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

from time to time. That wandering spirit and indolent way of doing business are little if at all defeated, and my rules, resolved on with thought and prayer, are forgotten.’²⁵ Sometimes, as in one case that November after he had dined with Pitt at Downing Street, he reproached himself for falling victim to ‘temptations of the table’, which he thought ‘disqualified me for every useful purpose in life, waste my time, impair my health, fill my mind with thoughts of resistance before and self-condemnation afterwards’. As a result he created fresh rules for himself about dining: ‘No dessert, no tastings, one thing in first, one in second course. Simplicity. In quantity moderate … Never more than six glasses of wine; my common allowance two or three … To be in bed always if possible by eleven and be up by six o’clock. In general to reform in accordance with my so often repeated resolutions … I will every night note down whether have been so or not …’²⁶

      Wilberforce’s determination not to waste time, and his conviction that he had frittered away most of his time hitherto – ‘What madness I said to myself, is this! Here have I been throwing away my time all my life past!’²⁷ – led him to make a huge effort that summer to catch up on the education he thought he should have received in his youth. Lamenting his ‘idleness at college’, he now made it his object ‘to improve my faculties and add to my slender stock of knowledge. Acting on this principle for many subsequent years, I spent the greater part of my Parliamentary recess at the House of one friend or another, where I could have the command of my time and enjoy just as much society as would be desirable for maintaining my spirits and enabling me to continue my labours with cheerfulness and comfort.’²⁸ He spent nine or ten hours a day studying by himself, very often reading the Bible, but also devouring recent works of literature, philosophy and economics: Locke, Pope, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire and Dr Johnson, committing to memory many verses by Shakespeare and Cowper. Continuing with this through the whole of August and September afforded few breaks to visit his constituents and meant he avoided the traditional summer progress around Yorkshire, but with both the country and the county in a state of reasonable political contentment, he was able to get away with just a brief trip to the great annual Cutlers’ feast at Sheffield on 7 September, that city having become the centre of cutlery-making in the seventeenth century. His comparative abstinence certainly altered his appearance, with one Hull resident writing that autumn: ‘I was much shocked to see him, he looks so emaciated and altered,’ although she also thought that ‘he spoke in a very pretty and feeling manner. There is a prospect of his being a very useful member of society if his life is preserved.’²⁹ Wilberforce’s main complaint was that his eyes seemed even worse, a situation all the more frustrating to him now that he had become keen on so many daily hours of reading. In a letter to Muncaster in late October he refers to himself as ‘half-blind’, and reports that he had been to see William Hey about his eyes and general health.³⁰ On Hey’s advice, he dawdled only briefly in London when he returned that November, and set off instead to take the waters of Bath.

      Since Wilberforce did not bore his friends with his beliefs, he was able to retain the wide circle of friendships he had already developed, and was always welcome in the houses of MPs and other acquaintances as he travelled. He made lists of friends who he thought needed help or prayer, but tended to try to nudge them towards religion rather than impose it on them. He expressed great concern that autumn about the state in which he might find ‘poor Eliot and Pitt’³¹ – the first having lost his wife and the second his sister when she died suddenly that September, five days after giving birth. Eliot would indeed shortly become a close companion in evangelicalism, while remaining a strong link between Wilberforce and Pitt. In future years they would pray for each other and attend chapel together: ‘We can render each other no more effectual service.’³² If friends seemed open to religion, then Wilberforce would indeed set about persuading them, urging regular prayer or even reading Doddridge aloud to them. Some, like Lord Belgrave and Matthew Montagu MP, would succumb to him, but others gave playful rebuffs. His long-standing friend and fellow parliamentarian Pepper Arden explained to Wilberforce, ‘I hope things are not quite as bad as you say. I think a little whipping would do for me, not with any severity, I assure you.’³³ Above all, Wilberforce would always regret that he could never persuade Pitt to treat religion with the seriousness he thought it deserved. Prevailing upon Pitt eventually to join him in listening to a sermon from a noted Evangelical preacher, Richard Cecil, he was deeply disappointed when on the way out of the church Pitt said, ‘You know, Wilberforce, I have not the slightest idea what that man has been talking about.’³⁴

      Wilberforce had never been very materialistic. When he visited his Yorkshire estate in 1786 he remarked only on ‘my land, just like anyone else’s land’.³⁵ And although he had stayed at Wimbledon a good deal in 1786, albeit in a quieter way than during the boisterous summers a few years before, he now decided to sell Lauriston House, since travelling there wasted his time and owning it consumed money he thought he could spend to better effect. Instead, he would shortly set himself up in 4 Old Palace Yard, directly opposite the House of Commons and Westminster Hall, and as near to the centre of political action as a private residence could ever be.^* For in Wilberforce’s mind, the learning and opinions he was accumulating from his books and his travels had a clear and overriding purpose: to turn Christian principles into political action.

      The voracious reading on which Wilberforce had embarked soon brought him into contact with the writings of Dr Josiah Woodward, who in 1701 had written An Account of the Progress of the Reformation of Manners. Woodward had written about the ‘very great success’ of efforts made towards ‘the suppressing of profane swearing and cursing, drunkenness and prophanation of the Lord’s Day, and the giving a great check to the open lewdness that was acted in many of our streets’ in the late seventeenth century, following a Proclamation by William and Mary in 1692 issued ‘for the encouragement of piety and virtue; and for the preventing of vice, prophaneness and immorality’.³⁶ Such Proclamations were issued routinely on the accession of a new sovereign, but the difference in this case was that it had actually been followed up: local ‘Societies for the Reformation of Manners’ had been formed to assist in the detection of crime and to ensure that prosecutions were brought in circumstances when a lone individual would hesitate to act. The work of such societies continued into the early eighteenth century: a summary of the action they had taken in the year 1718, for instance, included 1,253 prosecutions for lewd and disorderly practices, 492 for exercising trades or callings on the Lord’s Day, 228 for profane swearing and cursing, thirty-one for the keeping of bawdy and disorderly houses, seventeen for drunkenness and eight for keeping common gaming houses. Nevertheless, as the eighteenth century wore on, the efforts of such societies were overwhelmed by the riot of gambling, drunkenness, prostitution and petty crime which became commonplace in Hanoverian England. By 1759, the London Society was reduced to thanking a donor for a gift of ten guineas and giving ‘notice to all grocers, chandlers, butchers, publicans, pastry-cooks, and others whom it may concern’ that they were resolved to launch indictments concerning the ‘great and growing evil’ of trading on the Lord’s Day, but such threats appear no longer to have been taken seriously.

      In a remarkably short space of time, and with an energy which illustrated the idealism and determination to act with which he was now possessed, Wilberforce became the driving force behind the issuing of a fresh Royal Proclamation and the attempted mobilisation of the country’s moral and social leaders in a nationwide struggle against vice. His vision was straightforward: ‘In my opinion the strength of a country is most increased by its moral improvement, and by the moral and religious instruction of its people. Only think what a country that would be, where every one acted upon Xtian principles.’³⁷ He was convinced that crimes and misdemeanours could not be combated successfully in a piecemeal fashion; what was necessary was the transformation of the moral climate of the times. As he wrote to Wyvill, ‘the barbarous custom of hanging has been tried too long, and with the success which might have been expected from it. The most effectual way of preventing the greater crimes is by punishing the smaller, and by endeavouring to repress that general spirit of licentiousness, which is the parent of every species of vice. I know that by regulating the external conduct we do not at first change the hearts of men, but even they are ultimately to be wrought upon by these means, and we should at least so far remove the obtrusiveness of