William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner. William Hague

the great questions of the day. But ironically it was when he struck out on his own in this period that he ran not only into greater political obstacles, but into a degree of self-doubt; and not only adopted worthwhile measures of reform, but supported others which appeared rather bizarre. The first measure he attempted to take through the Commons in 1786 was a Registration Bill, a cherished project of parliamentary reformers such as Wyvill and Lord Mahon, Pitt’s brother-in-law. Introduced into the Commons by the two Yorkshire Members, Wilberforce and Duncombe, on 15 May, it was an attempt to bring about some positive change in the electoral system after the heavy defeat of wider reform the previous month. The plan was to improve the conduct of county elections by requiring voters to be registered in advance, the polling to take place in a single day but at a variety of locations. It was, therefore, a precursor of modern electoral arrangements, but it was opposed by many of Wilberforce’s own constituents, leading him to think that he had made a mistake in introducing it, that it had been a ‘very ill-advised measure’, and that it would be better that it were defeated in the House of Lords in case ‘the odium we have incurred by it will … be quite decisive of our fate at the next general election’.¹¹ The Bill was indeed too much for their Lordships, and was never passed; this was possibly the last time in his life that Wilberforce had cause to be grateful for the entrenched and unyielding conservatism of the House of Lords.

      The next proposal Wilberforce adopted was again at the instigation of a Yorkshire constituent, in this case, a prominent surgeon and devout Methodist from Leeds who was to be a lifelong correspondent, William Hey. Hey persuaded Wilberforce that the rule by which only the bodies of executed murderers could be made available for dissection was encouraging body-snatching and inhibiting anatomical research. Wilberforce therefore found himself coming forward with a proposal that the bodies of executed criminals who had not committed murder but were guilty of other capital offences, should be sold for dissection in the same way as those of murderers. This would have greatly enlarged the number of such bodies: a typical issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1787 would list a sizeable number of people executed on a single day for crimes other than murder:

      Wednesday 14 March. The following malefactors convicted in December were executed according to their sentence: Frederic Daniel Lucas for robbing Wm Pawlett on the highway on the Edgeware road, of a watch and a few shillings; Samuel Phipps, for robbing his master’s house of a gold watch and many other valuables; James Brown for robbing James Williamson, of his money; Dennis Sullivan, for breaking into the house of Henry Ringing, and stealing goods; William Adams, for robbing the house of William Briggs and stealing goods; Wm. Jones, Henry Staples, and John Innrer, for robbing James Pollard on Constitution hill; Robert Horsley, for robbing Jane Bearblock of her watch; and James Dubson, the letter carrier, for feloniously secreting a certain packet containing notes to the amount of £1000 …¹²

      As Hey put it: ‘Such bodies are the most fit for anatomical investigation, as the subjects generally die in health, the bodies are sound and the parts are distinct. Why should not those be made to serve a valuable purpose when dead, who were a universal nuisance when living?’¹³ While the legislative proposal which resulted may seem strange in later centuries, it was nevertheless a sound and well-argued case. Wilberforce prepared thoroughly, putting the drawing-up of the Bill into the hands of senior lawyers and working for the first time with Samuel Romilly, a lawyer with humanitarian concerns. Romilly persuaded him of the merits of another proposal, which Wilberforce incorporated into his Bill: the abolition of the law that a woman committed of high and petty treason (which in those days included murdering her husband) be sentenced to be burnt as well as hanged. In practice the hanging was carried out first in such cases, as this account of an execution in 1769 demonstrates:

      A post about seven feet high, was fixed in the ground; it had a peg near the top, to which Mrs Lott, standing on a stool, was fastened by the neck. When the stool was taken away, she hung about a quarter of an hour, till she was quite dead; a chain was then turned round her body, and properly fastened by staples to the post, when a large quantity of faggots being placed round her, and set on fire, the body was consumed to ashes … It is computed there were 5,000 persons attending the execution.¹⁴

      Wilberforce’s Bill for ‘Regulating the Disposal after Execution of the Bodies of Criminals Executed for Certain Offences, and for Changing the Sentence pronounced upon Female Convicts in certain cases of High and Petty Treason’¹⁵ did indeed pass through the House of Commons without much discussion, but once again the House of Lords was far more sceptical of change of any kind. There, the leading Whig lawyer Lord Loughborough was able to gain the satisfaction of not only venting his views but of obstructing the projects of young MPs associated with Pitt. He denounced these ‘raw, jejune, ill-advised and impracticable’ ideas,¹⁶ argued that the incorporation of burning into a death sentence made it more severe ‘than mere hanging’, and that dissection was such a strong deterrent, given the prevailing belief that it prevented the resurrection of the deceased, that unless it was reserved for capital crimes, burglars would be more likely to commit murders. Wilberforce’s first attempt at humanitarian reform therefore ended rather ignominiously and with another defeat in the House of Lords, a result with which he would one day become even more horribly familiar. For a great reformer, it had not been an auspicious start.

      As soon as the session of 1786 was over in early July, Wilberforce set off to the north to see his family, taking several days to travel through Grantham and Hull to Scarborough. Soon afterwards he was established, with his mother and sister, at the country home of his cousin, Samuel Smith, at Wilford near Nottingham. If his mother had been worried by reports of his new religious enthusiasm she soon discovered she need not have been, for in personality as in politics, much of the effect of Wilberforce’s conversion was the reinforcement of some of his better habits rather than a complete change in their nature. He wished, as he recorded in his notes that summer, to ‘be cheerful without being dissipated’,¹⁷ and in advance of joining his mother he made a note to be ‘more kind and affectionate than ever … show respect for her judgement, and manifest rather humility in myself than dissatisfaction concerning others’.¹⁸ Allied to his natural cheerfulness and interest in all subjects, the result was a most acceptable combination when it came to conversation, inducing Mrs Sykes to remark as he left Scarborough: ‘If this is madness, I hope that he will bite us all.’¹⁹ Now, and for the rest of his life, religion was never to make Wilberforce dreary, melancholy or intolerant. Years later he was to write to Bob Smith: ‘My grand objection to the religious system still held by many who declare them orthodox Churchmen … is, that it tends to render Xtianity so much a system of prohibitions rather than of privilege and hopes, and thus the injunction to rejoice so strongly enforced in the New Testament is practically neglected, and Religion is made to wear a forbidding and gloomy air and not one of peace and hope and joy.’²⁰ It was an attitude which meant that he was never shunned, socially or politically, but could combine what had always been an appealing personality with the force of steadfast belief.

      Even so, he struggled a great deal behind the scenes throughout 1786, constantly setting targets and resolutions for himself in line with his new beliefs, and then disapproving of his inadequacies when he failed to live up to them. Evangelicals followed Puritans and Methodists in keeping a diary ‘not as a means of recording events, but of self-examination of the recent past and adjustment to the future; it was the Evangelical equivalent of the confessional’.²¹ The Wesleys and White-field had kept such journals, and Doddridge, whose writings had such influence on Wilberforce, had recommended serious reflection each day on such topics as ‘What temptations am I likely to be assaulted with? … In what instances have I lately failed? …’²² Wilberforce had always been a keen diarist and note-taker, and his scribbles now became the means by which he recorded and fortified his intentions and tested his performance against them. He became steadily more systematic in doing so as the years went by. Thus on 21 June he was noting, ‘to endeavour from this moment to amend my plan for time, and to take account of it – to begin to-morrow’.²³ On 22 June it was, ‘did not think enough of God. Did not actually waste much time, but too dissipated when I should have had my thoughts secretly bent on God.’²⁴ ‘June 25th … I do not think I have a sufficiently strong conviction of sin: yet I see plainly that I am an ungrateful, stupid, guilty creature … July 2nd I take up my pen