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

the immense power of religion in general, and the fear of Catholic and thereby foreign influence in particular, among the general population of eighteenth-century Britain. A gathering of tens of thousands of members of the Protestant Association marched to Westminster under the leadership of Lord George Gordon to demand the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act, an attempt to recruit more soldiers by removing the practice of requiring recruits to take an oath denying the supremacy of the Pope. In a country where the Stuart kings of the seventeenth century had plotted with Catholic powers against their own subjects until they were driven out once and for all in 1688, and which had seen Jacobite attempts to seize the throne in 1715 and 1745, anti-Catholic feeling could still very easily reach boiling point. When Gordon lost control of the crowds, there were five days and nights of rioting in which dozens of buildings were burnt down and hundreds of people were killed, until the King himself took to the streets with troops to disperse the mob. In Hull, a smaller mob joined in the frenzy by burning down a new Roman Catholic chapel. As a friend to Catholic relief, as well as an opponent of the war, David Hartley was a doubly wounded candidate, quite apart from being up against the undoubted local popularity of both Lord Robert Manners and Wilberforce.

      All that remained was for Wilberforce to conduct a vigorous campaign and for the election itself to be called. The first reached a climax with a famous ox-roast on his twenty-first birthday, accompanied by many hogsheads of ale for the electors and merchants of Hull. The second obligingly followed within days, although had it been a little earlier he would have been too young to take his seat. On 1 September 1780 a general election was called. The polling took place in Hull on the eleventh, with a truly dramatic result. David Hartley had received 453 votes and had lost his seat, with Lord Robert Manners polling 673. But William Wilberforce, at the age of twenty-one years and eighteen days, had received exactly as many votes as the two of them put together, 1,126. In an election where each voter could cast two votes, this meant that the vast majority must have cast one of their votes for him. It also meant a very large bill. Wilberforce noted ‘the election cost me 8 or 9,000 £^* – great riot – D. Hartley and Sir G. Savilles lodgings broke open in the night and they escaping over the roof’.⁴³ His charm, sociability, obvious intelligence and wealth had won through decisively. Now he would take these advantages into the far bigger world of Westminster.

      Wilberforce took the oath as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons on 31 October 1780, and took his seat on the backbenches opposite Lord North and the other ministers. One of his first impressions was: ‘When I first came into parliament you could not go to the opposition side of the house without hearing the most shocking swearing &c. It was not so bad on the ministerial side tho’ not I’m afraid from their being much better than their opponents.’⁴⁴ North’s ministry had survived the general election, having taken the opposition by surprise with its timing, and could expect a reasonable majority in the House provided it retained the support of the ‘King’s friends’, who would support whoever George III wished to have as First Lord of the Treasury, and a reasonable proportion of the independent Members. Wilberforce, elected at Hull entirely as his own man, certainly regarded himself as one of the latter. He resolved within hours of his election ‘to be no party man’,⁴⁵ indicating from the outset an absence of appetite for ministerial office and a detachment from the main political groupings which would resurface much more strongly in his later years. As such, he was in good company. Probably around a third of the House at that time regarded themselves as independent to some degree, at a time when British political parties were rather weaker than they had been fifty years earlier, and dramatically weaker than they would become fifty years later.

      Wilberforce’s own election was a good illustration of why many seats were not within the control of any one faction. The terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ had lost much of the meaning which, decades earlier, divisions over the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession had given them; ‘Tory’ had become a pejorative and generally rejected label, while the label ‘Whig’ had been so widely adopted by the successful politicians of the mid-eighteenth century that it had become a commonplace. As William Pitt put it at this time, the name Whig ‘in words is hardly a distinction, as everyone alike pretends to it’.⁴⁶ At the beginning of the Parliament of 1780 it was thought that Lord North’s government could rely on the votes of at least 220 MPs, some of whom could be termed Tories, but who could more specifically be categorised as around eighty supporters of North and around 140 ‘King’s friends’. About a hundred MPs could be identified as firmly in the opposition camp, most of them in the ‘Whig’ opposition led by Fox and Burke in the Commons and Rockingham in the Lords, but others in a smaller grouping loyal to the memory of Chatham and led from the House of Lords by the Earl of Shelburne. The whole notion of faction or ‘party’ was thought by many to be wrong and unpatriotic: for an independent MP to arrive at the House of Commons, speak up for his constituency, vary his vote and mix with all of the parties was therefore perfectly normal. Wilberforce set out on his Westminster career as just such an MP.

      Wilberforce’s beginnings as a parliamentary debater were relatively slow and undistinguished. From what can be discerned from the far from comprehensive records of the debates at the time, he first spoke on 17 May 1781 on a Bill for the Prevention of Smuggling, arguing that ‘It would not only be severe, but unjust to confiscate the vessel: a master of a ship might take in the necessary quantity of spirits for three months’ voyage; and by fortunately having a fair and brisk wind, perform the voyage in six weeks; the custom house visit his ship and finding in it a greater quantity of spirits etc. than the law allows, insist that the vessel should be confiscated.’⁴⁷ His dutiful spokesmanship on behalf of the interests of Hull continued with what appears to be a second speech on 5 December 1781, in which he expressed both patriotism – it made ‘every Englishman’s breast glow with the noblest ardour whenever he heard of Great Britain being involved in a contest with France and Spain’ – and a request for government contracts for Hull: ‘A ship of the line called the Temple had been built some years since at the town he had the honour to represent, Kingston-upon-Hull; and ships might be procured from the same yard regularly if encouragement was given.’⁴⁸ Unfortunately this brought forth a rather withering retort from the minister, Lord Mulgrave, who reported that ‘The Temple, after having been at sea only three years, on a fine Summer’s day, in weather perfectly calm, went down and was lost,’⁴⁹ but the young Member was nevertheless doing his best for his constituents.

      While he was assiduous in attending the House of Commons, Wilberforce found himself welcomed with open arms into wider London society. He took rooms in the St James’s area, placing him only a few hundred yards from the House of Commons and squarely in the middle of London’s thriving clubland. The late eighteenth century was the heyday of the gentlemen’s clubs: White’s, which was exclusive and aristocratic; Boodle’s, full of the hunting and country squire set; and Brooks’s, founded only two years before Wilberforce’s arrival in London but rapidly becoming the playground of the opposition Whigs. These and other clubs were descended from the chocolate and coffee houses of earlier decades. Such places had steadily turned into centres for drinking and gambling, and eventually they were turned by wealthy people into private clubs so that such activities could be enjoyed in seclusion from the lower orders. It is testimony to Wilberforce’s social popularity and political independence that it was not long before he was a member of all three of the most celebrated clubs, along with a string of others such as Goostree’s, and Miles and Evans.

      It was in the clubs of St James’s Street and Pall Mall that Wilberforce would witness at first hand one of the most licentious and decadent times in London’s social history. The extravagance, immorality and sheer abandon of that era would do much to contribute to the stricter morals of Victorian times which were a natural reaction to them. Wilberforce’s own later views would be partly shaped by his experiences in London in the early 1780s, as he joined in with activities which he enjoyed at the time but which would later appal him. Gambling and heavy drinking could be pursued around the clock, notwithstanding the seniority and responsibilities of those involved. Horace Walpole’s description of three days in the life of Charles James Fox in 1772 give a flavour of the habits of the time:

      He had sat up at playing at hazard at Almack’s from Tuesday evening 4th, till five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 5th. An hour before he had recovered £12,000