All of these factors were important in Wilberforce’s election campaign. In some constituencies only the members of the corporation (the local council) or owners of certain properties or burgages possessed the vote, with the result that there were sometimes only a handful of voters; in others, like the city of Westminster and the counties, the franchise extended to all forty-shilling freeholders, and would generally include a good few thousand males with property above that rental value. In the case of Hull, it was the freemen of the town (those formally honoured by being given its ‘freedom’) who possessed the franchise, with the interesting complication that they did so by hereditary descent, and were therefore neither necessarily the richest inhabitants of the town, or even inhabitants at all. Several hundred of them were to be found living in London, and Wilberforce entertained them ‘at suppers in the different public houses of Wapping’.32 In common with voters throughout the rest of the country, the Hull freemen regarded their votes as financially precious, and expected to be paid for using them, the going rate being two guineas in return for one of their two votes, and four guineas in return for a ‘plumper’, a vote for that candidate and no one else. Those who needed to travel to Hull would expect to be paid their expenses, which might average £10.
A few decades later the freemen of Hull would be described as ‘generally persons in a low station of life, and the manner in which they are bribed shows how little worthy they are of being entrusted with a privilege from which so many of the respectable inhabitants of the town are excluded’.33 The intervention of Wilberforce would have been hugely welcome to the freemen in 1780, because it meant that there would be three candidates for the two seats, and therefore a contested election with expenses to be paid. Few things were more unwelcome to them than an uncontested election, as demonstrated by this account of the withdrawal of a candidate for Hull ten years later:
The plump jocund risibility, that an hour before enlightened all countenances, was gradually drawn down into a longitudinal dejection, which pervaded every face, even the friends of the opposition, shrunk with the consciousness of their own approaching unimportance, sensible that their consequence was then (for want of a protracted canvass) sunk to nought, and that nothing could restore it but a THIRD MAN; the cry of which resounded in all parts, while scoured through the streets of HULL the disappointed crowds; and a Bell was sent forth to the adjacent towns, to ring out an invitation to a third CANDIDATE FOR HULL.34
While the freemen happily sold their votes, this did not mean they auctioned them to the highest bidder. They simply expected any candidate they voted for to pay the going rate, and since there was no secret ballot at that time, and the vote of every freeman could be observed, each candidate was duly able to pay for the votes he received, and generally did so two weeks after the close of the poll – since allegations of bribery had to be brought forward before that time. Possession of money did not of itself, therefore, guarantee success, although it certainly inspired confidence that the appropriate payments would be made in due course. It also enabled a candidate to treat his potential supporters in other ways, most commonly through the provision of alcohol, food and accommodation. In some campaigns, tickets were issued to proven or promised supporters entitling them to claim a certain amount of drink and food, and even a bed at a particular supportive inn. The quantities consumed could be enormous: the £8,500 spent by the Grosvenor family at Chester towards inn-keepers’ bills in one election paid for 1,187 barrels of ale, 3,756 gallons of rum and brandy, and over twenty-seven thousand bottles of wine.35 This was in a city of a similar size to Hull, with 1,500 electors. To refuse to treat the voters was regarded as an insult, and in a freeman borough such as Hull would certainly have led to electoral disaster, and quite possibly disorder. Everyone understood that the best way to avoid chaos at election times was properly conducted treating ‘to humour the voters and to reward the faithful’.36
On top of all this, a good deal of money was spent on ancillary trades. Groceries, linen and meat purchased for use in the election were carefully and locally sourced, bands were employed at considerable expense, and carpenters and rosette-makers made a good profit. Yet since such employment could be had from more than one candidate, and payments for votes were made at a standard rate, it was still necessary to bring other means of persuasion to bear on the electorate. It was common for a Hull candidate or his agent to write to every inland merchant and manufacturer with any connection to Hull, to add to the pressure on local merchants to vote the right way. A candidate who had good connections with the government of the day could also dispense jobs in the customs service, obviously a major source of employment in a port.
What was very much unnecessary, astonishingly so by the standards of later centuries, was for a candidate to have policy positions, a manifesto or any kind of programme for government. National political organisations had not been developed. Since national newspapers were also in their infancy, there was usually little sense of the voters taking part in a single election along with their compatriots elsewhere in the country. A general election was more normally a multitude of disparate contests, and was not generally expected to lead to any change of government: when governments did change it was because of a shift in coalitions or royal favour rather than any discernible ‘swing’ among the voters. National issues could intrude into a constituency, and the opposition of David Hartley to the American War led to him being disowned by the Hull corporation, and very probably cost him votes in this particular election since the town, with a wartime garrison and a large customs service, had many loyal instincts. Such matters, however, did not predominate. The freemen were more interested in electing a candidate who would pay them a great deal of attention and ably handle their interests in Parliament. The Members for Hull were expected to speak up for the interest of the merchants and keep in touch with the local corporation – or bench, as it was called locally – and to present to ministers the various letters and grievances sent their way. A former Member for Hull, William Weddell, an associate of the main opposition party, the Rockingham Whigs, had lost his seat at the previous election as a result of his ‘want of activity’.37 A good candidate would engage in a comprehensive canvass of the freemen – one in 1790 canvassed every single one of them – and show them considerable deference. As the Earl of Sefton was told when he contested Liverpool some years later, ‘You have no conception how great a personage every Freeman conceives himself to be on the eve of a contest.’38
Wilberforce was well equipped for such a contest. He already knew all the principal families of Hull, and they knew that his pockets were deep. From May 1780, although still not twenty-one, he set about canvassing and writing to the freemen in expectation of an election within the following year. One surviving response of a freeman living in Reading said that he would not come to Hull unless his expenses were paid, and hoped that Wilberforce would support ‘the rights, liberties, and commercial interests of the people’. Another insisted that he would persist ‘in voting as Lord Rockingham shall direct’.39 Throughout the energetic canvassing there was little record of Wilberforce expressing decided opinions. One of his opponents, David Hartley, was an early opponent of slavery, and Wilberforce would later recall that ‘I expressed my hope to him that the time would come when I should be able to do something on behalf of the slaves,’40 the first recorded instance of his interest in this subject, which had yet to come to the attention of the public at large. The only positions Wilberforce had to take up in this first campaign were rather more local and personal: a stone was thrown at him during the hustings on election day, following which he was approached by the local butcher, Johnny Bell, who said, ‘I have found out who threw the stone at you, and I’ll kill him tonight.’41 This brought forth Wilberforce’s first appeal for patience and restraint in politics. He told the no doubt disappointed butcher that ‘You must only frighten him,’42 but it was an illustration that violence was never far beneath the surface of eighteenth-century politics.
June