With such rewards available, the Church was converted into a branch of the aristocracy. To cap it all, political patronage was decisive in most of the senior appointments. ‘No man,’ complained Dr Johnson, ‘can now be made a Bishop for his learning and piety: his only chance of promotion is his being connected with someone who has parliamentary interest.’36 One relative of Lord North, Prime Minister in the 1770s, became a bishop at thirty, was later promoted to the highly lucrative see of Winchester, and is said to have gained around £1,500,000 from Church funds over his life, while additionally securing thirty livings for other members of his family. Such sums are the equivalent of many tens of millions of pounds in today’s money. Meanwhile, low-paid curates struggled to do the work for which the clergy were paid, often receiving only a shilling a day and turning to farming or weaving for part of the week in order to supplement their income. Neglected Anglican congregations declined sharply during the eighteenth century, and the Church failed to establish itself in the new industrial towns. By 1750 Manchester had a population of twenty thousand, but only one parish church.
Of course there were still bishops and vicars who lived more frugally or honestly, but it was not difficult to make the case that parts of the English Church in the eighteenth century were in a state of virtual paganism, and that a radical new approach was required. To John Wesley, it was not necessary to change the doctrines or liturgy of the Church, but it was essential for both its clergy and its followers to adopt a purer and more devout approach in their public and private conduct. Since the Church appeared so uncontrollably corrupt and licentious, and set such a poor example to the population at large, Methodists believed that strict rules should be adopted for the regulation of daily life. Methodists were required to attend weekly class meetings and permit probing enquiries into their daily conduct. Their General Rules forbade ‘the profaning of the day of the Lord by either doing ordinary work thereon, or by buying or selling’, as well as ‘drunkenness, buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them, less in cases of extreme necessity’, along with ‘uncharitable or unprofitable conversation’ and ‘the putting on of gold or costly apparel’.37 They were also told to avoid ‘the singing of songs, or reading those books, which do not tend to the knowledge or love of God; softness or needless self-indulgence’.38 Wesley told them too that they should ‘take no more food than nature required’, to ‘sleep early and rise early’, and to wear cheap and plain dress.39 The adoption of such a lifestyle was meant to follow the conversion of the individual, in which a period of despair about his or her sins would be followed by a sense of forgiveness, and it would ultimately bring its reward in salvation in the eyes of God. Those who did not seek it would have much to fear from ‘the wrath to come’.40
The Methodist message, and the bold and emotional style in which it was preached, soon came up against the hostility of the Church. By 1740 Whitefield found churches closed to his preaching, but this simply caused him to take up the still more adventurous initiative of preaching to huge numbers of people in the open air. Crowds of fifty thousand at a time were known at such events: vast, silent gatherings which gave way after the preaching to dramatic conversions amidst much crying and emotion. Horace Walpole commented in 1749, ‘This sect increases as fast as almost ever any religious nonsense did.’41 Whitefield became such a celebrated figure that David Garrick, the best-known actor of the time, was reputed to have said that he would give £100 to be able to say ‘Oh’ in the way Whitefield said it.42 By the late 1760s Wesley and Whitefield had travelled hundreds of thousands of miles, claiming twenty-five thousand people as strict Methodists but influencing the opinions of far more.
Among Whitefield’s converts in the 1750s was John Thornton, a rich man ‘in great credit and esteem’,43 known for his charity and generosity, who owned a country estate at Clapham, a village to the south of London and only a few miles from the Wimbledon of his half-sister Hannah, William’s aunt. She, apparently, ‘was a great admirer of White-field’s preaching, and kept up a friendly connection with the early Methodists’.44 Now she took her nine-year-old charge to church to hear Evangelical preachers, including the great John Newton. Newton was in his mid-forties at the time, and had led a dramatic and extraordinary life: press-ganged into the navy in his teens, shipwrecked off Africa, abandoned as a slave to a planter’s black mistress, he eventually returned home to marry his sweetheart and become master of a slaving ship, writing in the 1750s diaries which were among the most intimate and detailed accounts of the purchasing of slaves off the coast of Africa. By the 1760s he had turned to religion, started writing hymns and become curate at the village of Olney in Buckinghamshire. He was a man of great presence, and his preaching made a deep impact on the young Wilberforce, who remembered ‘reverencing him as a parent when I was a child’.45
Not every child of nine or ten would have responded to such preaching, but for whatever reason of personality or inclination, the ear of the young William Wilberforce was sensitive from the outset to the beat of a religious drum. ‘Under these influences,’ he later wrote, ‘my mind was interested by religious subjects. How far these impressions were genuine I can hardly determine, but at least I may venture to say that I was sincere.’46 Listening to Newton and admiring the devotion and sincerity of his aunt and uncle, he adopted Methodism as his creed. In his own words, ‘My uncle and aunt were truly good people, and were in fact disciples of Mr Whitefield. At that time when the church of England had so much declined I really believe that Mr Whitefield and Wesley were the restorers of genuine religion.’47
What happened next would, thirty years later, be ascribed by Wilberforce to the intervention of Providence. Whatever the truth of that, the event took the physical form of the arrival of a very insistent and angry mother who removed him from London forthwith. For however strong the convictions of Hannah and Uncle William, they were not shared by most members of church-going society, or by the rest of the Wilberforce family at Hull. ‘When my poor mother heard that I was disposed to join the Methodists,’ Wilberforce recalled, ‘she was perfectly shocked.’48 In 1771 a determined Elizabeth Wilberforce took a coach to London and descended on Wimbledon. William would later recall that ‘After consultation with my grandfather [she] determined to remove me from my uncle’s, fearful lest I should imbibe what she considered as little less than poison which indeed I at that time had done.’49 He was torn from Wimbledon and put on a coach to Hull amidst much emotion and unhappiness: ‘being thus removed from my uncle and aunt affected me most seriously. It almost broke my heart.’50 Once returned to Hull he would write to his uncle, ‘I can never forget you as long as I live.’ The confrontation between mother and aunt had evidently been quite a spectacle, with Elizabeth Wilberforce making neat use of the Methodist belief that God was present in the smallest action: ‘If it be the work of grace you know it cannot fail.’51 Uncle and aunt were apparently ‘also inconsolable for the loss of me’.52
William’s grandfather