It was all there: doubt, shame, and sometimes near despair, all in an atmosphere of agonising introspection. He would always regard this as the most difficult experience of his life: ‘I was filled with sorrow. I am sure that no human creature could suffer more than I did for some months. It seems indeed it quite affected my reason; not so as others would observe, for all this time I kept out of company. They might see I was out of spirits.’61
Astonishingly, when he did appear in public he gave no sign of his inner torment, Pitt’s sister writing on 10 November that she had been ‘agreeably surprised by a visit from Mr Wilberforce who has come home remarkably well’.62 But although he complained to his diary that ‘all religious thoughts go off in London’,63 he was finding that he could no longer see the great men of the political world in the same light as before. Dining with the cabinet at Downing Street, he ‘was often thinking that pompous Thurlow [the Lord Chancellor] and elegant Carmarthen would soon appear in the same row with the poor fellow who waited behind their chairs’.64 By the end of November he felt he had to explain to his closest friends what was happening to him, but on a confidential basis so as to avoid any public reaction. The letter in which he explained himself to Pitt has not survived, but he later recalled that ‘I told him that though I should ever feel a strong affection for him, and had every reason to feel that I should be in general able to support him, yet I could no more be so much a Party man as I had been before.’65 Pitt’s reply, written from Downing Street on 2 December 1785, suggests that Wilberforce had raised the idea of withdrawing from general society and possibly from the political world. His immediate response was to affirm his friendship, begin to argue, and seek a discussion, in a letter which was all the more remarkable for having been written by a busy Prime Minister. He began by saying that he was ‘too deeply interested in whatever concerns you not to be very sensibly affected by what has the appearance of a new era in your life, and so important in its consequences for yourself and your friends. As to any public conduct which your opinions may ever lead you to, I will not disguise to you that few things could go nearer my heart than to find myself differing from you essentially on any great principle.’66 He went on to say that whatever happened, ‘it is impossible that it should shake the sentiments of affection and friendship which I bear towards you … They are sentiments engraved in my heart and will never be effaced or weakened.’67 But he followed this up with the first gentle advice to Wilberforce from any quarter to use his religious convictions for wider purposes:
… but forgive me if I cannot help expressing my fear that you are nevertheless deluding yourself into principles which have but too much tendency to counteract your own object, and to render your virtues and your talents useless both to yourself and mankind. I am not, however, without hopes that my anxiety paints this too strongly. For you confess that the character of religion is not a gloomy one, and that it is not that of an enthusiast. But why then this preparation of solitude, which can hardly avoid tincturing the mind either with melancholy or superstition? If a Christian may act in the several relations in life, must he seclude himself from them all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.68
Concerned that Wilberforce was about to isolate himself and make an irrevocable breach with public life, Pitt went on to ask for an urgent discussion:
What I would ask of you, as a mark both of your friendship and of the candour which belongs to your mind, is to open yourself fully and without reserve to one, who, believe me, does not know how to separate your happiness from his own. You do not explain either the degree or the duration of the retirement which you have prescribed to yourself; you do not tell me how the future course of your life is to be directed, when you think the same privacy no longer necessary; nor, in short, what idea you have formed of the duties which you are from this time to practise … I will not importune you with fruitless discussion on any opinion which you have deliberately formed … name any hour at which I can call upon you tomorrow. I am going to Kent, and can take Wimbledon in my way. Reflect, I beg of you, that no principles are the worse for being discussed, and believe me that at all events the full knowledge of the nature and extent of your opinions and intentions will be to me a lasting satisfaction.
Believe me, affectionately and unalterably yours,
W. Pitt.69
The next day Pitt did indeed call at Wimbledon. In the same house in which they had eaten, drunk and played so much, the two friends engaged in two hours of earnest discussion. Wilberforce recalled that ‘he tried to reason me out of my convictions but soon found himself unable to combat their correctness, if Christianity was true. The fact is, he was so absorbed with politics, that he had never given himself time for due reflection on religion.’70 Yet Pitt’s plea to Wilberforce that a Christian life should produce action rather than mere meditation was well considered, and may have made its mark. Wilberforce had clearly toyed with the idea of at least a period of retreat and isolation, and many other cases of religious conversion had led the individual concerned towards a life of preaching, concentration on religion, and often a lack of interest in worldly affairs. Whether Pitt influenced Wilberforce away from such a path cannot be known, but fortunately for history the next person to whom he turned in his agony was able to influence his future life with every advantage of long experience and deep religious conviction.
It was on 30 November that Wilberforce first ‘thought seriously this evening with going to converse with Mr Newton – waked in the night – obliged to compel myself to think of God’. With Milner experiencing his own conversion crisis, Wilberforce needed to draw on the strength of someone with long-established beliefs. By 2 December, the day before his conversation with Pitt, Wilberforce noted: ‘resolved again about Mr Newton. It may do good; he will pray for me his experience may enable him to direct me to new grounds of humiliation … It can do no harm … Kept debating in that unsettled way to which I have used myself, whether to go to London or not, and then how – wishing to save expense, I hope with a good motive, went at last in the stage to town – inquired for old Newton; but found he lived too far off for me to see him …’71 Now possessed of sufficient courage to discuss his beliefs with the great John Newton, the very man he had ‘reverenced as a parent’ in his youthful days at Clapham, he made his way into London from Wimbledon again on Sunday, 4 December, and delivered a letter to Newton’s church asking for a meeting. The letter showed his dread of his evangelicalism being publicly revealed before he was ready for it: ‘I am sure you will hold yourself bound to let no-one living know of this application, or of my visit till I release you from the obligation. p.s. Remember that I must be secret, and that the gallery of the House is now so universally attended, that the face of a Member of Parliament is pretty well-known.’72
Newton, the former slave trader, was now sixty years old, rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London and the author of many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. He had wise counsel for Wilberforce, such as telling him not to become cut off from his friends. Meeting Wilberforce three days after the delivery of the letter, ‘he told me he always had entertained hopes and confidence that God would sometime bring me to him’, and produced ‘a calm, tranquil state’ in Wilberforce’s tortured mind.73 It was Newton who not only calmed and soothed Wilberforce but, from that time and for a good decade afterwards, fortified him in combining his religious beliefs with a continued political career. In 1786 he would write of Wilberforce to the poet William Cowper: ‘I hope the Lord will make him a blessing both as a Christian and a statesman. How seldom do these characters coincide!! But they are not incompatible.’74 Two years later he wrote to Wilberforce: ‘It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of his Church, and for the good of the nation,’75 and in 1796: ‘I believe you are the Lord’s servant, and are in the post which He has assigned you; and though it appears to me more arduous, and requiring more self-denial than my own, I know that He who has called you to it can afford you strength according to your day.’76 And it was Newton who gradually widened the circle of friends in the Evangelical