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