The next morning, 26 March, the Yorkshire Whigs tried to salvage what they could from the situation by suggesting the agreed election of their nominee, Foljambe, and whoever was preferred by the anticoalition forces. This would inevitably have meant Duncombe. But Wilberforce had succeeded in giving the Yorkshire Association and its allies the confidence to try for both seats. Although there were two factions, Associators and non-Associators, ‘they determined that everyone should go into his own neighbourhood and see whether he had sufficient strength to encounter the great body of the aristocracy that was arrayed against us … I appeared to be so Independent and to observe so strict a neutrality that they both joined in asking me.’76 Thus was the gauntlet flung down for a full-scale election. An immense organisational effort was immediately set in train, with the Association mounting a canvassing operation with the efficiency and thoroughness of any modern political party, but with the added burden of securing the necessities of an eighteenth-century election campaign. The fulltime clerk of the Association, William Gray, appointed agents for every wapentake* with the intention of canvassing over thirteen thousand freeholders spread all over the county in just ten days. He engaged horses, chaises and inns on the road to York so that freeholders could be assured of the necessary free transportation and lodging, and secured in advance two-thirds of all the public houses and stables in the city of York for the likely duration of the poll. Plans were made to bring up to 1,300 supportive freeholders into the city each day, organised into ‘companies’ and taken to vote according to a schedule, since ‘At the last election most of them were eating and drinking whilst they should have been waiting on the road and their number helped to swell the public house bills considerably.’77 The instructions to agents give some flavour of the effort that was expected to be involved when polling itself took place. They were enjoined to ‘poll all such voters as are in the enemy’s strong country and all dubious ones as early as possible’; to ensure that freeholders arrived ‘under the lead and direction of some principal gentleman within the district’; to provide for ‘some strong active and zealous persons’ to ‘facilitate the approach of the freeholders’; to bring freeholders into the polling booths as early as possible in the day in order to ‘excite a spirit of emulation and exertion’; and ‘to have a confidential corps de reserve always ready to poll in case of exigency’.78
Such organisation was a great advantage for the Association, it being noted at the same time that ‘The hurry and eagerness commonly attendant upon the opening of canvass are great hindrances to its regular arrangement.’79 With the Whigs struggling to match either the organisational scope of the Association or the popularity of Pittite candidates, there was now every chance that Wilberforce would be elected as one of the two Members for the county. Nevertheless, it was still a good way from being a certainty, and it was therefore necessary for him to do what was perfectly common in an uncertain electoral situation in the eighteenth century: to ensure that he was elected elsewhere. In the very same election, for instance, Charles James Fox was fighting an intense battle to retain his seat in the City of Westminster – so closely fought that the poll was kept open for nearly six weeks – but had already ensured that he would be returned by a tiny electorate in the Orkney Islands. Once elected in a prestigious but risky contest, an MP would simply abandon the less distinguished of his constituencies, with the result that eighteenth-century elections were invariably followed by a swathe of by-elections to fill seats immediately vacated. To treat a rotten borough in this manner was easy enough, but to risk insulting the pride of the freemen of Hull was a more perilous proposition; Wilberforce therefore set out from York to Hull on the evening of 26 March to carry out an energetic canvass in his existing constituency. After arriving there at 2 a.m. he embarked on a tour next day, and found ‘people not pleased at my not canvassing’80 earlier. By the thirtieth he was noting: ‘Canvass all day – extremely hard work – till night – tired to death,’81 and two days later snowballs and other projectiles were thrown at him. Some effective speaking and his local popularity pulled him through, and he once again came top of the poll, although with fewer votes than in his 1780 triumph: he polled 807 votes compared to 751 for Samuel Thornton, son of John Thornton, and only 357 for a defeated and dejected David Hartley.
Duly elected for Hull on 1 April, Wilberforce was back on the road to York that same evening to resume his battle for the bigger prize. If by now he lacked energy, having considered himself thoroughly tired for at least a month, and having spent the previous two weeks continually travelling or campaigning well into the night, the ambitious twenty-four-year-old candidate certainly did not want for determination. With the canvassing of Yorkshire at fever pitch before the opening of the poll on 7 April, Wilberforce and Duncombe embarked on a tour of the West Riding towns, illustrated by his diary notes of these hectic few days:
To Rotherham – drawn into town – public dinner. At night to Sheffield – vast support – meeting at Cutler’s Hall … off to Barnsley … then to Wakefield … then off to Halifax. Drawn into town … after dinner (drunken postboy) to Bradford. Drawn into town – vast support. Then on to Leeds …82
As he travelled, express letters were being sent from Westminster by Pitt, who had been triumphantly returned for Cambridge University and could now abandon his own tame constituency of Appleby, with lists of the requests he had sent out for votes and money for Wilberforce. As things turned out, Pitt need not have worried: while his re-election for Hull had cost Wilberforce £8,807, nearly all of which had to be drawn from his own fortune, the county campaign had already brought in subscriptions and donations exceeding £18,000, along with the expectation of a great deal more. And although Wilberforce and Duncombe had ‘passed many great houses’, and ‘not one did we see that was friendly to us’, the canvass returns coming in from the freeholders of Yorkshire were truly crushing. With towns such as Wakefield and Halifax reporting margins up to thirty votes to one, Gray’s canvass reported 10,812 freeholders supporting Duncombe and Wilberforce, with only 2,758 opposed or undecided. Lord Fitzwilliam and the Whigs, moaning they had been ‘beat by the ragamuffins’, had no better option remaining than to avert both the humiliation and the expense of going to the polls. Wilberforce and Duncombe had returned to York on the evening of 6 April when, at 8 p.m. at the York Tavern, a message was received from their opponents conceding defeat without a single vote having to be cast.
It was a moment for exultation. The ‘utterly improbable’ project that Wilberforce had kept to himself until only twelve days earlier had come to fruition, and he was now to be the Member for one of the most sought-after seats in Parliament. He sat down immediately to write several letters of delight, telling Edward Eliot:
I am or at least shall be tomorrow (our enemies having this evening declared their intentions of declining a Poll)
Knight of the Shire for the
County of York.83
The celebrations were busy and varied: ‘7th. Up early – breakfasted tavern – rode frisky horse to castle – elected – chaired – dined … 8th. Walked – called – air balloon – dined …’84 When news reached London two days later, Pitt would write: ‘I can never enough congratulate you on such glorious success.’85 Across the country Pitt had won a decisive victory, remarkable for both its quality and quantity: not only did the new government have a three-figure majority in the House of Commons, but they had also won a huge proportion of those constituencies where there had been serious electoral competition, with the victory of Wilberforce as one of the jewels in Pitt’s electoral crown.
Cynical observers thought that Pitt would now be certain to include Wilberforce in the ministerial ranks. It was even thought that Wilberforce had switched constituencies with this uppermost in his mind, with Richard Sykes, from a prominent family in Hull, writing: ‘He has always lived above his income and it is certain he is now in expectation of a lucrative post from Government of which he is in the utmost need.’86 He went on to say that this would entail a by-election for the county, and ‘The accuracy of this intelligence may be depended upon,’87