It is certainly true that, while Wilberforce had by now withdrawn himself from the pleasures and gaming tables of gentlemen’s clubs, he avoided making a direct assault on their members’ habits, writing to Dudley Ryder in September 1789, ‘Don’t imagine I am about to run amuck and tilt at all I meet. You know that on many grounds I am a sworn foe to the Clubs, but I don’t think of opening my trenches against them and commencing open war on such potent adversaries. But then I honestly confess to you that I am restrained only by the conviction that by such desperate measure I should injure rather than serve the cause I have in view; and when ever prudential motives do not repress my “noble rage” I would willingly hunt down vice whether at St James’s or St Giles’s.’57 In making this judgement, Wilberforce was demonstrating what would become an obvious attribute: his idealistic objectives were always pursued by means which took into account practical and political constraints. Rather than denounce the activities of the better-off, but conscious of the possible charge of hypocrisy, he set out to involve senior national figures in order to change the prevailing fashion and habits of the times, at all social levels including their own. He believed that those who could set an example had adopted an inverted pride in which they claimed their behaviour to be worse than it actually was: ‘We have now an hypocrisy of an opposite sort, and I believe many affect to be worse in principle [than] they really are, out of deference to the licentious moral [sic] of the fashionable world.’58
The founding of the Proclamation Society was thus a forerunner of the many projects and causes Wilberforce would pursue throughout his life: in his methods, objectives and weaknesses, the same pattern would emerge again and again. His method was to win over leading figures in politics and society by the force of persuasion and the power of example, never failing to show due respect to their rank and to take enormous trouble over assuaging their doubts and fortifying their consciences. His objectives would always centre on using spiritual improvement to ameliorate the human condition by practical steps rather than dramatic transformation; in this case he was seeking a higher moral climate for the betterment of rich and poor, law-abiding and law-breaking alike, but not the social and political revolution which others would soon be advocating. He wanted to improve society rather than render it unrecognisable. Such methods and objectives would always have the weakness of being open to charges of excessive caution or conservatism, and be easily subject to mockery. In his book The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt would write: ‘Mr Wilberforce’s humanity will go to all lengths that it can with safety and discretion, but it is not to be supposed that it should lose him his seat for Yorkshire, the smile of Majesty, or the countenance of the loyal and pious.’59 His proposals were easily seen as being either puritanical or hypocritical. When the great playwright and opposition MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan was found years later lying drunk in a gutter and was asked to give his name, he famously replied, ‘Wilberforce!’60
Yet Wilberforce would also display, in his efforts to reform the nation’s manners, other attributes which would become lifelong characteristics of a great campaigner: steady persistence and a step-by-step accumulation of small additions towards his goal. The Proclamation Society duly succeeded in broadening its membership and support among the magistracy and gentry, and disseminating a great deal of instruction and guidance on enforcement – as in this attempt to help judge the state of intoxication:
Particularly as to drunkenness to use caution and prudence in judging whether a man is drunk. Though a man that cannot stand upon his legs, or that reels or staggers when he goes along the streets and is heard to falter remarkably in speech, unless in the cause of some known infirmity or defeat, may ordinarily be presumed to be drunk.61
In the later view of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Proclamation Society ‘set going a national movement’ which actually produced a marked lull in rioting, disorderly conduct and brutal amusements, and became ‘an important contributory cause of the remarkable advance of “respectability” made by the English working man during the first two decades of the nineteenth century’.62 Such a ‘lull’ is difficult to validate statistically, although it appears from the records of convictions for murder in London throughout the eighteenth century that violent crime was certainly on a downward trend which continued through this period. It may well be that British society was becoming less drunk, less violent and less disrespectful after a bout of mid-century excess, but it is also hard to deny that the Proclamation Society achieved practical results: convening conferences of magistrates to try to improve prison government and the regulation of vagrancy, and obtaining court judgements or Acts of Parliament which allowed brothels to be closed or the special nature of Sundays to be observed. As Britain began to move from Hanoverian excess to Victorian self-discipline, Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society would become one of the many forces propelling it on its way.
Busy as Wilberforce had been in conceiving of and launching the Proclamation Society, it was by no means his sole preoccupation in late 1786 and throughout 1787. For most of the rest of his life he would simultaneously pursue several issues in parallel, flitting between the mountains of correspondence and long lines of visitors which each issue aroused. Continually finding outlets for his public philanthropy, he was often also busily attending to the spiritual or financial condition of friends and relatives. Still close to Pitt, he became an intermediary to Robert Smith, later Lord Carrington, who had offered to sort out Pitt’s chaotic domestic finances. This would prove to be an impossible task at any stage in the next two decades, and would often call for Wilberforce’s intervention. ‘Indifferently as I thought of our friend’s domestic management,’ Smith wrote to him in 1786, ‘I was not prepared for such an account as the box contained … the necessity, however, of bringing his affairs into some better order is now so apparent, that no man who is attached to his person, or values his reputation, can be easy while he knows it is undone.’63
The following year Wilberforce received a series of entreaties from his sister in Hull, usually demanding an answer by return of post, requesting advice on Christian conversion or his judgement about what entertainments she was permitted to be involved in. Asked to determine whether his family should attend the theatre, he confessed in his reply to agonising over the pain he would cause his mother, a consciousness that he would have to ‘account for my answer to it at the bar of the great Judge of quick and dead’, and concluded: ‘in one word, then, I think the tendency of the theatre most pernicious … You talk of going only to one or two plays, and of not staying the farce … how will the generality of those who see you there know your motives for not being as frequent an attendant as formerly, and for not remaining during the whole performance? … Will not, then, your presence at the amusements of the theatre sanction them in the minds of all who see you there?’64 The need to combine political action, Evangelical principles and personal example meant that Wilberforce always had to fight on many fronts. And even as he wrote such letters, the greatest concern and most central campaign of his life was opening up.
While Wilberforce was with his family in Yorkshire in 1786 he had received a letter from Sir Charles Middleton MP which led him to promise to visit the Middleton family home, Barham Court at Teston in Kent, that autumn. He had many reasons for going. He already knew Middleton well, and had a high regard for him: Middleton was the father-in-law of Wilberforce’s friend Gerard Edwards, and was at that stage one of the few other Evangelical Members of Parliament. He was also serving as the highly effective Comptroller of the Navy and Head of the Navy Board, implementing the much-needed reforms demanded by Pitt to strengthen the Royal Navy and root out corruption in the dockyards after the failures of the American War. Furthermore, Middleton’s indomitable wife Margaret was an early Evangelical, a friend of Hannah More, Dr Johnson and Garrick, whose mind was ‘so constantly on the stretch in seeking out opportunities of promoting in every possible way the ease, the comfort, the prosperity, the happiness temporal and eternal, of all within her reach that she seems to have no time left for anything else and scarce ever appeared to bestow a single thought upon herself’.65 Their combination of naval experience and Evangelical beliefs had given the Middletons emphatic views about what they considered to be the greatest outrage of the eighteenth-century world. Those views were fully