Читать книгу William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner - William Hague - Страница 8

Who but madmen would enter a contest for such a county, or indeed for any county?

PHILIP FRANCIS TO CHRISTOPHER WYVILL,

on the subject of an election for the county of Yorkshire, 1794¹

Tear the enemy to pieces.

WILLIAM PITT TO WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 24 March 1784²

HOWEVER QUIET the scene when a tired messenger rode his horse up to Lord George Germain’s house in Pall Mall on the morning of Sunday, 25 November 1781, the contents of the message he carried would lead to two and a half years of upheaval and crisis in the government and politics of Britain. All night long the relays of horses from the port of Falmouth in Cornwall had borne towards London the news that Lord North and his embattled ministers must have dreaded: at Yorktown in Virginia, an entire British army under General Cornwallis had capitulated. While military commanders might calculate that the war could be continued from the British stronghold of New York, others knew that this disaster would ‘occasion the loss of all the Southern colonies very speedily’,³ and that British possessions in the West Indies, including Jamaica, could be ‘in imminent danger’.⁴ Germain, the dogged but hapless Secretary of State, would soon produce a plan for struggling on with the war, trying to hold New York, Charleston and Savannah while mounting amphibious raids and courting American loyalists. But Lord North, possessed as usual with a sure feel for parliamentary opinion, knew that in domestic politics the game was up. ‘Oh God it is all over!’⁵ he exclaimed when the news of Yorktown reached Downing Street that fateful Sunday morning.

Caught between the implacable George III on the one side and the growing view among MPs that further fighting would bring ruin at the hands of France and Spain in addition to the now inevitable loss of the American colonies, the North administration staggered uncertainly on through the winter of 1781–82, sacrificing Germain that January but still failing to win the confidence of Parliament or the nation. The attacks mounted on the enfeebled administration by Fox, Burke, Pitt and other opposition Members were merciless and scathing, while at the same time a growing number of independent MPs concluded that North must be ousted and the war ended. Wilberforce was among them, delivering a speech on 22 February 1782 which was his first major display of political partisanship in the Commons. While the year before he might have ‘staid in with the old fat fellow’, Wilberforce now turned on the same portly figure of Lord North. He declared that ‘while the present Ministry existed there were no prospects of either peace or happiness to this Kingdom’. It was clear that the government intended to pursue the ruinous war in a cruel, bloody and impracticable manner; the actions of ministers more ‘resembled the career of furious madmen than the necessarily vigorous and prudent exertions of able statesmen’.⁶ He voted solidly with the opposition in the close-fought divisions of late February and early March 1782. On 20 March he would have witnessed the resignation of North after twelve years in office, the snow falling outside the House of Commons as British politicians turned their minds to how to construct a fresh government while rescuing a tottering Empire. Nominally still an independent Member, Wilberforce had clearly aligned himself with the opposition, and was invited to their meetings. That he should have taken such a strong stand against the North government and the American War is not surprising. He had befriended Pitt, for whom opposition to the war was second nature; he admired Fox, whom he found ‘very pleasant and unaffected’⁷ at a number of dinners and who had masterminded the tactics of the opposition; he was also alert to the political mood and alive to the simple reality of the time, namely that the only way in which the British could mitigate their defeat was to turf out the ministers who could be blamed for it.

While ‘no party man’, Wilberforce would find himself for the next four years very much categorised as belonging to a party. The common thread which would run through all his political dispositions until 1786 was loyalty to his great friend Pitt. Pitt was not a member of the new government formed from among the opposition groupings in March 1782, having rather haughtily declared in advance that he could ‘never accept a subordinate situation’,⁸ and not having been offered a senior one. Nevertheless, he and Wilberforce were firm supporters of this new Whig-led government, headed by the Marquis of Rockingham, who was as munificent in his wealth and aristocratic grandeur as he was inadequate as a political leader or manager. Fox, the new Secretary of State and ministerial leader in the Commons, seethed with indignation that the King had seen fit only to conduct negotiations with the lesser of the opposition groupings, that led by Shelburne. Wilberforce was included in the discussions held about the formation of the government, and remembered ‘Fox awkwardly bringing out that Lord Shelburne only had seen the King, in short jealousy between Foxites and Shelburneites manifested, tho’ for a long time suppressed’.⁹ The wily George III, in a ‘masterpiece of Royal skill’,¹⁰ had ensured that the Rockingham administration would be poisoned from the outset with a rich dose of resentment and suspicion. He did not intend that those who had opposed the American War would stay in office for long.

The Rockingham administration did indeed turn out to be one of the most ill-fated in British history. Within weeks Fox and Shelburne were at furious loggerheads over the terms of the peace treaty being negotiated in Paris, and within three months of entering office Rockingham was dead. Wilberforce had been much courted by Rockingham during his final months. The formerly unknown Member for Hull was by now identified as an active MP who could think more clearly and speak more forcefully than most of his colleagues. With Rockingham keen to secure the loyalty of an able Yorkshireman, and the Whigs looking forward to creating new peers who could strengthen their position in the House of Lords, there were even rumours that Wilberforce would soon be ennobled. Eager suppliers of ermine robes were in touch with him to try to secure his business in the event of this happy elevation taking place.

It seems unlikely that Wilberforce would have accepted a peerage at the age of twenty-two, even though peerages in the eighteenth century were far scarcer than they have since become, and at that time carried the automatic guarantee of being passed on through the generations. Like Pitt, he saw the Commons as the only place for a young man of ambition and energy. At this stage of his life Wilberforce certainly harboured some ambitions for office, but in July 1782 he could only watch loyally as yet another new government took office, this time with Shelburne as First Lord of the Treasury and the twenty-three-year-old Pitt as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

There is no trace of jealousy in Wilberforce’s attitude towards the spectacular promotion of his friend. Indeed, it was in the summer of 1782 that these two young men began to form a bond of companionship sufficiently strong that it could never be completely ruptured even by the sharpest of disagreements in later years. They were both key members of the group of twenty-five Cambridge graduates who formed Goostree’s club in Pall Mall, dining, drinking and gambling there every night when Parliament was sitting. There, with Lord Euston, Pepper Arden, Henry Bankes and Edward Eliot, ‘all youngsters just entering into life’,¹¹ they enjoyed themselves to the full, going on to the House of Commons where George Selwyn could find them ‘singing and laughing à gorge déployée’, making him ‘wish for one day to be twenty’.¹² Some evenings or in the recess Pitt would ride out to Wimbledon to spend the night at Lauriston House, which Wilberforce had now inherited, and ‘for near three month slept almost every night there’.¹³ Despite the political responsibilities they now enjoyed, their letters and diary entries of this period suggest an atmosphere of almost carefree youth. Pitt would write to Wilberforce from the Commons in the afternoon, ‘Eliot, Arden and I will be with you before curfew and expect an early meal of peas and strawberries.’¹⁴ Wilberforce’s diary entries in the summers of 1782 and 1783 include: ‘Delicious day – lounged morning at Wimbledon with friends, foyning^* at night, and run about the garden for an hour or two,’ or ‘To Wimbledon with Pitt and Eliot, at their persuasion,’ or ‘Fine hot day, went on water with Pitt and Eliot fishing, came back, dined, walked evening. Eliot went home, Pitt stayed.’¹⁵ There was evidently much boisterous activity, with reports of neighbours being ‘alarmed with noises at their door’¹⁶ and of Pitt having cut up the silk hat of another visitor, a future Foreign Secretary, one night and strewn the remnants around the flowerbeds. Not only did Wilberforce admire Pitt’s political abilities, he also loved his company, thinking him ‘the most truly witty man he had ever met’,¹⁷ and later recording, ‘Mr Pitt was systematically witty … the others were often run away with by their wit. Mr Pitt was always master of his. He could turn it to any end or object he desired.’¹⁸ Pitt, in turn, cherished Wilberforce’s good humour and political support.

At Easter 1782, the two Williams had holidayed together in Bath and Brighthelmstone (modern-day Brighton). But with Pitt in office as Chancellor, Wilberforce was unable to take his friend with him later that year on the extended summer tour that would become his perennial habit over the next few years. Abandoning plans for a trip to the Continent because of a sudden by-election in Hull (Lord Robert Manners had died and was in due course succeeded, unopposed, by the previously defeated David Hartley), Wilberforce made once again for Rayrigg on Windermere before visiting Weymouth in the autumn. He simply could not do without country air, explaining to his sister in the summer of 1783 that the House of Commons was unable ‘to compensate to me for the loss of air, pleasant walks, and what Milton calls “each rural sight, each rural sound”’.¹⁹ ‘I never leave this poor villa,’ he wrote from Wimbledon, ‘without feeling my virtuous affections confirmed and strengthened; and I’m afraid it would be to some degree true if I were to add that I never remain long in London without their being somewhat injured and diminished.’²⁰ To Rayrigg he would take an assortment of books, including ‘classics, statutes at large and history’,²¹ and welcome a succession of friends.

In the Lakes he found solitude through riding, walking and boating, but also lifelong friendship, in particular with Colonel John Pennington, more than a quarter of a century older than Wilberforce and another admirer of Pitt, who as Lord Muncaster would become the recipient of a vast proportion of Wilberforce’s letters on public affairs. Other visitors included Pitt’s future political hostess the Duchess of Gordon, and a procession of Hull family friends, one of whom found Wilberforce to be ‘riotous and noisy’.²² Once ensconced at Weymouth in the middle of October, he was writing to Edward Eliot to say that ‘So mild is the climate and so calm and clear is the sea that on this very fifteenth day of October I am sitting with my window open on its side and am every moment wishing myself up to the chin in it.’²³ It was an abiding characteristic that he would seek out the long summer periods of rest and contemplation which his wealth permitted and his inclination and constitution required. Where Pitt was happy to spend many of his summers dealing with the grind of dispatches and correspondence and darting a short distance out of London for a brief respite, Wilberforce drew strength and inspiration from a more balanced existence. It was a difference of temperament which helped to make one of them suitable for high office, and the other designed for high ideals.

Pitt’s aptitude for high office was soon tested. His boss, the Earl of Shelburne, proved unable or unwilling to broaden the political base of his ministry during the long summer recess, leaving Pitt as a principal spokesman in the House of Commons for a government which had only minority support. By the time the preliminaries of the peace agreement with France, Spain and the new United States of America were ready to be put to Parliament for approval in February 1783, the Shelburne ministry was vulnerable to parliamentary ambush. The proposed peace treaties represented a reasonable settlement under all the circumstances, with Britain’s negotiating position having been strengthened by a crucial naval victory in the West Indies in April 1782. Britain would give up the Floridas and Minorca to Spain, St Lucia and some other islands to France, and the huge tracts of territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi were awarded to America at the same time as her independence was recognised. Shelburne had simultaneously taken great care to negotiate an extensive commercial treaty with America. While these proposals were wholly realistic, and even far-sighted, Fox took the opportunity to attack them as a means of removing his hated rival from power. In one of the great unholy alliances of British political history, the supporters of Fox, who had always opposed the war, and the party of North, which had prosecuted it, now came together to drive Shelburne from office, and Pitt with him.

Pitt asked Wilberforce to give one of the leading speeches in a crucial debate on the peace treaty on 17 February 1783. Clearly he believed that the voice of Wilberforce was already influential and eloquent; for his part Wilberforce was ready to do anything for his friend. Wilberforce was tense as he prepared for his most important speech to that date. He spent a weekend with ‘his sleep disturbed at the thoughts of a full House of Commons’,²⁴ walked for several hours on the Sunday afternoon, and made a plea for the necessity of peace in his speech on the Monday afternoon, arguing that if the Fox-North coalition defeated the ministry on this issue, ‘no Minister would in future dare to make such a peace as the necessity of the country might require’.²⁵ Wilberforce’s speech was well regarded, although he recorded the events of that day in his diary in a very matter-of-fact way:

17th. Walked down morning to House to get Milner into gallery. Seconded the address. Lost the motion by 16. Did not leave House till about eight in the morning, and bed about nine.²⁶

It must have been a deflating experience. Pitt’s own speech was regarded indifferently, and the government defeat by sixteen votes meant that the Shelburne ministry was virtually finished. In the climactic debate of four days later, Pitt pulled himself together to deliver a stirring defence of his colleague’s policy and his own conduct which established him as a major political force. Wilberforce again spoke up for his friend, and wrote down what has become a celebrated note of Pitt’s physical sickness at the time: ‘Pitt’s famous speech on second day’s debate – first day’s not so good. Spoke three hours, till four in the morning. Stomach disordered, and actually holding Solomon’s porch door opened with one hand, while vomiting during Fox’s speech to whom he was to reply.’²⁷

The combination of Pitt’s oratorical performances, the shortage of weighty figures in the Commons and the desperation of George III to find a parliamentary figure who could prevent the Fox-North coalition from coming to power catapulted William Pitt into the front rank of political life as a potential Prime Minister. Shelburne resigned on 24 February, but for the whole of March Pitt remained in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in a government without a leader while the King thrashed about in an increasingly desperate search for a Prime Minister he did not hate. Twice during the five-week crisis Pitt came close to accepting office as Prime Minister while still only twenty-three years old, but twice he had the good sense to recognise that he would have had no defence against a hostile House of Commons moving quickly to vote him out. The irascible King varied for five weeks between trying to insist that Pitt take office, begging other ex-ministers to do so, sending for Pitt’s uncle, Thomas Pitt, as a desperate resort -’Mr Thomas Pitt or Mr Thomas anybody’,²⁸ threatening to abdicate and finally, in late March, accepting the Fox-North coalition into power with the Duke of Portland as its nominal head. He did this with the worst possible grace, accompanied by a fixed resolution to create no peerages or honours at their request and a secret determination to eject them from office whenever a convenient pretext arose: ‘I trust the eyes of the Nation will soon be opened as my sorrow may prove fatal to my health if I remain long in this thraldom.’²⁹

Throughout the chaos Wilberforce remained closely connected to Pitt, both socially and politically. If he felt any jealousy about the spectacular rise to prominence of his friend he was good at hiding it, although on the day Pitt was first offered the premiership he noted: ‘24th. Dined Pitt’s – heard of the very surprising propositions.’³⁰ When Pitt resigned at the end of March, he gravitated immediately to the happy society of Goostree’s and Wilberforce’s villa: ‘31st. Pitt resigned today. Dined Pitt’s then Goostree’s where supped. Bed almost three o’clock. April 3rd. Wimbledon, where Pitt &c. dined and slept. Evening walk – bed a little past two.’³¹ Released from the cares of office, Pitt started to plan a summer of travel, including a visit to France, involving Wilberforce and their close mutual friend Edward Eliot. Knowing that conspiratorial meetings were taking place between George III, Earl Temple, and the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, with the intention of putting Pitt into office in more favourable circumstances than those available in March, they kept an eye on political events, but when Parliament rose in July Fox and North were still in office, while the King chafed. Pitt wrote to Wilberforce from Brighton on 6 August: ‘I have only to tell you that I have no news, which I consider as making it pretty certain that there will be none now before the meeting of Parliament [in November]. The party to Rheims holds of course, at least as far as depends upon me.’³²

Most of Pitt’s letters to Wilberforce from this time reveal two principal concerns about his friend: the first that he was having serious trouble with his eyesight, and the second that his punctuality and travel plans could not be relied upon. Pitt would end letters with: ‘I am very glad to see you write without the assistance of a secretary. Perhaps, however, you will not be able to read without the assistance of a decypherer. At least in compassion to your eyesight it is as well for me to try it no further,’³³ and Wilberforce’s diaries in 1783 have many entries such as ‘My eyes bad. Bed early,’³⁴ and ‘Bad day. Eyes indifferent.’³⁵ In Pitt’s concern about Wilberforce’s timekeeping there is a friendly hint of a more widespread opinion which had taken shape about him, that, as the first Lord Carrington was later to put it, ‘As to his fitting office his careless and inaccurate method of doing business rendered him wholly unfit for it.’³⁶ Pitt’s letter of 6 August enjoins Wilberforce to ‘recollect that you have to deal with punctual men, who would not risk their characters by being an hour too late for any appointment’.³⁷ By 22 August, with the trip to France imminent, Pitt was writing to Wilberforce:

Dear Wilberforce,

I hope you have found benefit enough from your inland rambling, to be in perfect order now for crossing the seas. Eliot and I meet punctually at Bankes’s the 1st September, and in two days after shall be in London. Pray let us see you, or hear from you by that time, and do not verify my prophecy of detaining us a fortnight and jilting us at the end of it. We shall really not have a day to lose, which makes me pursue you with this hasty admonition.

Adieu ever yours, W Pitt.³⁸

Pitt need not have worried on this occasion about Wilberforce’s reliability, for he duly turned up at Bankes’s house in Dorset in early September after a visit to his family and constituency in Hull. Pitt should, however, have been even more concerned about Wilberforce’s eyesight, because he nearly shot him while taking aim at a partridge. Wilberforce was sceptical about whether he had come so close to wiping out the nation’s political future, but, ‘So at least,’ he later recorded, ‘my companions affirmed, with a roguish wish, to make the most of my short-sightedness and inexperience in field sports.’³⁹

With the naïvety of young men who had never set foot outside their own country before, Wilberforce, Pitt and Eliot sailed for Calais in early September without the preparation and documents which were necessary for comfortable travel overseas in the eighteenth century. Having arrived in France with only a letter of introduction to a M. Coustier of Rheims, who was assumed to be a senior businessman or banker, Wilberforce described what happened next in a letter to Henry Bankes:

From Calais we made directly for Rheims, and the day after our arrival dressed ourselves unusually well, and proceeded to the house of Mons. Coustier to present, with not a little awe, our only letters of recommendation. It was with some surprise that we found Mons. Coustier behind a counter distributing figs and raisins. I had heard that it was very usual for gentlemen on the continent to practise some handicraft trade or other for their amusement, and therefore for my own part I concluded that his taste was in the fig way, and that he was only playing at grocer for his diversion; and viewing the matter in this light, I could not help admiring the excellence of his imitation; but we soon found that Mons. Coustier was a ‘véritable epicier,’ and that not a very eminent one.⁴⁰

Not only was M. Coustier not one of the local gentry, he could not even effect an introduction to them. The disorganised trio spent over a week at an inn, ‘without making any great progress in the French language, which could not indeed be expected of us, as we spoke to no human being but each other and our Irish courier’.⁴¹ But eventually they persuaded their grocer ‘to put on a bag and sword and carry us to the intendant of the police, whom he supplied with groceries’.⁴² The astonished police officer initially found their story incredible, and told the Abbé de Lageard, who under the Archbishop of Rheims wielded civic as well as religious authority, that ‘There are three Englishmen here of very suspicious character. They are in a wretched lodging, they have no attendants, yet their courier says that they are “grands seigneurs” and that one of them is the son of the great Chatham; but it must be impossible, they must be “des intrigants”.’⁴³ Having thus come close to being arrested for spying, the three now found their luck changed dramatically: the Abbé was a generous man who provided huge meals, long conversations and ‘the best wine the country can afford’.⁴⁴ After a week of such indulgence they were presented to the Archbishop, whose accessibility and normality made a very positive impression on Wilberforce: ‘N.B. Archbishops in England are not like Archevêques in France; these last are jolly fellows of about forty years of age, who play at billiards, &c. like other people.’⁴⁵

Having turned themselves from suspicious strangers into local celebrities in Rheims, the travellers were able to proceed to Paris, where even the Queen, Marie Antoinette, had heard about their time with the grocer and teased them about it. Joining the French court at its hunting retreat of Fontainebleau, they embarked on a whirlwind of meals, opera, cards, backgammon and billiards, and were often in the company of Marie Antoinette, whom Wilberforce found ‘a monarch of most engaging manners and appearance’.⁴⁶ He wrote on his return that ‘they all, men and women, crowded round Pitt in shoals’.⁴⁷ Such scenes must have been an enduring reminder to Wilberforce and Eliot that their friend already carried with him immense fame and prestige. The world of European politics was thrown open to them; they met Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin, and while Pitt was stag-hunting, Eliot and Wilberforce were taken to see Louis XVI himself, a ‘clumsy, strange figure in immense boots’.⁴⁸ Eating, drinking and gambling were their vices for the trip, and there are no accounts of the three young men becoming intimate with the local women. Pitt had no hesitation in refusing the offer of marriage to the daughter of the vastly wealthy and powerful Jacques Necker – she would subsequently almost rival him as an antagonist of Napoleon as Madame de Staël. At this stage of their lives, none of the three had marriage in mind. Wilberforce had already rejected one overture himself, saying that he preferred to remain ‘that isolated unproductive and stigmatised thing, a Bachelor’.⁴⁹ They just had time to see the sights of Paris, ‘going every night to a play, of which we were not able to make out a syllable’,⁵⁰ before their six-week visit to France was ended abruptly. On 22 October 1783 a special messenger arrived for Pitt, summoning him back to England with all possible speed. By the twenty-fourth they were on the road from Dover to London. One of the greatest constitutional crises of British history was imminent. However great their attachment and friendship, Pitt, Wilberforce and Eliot would never enjoy such carefree travels together again.

Wilberforce noted that he returned ‘to England … and secret plottings – the King groaning under the Ministry that had been imposed on him’.⁵¹ He was back to the familiar life of Wimbledon, Goostree’s and late-night dinners. Pitt, Eliot and Pitt’s elder brother, Lord Chatham, were his most frequent dining companions, but he was still sufficient of an independent, at least nominally, to be invited to dinner at Downing Street by the Duchess of Portland with Charles James Fox in attendance. Even so, there could be little doubt where Wilberforce would stand in the great confrontation between Pitt and Fox which was about to grip the nation.

After seven months in government, Fox, the inveterate gambler, decided to risk all on his East India Bill in the House of Commons. More than two centuries later, it is sometimes difficult to grasp the huge importance of India in eighteenth-century British politics. British business in India was conducted under the auspices of the East India Company, but the scale of the fortunes to be made and the importance of the decisions taken within the Company, which could affect the lives of millions of people and determine the course of a war or the duration of peace, meant that East India business was increasingly the business of the British government. In the 1770s Lord North had attempted to put the affairs of the East India Company on an acceptable political footing, introducing a Governor General, a Council and a Supreme Court. These reforms were now seen as failing, partly because of the intense loathing for each other evidenced by the Governor General, Warren Hastings, on the one hand and the members of the Council, such as Philip Francis, on the other. In the early 1780s Fox’s great ally Edmund Burke had led the denunciations of Hastings and the parliamentary assault on the alleged mismanagement of Indian affairs. Now they were in power, Fox and Burke intended to bring true political accountability to the Company’s decisions. Their Bill, presented to Parliament on 18 November 1783, included a proposal to create a Board of seven Commissioners, appointed by Parliament and with extensive powers over the officers and business of the East India Company, thus providing political authority over the Company’s management.

This was no innocent proposal. So extensive were the riches to be acquired in India that the power of the seven Commissioners to make key appointments within the East India Company would make them very powerful men. Furthermore, their appointment for fixed terms by parliamentary vote meant that the Fox-North majority would be able to determine all seven Commissioners to begin with, that they could not be immediately dismissed by a new administration, and that the King was shut out of a vital area of patronage and influence. Such would be the patronage accruing to the Fox-North coalition once they carried the Bill that it would materially consolidate their hold on power at Westminster. Well-intentioned as it may also have been, the East India Bill was therefore a direct challenge to the opposition and to George III to do their worst.

Fox intended to rush the Bill through within weeks as Pitt sought frantically to bring MPs to Westminster and denounced it as ‘one of the most boldest, most unprecedented, most desperate and alarming attempts at the exercise of tyranny that ever disgraced the annals of this or any other country’.⁵² Wilberforce was there to help his friend. In a debate on 20 November he spoke ‘with humour and ability’ and said that ‘If the present Bill passed we might see the government of Great Britain set up in India, instead of that of India in Great Britain.’⁵³ That Wilberforce was speaking at Pitt’s behest rather than in any way representing the wider views of the independent MPs became clear when Fox carried the Bill through the Commons with three-figure majorities and, in early December, proudly carried it to the House of Lords for approval.

It was a gamble too far. Earl Temple warned the King that the Bill was ‘a plan to take more than half the royal power, and by that means to disable His Majesty for the rest of the reign’.⁵⁴ After quietly consulting Pitt through an intermediary, George III took the unprecedented step of secretly asking members of the House of Lords to vote against the Bill, and then dismissed the Fox-North coalition from office on the grounds that their measure had been defeated in Parliament. On 19 December 1783, George III appointed Pitt as Prime Minister, even though Fox and North clearly continued to command majority support in the House of Commons. Few events in the entire history of the British constitution have roused such intense passions as this brutal exercise of royal power. To supporters of the King, he had been justified in ridding himself of ministers ‘who held him in bondage, and who meditated to render that bondage perpetual’.⁵⁵ But to opponents, the dismissal by the King of a government with a clear majority in the House of Commons, and the handing out of royal instructions to members of the House of Lords on how to vote, were utterly unconstitutional and a total violation of the constitutional settlement of 1688. As an enraged Charles James Fox put it to the House of Commons, it was an issue which would decide ‘whether we are henceforward free men or slaves; whether this House is the palladium of liberty or the engine of despotism’.⁵⁶ Pitt, at twenty-four by far the youngest Prime Minister in British history, would take office in the most difficult conceivable circumstances, on the back of a constitutional manoeuvre which was dubious at best and with a majority of MPs determined to remove him.

Seasoned observers believed Pitt to have little chance of surviving in office. Wilberforce himself recorded one of the most famous descriptions of the fledgling government in his diary on 22 December as Earl Temple, one of the few senior politicians prepared to join Pitt in the cabinet, resigned after only three days in office:

22nd. Lord Temple Resigned. No dissolution. Drove about for Pitt. Sat at home. Then Goostrees. ‘So your friend Mr Pitt means to come in,’ said Mrs Crewe;^* ‘Well, he may do what he likes during the holidays, but it will only be a mince-pie administration depend on it.’⁵⁷

The mince-pie administration, it was believed, would not last far into January 1784, but Pitt spent the period forming his government and winning over some MPs as best he could. Wilberforce was present throughout many key decisions – ‘23rd. Morning Pitt’s … Pitt nobly firm. Evening Pitt’s. Cabinet formed.’⁵⁸ Pitt managed to bring in the relatively undistinguished Lord Sydney as Home Secretary and Earl Carmarthen as Foreign Secretary, but it was scornfully noted in many quarters that the only distinguishing feature of his government was their collective capacity for drink. For junior ministerial positions Pitt was able to look to some of his friends and personal allies, but at no stage does he appear to have contemplated asking Wilberforce, perhaps his closest friend and companion, to join the ranks of the ministers. Wilberforce could have been forgiven for having been puzzled by this. Leaving Downing Street on the evening of 23 December he said to Tom Steele, another MP and close friend of Pitt, ‘Pitt must take care whom he makes Secretary of the Treasury,’ only to receive the reply, ‘Mind what you say, for I am Secretary of the Treasury.’⁵⁹ There is no record of Pitt offering office to Wilberforce and him refusing it. The subject seems simply not to have come up, either then or on any subsequent occasion.

Why would Pitt not offer a position to a friend he particularly trusted and liked, and who had already proved his parliamentary ability? Wilberforce was still only a junior MP, but so were several of the new ministers, including the Prime Minister himself. He needed more experience in debate, but so did many others, including Steele. He was popular, and could have held some sway over the Independent MPs whose votes would be desperately needed in the weeks ahead. The answer may be that Wilberforce was determined, even at this stage, to retain his nominal independence and to resist taking on a ministerial office which would have put an end to his travels to his beloved Lake District and elsewhere. He may even have made this clear to Pitt during their many long evenings at Wimbledon or in France, without making any record of it. Perhaps more likely, Pitt knew Wilberforce well enough, or thought he did, not to offer him a position which required skills of management and administration. His friends clearly thought of him as often being disorganised or late, not much of a recommendation in the days when ministers did most of their own work, with very few officials to assist them. And could a man who wrote to Henry Bankes earlier that year to say that his eyes had been so weak that he had been unable to write a letter for two or three weeks, carry out any function which involved the reading and writing of scores of letters each day? It would not have been difficult for Pitt to come to the conclusion that Wilberforce, however valuable as a personal friend and political ally, was neither physically nor temperamentally suited to ministerial office. If he had thought otherwise, Wilberforce’s life could well have run a very different course.

The passionate Commons debates of January to March 1784, as Fox inflicted one defeat after another on the infant administration while Pitt stoically refused to resign, were exhausting to many of the participants. Wilberforce was continually active on Pitt’s behalf, keeping in touch with the Independents, who at one stage made a serious move to bring about a grand coalition as a mediated solution to the constitutional impasse, voting regularly in the Commons and giving Pitt moral support. On the night of 28 February he called at White’s to see Pitt after he had been rescued from a violent affray in St James’s Street, and stayed up as so often until three in the morning. Two days later he spoke in the debate which became the climactic confrontation of the crisis, asserting that the conduct of Pitt ‘was dictated by a laudable ambition, which he would always be proud to cherish, as it tended to the salvation of the country’.⁶⁰ He noted that night that he was ‘extremely tired’.⁶¹ As it happened, the debate of 1 March 1784 opened the way to Pitt’s triumph. Two months previously, Fox had been defeating him by majorities of more than fifty on the floor of the House of Commons. That night the majority against Pitt fell to only one. In the meantime loyal addresses had poured in from all over the nation acclaiming the appointment of Pitt and the actions of the King. Pitt now had the necessary support and the justification for a dissolution of Parliament. The most tumultuous general election of the eighteenth century was about to take place. It was a contest for which Wilberforce harboured a private hope, one so secret he had shared it with no one else.

The events of late March 1784 would lead Wilberforce to display to the full his ability to combine clear support for a cause with a mastery of the practical minutiae of politics. They would prove that his eloquence and determination were major forces to be reckoned with, and they would elevate him, against all expectations except his own, into being one of the most prestigious Members of Parliament in the land.

With a general election imminent, Wilberforce set out initially not to Hull, where he would be expected to run for re-election, but to the city of York, where a major meeting of freeholders from across Yorkshire was due to take place on 25 March. He did this even though ‘he knew … nobody in York but Mr Mason the poet’.⁶² Such a meeting, in this case called to consider a loyal address to the King approving his recent actions, was of sufficient importance to carry national weight, for Yorkshire was generally considered to be a county of the highest political importance. This was partly on account of its size, in terms of both geography and electorate, with over twenty thousand freeholders eligible to vote: these were residents in towns and villages from all over Yorkshire, except those who returned MPs from their own boroughs. A successful election for the county of Yorkshire required a candidate to have recourse to either great popularity or enormous expense. Furthermore, the politics of the county in 1784 provided a major test for some of the principal political interests of the nation. It was in Yorkshire that some of the great Whig families particularly expected to hold sway, including the Fitzwilliams (Earl Fitzwilliam had succeeded his uncle, the Marquis of Rockingham, as one of the great landed magnates of the north) and Cavendishes. It was also the domain of the Yorkshire Association, formed by the Reverend Christopher Wyvill five years earlier to campaign for parliamentary reform, and now using its established organisation to campaign against the Fox-North coalition. The scene was thus set for a major confrontation at York, with both sides striving to bring their supporters to the city for 25 March in order to carry or defeat the address to the King, with the added expectation of this being immediately followed by a trial of strength as to who would be returned as the county’s two MPs.

The influence of the Whig Lords was so great in the county that Wilberforce doubted that it would be possible to ‘get up an opposition in Yorkshire’.⁶³ He arrived in York on 22 March, met Wyvill, helped to draw up the address to the King, and prepared for the meeting on the twenty-fifth, which was a ‘cold hailing day’⁶⁴ with a huge crowd assembled in the Castle Yard from ten o’clock in the morning to half-past four in the afternoon. There, in a ‘wonderful meeting for order and fair hearing’,⁶⁵ the proposers of the address came up against the full firepower of the Yorkshire Whigs: Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord John Cavendish (the former Chancellor of the Exchequer), Lord Carlisle and Lord Surrey (the future Duke of Norfolk) were assembled to denounce the Pitt ministry. As Wilberforce prepared to speak late into the meeting he had two powerful forces working in his favour: the first was that a national tide of opinion was running in Pitt’s favour, creating, perhaps uniquely in the eighteenth century, a countrywide ‘swing’ of opinion in favour of the new government, irrespective of local factors. Across the country, county meetings had voted loyal addresses, and in the coming days would voice such vociferous hostility to candidates representing Fox and North that many would stand down rather than meet the expense of a doomed contest. The combined impact of the unprincipled nature of the coalition, affection for the King, support for the apparently incorruptible nature of Pitt and the distribution by a burgeoning newspaper industry of far more political information and caricature than had ever been seen before, was about to unseat scores of opposition MPs and give Pitt a huge majority.

The second factor working in Wilberforce’s favour was his own native ability to command a huge meeting despite his tiny physical stature. Many of the crowd of four thousand had been unable to hear properly, amidst bad weather and weak speeches. An eyewitness thought, as Wilberforce mounted the platform, that the weather was so bad ‘that it seemed as if his slight frame would be unable to make head against its violence’.⁶⁶ As it turned out, other observers would consider it ‘impossible, though at the distance of so many years to forget his speech, or the effect which it produced’.⁶⁷ James Boswell told Henry Dundas that ‘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.’⁶⁸ Newspapers considered that his speech showed ‘such an exquisite choice of expression, and pronounced with such rapidity, that we are unable to do it justice in any account we can give of it’,⁶⁹ that it included both an effective answering of the arguments of the Whigs and the successful spreading of fear among the suddenly attentive audience: ‘He dwelt long on the odious East India Bill; read several clauses of it … he alarmed the Freeholders, by shewing that it might have been a Precedent for exercising the same tyranny over the property of every Man in the Kingdom.’⁷⁰

This was a masterly politician and orator at work. To complete the effect, his speech was interrupted after an hour by the arrival of a King’s messenger, who pushed through the crowd and handed up to him a letter from Pitt himself. As the first sentence of the letter gave him the information that Parliament would be dissolved that very day, he was able to announce this immediately to the steadily more supportive crowd, drawing attention to his own powerful connections and provoking a new wave of enthusiasm. He took care not to read out a later section of the letter which had instructed him to ‘tear the enemy to pieces’, and certainly did not reveal Pitt’s comment that ‘I am told Sir Robert Hildyard is the right candidate for the county.’⁷¹ That was a matter on which Wilberforce had other ideas.

As Wilberforce would later confide in a letter to a friend: ‘I had formed within my own heart the project of standing for the county. To anyone besides myself I was aware that it must appear so mad a scheme that I never mentioned it to Mr Pitt, or any of my political connexions. It was undoubtedly a bold idea but I was then very ambitious.’⁷² He knew that since he was not acquainted with the nobility and gentry of the county he would be considered, as the son of a merchant rather than an aristocrat, to be rather unsuitable for county representation. Having never previously been thought of as the candidate, with the general election already announced, he knew it would be thought an ‘utterly improbable’ proposition.⁷³ He considered that ‘It was very unlikely that the son of a merchant and with only my property could come in to represent Yorkshire, where the Members had always been persons of the oldest family, and the largest fortune. However I knew that such things had some times happened but I thought it foolish to talk about what was so unlikely and therefore I did not mention it to anyone.’⁷⁴ Yet he now supplied the burst of intense activity and skill which was necessary to bring it to fruition.

The county’s two incumbent Members, Foljambe and Duncombe, were both ready to take the field again, Foljambe being the candidate of the Whigs, and Duncombe the choice of the Yorkshire Association. In any normal contest, these two candidates would probably have been returned again without the need for an actual poll; such was the expense and difficulty of fighting a contested election in Yorkshire that only twice that century had the voters needed to go to the ballot box, and not at all for the previous forty-three years. But there was nothing normal about 1784, and Wilberforce knew it. Such was the strength of the pro-Pitt mood, and so strong was the impression that Wilberforce had made in the Castle Yard, that by the time the rival camps retired to their respective taverns for many hours of dinner and drinking Wilberforce was being openly touted as a running mate for Duncombe in a fight to unseat Foljambe and the Whigs altogether. As squabbling and drunkenness broke out, it was Wilberforce who helped Wyvill to restore order and secure a united front ‘by showing them the folly of giving up our common object … and by reminding them of the great constitutional principles which we all maintained. This confirmed the disposition to propose me for the county, an idea which had begun to be buzzed about at dinner, among all ranks.’⁷⁵ By midnight, the cry from the York Tavern was ‘Wilberforce and Liberty!’ It had taken him precisely eight hours to move from being the shrimp on the table to the joint candidate to represent the great county of Yorkshire.

The next morning, 26 March, the Yorkshire Whigs tried to salvage what they could from the situation by suggesting the agreed election of their nominee, Foljambe, and whoever was preferred by the anticoalition forces. This would inevitably have meant Duncombe. But Wilberforce had succeeded in giving the Yorkshire Association and its allies the confidence to try for both seats. Although there were two factions, Associators and non-Associators, ‘they determined that everyone should go into his own neighbourhood and see whether he had sufficient strength to encounter the great body of the aristocracy that was arrayed against us … I appeared to be so Independent and to observe so strict a neutrality that they both joined in asking me.’⁷⁶ Thus was the gauntlet flung down for a full-scale election. An immense organisational effort was immediately set in train, with the Association mounting a canvassing operation with the efficiency and thoroughness of any modern political party, but with the added burden of securing the necessities of an eighteenth-century election campaign. The fulltime clerk of the Association, William Gray, appointed agents for every wapentake^* with the intention of canvassing over thirteen thousand freeholders spread all over the county in just ten days. He engaged horses, chaises and inns on the road to York so that freeholders could be assured of the necessary free transportation and lodging, and secured in advance two-thirds of all the public houses and stables in the city of York for the likely duration of the poll. Plans were made to bring up to 1,300 supportive freeholders into the city each day, organised into ‘companies’ and taken to vote according to a schedule, since ‘At the last election most of them were eating and drinking whilst they should have been waiting on the road and their number helped to swell the public house bills considerably.’⁷⁷ The instructions to agents give some flavour of the effort that was expected to be involved when polling itself took place. They were enjoined to ‘poll all such voters as are in the enemy’s strong country and all dubious ones as early as possible’; to ensure that freeholders arrived ‘under the lead and direction of some principal gentleman within the district’; to provide for ‘some strong active and zealous persons’ to ‘facilitate the approach of the freeholders’; to bring freeholders into the polling booths as early as possible in the day in order to ‘excite a spirit of emulation and exertion’; and ‘to have a confidential corps de reserve always ready to poll in case of exigency’.⁷⁸

Such organisation was a great advantage for the Association, it being noted at the same time that ‘The hurry and eagerness commonly attendant upon the opening of canvass are great hindrances to its regular arrangement.’⁷⁹ With the Whigs struggling to match either the organisational scope of the Association or the popularity of Pittite candidates, there was now every chance that Wilberforce would be elected as one of the two Members for the county. Nevertheless, it was still a good way from being a certainty, and it was therefore necessary for him to do what was perfectly common in an uncertain electoral situation in the eighteenth century: to ensure that he was elected elsewhere. In the very same election, for instance, Charles James Fox was fighting an intense battle to retain his seat in the City of Westminster – so closely fought that the poll was kept open for nearly six weeks – but had already ensured that he would be returned by a tiny electorate in the Orkney Islands. Once elected in a prestigious but risky contest, an MP would simply abandon the less distinguished of his constituencies, with the result that eighteenth-century elections were invariably followed by a swathe of by-elections to fill seats immediately vacated. To treat a rotten borough in this manner was easy enough, but to risk insulting the pride of the freemen of Hull was a more perilous proposition; Wilberforce therefore set out from York to Hull on the evening of 26 March to carry out an energetic canvass in his existing constituency. After arriving there at 2 a.m. he embarked on a tour next day, and found ‘people not pleased at my not canvassing’⁸⁰ earlier. By the thirtieth he was noting: ‘Canvass all day – extremely hard work – till night – tired to death,’⁸¹ and two days later snowballs and other projectiles were thrown at him. Some effective speaking and his local popularity pulled him through, and he once again came top of the poll, although with fewer votes than in his 1780 triumph: he polled 807 votes compared to 751 for Samuel Thornton, son of John Thornton, and only 357 for a defeated and dejected David Hartley.

Duly elected for Hull on 1 April, Wilberforce was back on the road to York that same evening to resume his battle for the bigger prize. If by now he lacked energy, having considered himself thoroughly tired for at least a month, and having spent the previous two weeks continually travelling or campaigning well into the night, the ambitious twenty-four-year-old candidate certainly did not want for determination. With the canvassing of Yorkshire at fever pitch before the opening of the poll on 7 April, Wilberforce and Duncombe embarked on a tour of the West Riding towns, illustrated by his diary notes of these hectic few days:

To Rotherham – drawn into town – public dinner. At night to Sheffield – vast support – meeting at Cutler’s Hall … off to Barnsley … then to Wakefield … then off to Halifax. Drawn into town … after dinner (drunken postboy) to Bradford. Drawn into town – vast support. Then on to Leeds …⁸²

As he travelled, express letters were being sent from Westminster by Pitt, who had been triumphantly returned for Cambridge University and could now abandon his own tame constituency of Appleby, with lists of the requests he had sent out for votes and money for Wilberforce. As things turned out, Pitt need not have worried: while his re-election for Hull had cost Wilberforce £8,807, nearly all of which had to be drawn from his own fortune, the county campaign had already brought in subscriptions and donations exceeding £18,000, along with the expectation of a great deal more. And although Wilberforce and Duncombe had ‘passed many great houses’, and ‘not one did we see that was friendly to us’, the canvass returns coming in from the freeholders of Yorkshire were truly crushing. With towns such as Wakefield and Halifax reporting margins up to thirty votes to one, Gray’s canvass reported 10,812 freeholders supporting Duncombe and Wilberforce, with only 2,758 opposed or undecided. Lord Fitzwilliam and the Whigs, moaning they had been ‘beat by the ragamuffins’, had no better option remaining than to avert both the humiliation and the expense of going to the polls. Wilberforce and Duncombe had returned to York on the evening of 6 April when, at 8 p.m. at the York Tavern, a message was received from their opponents conceding defeat without a single vote having to be cast.

It was a moment for exultation. The ‘utterly improbable’ project that Wilberforce had kept to himself until only twelve days earlier had come to fruition, and he was now to be the Member for one of the most sought-after seats in Parliament. He sat down immediately to write several letters of delight, telling Edward Eliot:

I am or at least shall be tomorrow (our enemies having this evening declared their intentions of declining a Poll)

Knight of the Shire for the

County of York.⁸³

The celebrations were busy and varied: ‘7th. Up early – breakfasted tavern – rode frisky horse to castle – elected – chaired – dined … 8th. Walked – called – air balloon – dined …’⁸⁴ When news reached London two days later, Pitt would write: ‘I can never enough congratulate you on such glorious success.’⁸⁵ Across the country Pitt had won a decisive victory, remarkable for both its quality and quantity: not only did the new government have a three-figure majority in the House of Commons, but they had also won a huge proportion of those constituencies where there had been serious electoral competition, with the victory of Wilberforce as one of the jewels in Pitt’s electoral crown.

Cynical observers thought that Pitt would now be certain to include Wilberforce in the ministerial ranks. It was even thought that Wilberforce had switched constituencies with this uppermost in his mind, with Richard Sykes, from a prominent family in Hull, writing: ‘He has always lived above his income and it is certain he is now in expectation of a lucrative post from Government of which he is in the utmost need.’⁸⁶ He went on to say that this would entail a by-election for the county, and ‘The accuracy of this intelligence may be depended upon,’⁸⁷ showing that political gossip in the eighteenth century could be as wildly inaccurate as in any other age. Yet, however careless Wilberforce may have become about money, his election for Yorkshire made it even less likely than before that he would embark on a ministerial career. Pitt, preoccupied in the summer of 1784 with his own India Bill and his first budget, did not in any event carry out a major reshuffle of his government that year. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he had changed his opinion of Wilberforce’s suitability for high office. And from Wilberforce’s point of view, the burdens of representing and attending to his constituents had just been made vastly greater. He would now be expected to make tours of the county during the summer recess, and to represent all year round a vast range of interests, from the clothiers of Halifax to the manufacturers of Sheffield and the merchants of many small towns. An eighteenth-century county constituency did not fit well with a ministerial career: not only did it require a good deal of attention and representation, but the compulsory requirement to fight a by-election when accepting appointment as a minister could have been ruinously expensive. Contrary to the suspicions of Mr Sykes, it is likely therefore that, in Wilberforce’s own mind, his decision to stand for Yorkshire was consistent with political ambitions which were parliamentary rather than governmental. He had indeed sought greater power and prestige, but it was the prestige of an MP with elevated status and an independent power base, rather than as a minister rising in the ranks of the government of his friend.

Wilberforce was conscious from the beginning of the need to look after his new constituency. His first speech in the new Parliament, on 16 June 1784, was in favour of the principle of parliamentary reform, the much-cherished objective of the Yorkshire Association that had ensured his election. Once Parliament rose for the summer, he headed north to commune with his new constituents, becoming the ‘joy of York races’ and learning in detail about his new constituents – even years later he was still asking for lists of influential persons, graded according to their influence, ‘“Li” for little, – “Mi” for middling, – “Gr” for great, – and “V.Gr” for very great’,⁸⁸ together with useful observations such as, ‘Whether he likes the leg or wing of a fowl best, that when one dines with him one may win his heart by helping him, and not be taken in by his “just which you please, sir.” ’⁸⁹

After all the trials of the political season Wilberforce’s mind was once again set on travel, this time on a full-scale Continental tour. The old friend he initially asked to accompany him was unable to go, but holidaying at Scarborough later that summer Wilberforce found himself in the agreeable company of Isaac Milner, his school usher of sixteen years earlier and younger brother of Joseph. Wilberforce decided to ask Isaac to accompany him on a tour of several months with all expenses paid. It would turn out to be one of the most important decisions of his life.

^* Fencing with a weapon designed for thrusting or lunging – but in this context meaning verbal fencing.

^* Frances Crewe was a highly fashionable hostess and was regarded as one of the greatest beauties of her time, much admired by Fox, Burke and Sheridan.

^* The counties of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and Lincolnshire were divided into wapentakes, just as most of the remainder of England was divided into hundreds.