Yet on this night there was one crucial difference, and everyone present knew it. The Bill would be passed, not merely by a small margin but by a huge one; not then passed into oblivion but this time enacted within a few weeks as the law of His Majesty’s Kingdom and all of his Islands, Colonies, Dominions, and Territories. A nation which had transported over three million Africans across the Atlantic and invested vast sums in doing so would, from 1 May that year, outlaw such a trade and declare any vessel fitted out for it to be forfeit. The Royal Navy, the most powerful on earth, which had henceforth protected that trade, would from that day enforce its annihilation.
This Bill would finally succeed in abolishing the practices of decades and changing the behaviour of an Empire, and the MPs, still in their seats as midnight came on, now knew it. For unlike its predecessors, it came with the full force of a united ministry behind it and had already been passed by the House of Lords, for all the fulminations of the future King, the Duke of Clarence. Its passage would be hailed by the Prime Minister himself as the ‘most glorious measure that had ever been adopted by any legislative body in the world’,6 while the veteran campaigner Granville Sharp would drop to his knees in prayer and thanksgiving: the dam which had held back twenty years of anger, revulsion, education, petitioning, campaigning and parliamentary struggle had finally burst.
When four o’clock in the morning came the Members were still there in force, and in voting 283 for the Ayes and only sixteen for the Noes they would render the close or negative votes of earlier years hard to believe. Yet before they did so, speaker after speaker would single out one of their number as the architect of the victory to come; one who had found twenty years before that the trade was ‘so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable’ that he had ‘from this time determined that I would never rest till I had effected its abolition’;7 one whose speech against the trade in 1789 was, according to the great Edmund Burke, ‘not excelled by anything to be met with in Demosthenes’;8 and one who through all the dark years of war and revolution since then had persisted in the face of heavy defeats, gnawing and nagging his way to an objective he believed had been set before him by God.
Sir John Doyle referred to ‘the unwearied industry’ of this man, and ‘his indefatigable zeal … which washed out this foul stain from the pure ermine of the national character’. Lord Mahon said his ‘name will descend to the latest posterity, with never fading honour’, and Mr Walter Fawkes said he looked ‘with reverence and respect’ to a man who has ‘raised a monument to his fame, founded on the basis of universal benevolence’.9 As the debate approached its climax, it was Sir Samuel Romilly, the Attorney General, who compared the same individual with the tyrant Napoleon across the Channel. The Emperor might seem ‘when he sat upon his throne to have reached the summit of human ambition and the pinnacle of earthly happiness’, but in his bed ‘his solitude must be tortured and his repose banished by the recollection of the blood he had spilled and the oppressions he had committed’. By contrast, a certain Member of the House of Commons would that night ‘retire into the bosom of his happy and delighted family’ and lie down on his bed ‘reflecting on the innumerable voices that would be raised in every quarter of the world to bless him; how much more pure and permanent felicity must he enjoy, in the consciousness of having preserved so many millions of his fellow creatures, than the man with whom he had compared him, on the thrones of which he had waded through slaughter and oppression’.10 As Romilly closed, he was followed by an almost unheard-of event: the House of Commons rose as a body, cheering to the echo a man whom many of them had once ignored, opposed or abused. The object of their adulation found that the scene, as he later wrote, left him ‘completely overpowered by my feelings’,11 and the tears streamed down his face. A slight and hunched figure amidst a sea of tributes, he would indeed attain that night one of ‘the two great objects’ which he had long believed should be the work of his life. To some a ‘sacred relic’, yet to others the ‘epitome of the devil’, he was one of the finest debaters in Parliament, even in its greatest age of eloquence. While he never held ministerial office, his extraordinary combination of humanity, evangelism, philanthropy and political skill made him one of the most influential Britons in history. For the man saluted by the Commons that night, tearful, emotional, but triumphant as the hated slave trade was voted into history, bore the name of William Wilberforce.
My Mother hearing I had become a Methodist, came up to London to ascertain the fact and finding it true took me down to Hull almost heartbroken.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Autobiographical Notes1
No pious parent ever laboured more to impress a beloved child with sentiments of piety, than they did to give me a taste of the world and its diversions.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections2
THE PEDIGREE OF WILLIAM Wilberforce was impeccably Yorkshire. His grandfather, another William Wilberforce, had come to Hull to make his fortune early in the eighteenth century, but he had not come far: for centuries the family known as Wilberfoss had lived and prospered around the Yorkshire Wolds. A William Wilberfoss had been Mayor of Beverley at the time of the Civil War. The family could trace its ancestral line with certainty back to the small town of Wilberfoss* near York in the reign of Henry II (1154–89), and with some imagination and a hint of legend to the great conflicts of 1066, in which a Wilberfoss was said to have fought at Hastings and to have slain the would-be king, Harold Hardrada, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
This was a family proud of its traditions: among them civic leadership, commercial acumen and the prominence of the names William and Robert, both of which had featured in most of their generations since the fourteenth century. When grandfather William Wilberforce came to Hull he was soon elected as Mayor, and his two sons were duly named William and Robert, products of a marriage with Sarah Thornton, daughter of another successful trading family. William Wilberforce the future politician was the third child of the second son, Robert, and he was to owe his great inheritance to the lack of competing male progeny in his generation: he was an only son, two of whose three sisters died at an early age, while his uncle William – who confusingly married his cousin Hannah Thornton – was childless. The Wilberforce family would thus provide in full to its most famous descendant one of the most powerful formative influences of his early years: wealth.
The source of the family wealth was the Baltic trade. As a port on the east coast of England, Hull was well positioned to take advantage of the eighteenth-century boom in trade with northern Europe. Acquired by King Edward I in the thirteenth century,* it had long been ‘a good trading town by means of the great river Humber that ebbs and flows like the sea’.3 Its population of 7,500 in 1700 would almost quadruple in the following hundred years, with the town bursting out from medieval fortifications which were then erased, and a mass of warehouses, offices and fine homes being erected by the prospering merchants. London excepted, Hull became by far the busiest port on the east coast of England, with customs receipts over four times those of Newcastle. It was outstripped only by the great west coast ports of Bristol and Liverpool, with their access to the rich transatlantic trade, which included the trade in slaves. In the absence of any general quay, each merchant family needed its own private staiths for the loading and unloading of ships on the river Hull, just before its confluence with the great estuary of the Humber. The result was that the merchants’