Such an all-encompassing campaign was certainly likely to require the labours of a whole life. England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was rife with every activity of which Wilberforce now disapproved. In London, brothels had become fashionable and acceptable, and ‘prostitution is so profitable a business, and conducted so openly, that hundreds of persons keep houses of ill-fame, for the reception of girls not more than twelve or thirteen years of age, without a blush upon their integrity’.42 According to Sydney Smith, ‘Everyone is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.’43 In the Gordon Riots of 1780, many deaths had been caused when a distillery had been broken into and people had drunk unrefined gin from the gutters. A commentator earlier in the century had written:
What an intolerable Pitch that Vice is arriv’d at in this Kingdom, together with the astonishing NUMBER OF TAVERNS, COFFEEHOUSES, ALEHOUSES, BRANDY-SHOPS, &c. now extant in London, the like not to be paralleled by any other City in the Christian world … If this drinking spirit does not soon abate, all our Arts, Sciences, Trade, and Manufacturers will be entirely lost, and the Island become nothing but a Brewery or Distillery, and the Inhabitants all Drunkards.44
A House of Lords debate in the 1740s had heard that ‘You can hardly pass along any street in this great city, at any hour of the day, but you may see some poor creatures, mad drunk with this liquor [gin], and committing outrages in the street, or lying dead asleep upon bulks, or at the doors of empty houses.’45 Ministers and Members of Parliament seemed to be as bad as anyone, with George Rose, the Secretary to the Treasury, writing to Wilberforce on one occasion: ‘I have actually been drunk ever since ten o’clock this morning, and have not yet quite the use of my reason, but I am, Yours most faithfully and cordially, George Rose.’46
As to crime, ‘The most barefaced villains, swindlers, and thieves walk about the streets in the day-time, committing their various depredations, with as much confidence as men of unblemished reputation and honesty.’47 A comprehensive analysis of crime in London in 1796 produced ‘a shocking catalogue of human depravity’, along with the calculation that 115,000 (out of a population of little more than a million) supported themselves ‘in and near the metropolis by pursuits either criminal, illegal, or immoral’. Nearly half of these were thought to be ‘unfortunate females of all descriptions, who support themselves chiefly or wholly by prostitution’, but the other categories mentioned in the remarkably detailed and oddly precise calculations included eight thousand ‘Thieves, Pilferers, and Embezzlers’, 7,440 ‘Swindlers, Cheats, and low Gamblers’ who lived ‘chiefly by fraudulent transactions in the Lottery’, three thousand ‘Spendthrifts, Rakes, Giddy Young Men, inexperienced and in the pursuit of criminal pleasures’, two thousand ‘Professed Thieves, Burglars, Highway Robbers, Pick-pockets and River Pirates’, a thousand ‘Fraudulent, and dissolute Publicans who are connected with Criminal People’ and ‘allow their houses to be rendezvous for Thieves, Swindlers and Dealers in Base Money’ – all the way down to sixty ‘Professed and known Receivers of Stolen Goods of whom 8 or 10 are opulent’.48
It was against this daunting background that Wilberforce unfolded his plan to Porteus, who considered that ‘the design appeared to me in the highest degree laudable, and the object of the greatest importance and necessity; but I foresaw great difficulties in the execution of it unless conducted with great judgement and discretion … My advice therefore was to proceed in the beginning cautiously and privately, to mention the Plan in confidence, first of all to the leading men in Church and State, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr Pitt to engage their concurrence … and then by degrees to … obtain if possible the assistance of the principal and most respectable characters among the nobility, clergy and gentry in and about London and afterwards throughout the Kingdom.’49 Wilberforce proceeded precisely along these lines, winning the ‘entire approbation’ of the Prime Minister and the Archbishop,50 and, via the Archbishop, the approval of the King and Queen. By the end of May, he could hope that ‘The persons with whom I have concerted my measures, are so trusty, temperate, and unobnoxious, that I think I am not indulging a vain expectation in persuading myself that something considerable may be done.’51 It was thus largely at Wilberforce’s behest that on 1 June 1787 King George III issued a new Proclamation, observing ‘with inexpressible concern, the rapid progress of impiety and licentiousness and that deluge of prophaneness, immorality, and every kind of vice which, to the scandal of our holy religion, and to the evil example of our loving subjects, have broken in upon this nation’, and commanding the ‘Judges, Mayors, Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace and all our other subjects’ to set about the prosecution of all persons guilty of ‘excessive drinking, Blasphemy, profane Swearing and Cursing lewdness, Profanation of the Lord’s Day, or other dissolute, immoral, or disorderly Practices; and that they take Care also effectually to suppress all publick Gaming Houses and other loose and disorderly Houses, and also all unlicensed Publick Shews, Interludes, and Places of Entertainment’.52
While the population at large greeted the Proclamation with the customary indifference, Wilberforce’s objective was to mobilise leading figures to pursue the aims expressed in it over time rather than to achieve instant results. Throughout the late spring and summer of 1787 he was to be found circulating his plan to people of influence, persuading the Duke of Montagu to become President of the ‘Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality’ and visiting Bishops as far afield as Worcester, Hereford, Norwich, Lincoln, York and Lichfield. He met with much approval and sympathy, some of the aristocracy seeing his plan, as he did, as something which could ultimately lead to more humane and proportionate punishments; the Duke of Manchester wrote, ‘if you and other young men who are rising in the political sphere would undertake the arduous task of revising our code of criminal law … I mean largely the number of capital punishments, I am satisfied it would go far towards bettering the people of this country’.53 But others were more cynical or mistrustful. When Wilberforce was bold enough to visit Earl Fitzwilliam, who had tried to prevent his election for Yorkshire in 1784, Fitzwilliam laughed in his face and argued that the only way to avoid immorality was to become poor – ‘I promised him a speedy return of purity of morals in our own homes, if none of us had a shilling to spend in debauchery out of doors.’54 Involving outwardly respectable people in pressing on with such ideas, according to Fitzwilliam, would only expose their hypocrisy in due course. Another nobleman apparently expressed similar scepticism, responding to Wilberforce’s proposals by pointing to a painting of the crucifixion as an example of how idealistic young reformers met their end.
Nevertheless, when the names of the forty-nine founding members of the Society were published, they included four Members of Parliament (including the Prime Minister), ten peers, six Dukes and a Marquis, along with seventeen Bishops and the Archbishops of both Canterbury and York. While such impressive leadership had the advantage of showing that this was a powerful movement in which leading figures in society intended to display both activity and example, the disadvantage was that critics could easily point out that it was mainly poorer people who would have to change their behaviour if the great swathe of restrictions mentioned in the Proclamation were enforced. In the words of Hannah More: ‘Will not the common people think it a little inequitable that they are abridged of the diversions of the public-house and the gaming-yard on Sunday evening, when they shall hear that many houses of the first nobility are on that evening crowded with company, and such amusements carried on as are prohibited by human laws even on common