By this age Fox is thought to have lost £140,000, approximately comprising his whole fortune. Young aristocrats lost their entire estates, with White’s described as ‘the bane of half the English nobility’51 because of the terrible consequences of ‘that destructive fury, the spirit of play’.52 Huge sums of money were bet at hazard, faro, piquet, backgammon and even whist. Walpole wrote: ‘The young men lose five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds in an evening. Lord Stavordale, not one-and-twenty, lost eleven thousand last Tuesday, but recovered it by one great hand at Hazard. He swore a great oath – “Now, if I had been playing deep, I might have won millions!”’53 When games were not available, there was much betting on events. Each club had a betting book in which its members would wager against each other as to who would be Prime Minister by the end of the year, or even when the King would die. When George II had gone off to the European war in 1743, the going rate against his being killed was 4:1. On another occasion ‘A man dropped down at the door of White’s; he was carried into the house. Was he dead or not? The odds were immediately given and taken for and against. It was proposed to bleed him. Those who had taken the odds the man was dead, protested that the use of a lancet would affect the fairness of the bet.’54
The addiction to gambling was not confined to the aristocracy. A state-run lottery had been established in 1709 which collected a good deal of money from the poor and helped fund a whole range of fine projects, from the British Museum to Westminster Bridge, as well as helping to finance the American War. As he ventured to the gaming tables of St James’s in the winter of 1780–81, Wilberforce could easily have lost most or all of his inheritance. He had the encouragement of winning money from the Duke of Norfolk in Boodle’s at an early stage, and knew that, as he later wrote, ‘They considered me a fine, fat pigeon whom they might pluck.’55 When he first played faro at Brooks’s and a friend tried to interrupt, the well-known wit and rake George Selwyn responded greedily, ‘Oh sir, don’t interrupt him, he is very well employed.’56 But Wilberforce was careful not to play for ruinous stakes. His diary records the occasional loss of £100, yet it seems to be his winnings rather than his losses which began to give him an aversion to gambling. Asked to play the part of the bank one night at Goostree’s he ‘rose the winner of £600. Much of this was lost by those who were only heirs to future fortunes, and could not therefore meet such a call without inconvenience.’57 Such experiences nurtured in him a feeling of guilt which would be a powerful influence on his future, very different, behaviour.
Gambling was only one aspect of this time of excess. It was fashionable to drink heavily, particularly claret and port wine, and to eat greedily, with huge steaks and scores of turtles being the favourite dinners of the London clubs. Prince George, Prince of Wales, who was rapidly becoming the despair of King George III and Queen Charlotte through his disloyalty, decadence, extravagance and indebtedness, fully represented in his own person the barely controlled behaviour of the time. Holding fêtes and balls which would carry on from noon of one day into the morning of the next, and becoming so drunk that at one party he fell over while dancing and was sick in front of his guests, he also made the most of a string of mistresses, and was sometimes happy to share them with Charles James Fox. His brother, the Duke of Clarence and future King William IV, kept a mistress to whom he paid two hundred guineas every quarter for twenty years, and was so open about it that the first negotiations about her terms were actually reported in the press.
In such society, the possession by a married man of a mistress was regarded not only as a necessity, but her position was little short of official, understood and acknowledged by the rest of the establishment. In addition, the gentlemen walking from their gambling in one club to drinking in another could easily avail themselves of some of more than ten thousand prostitutes who plied their trade on the streets of London, who were ‘more numerous than at Paris, and have more liberty and effrontery than at Rome itself. About nightfall they arrange themselves in a file in the footpaths of all the great streets.’58 In Pall Mall itself, nestling among the gentlemen’s clubs was Mrs Hazer’s Establishment of Pleasure, where there was ‘naked dancing, and the floorshow included a Tahitian love feast’ involving twelve nymphs and twelve youths. Whether Wilberforce yielded to such temptations is not known. Years after his death, his son Samuel told the Bishop of Oxford that ‘his father when young used to drink tea every evening in a brothel’, although this was said to be ‘not … from any licentious purpose – his health alone would then have prevented that’.59 On the contrary, his ill health appeared to be no barrier to any social activity at this time: he was gambling, drinking, eating heartily, and singing beautifully – the Prince of Wales is meant to have told the Duchess of Devonshire that he would go anywhere to hear Wilberforce sing. But it does seem that, even at this stage, Wilberforce lived with more care and thoughtfulness than most of his social companions. He readily took advice from wise old birds such as the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden, who told him to desist from using his wonderful powers of mimicry because ‘It is but a vulgar accomplishment.’60 This did not quite put paid to the habit, particularly since he was in much demand for his impression of Lord North, but the relationship illustrated his need for genuine discussion rather than mere social frivolity: Camden ‘took a great fancy to me because, I believe, when all the others were wasting their time at cards or piquet we would come and talk with him and hear his stories of the old Lord Chatham’.61
Wilberforce was already displaying an extraordinary facility, which he would maintain throughout his life, of being careful about his own behaviour yet simultaneously sought-after for his good company and humour. As his Cambridge friend Gerard Edwards, who remained a close companion in London, put it even at this time, ‘I thank the Gods that I live in the age of Wilberforce and that I know one man at least who is both moral and entertaining.’62 His circle of friends naturally widened, now including many young politicians such as Pitt, Lord Euston, Edward Eliot and Henry Bankes, but still encompassing his old companions from Hull. To one of the latter, a B.B. Thompson, he wrote from London on 9 June 1781:
My Dear Thompson,
We have a blessed prospect of sitting till the end of next month. Judge how agreeable this must be to me, who was in the hope ere now to be indulging myself amongst the lakes of Westmoreland. As soon as ever I am released from my parliamentary attendance I mean to betake myself thither … Between business in the morning and pleasure at night my time is pretty well filled up. Whatever you … used to say of my idleness, one is, I assure you, as much attended to as the other.
The papers will have informed you how Mr William Pitt, second son of the late Lord Chatham, has distinguished himself; he comes out as his father did a ready-made orator, and I doubt not but that I shall one day or other see him the first man in the country. His famous speech, however, delivered the other night, did not convince me, and I staid in with the old fat fellow: by the way he grows every day fatter, so where he will end I know not.
My business requires to be transacted at places very distant from each other, and I am now going to call on Lord R.M. [Robert Manners] thence to Hoxton, and next to Tower Hill; so you may judge how much leisure I have left for letter writing …63
This single letter sums up Wilberforce’s predilections and personality as a young MP approaching the age of twenty-two. His eagerness to spend the summer in Windermere – he had rented a house, Rayrigg, with views over the lake – illustrates his determination to enjoy the hills and countryside; his assiduousness in attending Parliament and constant travelling around London to meetings demonstrate his seriousness amidst the continuing enjoyment of London nightlife; his political independence is displayed, since staying in with ‘the old fat fellow’ is a reference to voting with Lord North against the opposition; but his simultaneous and growing admiration for his friend and vocal member of the opposition, William Pitt, shines through.
Such admiration would soon draw him into