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

Most of Pitt’s letters to Wilberforce from this time reveal two principal concerns about his friend: the first that he was having serious trouble with his eyesight, and the second that his punctuality and travel plans could not be relied upon. Pitt would end letters with: ‘I am very glad to see you write without the assistance of a secretary. Perhaps, however, you will not be able to read without the assistance of a decypherer. At least in compassion to your eyesight it is as well for me to try it no further,’33 and Wilberforce’s diaries in 1783 have many entries such as ‘My eyes bad. Bed early,’34 and ‘Bad day. Eyes indifferent.’35 In Pitt’s concern about Wilberforce’s timekeeping there is a friendly hint of a more widespread opinion which had taken shape about him, that, as the first Lord Carrington was later to put it, ‘As to his fitting office his careless and inaccurate method of doing business rendered him wholly unfit for it.’36 Pitt’s letter of 6 August enjoins Wilberforce to ‘recollect that you have to deal with punctual men, who would not risk their characters by being an hour too late for any appointment’.37 By 22 August, with the trip to France imminent, Pitt was writing to Wilberforce:

Dear Wilberforce,

I hope you have found benefit enough from your inland rambling, to be in perfect order now for crossing the seas. Eliot and I meet punctually at Bankes’s the 1st September, and in two days after shall be in London. Pray let us see you, or hear from you by that time, and do not verify my prophecy of detaining us a fortnight and jilting us at the end of it. We shall really not have a day to lose, which makes me pursue you with this hasty admonition.

Adieu ever yours, W Pitt.38

Pitt need not have worried on this occasion about Wilberforce’s reliability, for he duly turned up at Bankes’s house in Dorset in early September after a visit to his family and constituency in Hull. Pitt should, however, have been even more concerned about Wilberforce’s eyesight, because he nearly shot him while taking aim at a partridge. Wilberforce was sceptical about whether he had come so close to wiping out the nation’s political future, but, ‘So at least,’ he later recorded, ‘my companions affirmed, with a roguish wish, to make the most of my short-sightedness and inexperience in field sports.’39

With the naïvety of young men who had never set foot outside their own country before, Wilberforce, Pitt and Eliot sailed for Calais in early September without the preparation and documents which were necessary for comfortable travel overseas in the eighteenth century. Having arrived in France with only a letter of introduction to a M. Coustier of Rheims, who was assumed to be a senior businessman or banker, Wilberforce described what happened next in a letter to Henry Bankes:

From Calais we made directly for Rheims, and the day after our arrival dressed ourselves unusually well, and proceeded to the house of Mons. Coustier to present, with not a little awe, our only letters of recommendation. It was with some surprise that we found Mons. Coustier behind a counter distributing figs and raisins. I had heard that it was very usual for gentlemen on the continent to practise some handicraft trade or other for their amusement, and therefore for my own part I concluded that his taste was in the fig way, and that he was only playing at grocer for his diversion; and viewing the matter in this light, I could not help admiring the excellence of his imitation; but we soon found that Mons. Coustier was a ‘véritable epicier,’ and that not a very eminent one.40

Not only was M. Coustier not one of the local gentry, he could not even effect an introduction to them. The disorganised trio spent over a week at an inn, ‘without making any great progress in the French language, which could not indeed be expected of us, as we spoke to no human being but each other and our Irish courier’.41 But eventually they persuaded their grocer ‘to put on a bag and sword and carry us to the intendant of the police, whom he supplied with groceries’.42 The astonished police officer initially found their story incredible, and told the Abbé de Lageard, who under the Archbishop of Rheims wielded civic as well as religious authority, that ‘There are three Englishmen here of very suspicious character. They are in a wretched lodging, they have no attendants, yet their courier says that they are “grands seigneurs” and that one of them is the son of the great Chatham; but it must be impossible, they must be “des intrigants”.’43 Having thus come close to being arrested for spying, the three now found their luck changed dramatically: the Abbé was a generous man who provided huge meals, long conversations and ‘the best wine the country can afford’.44 After a week of such indulgence they were presented to the Archbishop, whose accessibility and normality made a very positive impression on Wilberforce: ‘N.B. Archbishops in England are not like Archevêques in France; these last are jolly fellows of about forty years of age, who play at billiards, &c. like other people.’45

Having turned themselves from suspicious strangers into local celebrities in Rheims, the travellers were able to proceed to Paris, where even the Queen, Marie Antoinette, had heard about their time with the grocer and teased them about it. Joining the French court at its hunting retreat of Fontainebleau, they embarked on a whirlwind of meals, opera, cards, backgammon and billiards, and were often in the company of Marie Antoinette, whom Wilberforce found ‘a monarch of most engaging manners and appearance’.46 He wrote on his return that ‘they all, men and women, crowded round Pitt in shoals’.47 Such scenes must have been an enduring reminder to Wilberforce and Eliot that their friend already carried with him immense fame and prestige. The world of European politics was thrown open to them; they met Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin, and while Pitt was stag-hunting, Eliot and Wilberforce were taken to see Louis XVI himself, a ‘clumsy, strange figure in immense boots’.48 Eating, drinking and gambling were their vices for the trip, and there are no accounts of the three young men becoming intimate with the local women. Pitt had no hesitation in refusing the offer of marriage to the daughter of the vastly wealthy and powerful Jacques Necker – she would subsequently almost rival him as an antagonist of Napoleon as Madame de Staël. At this stage of their lives, none of the three had marriage in mind. Wilberforce had already rejected one overture himself, saying that he preferred to remain ‘that isolated unproductive and stigmatised thing, a Bachelor’.49 They just had time to see the sights of Paris, ‘going every night to a play, of which we were not able to make out a syllable’,50 before their six-week visit to France was ended abruptly. On 22 October 1783 a special messenger arrived for Pitt, summoning him back to England with all possible speed. By the twenty-fourth they were on the road from Dover to London. One of the greatest constitutional crises of British history was imminent. However great their attachment and friendship, Pitt, Wilberforce and Eliot would never enjoy such carefree travels together again.

Wilberforce noted that he returned ‘to England … and secret plottings – the King groaning under the Ministry that had been imposed on him’.51 He was back to the familiar life of Wimbledon, Goostree’s and late-night dinners. Pitt, Eliot and Pitt’s elder brother, Lord Chatham, were his most frequent dining companions, but he was still sufficient of an independent, at least nominally, to be invited to dinner at Downing Street by the Duchess of Portland with Charles James Fox in attendance. Even so, there could be little doubt where Wilberforce would stand in the great confrontation between Pitt and Fox which was about to grip the nation.

After seven months in government, Fox, the inveterate gambler, decided to risk all on his East India Bill in the House of Commons. More than two centuries later, it is sometimes difficult to grasp the huge importance of India in eighteenth-century British politics. British business in India was conducted under the auspices of the East India Company, but the scale of the fortunes to be made and the importance of the decisions taken within the Company, which could affect the lives of millions of people and determine the course of a war or the duration of peace, meant that East India business was increasingly the business of the British government. In the 1770s Lord North had attempted to put the affairs of the East India Company on an acceptable political footing, introducing a Governor General, a Council and a Supreme Court. These reforms were now seen as failing, partly because of the intense loathing for each other evidenced by the Governor General, Warren Hastings, on the one hand and the members of the Council, such as Philip Francis, on the other. In the early 1780s Fox’s great ally Edmund Burke had led the denunciations of Hastings and the parliamentary assault on the alleged mismanagement of Indian affairs. Now they were in power, Fox and Burke intended to bring true political accountability to the Company’s decisions. Their Bill, presented to Parliament on 18 November 1783, included a proposal to create a Board of seven Commissioners, appointed by Parliament and with extensive powers over the officers and business of the East India Company, thus providing political authority over the Company’s management.

This was no innocent proposal. So extensive were the riches to be acquired in India that the power of the seven Commissioners to make key appointments within the East India Company would make them very powerful men. Furthermore, their appointment for fixed terms by parliamentary vote meant that the Fox-North majority would be able to determine all seven Commissioners to begin with, that they could not be immediately dismissed by a new administration, and that the King was shut out of a vital area of patronage and influence. Such would be the patronage accruing to the Fox-North coalition once they carried the Bill that it would materially consolidate their hold on power at Westminster. Well-intentioned as it may also have been, the East India Bill was therefore a direct challenge to the opposition and to George III to do their worst.

Fox intended to rush the Bill through within weeks as Pitt sought frantically to bring MPs to Westminster and denounced it as ‘one of the most boldest, most unprecedented, most desperate and alarming attempts at the exercise of tyranny that ever disgraced the annals of this or any other country’.52 Wilberforce was there to help his friend. In a debate on 20 November he spoke ‘with humour and ability’ and said that ‘If the present Bill passed we might see the government of Great Britain set up in India, instead of that of India in Great Britain.’53 That Wilberforce was speaking at Pitt’s behest rather than in any way representing the wider views of the independent MPs became clear when Fox carried the Bill through the Commons with three-figure majorities and, in early December, proudly carried it to the House of Lords for approval.

It was a gamble too far. Earl Temple warned the King that the Bill was ‘a plan to take more than half the royal power, and by that means to disable His Majesty for the rest of the reign’.54 After quietly consulting Pitt through an intermediary, George III took the unprecedented step of secretly asking members of the House of Lords to vote against the Bill, and then dismissed the Fox-North coalition from office on the grounds that their measure had been defeated in Parliament. On 19 December 1783, George III appointed Pitt as Prime Minister, even though Fox and North clearly continued to command majority support in the House of Commons. Few events in the entire history of the British constitution have roused such intense passions as this brutal exercise of royal power. To supporters of the King, he had been justified in ridding himself of ministers ‘who held him in bondage, and who meditated to render that bondage perpetual’.55 But to opponents, the dismissal by the King of a government with a clear majority in the House of Commons, and the handing out of royal instructions to members of the House of Lords on how to vote, were utterly unconstitutional and a total violation of the constitutional settlement of 1688. As an enraged Charles James Fox put it to the House of Commons, it was an issue which would decide ‘whether we are henceforward free men or slaves; whether this House is the palladium of liberty or the engine of despotism’.56 Pitt, at twenty-four by far the youngest Prime Minister in British history, would take office in the most difficult conceivable circumstances, on the back of a constitutional manoeuvre which was dubious at best and with a majority of MPs determined to remove him.

Seasoned observers believed Pitt to have little chance of surviving in office. Wilberforce himself recorded one of the most famous descriptions of the fledgling government in his diary on 22 December as Earl Temple, one of the few senior politicians prepared to join Pitt in the cabinet, resigned after only three days in office:

22nd. Lord Temple Resigned. No dissolution. Drove about for Pitt. Sat at home. Then Goostrees. ‘So your friend Mr Pitt means to come in,’ said Mrs Crewe;* ‘Well, he may do what he likes during the holidays, but it will only be a mince-pie administration depend on it.’57

The mince-pie administration, it was believed, would not last far into January 1784, but Pitt spent the period forming his government and winning over some MPs as best he could. Wilberforce was present throughout many key decisions – ‘23rd. Morning Pitt’s … Pitt nobly firm. Evening Pitt’s. Cabinet formed.’58 Pitt managed to bring in the relatively undistinguished Lord Sydney as Home Secretary and Earl Carmarthen as Foreign Secretary, but it was scornfully noted in many quarters that the only distinguishing feature of his government was their collective capacity for drink. For junior ministerial positions Pitt was able to look to some of his friends and personal allies, but at no stage does he appear to have contemplated asking Wilberforce, perhaps his closest friend and companion, to join the ranks of the ministers. Wilberforce could have been forgiven for having been puzzled by this. Leaving Downing Street on the evening of 23 December he said to Tom Steele, another MP and close friend of Pitt, ‘Pitt must take care whom he makes Secretary of the Treasury,’ only to receive the reply, ‘Mind what you say, for I am Secretary of the Treasury.’59 There is no record of Pitt offering office to Wilberforce and him refusing it. The subject seems simply not to have come up, either then or on any subsequent occasion.

Why would Pitt not offer a position to a friend he particularly trusted and liked, and who had already proved his parliamentary ability? Wilberforce was still only a junior MP, but so were several of the new ministers, including the Prime Minister himself. He needed more experience in debate, but so did many others, including Steele. He was popular, and could have held some sway over the Independent MPs whose votes would be desperately needed in the weeks ahead. The answer may be that Wilberforce was determined, even at this stage, to retain his nominal independence and to resist taking on a ministerial office which would have put an end to his travels to his beloved Lake District and elsewhere. He may even have made this clear to Pitt during their many long evenings at Wimbledon or in France, without making any record of it. Perhaps more likely, Pitt knew Wilberforce well enough, or thought he did, not to offer him a position which required skills of management and administration. His friends clearly thought of him as often being disorganised or late, not much of a recommendation in the days when ministers did most of their own work, with very few officials to assist them. And could a man who wrote to Henry Bankes earlier that year to say that his eyes had been so weak that he had been unable to write a letter for two or three weeks, carry out any function which involved the reading and writing of scores of letters each day? It would not have been difficult for Pitt to come to the conclusion that Wilberforce, however valuable as a personal friend and political ally, was neither physically nor temperamentally suited to ministerial office. If he had thought otherwise, Wilberforce’s life could well have run a very different course.

The passionate Commons debates of January to March 1784, as Fox inflicted one defeat after another on the infant administration while Pitt stoically refused to resign, were exhausting to many of the participants. Wilberforce was continually active on Pitt’s behalf, keeping in touch with the Independents, who at one stage made a serious move to bring about a grand coalition as a mediated solution to the constitutional impasse, voting regularly in the Commons and giving Pitt moral support. On the night of 28 February he called at White’s to see Pitt after he had been rescued from a violent affray in St James’s Street, and stayed up as so often until three in the morning. Two days later he spoke in the debate which became the climactic confrontation of the crisis, asserting that the conduct of Pitt ‘was dictated by a laudable ambition, which he would always be proud to cherish, as it tended to the salvation of the country’.60 He noted that night that he was ‘extremely tired’.61 As it happened, the debate of 1 March 1784 opened the way to Pitt’s triumph. Two months previously, Fox had been defeating him by majorities of more than fifty on the floor of the House of Commons. That night the majority against Pitt fell to only one. In the meantime loyal addresses had poured in from all over the nation acclaiming the appointment of Pitt and the actions of the King. Pitt now had the necessary support and the justification for a dissolution of Parliament. The most tumultuous general election of the eighteenth century was about to take place. It was a contest for which Wilberforce harboured a private hope, one so secret he had shared it with no one else.

The events of late March 1784 would lead Wilberforce to display to the full his ability to combine clear support for a cause with a mastery of the practical minutiae of politics. They would prove that his eloquence and determination were major forces to be reckoned with, and they would elevate him, against all expectations except his own, into being one of the most prestigious Members of Parliament in the land.

With a general election imminent, Wilberforce set out initially not to Hull, where he would be expected to run for re-election, but to the city of York, where a major meeting of freeholders from across Yorkshire was due to take place on 25 March. He did this even though ‘he knew … nobody in York but Mr Mason the poet’.62 Such a meeting, in this case called to consider a loyal address to the King approving his recent actions, was of sufficient importance to carry national weight, for Yorkshire was generally considered to be a county of the highest political importance. This was partly on account of its size, in terms of both geography and electorate, with over twenty thousand freeholders eligible to vote: these were residents in towns and villages from all over Yorkshire, except those who returned MPs from their own boroughs. A successful election for the county of Yorkshire required a candidate to have recourse to either great popularity or enormous expense. Furthermore, the politics of the county in 1784 provided a major test for some of the principal political interests of the nation. It was in Yorkshire that some of the great Whig families particularly expected to hold sway, including the Fitzwilliams (Earl Fitzwilliam had succeeded his uncle, the Marquis of Rockingham, as one of the great landed magnates of the north) and Cavendishes. It was also the domain of the Yorkshire Association, formed by the Reverend Christopher Wyvill five years earlier to campaign for parliamentary reform, and now using its established organisation to campaign against the Fox-North coalition. The scene was thus set for a major confrontation at York, with both sides striving to bring their supporters to the city for 25 March in order to carry or defeat the address to the King, with the added expectation of this being immediately followed by a trial of strength as to who would be returned as the county’s two MPs.

The influence of the Whig Lords was so great in the county that Wilberforce doubted that it would be possible to ‘get up an opposition in Yorkshire’.63 He arrived in York on 22 March, met Wyvill, helped to draw up the address to the King, and prepared for the meeting on the twenty-fifth, which was a ‘cold hailing day’64 with a huge crowd assembled in the Castle Yard from ten o’clock in the morning to half-past four in the afternoon. There, in a ‘wonderful meeting for order and fair hearing’,65 the proposers of the address came up against the full firepower of the Yorkshire Whigs: Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord John Cavendish (the former Chancellor of the Exchequer), Lord Carlisle and Lord Surrey (the future Duke of Norfolk) were assembled to denounce the Pitt ministry. As Wilberforce prepared to speak late into the meeting he had two powerful forces working in his favour: the first was that a national tide of opinion was running in Pitt’s favour, creating, perhaps uniquely in the eighteenth century, a countrywide ‘swing’ of opinion in favour of the new government, irrespective of local factors. Across the country, county meetings had voted loyal addresses, and in the coming days would voice such vociferous hostility to candidates representing Fox and North that many would stand down rather than meet the expense of a doomed contest. The combined impact of the unprincipled nature of the coalition, affection for the King, support for the apparently incorruptible nature of Pitt and the distribution by a burgeoning newspaper industry of far more political information and caricature than had ever been seen before, was about to unseat scores of opposition MPs and give Pitt a huge majority.

The second factor working in Wilberforce’s favour was his own native ability to command a huge meeting despite his tiny physical stature. Many of the crowd of four thousand had been unable to hear properly, amidst bad weather and weak speeches. An eyewitness thought, as Wilberforce mounted the platform, that the weather was so bad ‘that it seemed as if his slight frame would be unable to make head against its violence’.66 As it turned out, other observers would consider it ‘impossible, though at the distance of so many years to forget his speech, or the effect which it produced’.67 James Boswell told Henry Dundas that ‘I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but, as I listened, he grew and grew until the shrimp became a whale.’68 Newspapers considered that his speech showed ‘such an exquisite choice of expression, and pronounced with such rapidity, that we are unable to do it justice in any account we can give of it’,69 that it included both an effective answering of the arguments of the Whigs and the successful spreading of fear among the suddenly attentive audience: ‘He dwelt long on the odious East India Bill; read several clauses of it … he alarmed the Freeholders, by shewing that it might have been a Precedent for exercising the same tyranny over the property of every Man in the Kingdom.’70

This was a masterly politician and orator at work. To complete the effect, his speech was interrupted after an hour by the arrival of a King’s messenger, who pushed through the crowd and handed up to him a letter from Pitt himself. As the first sentence of the letter gave him the information that Parliament would be dissolved that very day, he was able to announce this immediately to the steadily more supportive crowd, drawing attention to his own powerful connections and provoking a new wave of enthusiasm. He took care not to read out a later section of the letter which had instructed him to ‘tear the enemy to pieces’, and certainly did not reveal Pitt’s comment that ‘I am told Sir Robert Hildyard is the right candidate for the county.’71 That was a matter on which Wilberforce had other ideas.

As Wilberforce would later confide in a letter to a friend: ‘I had formed within my own heart the project of standing for the county. To anyone besides myself I was aware that it must appear so mad a scheme that I never mentioned it to Mr Pitt, or any of my political connexions. It was undoubtedly a bold idea but I was then very ambitious.’72 He knew that since he was not acquainted with the nobility and gentry of the county he would be considered, as the son of a merchant rather than an aristocrat, to be rather unsuitable for county representation. Having never previously been thought of as the candidate, with the general election already announced, he knew it would be thought an ‘utterly improbable’ proposition.73 He considered that ‘It was very unlikely that the son of a merchant and with only my property could come in to represent Yorkshire, where the Members had always been persons of the oldest family, and the largest fortune. However I knew that such things had some times happened but I thought it foolish to talk about what was so unlikely and therefore I did not mention it to anyone.’74 Yet he now supplied the burst of intense activity and skill which was necessary to bring it to fruition.