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2 Ambition and Election

As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make any one else studious.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections¹

Some time before when an uncle of mine had got into parliament, I recollect thinking it a very great thing.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections²

IN HIS OWN WORDS, Wilberforce was armed upon his arrival as an undergraduate at Cambridge with ‘a perfect command of money’.³ The death of both the other living William Wilberforces, his grandfather in 1776 and his uncle in 1777, left him as the sole male heir of the Wilberforce line. This meant that he was now in possession of a considerable fortune, and without the distraction of having to run the family business from which that fortune had been derived. Since his father’s death eight years earlier it had been Abel Smith, a scion of the rising Nottingham banking family who had married his mother’s sister, who had presided over the enterprise at Hull, now renamed Wilberforce and Smith.

The precise dimensions of Wilberforce’s fortune are unclear. He was not one of the super-rich of those days, the great landed families like the Fitzwilliams who owned colossal mansions and tens of thousands of acres, or the ‘nabobs’ who had returned from India with the wealth to set themselves up with land and pocket boroughs. It seems likely, given what is known about his assets and what can be calculated from the size of the losses which dissipated his family’s wealth half a century later, that he could lay claim to a personal fortune in the low hundreds of thousands of pounds, with £100,000 at that time roughly corresponding to £10 million today. He was, therefore, by no means able to set up a great country house, even had he wished to, but he easily had enough to live comfortably as a gentleman for the rest of his life.

This was a dangerous position for a seventeen-year-old arriving at Cambridge to be in. It was at St John’s College, alma mater of Kingsman Baskett, that his name was entered in the admissions book on 31 May 1776 (with ‘Wilberfoss’ crossed out and replaced with ‘Wilberforce’ as the college authorities belatedly caught up with the development of the family name), and he arrived there in October of that year. ‘I was introduced on the very first night of my arrival,’ he wrote, ‘to as licentious a set of men as can well be conceived. They drank hard, and their conversation was even worse than their lives … often indeed I was horror-struck at their conduct.’⁴

This might be thought, by anyone who has attended Oxford or Cambridge at any point in history, to be the entirely normal reaction of a provincial innocent on his first night in college. Yet Cambridge does seem to have been particularly open to a dissolute lifestyle at that time. A sermon preached in the university church a few years later bemoaned ‘the scandalous neglect of order and discipline throughout the University’, and one observer complained that ‘It disgusts me to go through Cambridge … where one meets nothing academic or like a place of study, regularity or example.’⁵ In the very year of Wilberforce’s arrival, Dr Ewin, a local Justice of the Peace, was hoping, forlornly it seems, that ‘young men see the folly of intemperance … vice and disorderly conduct … we never were at a greater pitch of extravagance in living, not dining in the halls, neglect of chapel … and not without women are our present misfortunes’.⁶ Even by the normal standards of a boisterous university, rioting and the breaking down of other students’ doors were particularly prevalent. One St John’s freshman wrote to his father about a series of riots, complaining that ‘they had broke my door to pieces before I could get hold of my trusty poker’,⁷ and the Master of the College felt it necessary in 1782 to denounce ‘scandalous outrages’ and to make clear that ‘Whoever shall be detected in breaking down the door of any person in college … shall be rusticated without hope of ever being recalled.’⁸ Wilberforce considered he had been introduced to ‘some, I think of the very worse men that I ever met with in my life’.⁹

To any teenager of a purely pleasure-loving or disruptive disposition, then, there was much to look forward to alongside several years of academic indolence. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge was a great centre of intellectual ferment at this point: the numbers of students had declined mid-century, and the dons were ‘decent easy men’ who ‘from the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing … had absolved their conscience’.¹⁰ Medical students preferred to study in Holland; religious dissenters went to Edinburgh; the old English universities had become sleepy, conservative, and ‘the starting line in the race for Church livings’.¹¹

A further temptation to academic inactivity for Wilberforce arose from his being a Fellow Commoner, less exalted than a nobleman in the class-conscious eyes of those times, but enjoying many privileges over the pensioners and sizars, who paid lower fees and were generally on their way to a career in the Church. Fellow Commoners paid extra fees to ‘common’ (i.e. dine) at the Fellows’ table, and were exempt from many lectures and studies, although St John’s had recently introduced new rules requiring them to be publicly examined twice a year. Even so, the tutors told Wilberforce he really need not bother with work: ‘Their object seemed to be, to make and keep me idle. If ever I appeared studious, they would say to me, “Why in the world should a man of your fortune trouble himself with fagging?”’¹² The result was that he did a certain amount to get through the exams, but, while shaking off within a year or so his initial and shocking companions, spent the rest of the time socialising: ‘I used to play at cards a great deal and do nothing else and my tutor who ought to have repressed this disposition, if not by his authority at least by his advice, rather encouraged it: he never urged me to attend lectures and I never did. And I should have had nothing, all the time I was at college but for a natural love of classical learning and that it was necessary for a man who was to be publicly examined to prevent his being disgraced.’¹³

The resulting academic record was undistinguished: in the college exams of December 1776, his performance ‘would have been mentioned sooner if he had prepared himself in the whole of Stanyan’ (Greek history); in 1777 he was said to be due ‘some praise’, and later in the year ‘was good in the Classic’ and in 1778 ‘did well in Butler’ (Analogy of Religion).¹⁴ But as to mathematics, which he later thought his mind ‘greatly needed’, he was ‘told that I was too clever to require them’.¹⁵

Undeniably, however, he had a good time, without the truly excessive drinking, womanising and violence of some of his contemporaries, but falling happily into the category of ‘sober dissipation’,¹⁶ as he described it himself. He was already ‘so far from what the world calls licentious, that I was rather complimented on being better than young men in general’,¹⁷ but he was very quickly a popular figure, showing to full effect all the abilities of singing, conversation and hospitality which the years of Hull society had honed in him. Unprepossessing as he must have been in appearance, only five feet four inches tall, with an eyeglass on a ribbon, his life at Cambridge soon became a foretaste of his future residence at Westminster, with people always clustering around him and filling his rooms. Thomas Gisborne, who was to become a renowned writer, poet, moralist and natural philosopher, had the rooms next door to Wilberforce but was much more studious, remembering him in the streets ‘encircled by young men of talent’. Wilberforce apparently kept a great Yorkshire pie in his rooms (an unlikely journey for a pie before the days of refrigeration), and ‘whatever else the good things was, to console the hungry visitor’.¹⁸ He lived, according to Gisborne, ‘far too much for self-indulgence in habits of idleness and amusement. By his talents, his wit, his kindness, his social powers, his universal accessibility, and his love of society, he speedily became the centre of attraction to all the clever and the idle of his own college and of other colleges. He soon swarmed with them from the time when he arose, generally very late, like he went to bed. He talked and he laughed and he sang, and he amused and interested everyone.’¹⁹

In later life Wilberforce would deeply regret the waste of time. When he ought to have been ‘under a strict and wholesome regimen’,²⁰ he found that ‘As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make any one else studious.’²¹ If he gained anything specific from his Cambridge years it was certain friendships which further broadened his horizons: William Cookson, the uncle of Wordsworth, who took him during vacations to the Lake District and gave him a lifelong adoration of that part of England, soon to become his regular fresh-air retreat; Gerard Edwards, an entertaining young landowner who would one day make one of the most important introductions of Wilberforce’s life; and Edward Christian, whose brother Fletcher would soon enjoy the lasting fame of leading the mutiny on the Bounty. Three whole years of card parties and late-night drinking went by until, as these friends began to leave Cambridge in 1779, Wilberforce turned his mind to what to do with the rest of his life.

Many of the options available were presumably fairly easily dismissed. He had no wish to go into the family business, now in the capable hands of Abel Smith, and in any case probably was not attracted to spending the rest of his life in Hull. While others in search of a career would have gone into practising law, he had no record of the necessary studious application and no need of the money either. The majority of his fellow Cambridge graduates would have gone into the Church, but at this stage in his life this would not have offered a remotely desirable lifestyle, and his early Methodism had left him with serious doubts about the established Church – his sons reported in their biography of him that while at Cambridge he briefly refused to declare his assent to the Articles of the Church. He could, of course, have been a gentleman of pure leisure, but to a man of twenty who so much enjoyed being a centre of attention and part of a lively community that would have been an unlikely and premature retirement.

Instead, he had resolved to be a Member of Parliament. There is no record of how he arrived at this ambition, or of the reaction of his friends and family to the news that he wished to enter politics, except his own statement that ‘At this time I knew there was a general election coming on and at Hull the conversation often turned to politics and rooted me to ambition.’²² His family may well have been surprised: they had a tradition of civic, but not parliamentary, leadership; and his friends did not at this stage include the great swathe of would-be rulers of Britain with whom he would soon be acquainted. Yet there were present in his personality many of the essential components of a young political aspirant: ability to perform for an audience, an easy popularity, and an interest in the world beyond his own town or college. As for paying the expenses of an election, that was what that inheritance was for.

On top of these factors was something else which may have been decisive: the time through which the young Wilberforce was living was one of the most arresting for decades in demanding the attention of those remotely interested in national affairs. A critical ingredient of youthful commitment to politics was present: that great events and dramatic change were in the offing. For Britain was at war, a war that was rapidly widening, and the increasingly ill-tempered debates of the House of Commons were testimony to the fact that at present the country was not winning it.

It was in 1775, while Wilberforce was still partying in Hull and studying at Pocklington School, that the gunfire at Lexington signalled the start of the American War of Independence. In 1776, while he was falling in with the gamblers at St John’s College, Britain had waved farewell to an armada of hundreds of ships and a force of thirty-two thousand troops which, it was widely assumed, would soon bring the recalcitrant colonies to heel. Yet the war in America was never as simple as a conflict between Americans and Britons.

Just as there were many loyalist ‘Tories’ in the colonies who wished to remain under the rule of their mother country, so there was no shortage of spokesmen among the opposition in Britain who had favoured a policy of conciliation rather than confrontation, and now opposed the war. Among them were some of the greatest orators of the age, or indeed of any age, including the foremost opponents of the government of Lord North: Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke. As the colonies declared themselves independent in 1776, Fox was arguing that it would be better to abandon America than to oppress it, and denouncing the ‘diabolical measures’ of the government: ‘How cruel and intolerable a thing it is to sacrifice thousands of lives almost without prospect of advantage.’²³ He attacked the ‘boasts, blunders, and disgraces of the Administration’, and the following year was launching onslaughts on the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord George Germain, as ‘that ill-auspicious and ill-omened character’ who was guilty of ‘arrogance and presumption … ignorance and inability’.²⁴ To add to the drama, the Elder Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, thundered out of retirement to rock the House of Lords with denunciations of the war. Most dramatically of all, Chatham’s final onslaught on the mismanagement of the war in April 1778 was cut short by his own collapse and subsequent death, ending for good speculation that he would again be called upon to rescue his country. ‘We shall be forced,’ he told the government at the beginning of the American War, ‘ultimately to retract: let us retract while we can not when we must.’²⁵ By 1778 these critics of the entire notion of fighting a war in the American colonies were being proved right, with the army of General Burgoyne capitulating at Saratoga and France and Spain gleefully joining in the war to make the most of their chance of crippling the British Empire. 1779 saw the Royal Navy stretched to breaking point as French and Spanish warships cruised unmolested in the English Channel. The assumption of four years earlier that British forces could soon compel the colonists to pay their taxes and accept continued rule from London had been shattered.

By any standards, therefore, the late 1770s were a time of intensifying partisanship, stridency and bitterness in domestic politics. As the government of Lord North looked steadily shakier and as Germain came under increasingly furious attack, the morale of the political opposition rose correspondingly. In February 1779 there was exultation among the opposition following the acquittal of Admiral Keppel, whose court martial after a badly-managed encounter with the French fleet resulted in the revelation that the inadequate arming of the Royal Navy was the direct result of the government’s own incompetence. Crowds took to the streets and broke the windows of government ministers in celebration of the huge embarrassment. For there was more to the political atmosphere of the time than arguments over a war that had gone wrong: there was also a feeling that the mismanagement and lack of coordination of the war effort pointed to systemic failings in the British state, and that the absence of any responsiveness to hostile public opinion on such a vital issue was a sign of corruption and excessive place-seeking. It was thus not just the ministry but the entire system of government which came under attack, and not just the ministers but the powers of King George III himself. Almost a third of the House of Commons and much of the House of Lords held titles, sinecures or pensions in the gift of the King and his ministers; almost half of the House of Commons sat for ‘pocket boroughs’ which were controlled by a small number of men, and sometimes literally bought by the Treasury itself. Failure in war opened the way for these practices to be attacked. The Whig aristocracy feared that the powers of the Crown had grown to the extent that the balance of the constitutional settlement arrived at in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had been upset, and now Edmund Burke led their calls for ‘economical reform’, involving the abolition of swathes of sinecures and of the expensive additions to the royal household.

Outside Parliament, movements such as the Yorkshire Association of the Reverend Christopher Wyvill arose, campaigning for the reform of parliamentary representation and the holding of elections every three years instead of seven. There was a feeling that great change was in the air, and would soon be conceded. In April 1780 the opposition MP John Dunning succeeded in carrying his famous motion ‘That the powers of the Crown have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished’ on the floor of the House of Commons. In London there was a feeling of political crisis; overseas the war went on unabated. If any time in the eighteenth century was likely to draw a thoughtful and ambitious young man into politics, then this was it.

It was in the highly charged political atmosphere of the winter of 1779–80 that Wilberforce, finding little need to stay in permanent residence in Cambridge when so few academic demands were made of him, began paying regular visits to London and venturing into the public gallery of the House of Commons. At that time the public gallery was only fifteen feet above the floor of the Commons, supported by pillars reaching down among the benches. The entire chamber measured only fifty-seven feet by thirty-three, and had been uncomfortably crowded on busy days ever since the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 had swelled the number of MPs to 558. A visitor to the gallery was thus readily enveloped in an often hot and boisterous atmosphere, all the more so as the debates about the American War and the nature of the constitution raged only yards from where he was sitting. As he looked beneath him, Wilberforce would have seen the great figures of late-eighteenth-century British politics locked in oratorical combat. But it was alongside him in the gallery that winter that he was to find a friend who, for the next five years at least, would be one of the greatest influences on his life. For also sitting in the gallery, with an attitude of earnest studiousness which Wilberforce would have found hard to match, was William Pitt, son of the great Chatham, and ultimately known to history as William Pitt the Younger.

Pitt and Wilberforce must have looked and seemed a strange couple as they sat observing the debates. For one thing, Pitt must have been nearly a foot taller than Wilberforce. He also had, even at that age, an aloof manner towards people he did not know well, suggestive of his always being conscious of being his father’s son, but also the product of his natural diffidence: ‘I am the shyest man alive,’²⁶ he would say to Wilberforce once their friendship had developed. Such shyness evidently soon evaporated in the warmth of Wilberforce’s friendly disposition. They had been barely acquainted at Cambridge, Pitt having been largely confined within the walls of Pembroke College by a more demanding tutor and an eagerness for classics and mathematics. Yet soon Wilberforce, the unknown son of a Hull merchant, and Pitt, the son of the most revered British statesman of the eighteenth century, were firm friends.

It would be obvious from the events of later years that there was a genuine warmth in the friendship between Pitt and Wilberforce. As it happened, there was also a happily complementary nature to the advantages each of them possessed if they wished to become active in politics: Pitt had plentiful connections, widespread recognition and a famous name, but no money; Wilberforce had exactly the opposite. In years to come, Pitt would enjoy Wilberforce’s generous hospitality. For now, it was Wilberforce who found in Pitt an additional enticement to the world of politics. Pitt had firm views, being strongly in favour of the prevailing fashions of economical and parliamentary reform, and he followed his deceased father in his opposition to the American War. He had an appreciation of great oratory, being thrilled to hear a formidable speech by Burke that winter – ‘I had no idea until now of his excellence’²⁷ – but critical of some speakers in the House of Lords – ‘Paltry matter and a whiney delivery’.²⁸ He also had impressive and immediate connections, with Fox himself coming into the gallery to join this young observer in analysing the debates – ‘But surely, Mr Fox, that might be met thus …’²⁹ The extent to which this friendship and such conversations persuaded Wilberforce of the attractions of entering Parliament cannot be known, but it is clear that by the time he went down from Cambridge in the spring of 1780 he was resolved, like his friend, to enter Parliament at the forthcoming general election if he could.

Neither Pitt nor Wilberforce could countenance delay. Great events were at hand. The outcome of the war was in the balance, the House of Commons was becoming harder to control, and a general election was due by 1781 at the latest – one in which the North administration might lose a significant number of seats. Pitt was training at the Bar because he needed a source of income; Wilberforce had no need of such trifles. Both of them wanted to get into Parliament, and fast. Where and how could two young men approaching twenty-one years of age go about it?

Their age, which would seem precocious for a political career in later centuries, was no barrier. In the House of Commons about to be elected there would be fully a hundred Members under the age of thirty.^* Since MPs were entirely unpaid and were generally able to live on a private income, most of them had no need of an alternative career beforehand, and since most electorates were small and buyable there was no need to spend many years building up support and recognition, as would become necessary in the days of a universal franchise. Two individuals as famous as Pitt and as wealthy as Wilberforce were highly likely to be able to get into the Commons, but that still required the careful selection and handling of an appropriate constituency; since neither of them belonged to the main parties of government or opposition, nor to the great landed families that controlled many of the seats, the exercise would require a certain amount of ingenuity or personal expense.

Unable to incur great expense, Pitt went for ingenuity. Neither he nor Wilberforce was able to contemplate standing for one of the great county seats at this stage. These supplied the eighty Members who represented forty counties, among which the most prestigious were Yorkshire and Middlesex. They were generally under the control of the aristocracy and country gentry, often divided by agreement between government and opposition, and their size and relatively large electorates meant that they were inordinately expensive to fight if they were contested: one candidate had spent £40,000 (the equivalent of more than £5 million today) contesting Oxfordshire in 1754, but had still not been successful. It would not have been too difficult for Pitt, with his many connections, to obtain a pocket borough, but, fired by an idealistic belief in rooting out corruption and pursuing parliamentary reform, he wished to be elected in his own right, and in a more open contest. He therefore decided to stand for the one place he knew well, Cambridge University, which elected two MPs and which also had a relatively democratic electorate of several hundred members of the University Senate. As it turned out he was heavily defeated there, and ended up temporarily accepting a pocket borough after all, albeit on a ‘liberal, Independent footing’,³⁰ from the northern borough-monger Sir James Lowther.

Wilberforce, by contrast, could indulge in simple expense. Although he could have bought an average pocket borough for about £4,000 and never needed to visit it in his life, his continuing affection for Hull, and a possible affinity with Pitt’s belief that it was better to arrive at the House of Commons through at least the semblance of a real election, led him in an obvious direction. Hull was a respected and ancient borough, with two Members of Parliament, but with approaching 1,500 voters it was certainly not a rotten one, nor permanently residing in anyone’s pocket. As things stood, the two seats were divided, as was so often the case, between government and opposition. The government’s supporter was Lord Robert Manners, a General who backed Lord North and had now been an MP for thirty-three years. The opposition representative was David Hartley, who was a distinguished opponent of the American War and a talented inventor of fireproofing for buildings and ships, but who suffered from giving such boring speeches that in the Commons ‘his rising always operated like a dinner-bell’.³¹ Wilberforce decided, with good reason, that his local popularity, myriad family connections and abundant funds would allow him to break the long-established grip of the main political groupings and become Member of Parliament for Hull without being dependent on anyone.

All of these factors were important in Wilberforce’s election campaign. In some constituencies only the members of the corporation (the local council) or owners of certain properties or burgages possessed the vote, with the result that there were sometimes only a handful of voters; in others, like the city of Westminster and the counties, the franchise extended to all forty-shilling freeholders, and would generally include a good few thousand males with property above that rental value. In the case of Hull, it was the freemen of the town (those formally honoured by being given its ‘freedom’) who possessed the franchise, with the interesting complication that they did so by hereditary descent, and were therefore neither necessarily the richest inhabitants of the town, or even inhabitants at all. Several hundred of them were to be found living in London, and Wilberforce entertained them ‘at suppers in the different public houses of Wapping’.³² In common with voters throughout the rest of the country, the Hull freemen regarded their votes as financially precious, and expected to be paid for using them, the going rate being two guineas in return for one of their two votes, and four guineas in return for a ‘plumper’, a vote for that candidate and no one else. Those who needed to travel to Hull would expect to be paid their expenses, which might average £10.

A few decades later the freemen of Hull would be described as ‘generally persons in a low station of life, and the manner in which they are bribed shows how little worthy they are of being entrusted with a privilege from which so many of the respectable inhabitants of the town are excluded’.³³ The intervention of Wilberforce would have been hugely welcome to the freemen in 1780, because it meant that there would be three candidates for the two seats, and therefore a contested election with expenses to be paid. Few things were more unwelcome to them than an uncontested election, as demonstrated by this account of the withdrawal of a candidate for Hull ten years later:

The plump jocund risibility, that an hour before enlightened all countenances, was gradually drawn down into a longitudinal dejection, which pervaded every face, even the friends of the opposition, shrunk with the consciousness of their own approaching unimportance, sensible that their consequence was then (for want of a protracted canvass) sunk to nought, and that nothing could restore it but a THIRD MAN; the cry of which resounded in all parts, while scoured through the streets of HULL the disappointed crowds; and a Bell was sent forth to the adjacent towns, to ring out an invitation to a third CANDIDATE FOR HULL.³⁴

While the freemen happily sold their votes, this did not mean they auctioned them to the highest bidder. They simply expected any candidate they voted for to pay the going rate, and since there was no secret ballot at that time, and the vote of every freeman could be observed, each candidate was duly able to pay for the votes he received, and generally did so two weeks after the close of the poll – since allegations of bribery had to be brought forward before that time. Possession of money did not of itself, therefore, guarantee success, although it certainly inspired confidence that the appropriate payments would be made in due course. It also enabled a candidate to treat his potential supporters in other ways, most commonly through the provision of alcohol, food and accommodation. In some campaigns, tickets were issued to proven or promised supporters entitling them to claim a certain amount of drink and food, and even a bed at a particular supportive inn. The quantities consumed could be enormous: the £8,500 spent by the Grosvenor family at Chester towards inn-keepers’ bills in one election paid for 1,187 barrels of ale, 3,756 gallons of rum and brandy, and over twenty-seven thousand bottles of wine.³⁵ This was in a city of a similar size to Hull, with 1,500 electors. To refuse to treat the voters was regarded as an insult, and in a freeman borough such as Hull would certainly have led to electoral disaster, and quite possibly disorder. Everyone understood that the best way to avoid chaos at election times was properly conducted treating ‘to humour the voters and to reward the faithful’.³⁶