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.
The county’s two incumbent Members, Foljambe and Duncombe, were both ready to take the field again, Foljambe being the candidate of the Whigs, and Duncombe the choice of the Yorkshire Association. In any normal contest, these two candidates would probably have been returned again without the need for an actual poll; such was the expense and difficulty of fighting a contested election in Yorkshire that only twice that century had the voters needed to go to the ballot box, and not at all for the previous forty-three years. But there was nothing normal about 1784, and Wilberforce knew it. Such was the strength of the pro-Pitt mood, and so strong was the impression that Wilberforce had made in the Castle Yard, that by the time the rival camps retired to their respective taverns for many hours of dinner and drinking Wilberforce was being openly touted as a running mate for Duncombe in a fight to unseat Foljambe and the Whigs altogether. As squabbling and drunkenness broke out, it was Wilberforce who helped Wyvill to restore order and secure a united front ‘by showing them the folly of giving up our common object … and by reminding them