life. Such differences of view partly stemmed from, and in turn strengthened, the general tendency for leading Evangelicals to be drawn from the more highly educated and business-orientated classes, while the tens of thousands of converts to Methodism were drawn heavily from lower income groups. Wilberforce was therefore a natural Evangelical, and would in due course find no shortage of people with a similar background to his own who could share his habits and thinking.

If Evangelicalism was more an attitude towards Christianity than a separate branch of the faith, what were its defining attributes, as now adopted by Wilberforce? One was certainly a belief in the all-encompassing role of Providence: God’s hand could be detected in events great and small. It was Providence, he believed, that had enabled him to win his seat in Parliament by methods he would later have found unacceptable, thus launching him on a political life when an earlier conversion would have kept him away from it. If he escaped without injury from an accident, as he did when the linchpin on his coach fell out, he saw Providence at work; when Napoleon dominated Europe, Wilberforce considered him ‘manifestly an instrument in the hands of Providence’, and ‘When God has done with him he will probably show how easily he can get rid of him.’89 That anything would happen entirely accidentally was now alien to Wilberforce’s thinking: ‘How I abhor that word, fortunate; as if things happen by chance!’90

A second fundamental aspect of Evangelical beliefs was that Christian principles should be applied to all areas of life. They should guide every aspect of human life, not merely be added on to other beliefs or conflicting activities. As a result, drunkenness, gambling, duelling, the unfairness of the penal system, every form of immorality and the lack of observation of the Sabbath were all targets of Evangelical attack. Evangelicals considered themselves as ambassadors of God on earth, and to be at all times, an example of his godliness, holiness and compassion. Such activities as card-playing, public dancing and horse-racing were a distraction from devotion to God. Worldly indulgence was to be avoided, and leisure was seen as an opportunity for renewal rather than an end in itself. By contrast, prayer and devotion were essential: ‘There is nothing more fatal to the life and power of religion; nothing which makes God more certainly withdraw his grace’, than neglect of prayer.91 And it was not sufficient for that prayer to be calculating, or to signify mere intellectual acceptance of Christian truth: an Evangelical needed to show that his ‘whole heart is engaged’,92 as Wilberforce approvingly noted of Newton.

Above all, the Evangelicals felt an overpowering sense of accountability, and a responsibility to God, for their actions. As one commentator would later note of them: ‘I recall an abiding sense of religious responsibility, a self-sacrificing energy and works of mercy, an Evangelistic zeal, an aloofness from the world, and a level of saintliness in daily life such as I do not expect again to see realised on earth. Everything down to the minutest detail of action and speech were considered with reference to eternity.’93 Although he had always been good at documenting his actions, Wilberforce would now do so with all the more rigour, as humble preparation for a day of judgement. His money, abilities and power had been given to him by God, and he considered himself accountable in the smallest detail for how he would now use them. His mission now was to apply Christian principles as he understood them to the world as he saw it around him. He would say later that ‘I was strongly impressed with a sense of it being incumbent on me to perform my Parliamentary duties with increased diligence and conscientiousness.’94 As Newton wrote to him in March 1786, they had ‘great subjects to discuss, great plans to promote, great prospects to contemplate’.95 Now Wilberforce would turn his own mind to what those subjects and plans would be.

* ‘Animal magnetism’ was meant to have great healing powers, released by powerful magnets or other devices. For a time it was taken seriously by the French Academy of Science.

* Richmond is credited with the idea of using boards with movable numbers to inform congregations about which hymns they would be singing. He was the author of The Dairyman’s Daughter.

* Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French philosopher whose book Pensées included a section on ‘The Misery of Man Without God’.

** Joseph Butler was famous for his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736).

5 Diligence and New Causes

What madness I said to myself, is this! Here have I been throwing away my time all my life past!

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, autumn 17861

There is a prospect of his being a very useful member of society if his life is preserved.

CATHERINE KING TO GEORGE KING, November 17862

THE WILLIAM WILBERFORCE who resumed his attendance at the House of Commons in the spring of 1786 was a changed man, yet this would not have been immediately apparent to an observer in the public gallery who happened to study his parliamentary behaviour. In time, his conversion to Evangelical Christianity would give him the moral force and unshakeable will to become one of the greatest campaigners, and liberators, in the whole course of British history. In old age, Wilberforce would write to his son Samuel, ‘The best preparation for being a good politician, as well as a superior man in every other line, is to be a truly religious man. For this includes in it all those qualities which fit men to pass through life with benefit to others and with reputation to ourselves.’3 Yet the immediate impact on his performance as a Member of Parliament was subtle rather than sharp, underlining the fact that his conversion reinforced many of his existing traits more than it created in him a new personality. Determined to apply himself with diligence to the post in which Providence had placed him, and writing to Wyvill that he now had a ‘higher sense of the duties of my station, and a firmer resolution to discharge them with fidelity and zeal’,4 Wilberforce had always been an assiduous MP by the standards of the eighteenth century, in attending both to the chamber of the House of Commons and to the needs of his Yorkshire constituents. Resolved now, as he had told Pitt, ‘to be no Party man’, he had always remained nominally an Independent, and had from his first election to the Commons styled himself as a man who would pursue his own views. For some years his theoretical profession of independence but practical loyalty to Pitt had given him an ambiguous political stance; his new approach to life led to a shift of emphasis within that ambiguity rather than a departure from it. And while he would now take up a variety of well-intentioned causes, many of them were, at least initially, taken up at the behest of his constituents, as they might have been before, with his speeches on the main issues of the day indicating no change in his wider political philosophy.

April 1786 saw the beginning of a series of highly charged debates on the floor of the House of Commons about the conduct of Warren Hastings as Governor General of India. When Hastings had returned to Britain the previous year, he had expected the plaudits of the nation for a period of rule which had seen him use every military and economic means to extend and confirm British power in India; he had been a victor in war, and a guarantor of great profits. In the process, however, he had created two powerful groups of enemies within the British body politic. The first consisted of those who had been his political rivals in India, such as Philip Francis, who also returned to Britain and entered the House of Commons to pursue him. The second group was led by Edmund Burke, for whom the ruthless and arbitrary nature of Hastings’ governing of India was in conflict with their sense of British justice and law, and who, perhaps significantly for Wilberforce’s future work, demonstrated a new level of concern about the colonial mistreatment of native peoples.

As Burke thundered out his accusations of tyrannical conduct against Hastings that April, Wilberforce had no problem as a backbencher in joining in with Pitt’s official line: he accused Burke of an excess of passion, and in a speech on 1 June argued that it was too late now to blame Hastings for actions taken many years earlier under the government of Lord North: ‘To punish Mr Hastings now was like eating the mutton of the sheep which we have previously shorn of its fleece. Certainly we ought to have recalled him when he committed the fault; but having suffered him to wear out his constitution in our service, it was wrong to try him when he could be of no farther use.’5 Wilberforce therefore joined Pitt in voting down the initial charges against Hastings. When he did turn against Hastings, it was once again in conjunction with Pitt, and seemingly at his behest. Pitt’s celebrated volte face followed him beckoning to Wilberforce to join him behind the Speaker’s chair and saying, ‘Does not this look very ill to you?’, with Wilberforce replying, ‘Very bad indeed.’6 Pitt then went to the dispatch box to declare that the latest charge against Hastings did indeed concern behaviour which was ‘beyond all proportion exorbitant, unjust, and tyrannical’,7 and that it could merit his impeachment. This bombshell paved the way for a dramatic but undistinguished chapter in British history: the trial of Warren Hastings would eventually commence amidst huge excitement in Westminster Hall in 1788, consume great political energy and substantial resources, and after seven long years of proceedings would end in his acquittal in 1795, a ruined and embittered man. Wilberforce would always maintain that Pitt’s judgement on Hastings was based on nothing other than the evidence: ‘He paid as much impartial attention as if were a jury-man,’8 yet in thinking this Wilberforce may have been a little naïve, since Pitt was probably looking for a reason to abandon Hastings as a means of disarming his own opponents.

Wilberforce was still essentially loyal to Pitt, and recorded that ‘I was surprised to find how generally we agreed.’9 The following session would see him giving energetic support to one of Pitt’s earliest achievements, the concluding of a commercial treaty with France. This treaty, which opened up many domestic markets to trade, did not create the alarm occasioned by the ill-fated Irish Propositions two years earlier, and Wilberforce could support it without any qualms whatsoever: it accorded with his previous views, was championed by his friend, and ‘It gave him a particular pleasure to be able to say that whilst he was acting in conformity with the dictates of his own conscience, he was voting agreeably to the general wishes of his constituents.’10

Such support for the Pitt ministry, coming from a man with such close personal connections with the Prime Minister, would have gone unremarked at Westminster. It confirmed Wilberforce as an active and valued debater of the great questions of the day. But ironically it was when he struck out on his own in this period that he ran not only into greater political obstacles, but into a degree of self-doubt; and not only adopted worthwhile measures of reform, but supported others which appeared rather bizarre. The first measure he attempted to take through the Commons in 1786 was a Registration Bill, a cherished project of parliamentary reformers such as Wyvill and Lord Mahon, Pitt’s brother-in-law. Introduced into the Commons by the two Yorkshire Members, Wilberforce and Duncombe, on 15 May, it was an attempt to bring about some positive change in the electoral system after the heavy defeat of wider reform the previous month. The plan was to improve the conduct of county elections by requiring voters to be registered in advance, the polling to take place in a single day but at a variety of locations. It was, therefore, a precursor of modern electoral arrangements, but it was opposed by many of Wilberforce’s own constituents, leading him to think that he had made a mistake in introducing it, that it had been a ‘very ill-advised measure’, and that it would be better that it were defeated in the House of Lords in case ‘the odium we have incurred by it will … be quite decisive of our fate at the next general election’.11 The Bill was indeed too much for their Lordships, and was never passed; this was possibly the last time in his life that Wilberforce had cause to be grateful for the entrenched and unyielding conservatism of the House of Lords.