Wesley and Whitefield could attract and rouse huge crowds, but they seemed threatening, intrusive or ridiculous to many others. The Anglican hierarchy attacked their claims to superiority as well as their doctrines of salvation by faith and the idea of conversion or new birth. In particular, Methodists’ earnestness and enthusiasm came in for much mockery. The Cornish actor, dramatist and theatre manager Samuel Foote wrote of Whitefield: ‘If he is bit by Fleas, he is buffeted by Satan. If he has the good Fortune to catch them, God will subdue his Enemies under his Feet.’55 Sydney Smith attacked the Methodists because they ‘hate pleasure and amusements; no theatre, no cards, no dancing, no punchinello, no dancing dogs, no blind fiddlers – all the amusements of the rich and of the poor must disappear wherever these gloomy people get a footing’.56 Accusations of hypocrisy on the part of Methodist preachers were mingled with suspicion of their hostility to alcohol, as in this verse from She Stoops to Conquer (1773) by the popular playwright Oliver Goldsmith:
When Methodist preachers come down,
A preaching that drinking is sinful,
I’ll wager the rascals a crown,
They always preach best with a skinful.57
More seriously, there were occasional riots against Methodist preachers, whose appeal to the poor and conversion of women and young people could disrupt family life and cause divisions in a parish. Their classes and so-called ‘love feasts’ were sometimes viewed as a cover for suspicious or even obscene practices. Others simply objected to being lectured by them. As the Duchess of Buckingham put it, ‘It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.’58 Such scorn would not succeed: there would be over seventy thousand practising Methodists by the 1790s, and perhaps over 400,000 by 1830.
Cut off from the age of twelve from the aunt and uncle he adored, and not even returned to the teacher he had liked, William was now sent to board at Pocklington School, his grandfather’s old school thirteen miles from York. This kept him safely within reach of his family and entirely separated from Methodist teaching under the watchful eye of the master, the Reverend Kingsman Baskett. Pocklington, an endowed grammar school, could accommodate about fifty pupils, but was going through a difficult patch in 1771, with only about thirty in attendance. Baskett did not require his pupils to work hard; Wilberforce remembered him as ‘an elegant though not deep scholar and of gentlemanly mind and manners’.59 The school was paid the generous sum of £400 a year to take William and to give him certain privileges –considerable ones, in view of the fact that a normal fee at most schools for a year’s boarding was a mere £10. These included ‘a very good room to myself’,60 dining with the headmaster and being specially tutored by him. Here he stayed for five years, ‘going in the holydays to my Mother’s at Hull and occasionally going to visit my grandfather’.61
Even in this sanitised environment, it would take several years for William’s attachment to Methodist teaching and to his distant aunt and uncle to fade. A letter to his uncle in November 1771 ends:
May the blessing of the living God keep you and preserve you in this world and may he bring you unto his Kingdom of bliss and joy. I am your, dearest, dearest son, W Wilberforce
ps. I cannot write more because it is seen where the letter is to.62
Later in the same month he wrote: ‘I own I would give anything in the world to be with you again yet I trust that everything is ordered for the best and if we put our whole trust and confidence in Him we shall never be confounded.’63 In August 1772 he complained to his aunt that ‘one of the greatest misfortunes I had whilst at Hull was not being able to hear the blessed word of God, as my mama would not let me go to High Church on a Sunday afternoon’.64 And the following month, he took the opportunity of writing ‘by the maid who goes away tomorrow; thinking it a better way than sending it to my uncle, since grandpa might perhaps see the letter’.65 Yet in his essays, overseen by Baskett, Methodist sentiments were absent. Those that have survived suggest a serious, thoughtful young man who could express himself clearly. Too much should not be made of the significance of school essays, which then, as now, were principally written with the reader and marker in mind, but it is striking how many of Wilberforce’s opinions in later life seem to have already been formed before the age of fifteen. ‘Since there is so much to be begot by the society of a good companion and as much to be lost by that of a bad one we ought to take the greatest care not to form any improper connections,’ he wrote in March 1772. ‘We never ought to admit anyone into that class till we are perfectly acquainted both with his Morals and Abilities.’66 In 1773 he ventured the opinion that ‘Those who bend their thoughts upon gaining popularity, will find themselves most egregiously mistaken, if they expect to find it so desirable as is represented by some … When a man once aims at popular applause he must part with everything though ever so near and dear to him at the least nod of a giddy multitude.’67 In 1774 he produced this: ‘Life is a very uncertain thing at best, therefore we ought not to rely upon any good Fortune, since perhaps this moment we may enjoy the greatest Worldly Happiness; the next be plunged into the Deepest Abyss of unutterable Misery.’68
Whether or not William felt he had been ‘plunged into the deepest abyss’ when uprooted from Wimbledon, he now showed a teenager’s resilience in recovering from it. His own feelings about this period of his life would change over the years. Twenty-five years later he wrote in his journal that ‘My mother’s taking me from my uncle’s when about twelve or thirteen and then completely a Methodist, probably has been the means of my becoming useful in life, connected with political men. If I had staid with my uncle I should probably have become a bigoted, despised Methodist.’69 As he would later see it, he had been rescued from a life devoted wholly to religion and given the opportunity to put his beliefs into practice. For if wealth, an early glimpse of knowledge and a temporary immersion in religion were the governing influences of Wilberforce’s early years, a final and crucial factor was his busy social life as a teenager, which amplified the ease, grace and charm he would always show in society, and make it possible for him to succeed in public life.
Nothing could have been more antithetical to Methodist attitudes than the social life of the Hull merchant class into which his family now ensured that William was plunged. Methodists thoroughly disapproved of theatres, and a local preacher would say in 1792 that ‘Everyone who entered a playhouse was, with the players, equally certain of eternal damnation,’70 but Hull’s new Theatre Royal, completed in 1770, was central to the social life of the town. Proceedings would commence as early as six in the evening with a play, followed by a musical or a comic opera, and then by dancers, jugglers, and sometimes performing dogs. Tate Wilkinson, actor-manager of the Theatre Royal, called Hull ‘the Dublin of England’ on account of its hearty welcome, and reported ‘the many acts of kindness I received in that friendly seat, occasions my being oftener in bad health in Hull than at any other place in my yearly round’.71 Balls were held which ‘continued with unremitting gaiety to a late hour … and gave such a zest to hilarity, that numbers were left at four o’clock in the morning enjoying the united pleasures of the enlivening dance’.72 Residents reported that ‘We have a very Gay Town with diversions of some or other kind.’73
William at first resisted these pleasures; when he was first taken to a play it was almost by force. As he wrote himself, Hull ‘was then as