Above all, the Evangelicals felt an overpowering sense of accountability, and a responsibility to God, for their actions. As one commentator would later note of them: ‘I recall an abiding sense of religious responsibility, a self-sacrificing energy and works of mercy, an Evangelistic zeal, an aloofness from the world, and a level of saintliness in daily life such as I do not expect again to see realised on earth. Everything down to the minutest detail of action and speech were considered with reference to eternity.’93 Although he had always been good at documenting his actions, Wilberforce would now do so with all the more rigour, as humble preparation for a day of judgement. His money, abilities and power had been given to him by God, and he considered himself accountable in the smallest detail for how he would now use them. His mission now was to apply Christian principles as he understood them to the world as he saw it around him. He would say later that ‘I was strongly impressed with a sense of it being incumbent on me to perform my Parliamentary duties with increased diligence and conscientiousness.’94 As Newton wrote to him in March 1786, they had ‘great subjects to discuss, great plans to promote, great prospects to contemplate’.95 Now Wilberforce would turn his own mind to what those subjects and plans would be.
* ‘Animal magnetism’ was meant to have great healing powers, released by powerful magnets or other devices. For a time it was taken seriously by the French Academy of Science.
* Richmond is credited with the idea of using boards with movable numbers to inform congregations about which hymns they would be singing. He was the author of The Dairyman’s Daughter.
* Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French philosopher whose book Pensées included a section on ‘The Misery of Man Without God’.
** Joseph Butler was famous for his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736).
What madness I said to myself, is this! Here have I been throwing away my time all my life past!
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, autumn 17861
There is a prospect of his being a very useful member of society if his life is preserved.
CATHERINE KING TO GEORGE KING, November 17862
THE WILLIAM WILBERFORCE who resumed his attendance at the House of Commons in the spring of 1786 was a changed man, yet this would not have been immediately apparent to an observer in the public gallery who happened to study his parliamentary behaviour. In time, his conversion to Evangelical Christianity would give him the moral force and unshakeable will to become one of the greatest campaigners, and liberators, in the whole course of British history. In old age, Wilberforce would write to his son Samuel, ‘The best preparation for being a good politician, as well as a superior man in every other line, is to be a truly religious man. For this includes in it all those qualities which fit men to pass through life with benefit to others and with reputation to ourselves.’3 Yet the immediate impact on his performance as a Member of Parliament was subtle rather than sharp, underlining the fact that his conversion reinforced many of his existing traits more than it created in him a new personality. Determined to apply himself with diligence to the post in which Providence had placed him, and writing to Wyvill that he now had a ‘higher sense of the duties of my station, and a firmer resolution to discharge them with fidelity and zeal’,4 Wilberforce had always been an assiduous MP by the standards of the eighteenth century, in attending both to the chamber of the House of Commons and to the needs of his Yorkshire constituents. Resolved now, as he had told Pitt, ‘to be no Party man’, he had always remained nominally an Independent, and had from his first election to the Commons styled himself as a man who would pursue his own views. For some years his theoretical profession of independence but practical loyalty to Pitt had given him an ambiguous political stance; his new approach to life led to a shift of emphasis within that ambiguity rather than a departure from it. And while he would now take up a variety of well-intentioned causes, many of them were, at least initially, taken up at the behest of his constituents, as they might have been before, with his speeches on the main issues of the day indicating no change in his wider political philosophy.
April 1786 saw the beginning of a series of highly charged debates on the floor of the House of Commons about the conduct of Warren Hastings as Governor General of India. When Hastings had returned to Britain the previous year, he had expected the plaudits of the nation for a period of rule which had seen him use every military and economic means to extend and confirm British power in India; he had been a victor in war, and a guarantor of great profits. In the process, however, he had created two powerful groups of enemies within the British body politic. The first consisted of those who had been his political rivals in India, such as Philip Francis, who also returned to Britain and entered the House of Commons to pursue him. The second group was led by Edmund Burke, for whom the ruthless and arbitrary nature of Hastings’ governing of India was in conflict with their sense of British justice and law, and who, perhaps significantly for Wilberforce’s future work, demonstrated a new level of concern about the colonial mistreatment of native peoples.
As Burke thundered out his accusations of tyrannical conduct against Hastings that April, Wilberforce had no problem as a backbencher in joining in with Pitt’s official line: he accused Burke of an excess of passion, and in a speech on 1 June argued that it was too late now to blame Hastings for actions taken many years earlier under the government of Lord North: ‘To punish Mr Hastings now was like eating the mutton of the sheep which we have previously shorn of its fleece. Certainly we ought to have recalled him when he committed the fault; but having suffered him to wear out his constitution in our service, it was wrong to try him when he could be of no farther use.’5 Wilberforce therefore joined Pitt in voting down the initial charges against Hastings. When he did turn against Hastings, it was once again in conjunction with Pitt, and seemingly at his behest. Pitt’s celebrated volte face followed him beckoning to Wilberforce to join him behind the Speaker’s chair and saying, ‘Does not this look very ill to you?’, with Wilberforce replying, ‘Very bad indeed.’6 Pitt then went to the dispatch box to declare that the latest charge against Hastings did indeed concern behaviour which was ‘beyond all proportion exorbitant, unjust, and tyrannical’,7 and that it could merit his impeachment. This bombshell paved the way for a dramatic but undistinguished chapter in British history: the trial of Warren Hastings would eventually commence amidst huge excitement in Westminster Hall in 1788, consume great political energy and substantial resources, and after seven long years of proceedings would end in his acquittal in 1795, a ruined and embittered man. Wilberforce would always maintain that Pitt’s judgement on Hastings was based on nothing other than the evidence: ‘He paid as much impartial attention as if were a jury-man,’8 yet in thinking this Wilberforce may have been a little naïve, since Pitt was probably looking for a reason to abandon Hastings as a means of disarming his own opponents.
Wilberforce was still essentially loyal to Pitt, and recorded that ‘I was surprised to find how generally we agreed.’9 The following session would see him giving energetic support to one of Pitt’s earliest achievements, the concluding of a commercial treaty with France. This treaty, which opened up many domestic markets to trade, did not create the alarm occasioned by the ill-fated Irish Propositions two years earlier, and Wilberforce could support it without any qualms whatsoever: it accorded with his previous views, was championed by his friend, and ‘It gave him a particular pleasure to be able to say that whilst he was acting in conformity with the dictates of his own conscience, he was voting agreeably to the general wishes of his constituents.’10
Such support for the Pitt ministry, coming from a man with such close personal connections with the Prime Minister, would have