At 4am, on February 24, 1807, the House of Commons voted by 283 to 16 for the
second reading of a bill to abolish the British slave trade. In an almost
unprecedented gesture, nearly the entire house rose to cheer one of its
members who, for two decades, had been ignored, abused or violently opposed
for making the promotion of this measure his life’s work.
William Wilberforce, the Yorkshire MP, was “completely overpowered by my
feelings” and sat with tears streaming down his face. His campaign had been
extraordinary. He made himself perhaps the most influential back-bencher in
British parliamentary history. A remarkable man espoused a great cause to
the point of obsession, and thereby achieved greatness for himself.
The success of William Hague’s biography of Pitt the Younger prompted him to
take on Pitt’s intimate friend Wilberforce, who flourished in an age when,
as the shadow foreign secretary observes, “the readiness of MPs to switch
their votes according to the arguments presented, particularly on an issue .
. . where party loyalties did not apply, placed a premium on oratorical
ability and persuasiveness which the rise of disciplined political parties
would render almost worthless”.
Although this is a book about a politician, its appeal reaches well beyond
politics. Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759, into a family that had grown
rich in the Baltic trade. As a young man, the early deaths of his father and
uncle made him their sole heir, with the huge income of £8,000 a year. At
Cambridge and as a 21-year-old MP (winning the Hull seat cost him £9,000) he
gambled and partied with his contemporaries in an age notable for its
dissipation. His relationship with Pitt was unimpaired by an incident in
which the appallingly shortsighted Wilberforce almost shot him in mistake
for a partridge.
He stood only 5ft 5ins high, but his voice enchanted every listener, both in
song and speech. After hearing Wilberforce address a meeting, Boswell wrote:
“I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he
grew and grew until the shrimp became a whale.” Wilberforce took heed of a
warning from Camden, the lord chancellor, against exploitation of his gifts
as a mimic, saying “it is but a vulgar accomplishment”. This was a pity, for
the young MP’s imitations of Lord North were famous.
From an early age, he displayed interest in religion and appalled his mother
by a dalliance with Methodism. In 1784, while on the Grand Tour with Isaac
Milner, the brilliant Cambridge don, Wilberforce embraced evangelical
Christianity. He renounced his fleshly sins (not that these were ever
heinous) and considered also quitting politics. He was persuaded to
persevere by the former slave trader John Newton, now a London parson.
Newton urged him to fulfil his spiritual quest through action rather than
reflection.
Wilberforce’s first initiative was ill-advised. He harnessed his new-found
zeal to a crusade against vice. It was true that British society was
addicted to gaming, whoring and drink on a horrific scale. The Treasury
secretary wrote shamelessly to Wilberforce: “I have actually been drunk ever
since 10 o’clock this morning, and have not yet quite the use of my reason,
but I am, yours most faithfully and cordially, George Rose.”
But the young MP’s campaign provoked the anger of some important people and
the mockery of many more. He seemed happy to ignore the excesses of the
ruling class, in his eagerness to check wickedness among the poor. Sydney
Smith suggested that his aim was “suppressing the vices of persons whose
income does not exceed £500 a year”.
In 1787, Wilberforce changed direction. On a visit to a fellow MP, Charles
Middleton, he was urged to address his energies to the slave trade. Pitt
encouraged him. Wilberforce began to study the issue, and was appalled by
all he learnt. He embarked on the campaign that dominated the rest of his
life.
In the early years, violent opponents of Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, his
foremost ally outside parliament, argued that slavery was economically
indispensable to Britain’s mercantile life and its colonies abroad; that it
was untrue that the institution was cruel. In those days, as Hague remarks,
facts about almost everything were in short supply. Clarkson and others
amassed an arsenal of information about the brutalities of the passage,
death rates and conditions endured by captives sold in the Caribbean and the
Americas.
Yet after the first big debate in the Commons promoted by Wilberforce in 1789,
he did not seek a vote, because he perceived how badly he would lose.
Despite the cause having the backing of both Pitt and Fox, backbench opinion
was overwhelmingly hostile to abolition. The Reign of Terror across the
Channel, together with the years of upheaval and war that followed, were
gravely damaging to radical causes, including those of Wilberforce.
The royal family was especially hard on Wilberforce and abolition. George
III’s brother Clarence told the House of Lords that slaves existed
“comparatively in a state of humble happiness”. Wilberforce further damaged
his case by displaying little enthusiasm for the conflict with France. War
offended his deepest instincts. Paradoxically, his conservatism on British
domestic issues caused him to provide warm support to Pitt on security
issues. But Wilberforce’s reputation was clouded by his apparent wetness
about the national mission of drubbing the French.
Through all the years of travail that followed, at no moment is Wilberforce’s
story dull. There were bitterly fought elections against landowning
grandees; struggles with chronic ill-health that made him dependent on
opium; wide-ranging philanthropy, much of this promoted through the
so-called Clapham group of like-minded rich liberals. It would be too
cynical to describe his gifts for friendship as networking, but they
contributed much to the ultimate success of his crusade.
At 37, he met Barbara Ann Spooner, the 20-year-old daughter of a Birmingham
businessman, and married her six weeks later. Their six children became one
of the passions of Wilberforce’s life, though in his old age his eldest son
brought about the family’s financial ruin, by a rash investment in a dairy
farm. Even after Wilberforce’s triumph in securing abolition of the trade in
slaves, he battled on until his death in 1833 against the institution of
slavery, which Britain ended only in 1834. He died broke but beloved,
applauded for his rhetorical genius, warmth of heart and nobility of spirit.
He was recognised as a national treasure, and buried in Westminster Abbey.
Books by front-line politicians are sometimes overpraised for the same reason
Johnson claimed that women preachers commanded admiration, because people
are amazed to see them putting pen to paper. A sceptic might say of Hague’s
Wilberforce, as was suggested of his Pitt, that it is not notably original.
But the author has produced a splendid read, for which he deserves the
utmost credit. He tells Wilberforce’s story with such enthusiasm and
narrative skill that, in this bicentennial year, his book seems assured of
bestsellerdom. I put it down liking Hague as much as I was moved by his
tale, one of the most remarkable in British political history.
William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Campaigner by
William Hague
HarperCollins £25 pp592
Available at the Books First price of £23 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
Read on...
The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas (Phoenix £16.99) Classic history
