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I must awake to my dangerous state, and never be at rest till I have made my peace with God.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 27 November 1785¹

Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.

WILLIAM PITT TO WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 2 December 1785²

AFTER SUMMERING in York and Scarborough, Wilberforce set out over the Pennines in the early autumn of 1784 to visit his beloved Rayrigg, and ‘looked over all the old scenes again with vast pleasure’.³ His visit there had many frustrations: his eyes were in too poor a state for reading, no visitor of any interest passed through, and he failed to find a spot on which he could locate his ‘future residence’.⁴ By 20 October, after brief stops in London and Brighton, he had set out on his Continental tour and, in spite of the calm conditions, suffered from seasickness while sailing from Dover to Calais. His party travelled in two coaches. The first contained his mother, his sister and ‘a couple of sick cousins, very good girls, whose health we hope to re-establish by the change of air’.⁵ In the other were Wilberforce himself, a small mountain of neglected correspondence – ‘which, to my sore annoyance and discomfort, I have brought in my chaise to the heart of France’⁶ –and the even larger bulk of Isaac Milner.

Feeling threatened by the prospect of several months with only women of his own family for company, Wilberforce had resorted to inviting on the tour a man he did not then know very well. Yet soon he would be describing Milner as ‘a most intelligent and excellent friend of mine’.⁷ Milner had a broad Yorkshire accent and was physically enormous, being described in later years by Marianne Thornton as ‘a rough loud and rather coarse man’, and ‘the most enormous man it was ever my fate to see in a drawing-room’,⁸ but he had a gentle nature and a ready wit which Wilberforce found highly congenial. He also happened to be intellectually brilliant: shortly after Wilberforce had known him as a school usher, having been plucked away from being a Leeds weaver by his elder brother Joseph, he had entered Queens’ College Cambridge, where he revealed an extraordinary intelligence. Many years later, Cambridge dons were still discussing his triumphant progress: by 1774 his academic performance was considered ‘incomparabilis’, and two years later he was a Fellow of his college, going on to become a tutor, rector and, at the age of thirty-two, the first Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy. Some observers were even moved to believe that ‘The university, perhaps, never produced a man of more eminent abilities.’⁹

It says a lot for Wilberforce’s charm and reputation that such a man was happy to ask for leave of absence from his college and set off on a journey expected to last several months with the Wilberforce family in tow. Fortunately, Milner had always thought well of Wilberforce, and he presumably had the additional incentive of being able to visit foreign parts which, having never been wealthy himself, he did not expect to be able to visit on his own. Wilberforce found him ‘lively and dashing in his conversation’,¹⁰ and they were soon covering many subjects in the days and weeks they spent travelling south across France. On the journey they had much to enjoy: ‘the wines, Cote Rotie, Hermitage, &c. all strong’; along the Rhône to Avignon in a barge ‘without a cloud (in October)’; the Frenchmen ‘who always make you a bow where an Englishman would give you an oath’; the ‘large, quiet, sleepy’ town of Aix; Marseilles, ‘the most entertaining place I ever saw, all bustle and business’; and then the final journey towards Nice with ‘astonishing rocks hewn through, and ready to close over you’.¹¹ Inside the carriage, religion was only an occasional talking point, although if it came up Milner always gave a hint of holding powerful convictions. Even back in Scarborough early that year, when Wilberforce had described an Evangelical rector as one who took things too far, Milner had replied, ‘No, how does he carry them too far?’ and continued the argument. Similarly in France, as Wilberforce ridiculed the Methodist views of his aunt and John Thornton, having ‘quite forgotten the beliefs I had when a child’,¹² Milner eventually said to him, ‘Wilberforce, I don’t pretend to be a match for you in this sort of running fire. But if you really wish to discuss these topics in a serious and argumentative manner I should be most happy to enter on them with you.’¹³

Such a considered discussion did not take place immediately. Their arrival in Nice brought the usual round of dinners, card parties and gambling in the company of a fair slice of London society. They even experienced one of the intriguing fads of the time when an operator of animal magnetisers^* ‘tried his skill upon Milner and myself but neither of us felt anything, owing perhaps to our incredulity’.¹⁴ While Mrs Wilberforce refused Sunday invitations, Milner had no such scruples: ‘he appeared in all respects like an ordinary man of the world, mixing like myself in all companies, and joining as readily as others in the prevalent Sunday parties. Indeed, when I engaged him as a companion in my tour I knew not that he had any deeper principles.’¹⁵

Yet those deeper principles would shortly emerge. It is unclear how long Wilberforce intended to stay in Nice, and even though the new session of Parliament was to begin on 25 January 1785, the happy party remained on the Riviera throughout that month. Wilberforce later remembered that ‘Many times during the month of January we carried our cold meat into some of the beautiful recesses of the mountains and rocks by which the place is surrounded on the land side and dined in the open air as we should here, in the summer.’¹⁶ Sometime that month, however, he would have received from Pitt a letter written on 19 December 1784 explaining that ‘as much as I wish you to bask on, under an Italian sun, I am perhaps likely to be the instrument of snatching you from your present paradise … A variety of circumstances concur to make it necessary to give notice immediately on the meeting of Parliament of the day on which I shall move the question of the Reform.’¹⁷ If Pitt as Prime Minister was making a major push for parliamentary reform, it was unthinkable for Wilberforce to be absent. Pitt had worked with Wyvill on a scheme which would abolish seventy-two seats in rotten boroughs and allocate them to newly populous towns and cities. Loyalty to Pitt and to Yorkshire demanded that Wilberforce be present to argue for such a proposal. As a result, it was decided that he and Milner would return to England, leaving the ladies where they were and coming back to join them in the summer. Just before leaving Nice on 5 February, Wilberforce asked Milner if a book he had happened to pick up, Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, was worth reading. Milner responded: ‘It is one of the best books ever written. Let us take it with us and read it on our journey.’¹⁸

In the whole course of Wilberforce’s life, no volume would be more influential in determining his conduct than the book he so casually selected from among the possessions of his cousin, Bessy Smith. He would write thirty-two years later to his daughter, ‘You cannot read a better book. I hope it was one of the means of turning my heart to God.’¹⁹ Philip Doddridge had published the book in 1745, six years before his death at the age of forty-nine. Doddridge’s version of ‘vital Christianity’ was itself built on the seventeenth-century work of Richard Baxter, an English Puritan minister who had become a leading Presbyterian non-conformist. Baxter had urged Christians to concentrate on the fundamental points on which the wide spread of Christian denominations should be able to reach a consensus. In his turn, Doddridge advocated Christian unity and religious toleration, along with a practical faith and a powerful vision of heaven. It was thus in the course of an uncomfortable midwinter journey across France that Wilberforce sat in his carriage absorbing many of the essentials of English Puritanism. For Doddridge set out in his book a complete framework for religious observation, and a philosophy of how to live, which initially merely caused Wilberforce to think, but which would eventually provide the framework for his whole life. The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul emphasised the importance of daily self-examination, prayer, early-morning devotions, diligence in business, prudence in recreation, the careful observation of Providence, the importance of solitude, and the value of time. It stressed the certainty of death and judgement, and the need for humankind to show its usefulness throughout a lifetime. The message of the book was designed first to be worrying: ‘Thousands are, no doubt, already in hell, whose guilt never equalled thine; and it is astonishing, that God hath spared thee to read this representation of thy case;’²⁰ and then to be uplifting: ‘You will wish to commence a hero in the cause of Christ; opposing with a rigorous resolution the strongest efforts of the powers of darkness, the inward corruption of your own heart, and all the outward difficulties you may meet with in the way of your duty, while in the cause and in the strength of Christ you go on conquering and to conquer.’²¹ Doddridge’s enjoinders would subsequently become Wilberforce’s prescription for life: ‘Be an advocate for truth; be a counsellor of peace; be an example of candour; and do all you can to reconcile the hearts of men, especially of good men, to each other, however they may differ in their opinions about matters which it is impossible for good men to dispute.’²²

The immediate effect on Wilberforce, no doubt encouraged by Milner, was that ‘he determined at some future season to examine the Scriptures for himself and see if things were stated there in the same manner’.²³ For the moment, more immediate events would break back into his mind, for both the journey home and the political situation on his return were more difficult than he might have anticipated. The return journey involved bad roads, filthy inns and terrible food, without any of ‘those things which in England we should deem indispensable for our comfort and even our health’.²⁴ In heavy snow in Burgundy, when Milner and Wilberforce were walking behind their chaise it slipped on the ice, and looked like toppling over a precipice with the horses, had Milner not used all his strength to hold it. The weight of Milner’s luggage might not have helped, since he was ‘invariably carrying about with him an assortment which, to most persons, appeared uselessly large, of implements of a heavy kind – such as scissors of various sizes, pincers, files, penknives, razors and even hammers’.²⁵ After these adventures, it was 22 February before they arrived in London and Wilberforce ‘took up my quarters for a short time under the roof of Mr Pitt’,²⁶ which literally meant lodging in 10 Downing Street, where the maid accidentally burned about fifty of his letters, many unopened: ‘I dreaded the effects on my reputation in Yorkshire but happily no bad consequence ensued.’²⁷

Wilberforce showed no resentment that the haste of his return proved unnecessary when the great debate on Reform was put off until late March, and then again until 18 April. He threw himself back into London’s political and social whirl, and was soon noting in his diary that he was ‘sitting up all night singing’, and had ‘danced till five in the morning’.²⁸ When the Reform debate finally took place Wilberforce was in his place to support Pitt and to speak up for Yorkshire, but his speech, however much it accorded with his own views and ideals, was not calculated to win over sceptical MPs. Showing his disdain for political parties, he argued that the abolition of rotten boroughs would ‘tend to diminish the progress of party and cohesion in this country from which … our greatest misfortunes arose … By destroying them the freedom of opinion would be restored, and party connexions in a great measure vanish.’²⁹ MPs with less secure parliamentary seats than Wilberforce might well have considered as they listened to him that if party connections vanished, they might well vanish themselves. Even this modest measure of reform was thrown out, by 248 votes to 174, and one of Pitt’s most cherished projects among ‘his good hopes of the country, and noble, patriotic heart’,³⁰ in Wilberforce’s words of that time, went down to defeat. Wilberforce’s diary for that day said it all: ‘To town – Pitt’s – house – Parliamentary Reform – terribly disappointed and beat – extremely fatigued – spoke extremely ill, but commended. – Called at Pitt’s – met poor Wyvill.’³¹

The following month he was again on his feet in the House of Commons supporting Pitt, this time even against the wishes of some of his constituents. Pitt’s so-called ‘Irish Propositions’ were designed to create freer trade between Ireland and England, with the object of reducing discontent in Ireland and strengthening England’s security. They were opposed, however, by many manufacturers, including the woollen businesses of the Yorkshire West Riding. It was either his efforts to reconcile these conflicting views or his general lifestyle which caused Wilberforce physical discomfort and even disorientation in the debate of 12 May. He noted that he ‘cannot preserve the train as some could do, and too hot and violent’,³² and it was reported that ‘overcome with sensibility, the fatigue of having sat in the House so many hours, and with the pressure of infirmity, he sunk upon his seat’.³³ It was not an easy session for him. As he wrote to one dissatisfied constituent, ‘The situation of a Representative disagreeing with his constituents on a matter of importance must ever be a situation of pain and embarrassment,’³⁴ but he continued to admire Pitt, who he thought ‘spoke wonderfully’ on the same subject, and to be loyal to his old friend. Yet there were also the first signs of a developing dissatisfaction with the political and social scene. A letter from Pitt later in the year refers to Wilberforce’s ‘constant call for Something out of the Common Way’.³⁵ At the same time, his disapproval of a variety of public habits was becoming evident in his diary. He found the laughing at a christening ‘very indecent’, considered a dance at the opera ‘shocking’, and after talking with one wealthy friend thought it ‘strange that the most generous men and religious, do not see that their duties increase with their fortune, and that they will be punished for spending it in eating, etc’.³⁶

The change in his sentiments was to gather pace when he and Milner resumed their travels once Parliament had risen at the end of June. Heading first for Genoa for a reunion with the ladies, they then travelled to Switzerland, where Wilberforce was overcome by the beauty of the mountains: ‘I have never since ceased to recur with peculiar delight to its enchanting scenery, especially to that of Interlaken, which is a vast garden of the loveliest fertility and beauty stretched out at the base of the giant Alps.’³⁷ He wrote to Muncaster on 14 August that ‘I have never been in any other part of the world, for which I could quit a residence in England with so little regret,’ but while retaining his normal good humour – ‘If you read on thus far, I am sure your patience will hold out no longer, and my letter goes into the fire, which in your cold part of the world you will certainly be sitting over when my packet arrives’ – he said he was in despair at ‘the universal corruption and profligacy of the times’, which had now ‘extended its baneful influence and spread its destructive poison through the whole body of the people. When the mass of blood is corrupt, there is no remedy but amputation.’³⁸ While in Geneva he happily entertained the many contacts and friends, such as de Lageard, Wyvill and Earl Spencer, who turned up there; but others were evidently noticing a distinct change in his behaviour. When they reached Spa in the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium), he noted: ‘Mrs Crewe cannot believe that I think it wrong to go to the play. – Surprised at hearing that halting on the Sunday was my wish and not my mother’s.’³⁹ When he wrote to congratulate Eliot on his marriage to Pitt’s sister Harriot, he expressed his growing contempt for the pursuit of money, saying that if a man had enough, then ‘to torment himself for fresh acquisitions as delusive in this enjoyment and uncertain in their possession as these are, seems to me a perfect madness’.⁴⁰

Closeted in his carriage with Milner and the Greek version of the New Testament, to the point that the ladies complained of him paying them insufficient attention, Wilberforce was becoming gradually convinced of the Evangelical Christian case. He always liked to examine a question before pronouncing his view on it; now Milner’s arguments left him intellectually convinced by, but not yet emotionally committed to, the need for a new approach to life. Much later he would recall: ‘I got a clear idea of the doctrines of Religion, perhaps clearer than I have had since, but it was quite in my head. Well, I now fully believed the Gospel and was persuaded that if I died at any time I should perish everlastingly. And yet, such is man, I went on cheerful and gay.’⁴¹ Very soon, however, he was to be overwhelmed by the force of what he now believed to be true. ‘What madness is all this,’ he began to think, ‘to continue easy in a state in which a sudden call out of the world would consign me to everlasting misery, and that, when eternal happiness is within my grasp!!’ By the time he was preparing to return to England in late October 1785, ‘the deep guilt and black ingratitude of my past life forced itself upon me in the strongest colours, and I condemned myself for having wasted my precious time, and opportunities, and talents’.⁴² The ‘great change’ was upon him.

In the autumn of 1785 Wilberforce experienced a classic conversion to Christian evangelicalism, a mental and spiritual experience of enormous power. When it came, the climax of his conversion was neither as dramatic nor as seemingly supernatural as in many other documented cases of the eighteenth century. Charles Wesley had experienced his conversion in 1738 when his sleep was interrupted by someone entering his room and saying, ‘In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise, and believe …’, the speaker turning out to be a friend’s sister who had dreamt that Christ had knocked at her door and told her to do this.⁴³ The celebrated Colonel James Gardiner, who was killed in battle with the Jacobites in 1745 but immortalised in a biography written by Doddridge, experienced his conversion when a ‘blaze of light’⁴⁴ fell upon a book he was reading and he lifted up his eyes to see a vision of Christ on the Cross, causing him ‘unutterable astonishment and agony of heart’,⁴⁵ with the result that ‘the whole frame and disposition of his soul was new-modelled and changed; so that he became, and continued to the last day of his exemplary and truly Christian life, the very reverse of what he had been before’.⁴⁶

Many other famous conversions can be pinpointed to a single day. John Wesley could trace his own such moment to 8.45 p.m. on 14 May 1738, when ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that he had taken my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’⁴⁷ John Newton’s conversion followed a near shipwreck in which he ‘dreaded death now, and my heart foreboded the worst, if the Scriptures which I had long since opposed, were indeed true’.⁴⁸ His survival and recovery from a subsequent fever led him ‘from that time’ to be ‘delivered from the power and dominion of sin … I now began to wait upon the Lord.’⁴⁹ William Huntington, whose conversion led to him building his own chapel in London after a dissolute youth, also had a sudden conversion – one day, he became intensely conscious of sin: ‘I leapt up, with my eyes ready to start out of my head, my hair standing erect, and my countenance stained with all the horrible gloom and dismay of the damned. I cried out to my wife, and said, “Molly, I am undone for ever; I am lost and gone; there is no hope or mercy for me; you know not what a sinner I am; you know not where I am, nor what I feel!”’ He later saw a vision of the Holy Ghost and ‘heard a voice from Heaven, saying unto me in plain words, “Lay by your forms of prayers, and go pray to Jesus Christ; do you not see how pitifully he speaks to Sinners.”’⁵⁰

It is not possible to pinpoint Wilberforce’s own conversion to a single day, nor did he report the intervention of an other-worldly vision or voice. Yet the time which elapsed between him going about his normal business in the late spring of 1785 and the adoption of an entirely new and rigorous approach to life that December was unusually short. Many such conversions followed years of intellectual doubt and agonising. Gardiner had kept his religious side subordinate for eleven years before his conversion burst through; the ‘awakening’ of the Wesleys also took place over many years; Newton endured periods of internal conflict spread over twelve years; and the great George Whitefield experienced his conversion crisis six years after being deeply affected by listening to a sermon. In another documented case, that of William Grimshaw, the son of a poor farmer from Lancashire who became second only to the Wesleys in Methodist authority, his final conversion took place eight years after he had first been ‘powerfully awakened and alarmed’.⁵¹ Wilberforce was clear in later life that true religious conviction could only emerge after a period of self-examination, doubt, and often agony. Writing of his son Samuel’s expectation of his own ‘great change’, he said: ‘I come again and again to look to see if it really be begun, just as a gardener walks up again and again to his fruit trees to see if his peaches are set; if they are swelling and becoming larger, finally they are becoming ripe and rosy.’⁵² Away from the daily cares of Westminster that summer, and with a companion in Milner who had ‘doctrines of religion in his head though not then I think in his heart’,⁵³ Wilberforce found that his own period of doubt and awakening was relatively short.

A role model of the kind Isaac Milner provided for Wilberforce could be crucial in providing reassurance that conversion was both attainable and desirable. Wilberforce had always been struck by Milner’s intellect, coherence and equanimity; he had a quiet strength to which it is not surprising that the sometimes erratic and overheated young Member of Parliament aspired. There are clear parallels with the cases of others: the conversion of the great Scottish preacher Ebenezer Erskine followed on from ‘his realisation that others have found an experience which he lacked’,⁵⁴ and that of Lady Huntingdon, founder of a radical Calvinistic movement within Methodism, apparently came about because ‘the happiness of her sister-in-law induced a longing for the same condition’.⁵⁵ Wilberforce had this factor and many others in common with those who underwent a similar religious experience. For instance, many of them had been exposed to strong religious influences in childhood. Gardiner, Whitefield, the Wesleys and Newton all had mothers with strong personalities who managed to give their children a religious inclination even if it did not become apparent until much later in life. Wilberforce’s own acceptance of religious teaching from his aunt and uncle at the age of nine is a different but comparable case. Yet it is also true that those who experienced conversion were not ‘weak-minded’ or ‘over-suggestible’,⁵⁶ but tended to be particularly thoughtful, as well as eloquent, individuals: John Berridge, vicar of Everton, was a prolific hymn-writer; William Cowper became one of the most popular poets of his time; John Fletcher became a foremost theologian and Methodist leader; Thomas Halyburton was a Professor of Divinity; the Countess of Huntingdon was a formidable figure who founded sixty-four chapels and a training college for Methodist ministers; Legh Richmond was a curate, later influenced by Wilberforce, who became a prolific author, with works translated into nineteen languages;^* Thomas Scott was a biblical scholar who wrote widely read books such as The Force of Truth; and Henry Venn was a highly active vicar who wrote The Complete Duty of Man. Isaac Milner was, of course, an outstanding academic who was to become Master of Queens’ College Cambridge.

Since Wilberforce’s life followed or overlapped with those of these and comparable figures, he knew at the time of his conversion that he was in good company. Those who had embraced varying forms of Methodism and evangelicalism and experienced a crisis of religious conversion were often persuasive, well connected and, as in the case of his kinsman John Thornton, a leading figure in the Evangelical revival of the time, comfortingly rich. Nevertheless, they were a small minority, still open to the strong suspicions and hostility which Wilberforce had witnessed in his mother in earlier years, and in most cases they saw their newly crystallised religious duty as being to spread the word of God through preaching and missions rather than to try to pursue Christian principles through the political world. The tumult going on in Wilberforce’s mind that summer would therefore have embraced serious doubts about the viability of the political career he had recently done so much to advance.

In spite of these considerations, Wilberforce clearly felt an ineluctable pull towards an enthusiasm for Christianity which would guide and dictate all his future actions in every aspect of life. While he attributed his new feelings to the intervention of Providence, in common with the experience across faiths of nearly all kinds of religious conversion, with a sense of being controlled from above and accepting Divine Grace, there were many personal factors which could have affected him. His effortless possession of great wealth, and the long period of relative leisure which it had permitted, may have helped to create in him a feeling of guilt towards other people. Certainly, one of his early resolutions as he adopted a new regimen of life was to live more frugally. His diary for 25 November recorded, ‘Walked, and stagecoach, to save the expense of a chaise,’⁵⁷ and he would become increasingly generous towards a wide range of charitable causes. In addition, there are signs that he was suffering a twinge of disillusionment with conventional politics by the middle of 1785. His call to Pitt for ‘something out of the common way’ almost certainly reflects his disappointment that Pitt’s triumph of the earlier year had failed to elevate the conduct of politics as a whole. Reform had been defeated, rotten boroughs remained, idealism on Ireland had been frustrated, the culture of place-seeking, patronage and parties remained. As time and travel separated him from the intense partisanship of the 1784 election, his disdain for fixed party loyalties may already have been resurfacing. He had always idealised the exercising of independent judgement, and a fresh philosophical framework for such judgement must have had its appeal.

It is impossible to know what other subconscious forces pushed William Wilberforce that November into the agony of his conversion crisis. Such was the effect, he later wrote, of the ‘sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Saviour … that for months I was in a state of the deepest depression … nothing which I have ever read in the accounts of others exceeded what I then felt’.⁵⁸ Having attained the great heights of becoming a Member for Yorkshire, but having no expectation of becoming a minister, did he reflect, at the age of twenty-six, that his personal ambitions had already reached their limit? Was it that the excesses of the London clubland he inhabited, with its gambling, womanising, gluttony and prostitution, had finally revolted him? Had the enormous amount of time he had spent travelling, and the futility of his recent efforts in the Commons, given him a stronger than usual sense of waste and lack of purpose? Or was it that having discovered that attaining his ambitions and satisfying all his material needs did not lead to satisfaction, he was predisposed to search for something which could represent for him the highest ambition of them all? By November 1785 some mixture of these influences, added to his early receptiveness towards religion, the guidance of Doddridge’s writing, and the force of Milner’s arguments, produced in William Wilberforce a true conversion crisis.

In his book The Psychology of Religion, published at the end of the nineteenth century, E.D. Starbuck identified the mental attributes of a full-blown conversion crisis: ‘struggle after the new-life: prayer, calling on God; sense of estrangement from God; doubts and questioning: tendency to resist conviction; depression and sadness; restlessness, anxiety, and uncertainty; helplessness and humility; earnestness and seriousness … The central fact in it all is the sense of sin.’⁵⁹ For a time, such a crisis could produce a state of deep dissatisfaction and a divided personality, the individual concerned oscillating between aiming for new ideals and believing that he cannot attain them. The more the prospective convert struggled to be free of sin, the more he would become conscious of his past sins and his unworthiness. The stricter he tried to become about religious devotion, observances and prayer, the more likely he was to be tempted away by the various attractions of human society, and to feel that he was trying to adopt a standard which could not be maintained. Such internal conflict, well documented by John Wesley, Whitefield, Fletcher and Henry Venn, eventually produces a mental breaking point, resulting in conversion, retreat or collapse. The honesty and thoroughness of Wilberforce’s diary-keeping meant that he left behind him a clear and revealing account of this agony:

25th. Up at six – private devotions half an hour – Pascal three quarters^* – to town on business. I feel quite giddy and distracted by the tumult, except when in situations of which I am rather ashamed, as in the stage coach: the shame, pride; but a useful lesson …

Sunday 27th. Up at six – devotions half an hour – Pascal three quarters – Butler^** three quarters – church – read the Bible, too ramblingly, for an hour – heard Butler, but not attentively, two hours – meditated twenty minutes – hope I was more attentive at church than usual, but serious thoughts vanished the moment I went out of it, and very insensible and cold in the evening service – some very strong feelings when I went to bed; God turn them to account, and in any way bring me to himself. I have been thinking I have been doing well by living alone, and reading generally on religious subjects; I must awake to my dangerous state, and never be at rest till I have made my peace with God.

My heart is so hard, my blindness so great, that I cannot get a due hatred of sin, though I see I am all corrupt, and blinded to the perception of spiritual things.

28th. I hope as long as I live to be the better for the meditation of this evening; it was on the sinfulness of my own heart, and its blindness and weakness. True, Lord, I am wretched, and miserable and naked. What infinite love, that Christ should die to save such a sinner and how necessary is it He should save us altogether that we may appear before God with nothing of our own! God grant I may not deceive myself, in thinking I feel the beginnings of gospel comfort. Began this night constantly family prayer, and resolved to have it every morning and evening, and to read a chapter when time.

Tuesday 29th. I bless God I enjoyed comfort in prayer this evening. I must keep my own unworthiness ever in view. Pride is my greatest stumbling block; and there is danger in it in two ways – lest it should make me desist from a Christian life, through fear of the world, my friends, &c.; or if I persevere, lest it should make me vain of so doing. In all disputes on religion, I must be particularly on my guard to distinguish it from a zeal for God and his cause. I must consider and set down the marks whereby they may be known from each other. I will form a plan of my particular duty, praying God to enable me to do it properly, and set it before me as a chart of the country, and map of the road I must travel …

November 30th. Was very fervent in prayer this morning, and thought these warm impressions would never go off. Yet in vain endeavoured in the evening to rouse myself. God grant it may not all prove vain; oh if it does, how will my punishment be deservedly increased! The only way I find of moving myself, is by thinking of my great transgressions, weakness, blindness, and of God’s having promised to supply these defects. But though I firmly believe them, yet I read of future judgement, and think of God’s wrath against sinners with no great emotions …⁶⁰

It was all there: doubt, shame, and sometimes near despair, all in an atmosphere of agonising introspection. He would always regard this as the most difficult experience of his life: ‘I was filled with sorrow. I am sure that no human creature could suffer more than I did for some months. It seems indeed it quite affected my reason; not so as others would observe, for all this time I kept out of company. They might see I was out of spirits.’⁶¹

Astonishingly, when he did appear in public he gave no sign of his inner torment, Pitt’s sister writing on 10 November that she had been ‘agreeably surprised by a visit from Mr Wilberforce who has come home remarkably well’.⁶² But although he complained to his diary that ‘all religious thoughts go off in London’,⁶³ he was finding that he could no longer see the great men of the political world in the same light as before. Dining with the cabinet at Downing Street, he ‘was often thinking that pompous Thurlow [the Lord Chancellor] and elegant Carmarthen would soon appear in the same row with the poor fellow who waited behind their chairs’.⁶⁴ By the end of November he felt he had to explain to his closest friends what was happening to him, but on a confidential basis so as to avoid any public reaction. The letter in which he explained himself to Pitt has not survived, but he later recalled that ‘I told him that though I should ever feel a strong affection for him, and had every reason to feel that I should be in general able to support him, yet I could no more be so much a Party man as I had been before.’⁶⁵ Pitt’s reply, written from Downing Street on 2 December 1785, suggests that Wilberforce had raised the idea of withdrawing from general society and possibly from the political world. His immediate response was to affirm his friendship, begin to argue, and seek a discussion, in a letter which was all the more remarkable for having been written by a busy Prime Minister. He began by saying that he was ‘too deeply interested in whatever concerns you not to be very sensibly affected by what has the appearance of a new era in your life, and so important in its consequences for yourself and your friends. As to any public conduct which your opinions may ever lead you to, I will not disguise to you that few things could go nearer my heart than to find myself differing from you essentially on any great principle.’⁶⁶ He went on to say that whatever happened, ‘it is impossible that it should shake the sentiments of affection and friendship which I bear towards you … They are sentiments engraved in my heart and will never be effaced or weakened.’⁶⁷ But he followed this up with the first gentle advice to Wilberforce from any quarter to use his religious convictions for wider purposes:

… but forgive me if I cannot help expressing my fear that you are nevertheless deluding yourself into principles which have but too much tendency to counteract your own object, and to render your virtues and your talents useless both to yourself and mankind. I am not, however, without hopes that my anxiety paints this too strongly. For you confess that the character of religion is not a gloomy one, and that it is not that of an enthusiast. But why then this preparation of solitude, which can hardly avoid tincturing the mind either with melancholy or superstition? If a Christian may act in the several relations in life, must he seclude himself from them all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.⁶⁸

Concerned that Wilberforce was about to isolate himself and make an irrevocable breach with public life, Pitt went on to ask for an urgent discussion:

What I would ask of you, as a mark both of your friendship and of the candour which belongs to your mind, is to open yourself fully and without reserve to one, who, believe me, does not know how to separate your happiness from his own. You do not explain either the degree or the duration of the retirement which you have prescribed to yourself; you do not tell me how the future course of your life is to be directed, when you think the same privacy no longer necessary; nor, in short, what idea you have formed of the duties which you are from this time to practise … I will not importune you with fruitless discussion on any opinion which you have deliberately formed … name any hour at which I can call upon you tomorrow. I am going to Kent, and can take Wimbledon in my way. Reflect, I beg of you, that no principles are the worse for being discussed, and believe me that at all events the full knowledge of the nature and extent of your opinions and intentions will be to me a lasting satisfaction.

Believe me, affectionately and unalterably yours,

W. Pitt.⁶⁹

The next day Pitt did indeed call at Wimbledon. In the same house in which they had eaten, drunk and played so much, the two friends engaged in two hours of earnest discussion. Wilberforce recalled that ‘he tried to reason me out of my convictions but soon found himself unable to combat their correctness, if Christianity was true. The fact is, he was so absorbed with politics, that he had never given himself time for due reflection on religion.’⁷⁰ Yet Pitt’s plea to Wilberforce that a Christian life should produce action rather than mere meditation was well considered, and may have made its mark. Wilberforce had clearly toyed with the idea of at least a period of retreat and isolation, and many other cases of religious conversion had led the individual concerned towards a life of preaching, concentration on religion, and often a lack of interest in worldly affairs. Whether Pitt influenced Wilberforce away from such a path cannot be known, but fortunately for history the next person to whom he turned in his agony was able to influence his future life with every advantage of long experience and deep religious conviction.

It was on 30 November that Wilberforce first ‘thought seriously this evening with going to converse with Mr Newton – waked in the night – obliged to compel myself to think of God’. With Milner experiencing his own conversion crisis, Wilberforce needed to draw on the strength of someone with long-established beliefs. By 2 December, the day before his conversation with Pitt, Wilberforce noted: ‘resolved again about Mr Newton. It may do good; he will pray for me his experience may enable him to direct me to new grounds of humiliation … It can do no harm … Kept debating in that unsettled way to which I have used myself, whether to go to London or not, and then how – wishing to save expense, I hope with a good motive, went at last in the stage to town – inquired for old Newton; but found he lived too far off for me to see him …’⁷¹ Now possessed of sufficient courage to discuss his beliefs with the great John Newton, the very man he had ‘reverenced as a parent’ in his youthful days at Clapham, he made his way into London from Wimbledon again on Sunday, 4 December, and delivered a letter to Newton’s church asking for a meeting. The letter showed his dread of his evangelicalism being publicly revealed before he was ready for it: ‘I am sure you will hold yourself bound to let no-one living know of this application, or of my visit till I release you from the obligation. p.s. Remember that I must be secret, and that the gallery of the House is now so universally attended, that the face of a Member of Parliament is pretty well-known.’⁷²

Newton, the former slave trader, was now sixty years old, rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London and the author of many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. He had wise counsel for Wilberforce, such as telling him not to become cut off from his friends. Meeting Wilberforce three days after the delivery of the letter, ‘he told me he always had entertained hopes and confidence that God would sometime bring me to him’, and produced ‘a calm, tranquil state’ in Wilberforce’s tortured mind.⁷³ It was Newton who not only calmed and soothed Wilberforce but, from that time and for a good decade afterwards, fortified him in combining his religious beliefs with a continued political career. In 1786 he would write of Wilberforce to the poet William Cowper: ‘I hope the Lord will make him a blessing both as a Christian and a statesman. How seldom do these characters coincide!! But they are not incompatible.’⁷⁴ Two years later he wrote to Wilberforce: ‘It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of his Church, and for the good of the nation,’⁷⁵ and in 1796: ‘I believe you are the Lord’s servant, and are in the post which He has assigned you; and though it appears to me more arduous, and requiring more self-denial than my own, I know that He who has called you to it can afford you strength according to your day.’⁷⁶ And it was Newton who gradually widened the circle of friends in the Evangelical community to whom he could turn for advice. By Christmas Eve 1785 John Thornton was writing to Wilberforce: ‘you may easier conceive than I can express the satisfaction I had from a few minutes’ converse with Mr Newton yesterday afternoon. As in nature, so in Grace, what comes very quickly forward rarely abides long: I am aware of your difficulties which call for great prudence and caution. Those that believe, must not make haste, but be content to go God’s pace and watch the leadings of his providence.’⁷⁷

Thornton advised Wilberforce not to make haste, and to accept that such a change took time. Through December and into the new year Wilberforce’s many doubts about his own worthiness and ability to uphold his new beliefs did indeed continue. His diary is peppered with such statements as: ‘I am colder and more insensible than I was – I ramble – oh God, protect me from myself’; ‘colder than ever – very unhappy – called at Newton’s and bitterly moved; he comforted me’; and ‘was strengthened in prayer, and first I shall be able to live more to God, which determined to do – much affected by Doddridge’s directions for spending time, and hoped to conform to them in some degree: it must be by force at first, for I find I perpetually wander from serious thoughts when I am off my guard’.⁷⁸ Steadily, as the weeks went by, his willpower and new convictions prevailed. He resigned from the clubs at which he had passed so many happy evenings, spent many hours each day studying the Bible, and took new lodgings in London ‘at one of the Adelphi hotels’,⁷⁹ which gave him easier access to Evangelical preaching. He wrote earnestly to his sister about his beliefs, and reassuringly to his mother about his continuance in public life: he would not ‘fly from the post where Providence has placed me’.⁸⁰ He continued to visit Downing Street and attend the House of Commons, his mind more at peace as he realised he could live up to the standards he had set himself without forsaking the world he had always known.

One study of religious conversion contends that once conversion is complete ‘there is the sensation of liberation and victory, which the convert displays by a powerful and integral joy of the spirit’. The convert also has a ‘sense more or less like the sense of vision or touch of nearness to God’, and of ‘an answering touch which thrills and recreates him’.⁸¹ By Easter 1786 Wilberforce was writing to his sister from Stock in Essex on a beautiful day: ‘the day has been delightful. I was out before six … I think my own devotions become more fervent when offered in this way amidst the general chorus with which all nature seems to be swelling the song of praise and thanksgiving; and accept the time which has been spent at church and at dinner … and neither in the sanctuary nor at table I trust, had I a heart unwarmed with gratitude to the giver of all good things.’⁸² William Wilberforce had found his faith.

Wilberforce would later describe his emergence as an Evangelical convert as being akin to wakening from a dream and recovering ‘the use of my reason after a delirium’.⁸³ His governing motives had been ‘emulation, and a desire of distinction … ardent after the applause of my fellow creatures, I quite forgot that I was an accountable being; that I was hereafter to appear at the bar of God’.⁸⁴ Now he believed ‘that if Christianity were not a fable, it was infinitely important to study its precepts, and when known to obey them’,⁸⁵ and resolved to regulate his political conduct according to a new golden rule, ‘to do as I would be done by’.⁸⁶ He was clear that he would stay in politics, but from now on his political activity would be directed and armed by the philosophy of Christian evangelicalism, of which he was now an adherent and would eventually become a leader.

Most people found it hard to distinguish between the Evangelicals and Methodists. As Sydney Smith wrote in 1808: ‘Arminian and Calvinistic Methodists and the Evangelical clergymen of the Church of England … We shall use the general term of Methodism to designate those three classes of fanatics, not troubling ourselves to point out the finer shades and nicer discriminations of lunacy, but treating them all as in one general conspiracy against common sense and rational orthodox Christianity.’⁸⁷ Another observer had written in 1772: ‘As soon as a person begins to show any symptoms of seriousness and strictness more than the fashion of the age allows he is called a Methodist, though he may happen to have no sort of connection with them; and when once this stigma is fixed upon him, he becomes like a deer whom the sportsmen have marked out for a chase.’⁸⁸ Evangelicals such as Newton also blurred matters by insisting that religious experience was more important than ‘nice distinctions’ between different categories of Christians. Methodism and evangelicalism were indeed part of the same religious movement. They both had their intellectual origins in German Pietism and English Puritanism, which had stressed ‘a reformation or purification in worship as well in life’. They both contended that every person was lost in sin and could only be rescued and achieve personal salvation through faith in Christ. They had both moved on from the seventeenth-century Puritans of Civil War times by determinedly staying within the Church of England (although the Methodists broke away in 1795), and giving complete loyalty to the Crown. The general themes of Methodists and Evangelicals were indistinguishable, and Methodists would generally have regarded themselves as Evangelicals: it was not sufficient merely to observe the forms of being a Christian; eternal damnation could only be avoided by allowing Christian beliefs to guide all the habits and actions of daily life. Their theology was no different from that of the established Church, but the seriousness with which they practised it most certainly was.

Any doctrinal differences between Methodists and Evangelicals were blurred by the cross-currents of beliefs within each grouping: some Evangelicals, such as Newton, held to the Calvinistic concept of predestination favoured by some Methodists; others were in accord with Wesley himself in believing in unlimited atonement and the free will of human beings. The crucial differences between Methodists and Evangelicals were therefore largely of nuance and organisation, but these led to important differences in the type of person likely to join each group. Methodists were organised around their own Societies and Conferences, with a national and eventually international network and hierarchy, while Evangelicals were entirely outside such machinery. Evangelicals tended to be more in tune with prevailing English culture, less likely to separate themselves from society, less austere in their attitudes to simple sports and leisure, more likely to encourage a broad education, and readier to involve themselves in public life. Such differences of view partly stemmed from, and in turn strengthened, the general tendency for leading Evangelicals to be drawn from the more highly educated and business-orientated classes, while the tens of thousands of converts to Methodism were drawn heavily from lower income groups. Wilberforce was therefore a natural Evangelical, and would in due course find no shortage of people with a similar background to his own who could share his habits and thinking.

If Evangelicalism was more an attitude towards Christianity than a separate branch of the faith, what were its defining attributes, as now adopted by Wilberforce? One was certainly a belief in the all-encompassing role of Providence: God’s hand could be detected in events great and small. It was Providence, he believed, that had enabled him to win his seat in Parliament by methods he would later have found unacceptable, thus launching him on a political life when an earlier conversion would have kept him away from it. If he escaped without injury from an accident, as he did when the linchpin on his coach fell out, he saw Providence at work; when Napoleon dominated Europe, Wilberforce considered him ‘manifestly an instrument in the hands of Providence’, and ‘When God has done with him he will probably show how easily he can get rid of him.’⁸⁹ That anything would happen entirely accidentally was now alien to Wilberforce’s thinking: ‘How I abhor that word, fortunate; as if things happen by chance!’⁹⁰

A second fundamental aspect of Evangelical beliefs was that Christian principles should be applied to all areas of life. They should guide every aspect of human life, not merely be added on to other beliefs or conflicting activities. As a result, drunkenness, gambling, duelling, the unfairness of the penal system, every form of immorality and the lack of observation of the Sabbath were all targets of Evangelical attack. Evangelicals considered themselves as ambassadors of God on earth, and to be at all times, an example of his godliness, holiness and compassion. Such activities as card-playing, public dancing and horse-racing were a distraction from devotion to God. Worldly indulgence was to be avoided, and leisure was seen as an opportunity for renewal rather than an end in itself. By contrast, prayer and devotion were essential: ‘There is nothing more fatal to the life and power of religion; nothing which makes God more certainly withdraw his grace’, than neglect of prayer.⁹¹ And it was not sufficient for that prayer to be calculating, or to signify mere intellectual acceptance of Christian truth: an Evangelical needed to show that his ‘whole heart is engaged’,⁹² as Wilberforce approvingly noted of Newton.

Above all, the Evangelicals felt an overpowering sense of accountability, and a responsibility to God, for their actions. As one commentator would later note of them: ‘I recall an abiding sense of religious responsibility, a self-sacrificing energy and works of mercy, an Evangelistic zeal, an aloofness from the world, and a level of saintliness in daily life such as I do not expect again to see realised on earth. Everything down to the minutest detail of action and speech were considered with reference to eternity.’⁹³ Although he had always been good at documenting his actions, Wilberforce would now do so with all the more rigour, as humble preparation for a day of judgement. His money, abilities and power had been given to him by God, and he considered himself accountable in the smallest detail for how he would now use them. His mission now was to apply Christian principles as he understood them to the world as he saw it around him. He would say later that ‘I was strongly impressed with a sense of it being incumbent on me to perform my Parliamentary duties with increased diligence and conscientiousness.’⁹⁴ As Newton wrote to him in March 1786, they had ‘great subjects to discuss, great plans to promote, great prospects to contemplate’.⁹⁵ Now Wilberforce would turn his own mind to what those subjects and plans would be.

^* ‘Animal magnetism’ was meant to have great healing powers, released by powerful magnets or other devices. For a time it was taken seriously by the French Academy of Science.

^* Richmond is credited with the idea of using boards with movable numbers to inform congregations about which hymns they would be singing. He was the author of The Dairyman’s Daughter.

^* Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French philosopher whose book Pensées included a section on ‘The Misery of Man Without God’.

^** Joseph Butler was famous for his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736).