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was the crucial characteristic which allowed the term ‘Methodism’ to stick.
The desire of these men to reform the Church, reinforced by the preachings of Whitefield from the late 1730s, found a ready audience in England and in the American colonies. It is not surprising that many people were willing to hear the message that Christianity should be practised with a stronger sense of purpose, stricter rules and more pressing obligations. The abuse of ecclesiastical offices and the neglect of religious purpose in the Church of the eighteenth century had fully invited such a reaction, for it was mired in a period of place-seeking, money-grabbing and moral irrelevance. It was not just the Methodists who denounced the state of the Church. Jonathan Swift would make harsh and terrible claims about the deans and bishops he knew, while other observers spoke of the eighteenth-century Church as ‘one of the most corrupt in its administration’, or as ‘the biggest den of thieves in the whole world’.
As Voltaire put it, ‘There is only just enough religion in England to distinguish Tories who have a little from Whigs who have none.’
Many observers considered that Christianity was largely absent from much of the Church’s preaching. The renowned lawyer Sir William Blackstone did the rounds of the best preachers in London before declaring that ‘Not one of the sermons contained more Christianity than the writings of Cicero.’
The vicar Henry Venn considered, after listening to sermons in York, that ‘excepting a single phrase or two, they might be preached in a synagogue or mosque without offence’.
It was common for apathetic clergy simply to buy sermons from each other, saving themselves the thought or effort required to come up with their own words. William’s Hull Grammar School teacher Joseph Milner would assert in the 1780s, ‘That sermons should be sold to them by a person advertising the newspapers, is a flaming proof of the low state of their religious views and studies.’
This was not surprising in an age when many of the clergy ceased to perform religious duties at all. Having been appointed to a lucrative parish, it was common practice for clergymen to become absentees, keeping the living obtained from the parish and delegating curates to carry out their duties at a much lower rate of pay. In 1771 the Reverend Dr John Trustler started a business ‘abridging the Sermons of eminent divines, and printing them in the form of manuscripts, so as not only to save clergymen the trouble of composing their discourses, but even of transcribing them’.
One commentator wrote that ‘Country towns abound with curates who never see the parishes they serve but when they are absolutely forced to it by duty: that several parishes are often served by the same person, who, in order to double or treble his curacy, hurries through the service in a manner perfectly indecent; strides from the pulpit to his horse and gallops away as if pursuing a fox.’
Indeed, the hunting parson became the caricature of the eighteenth-century Church. One clergyman in Suffolk ‘kept an excellent hunter, rode well up to the hounds, drank very hard … he sang an excellent song, danced remarkably well, so that the young ladies considered no party complete without him’.
Hard drinking was common, Wesley writing from St Ives in 1747 that two clergymen ‘were led home at one or two in the morning in such a condition as I care not to describe’.
Above all, it was the ruthless competition for the most lucrative parishes and dioceses that made the eighteenth-century Church a place of touting and toadying ambition, and caused understandable anger amongst a general population whose tithe payments funded the generous livings and evident abuses. There seemed no end to the number of positions a bishop might occupy: ‘The bishops are frequently archdeacons and deans, rectors, vicars and curates, besides holding professorships, Clerkships, prebends, precentorships, and other offices in cathedrals.’
One observer recorded that ‘the late Bishop of Salisbury is said to have died worth upwards of £150,000 … I can hardly think it probable that he could amass so much wealth … I never heard him accused of avarice: nor did I ever hear that he had any great fortune with any of his four wives.’
Nepotism only made matters worse. It was said of one family alone, the Beresfords, that one of them had cumulatively received over £350,000 from his Church living, another just under £300,000, a third £250,000 and a fourth, with four livings simultaneously, earned £58,000. In total, through eight clerics this family obtained £1.5 million from the Irish Church. Families with political connections were proud of their ability to obtain Church livings. The tombstone of one lady of the Stanhope family proudly declared: ‘She had the merit to obtain for her husband and children, twelve several appointments in Church and State.’
Lord Hugh Percy, Bishop of Carlisle, received over £250,000 from the Church, and ensured a steady supply of canonries, prebends and rectories for his sons and sons-in-law.
With such rewards available, the Church was converted into a branch of the aristocracy. To cap it all, political patronage was decisive in most of the senior appointments. ‘No man,’ complained Dr Johnson, ‘can now be made a Bishop for his learning and piety: his only chance of promotion is his being connected with someone who has parliamentary interest.’
One relative of Lord North, Prime Minister in the 1770s, became a bishop at thirty, was later promoted to the highly lucrative see of Winchester, and is said to have gained around £1,500,000 from Church funds over his life, while additionally securing thirty livings for other members of his family. Such sums are the equivalent of many tens of millions of pounds in today’s money. Meanwhile, low-paid curates struggled to do the work for which the clergy were paid, often receiving only a shilling a day and turning to farming or weaving for part of the week in order to supplement their income. Neglected Anglican congregations declined sharply during the eighteenth century, and the Church failed to establish itself in the new industrial towns. By 1750 Manchester had a population of twenty thousand, but only one parish church.
Of course there were still bishops and vicars who lived more frugally or honestly, but it was not difficult to make the case that parts of the English Church in the eighteenth century were in a state of virtual paganism, and that a radical new approach was required. To John Wesley, it was not necessary to change the doctrines or liturgy of the Church, but it was essential for both its clergy and its followers to adopt a purer and more devout approach in their public and private conduct. Since the Church appeared so uncontrollably corrupt and licentious, and set such a poor example to the population at large, Methodists believed that strict rules should be adopted for the regulation of daily life. Methodists were required to attend weekly class meetings and permit probing enquiries into their daily conduct. Their General Rules forbade ‘the profaning of the day of the Lord by either doing ordinary work thereon, or by buying or selling’, as well as ‘drunkenness, buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them, less in cases of extreme necessity’, along with ‘uncharitable or unprofitable conversation’ and ‘the putting on of gold or costly apparel’.
They were also told to avoid ‘the singing of songs, or reading those books, which do not tend to the knowledge or love of God; softness or needless self-indulgence’.
Wesley told them too that they should ‘take no more food than nature required’, to ‘sleep early and rise early’, and to wear cheap and plain dress.
The adoption of such a lifestyle was meant to follow the conversion of the individual, in which a period of despair about his or her sins would be followed by a sense of forgiveness, and it would ultimately bring its reward in salvation in the eyes of God. Those who did not seek it would have much to fear from ‘the wrath to come’.
The Methodist message, and the bold and emotional style in which it was preached, soon came up against the hostility of the Church. By 1740 Whitefield found churches closed to his preaching, but this simply caused him to take up the still more adventurous initiative of preaching to huge numbers of people in the open air. Crowds of fifty thousand at a time were known at such events: vast, silent gatherings which gave way after the preaching to dramatic conversions amidst much crying and emotion. Horace Walpole commented in 1749, ‘This sect increases as fast as almost ever any religious nonsense did.’
Whitefield became such a celebrated figure that David Garrick, the best-known actor of the time, was reputed to have said that he would give £100 to be able to say ‘Oh’ in the way Whitefield said it.
By the late 1760s Wesley and Whitefield had travelled hundreds of thousands of miles, claiming twenty-five thousand people as strict Methodists but influencing the opinions of far more.
Among Whitefield’s converts in the 1750s was John Thornton, a rich man ‘in great credit and esteem’,
known for his charity and generosity, who owned a country estate at Clapham, a village to the south of London and only a few miles from the Wimbledon of his half-sister Hannah, William’s aunt. She, apparently, ‘was a great admirer of White-field’s preaching, and kept up a friendly connection with the early Methodists’.
Now she took her nine-year-old charge to church to hear Evangelical preachers, including the great John Newton. Newton was in his mid-forties at the time, and had led a dramatic and extraordinary life: press-ganged into the navy in his teens, shipwrecked off Africa, abandoned as a slave to a planter’s black mistress, he eventually returned home to marry his sweetheart and become master of a slaving ship, writing in the 1750s diaries which were among the most intimate and detailed accounts of the purchasing of slaves off the coast of Africa. By the 1760s he had turned to religion, started writing hymns and become curate at the village of Olney in Buckinghamshire. He was a man of great presence, and his preaching made a deep impact on the young Wilberforce, who remembered ‘reverencing him as a parent when I was a child’.
Not every child of nine or ten would have responded to such preaching, but for whatever reason of personality or inclination, the ear of the young William Wilberforce was sensitive from the outset to the beat of a religious drum. ‘Under these influences,’ he later wrote, ‘my mind was interested by religious subjects. How far these impressions were genuine I can hardly determine, but at least I may venture to say that I was sincere.’
Listening to Newton and admiring the devotion and sincerity of his aunt and uncle, he adopted Methodism as his creed. In his own words, ‘My uncle and aunt were truly good people, and were in fact disciples of Mr Whitefield. At that time when the church of England had so much declined I really believe that Mr Whitefield and Wesley were the restorers of genuine religion.’
What happened next would, thirty years later, be ascribed by Wilberforce to the intervention of Providence. Whatever the truth of that, the event took the physical form of the arrival of a very insistent and angry mother who removed him from London forthwith. For however strong the convictions of Hannah and Uncle William, they were not shared by most members of church-going society, or by the rest of the Wilberforce family at Hull. ‘When my poor mother heard that I was disposed to join the Methodists,’ Wilberforce recalled, ‘she was perfectly shocked.’
In 1771 a determined Elizabeth Wilberforce took a coach to London and descended on Wimbledon. William would later recall that ‘After consultation with my grandfather [she] determined to remove me from my uncle’s, fearful lest I should imbibe what she considered as little less than poison which indeed I at that time had done.’
He was torn from Wimbledon and put on a coach to Hull amidst much emotion and unhappiness: ‘being thus removed from my uncle and aunt affected me most seriously. It almost broke my heart.’
Once returned to Hull he would write to his uncle, ‘I can never forget you as long as I live.’ The confrontation between mother and aunt had evidently been quite a spectacle, with Elizabeth Wilberforce making neat use of the Methodist belief that God was present in the smallest action: ‘If it be the work of grace you know it cannot fail.’
Uncle and aunt were apparently ‘also inconsolable for the loss of me’.
William’s grandfather was adamant that he should be detached from Methodist influence, saying, ‘If Billy turns Methodist he shall not have a sixpence of mine.’
The family must have felt under siege, since to the astonishment of the local community the previously respected Joseph Milner had turned Methodist as well. William could not, in the light of this, even be returned to his former school. In the more ecumenical climate of the twenty-first century it is difficult to imagine the horror and suspicion occasioned in the late eighteenth century by flirtation with Methodist teaching. It is a measure of such suspicion that for all Milner’s effectiveness and popularity, the effect of his adherence to Methodism was to cause an exodus from the school, a sharp reduction in his income, and virtual ostracism in the town: ‘Few persons who wore a tolerably good coat would take notice of him when they met him in the street.’
Wesley and Whitefield could attract and rouse huge crowds, but they seemed threatening, intrusive or ridiculous to many others. The Anglican hierarchy attacked their claims to superiority as well as their doctrines of salvation by faith and the idea of conversion or new birth. In particular, Methodists’ earnestness and enthusiasm came in for much mockery. The Cornish actor, dramatist and theatre manager Samuel Foote wrote of Whitefield: ‘If he is bit by Fleas, he is buffeted by Satan. If he has the good Fortune to catch them, God will subdue his Enemies under his Feet.’
Sydney Smith attacked the Methodists because they ‘hate pleasure and amusements; no theatre, no cards, no dancing, no punchinello, no dancing dogs, no blind fiddlers – all the amusements of the rich and of the poor must disappear wherever these gloomy people get a footing’.
Accusations of hypocrisy on the part of Methodist preachers were mingled with suspicion of their hostility to alcohol, as in this verse from She Stoops to Conquer (1773) by the popular playwright Oliver Goldsmith:
When Methodist preachers come down,
A preaching that drinking is sinful,
I’ll wager the rascals a crown,
They always preach best with a skinful.
More seriously, there were occasional riots against Methodist preachers, whose appeal to the poor and conversion of women and young people could disrupt family life and cause divisions in a parish. Their classes and so-called ‘love feasts’ were sometimes viewed as a cover for suspicious or even obscene practices. Others simply objected to being lectured by them. As the Duchess of Buckingham put it, ‘It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.’
Such scorn would not succeed: there would be over seventy thousand practising Methodists by the 1790s, and perhaps over 400,000 by 1830.
Cut off from the age of twelve from the aunt and uncle he adored, and not even returned to the teacher he had liked, William was now sent to board at Pocklington School, his grandfather’s old school thirteen miles from York. This kept him safely within reach of his family and entirely separated from Methodist teaching under the watchful eye of the master, the Reverend Kingsman Baskett. Pocklington, an endowed grammar school, could accommodate about fifty pupils, but was going through a difficult patch in 1771, with only about thirty in attendance. Baskett did not require his pupils to work hard; Wilberforce remembered him as ‘an elegant though not deep scholar and of gentlemanly mind and manners’.
The school was paid the generous sum of £400 a year to take William and to give him certain privileges –considerable ones, in view of the fact that a normal fee at most schools for a year’s boarding was a mere £10. These included ‘a very good room to myself’,
dining with the headmaster and being specially tutored by him. Here he stayed for five years, ‘going in the holydays to my Mother’s at Hull and occasionally going to visit my grandfather’.
Even in this sanitised environment, it would take several years for William’s attachment to Methodist teaching and to his distant aunt and uncle to fade. A letter to his uncle in November 1771 ends:
May the blessing of the living God keep you and preserve you in this world and may he bring you unto his Kingdom of bliss and joy. I am your, dearest, dearest son, W Wilberforce
ps. I cannot write more because it is seen where the letter is to.
Later in the same month he wrote: ‘I own I would give anything in the world to be with you again yet I trust that everything is ordered for the best and if we put our whole trust and confidence in Him we shall never be confounded.’
In August 1772 he complained to his aunt that ‘one of the greatest misfortunes I had whilst at Hull was not being able to hear the blessed word of God, as my mama would not let me go to High Church on a Sunday afternoon’.
And the following month, he took the opportunity of writing ‘by the maid who goes away tomorrow; thinking it a better way than sending it to my uncle, since grandpa might perhaps see the letter’.
Yet in his essays, overseen by Baskett, Methodist sentiments were absent. Those that have survived suggest a serious, thoughtful young man who could express himself clearly. Too much should not be made of the significance of school essays, which then, as now, were principally written with the reader and marker in mind, but it is striking how many of Wilberforce’s opinions in later life seem to have already been formed before the age of fifteen. ‘Since there is so much to be begot by the society of a good companion and as much to be lost by that of a bad one we ought to take the greatest care not to form any improper connections,’ he wrote in March 1772. ‘We never ought to admit anyone into that class till we are perfectly acquainted both with his Morals and Abilities.’
In 1773 he ventured the opinion that ‘Those who bend their thoughts upon gaining popularity, will find themselves most egregiously mistaken, if they expect to find it so desirable as is represented by some … When a man once aims at popular applause he must part with everything though ever so near and dear to him at the least nod of a giddy multitude.’
In 1774 he produced this: ‘Life is a very uncertain thing at best, therefore we ought not to rely upon any good Fortune, since perhaps this moment we may enjoy the greatest Worldly Happiness; the next be plunged into the Deepest Abyss of unutterable Misery.’
Whether or not William felt he had been ‘plunged into the deepest abyss’ when uprooted from Wimbledon, he now showed a teenager’s resilience in recovering from it. His own feelings about this period of his life would change over the years. Twenty-five years later he wrote in his journal that ‘My mother’s taking me from my uncle’s when about twelve or thirteen and then completely a Methodist, probably has been the means of my becoming useful in life, connected with political men. If I had staid with my uncle I should probably have become a bigoted, despised Methodist.’
As he would later see it, he had been rescued from a life devoted wholly to religion and given the opportunity to put his beliefs into practice. For if wealth, an early glimpse of knowledge and a temporary immersion in religion were the governing influences of Wilberforce’s early years, a final and crucial factor was his busy social life as a teenager, which amplified the ease, grace and charm he would always show in society, and make it possible for him to succeed in public life.
Nothing could have been more antithetical to Methodist attitudes than the social life of the Hull merchant class into which his family now ensured that William was plunged. Methodists thoroughly disapproved of theatres, and a local preacher would say in 1792 that ‘Everyone who entered a playhouse was, with the players, equally certain of eternal damnation,’
but Hull’s new Theatre Royal, completed in 1770, was central to the social life of the town. Proceedings would commence as early as six in the evening with a play, followed by a musical or a comic opera, and then by dancers, jugglers, and sometimes performing dogs. Tate Wilkinson, actor-manager of the Theatre Royal, called Hull ‘the Dublin of England’ on account of its hearty welcome, and reported ‘the many acts of kindness I received in that friendly seat, occasions my being oftener in bad health in Hull than at any other place in my yearly round’.
Balls were held which ‘continued with unremitting gaiety to a late hour … and gave such a zest to hilarity, that numbers were left at four o’clock in the morning enjoying the united pleasures of the enlivening dance’.
Residents reported that ‘We have a very Gay Town with diversions of some or other kind.’
William at first resisted these pleasures; when he was first taken to a play it was almost by force. As he wrote himself, Hull ‘was then as gay a place as could be found out of London. The theatre, balls, great suppers, and card parties, were the delight of the principal families in the town. The usual dinner hour was two o’clock, and at six they met at sumptuous suppers. This mode of life was at first distressing to me, but by degrees I acquired a relish for it, and became as thoughtless as the rest. As grandson to one of the principal inhabitants, I was everywhere invited and caressed: my voice and love of music made me still more acceptable. The religious impressions which I had gained at Wimbledon continued for a considerable time after my return to Hull, but my friends spared no pains to stifle them. I might almost say, that no pious parent ever laboured more to impress a beloved child with sentiments of piety, than they did to give me a taste of the world and its diversions.’
His vacations were therefore an endless round of social events; every self-respecting family in Hull would have wanted to meet the young man with a lively mind, a kind disposition, a melodious voice and a fortune in the offing. His growing enjoyment of gambling, card parties, theatre-going and socialising long into the night would have outraged his aunt and uncle: ‘After tea we played cards till nine; then there was a great supper, game, turkey etc … In this idle way did they make me live; giving me a taste for cards, introducing me to pretty young women etc.’
In later years he would similarly report ‘utter idleness and dissipation … cards, assemblies, concerts, plays; and for two last years with the girls all the morning – religion gradually wearing away till quite gone’.
He was now ‘about 14 or 15 a boy of very high spirits’,
and his circumstances ‘did not dispose me for exertion when I returned to school’.
The Methodism had been drawn out of him. In 1774, with his mind no longer on his aunt and uncle, the religious sentiments expressed in his letters to them ceased. As he contemplated his next move, to Cambridge University, his many attributes and advantages in life were clear: sociability, wealth, thoughtfulness and an easy command of language. No one, including him, yet had any idea how he would use them.
Wilberfoss was at the edge of what was once the forest of Galtres, from whose herds of wild boar it took the name of ‘Wild-Boar-Foss’, and hence Wilberfoss.
Hence it was called the King’s town, producing its correct modern name of Kingston upon Hull.
2 Ambition and Election (#ulink_5b6f6129-d76c-596d-8288-40ff021f03b3)
As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make any one else studious.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections
Some time before when an uncle of mine had got into parliament, I recollect thinking it a very great thing.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Recollections
IN HIS OWN WORDS, Wilberforce was armed upon his arrival as an undergraduate at Cambridge with ‘a perfect command of money’.
The death of both the other living William Wilberforces, his grandfather in 1776 and his uncle in 1777, left him as the sole male heir of the Wilberforce line. This meant that he was now in possession of a considerable fortune, and without the distraction of having to run the family business from which that fortune had been derived. Since his father’s death eight years earlier it had been Abel Smith, a scion of the rising Nottingham banking family who had married his mother’s sister, who had presided over the enterprise at Hull, now renamed Wilberforce and Smith.
The precise dimensions of Wilberforce’s fortune are unclear. He was not one of the super-rich of those days, the great landed families like the Fitzwilliams who owned colossal mansions and tens of thousands of acres, or the ‘nabobs’ who had returned from India with the wealth to set themselves up with land and pocket boroughs. It seems likely, given what is known about his assets and what can be calculated from the size of the losses which dissipated his family’s wealth half a century later, that he could lay claim to a personal fortune in the low hundreds of thousands of pounds, with £100,000 at that time roughly corresponding to £10 million today. He was, therefore, by no means able to set up a great country house, even had he wished to, but he easily had enough to live comfortably as a gentleman for the rest of his life.
This was a dangerous position for a seventeen-year-old arriving at Cambridge to be in. It was at St John’s College, alma mater of Kingsman Baskett, that his name was entered in the admissions book on 31 May 1776 (with ‘Wilberfoss’ crossed out and replaced with ‘Wilberforce’ as the college authorities belatedly caught up with the development of the family name), and he arrived there in October of that year. ‘I was introduced on the very first night of my arrival,’ he wrote, ‘to as licentious a set of men as can well be conceived. They drank hard, and their conversation was even worse than their lives … often indeed I was horror-struck at their conduct.’
This might be thought, by anyone who has attended Oxford or Cambridge at any point in history, to be the entirely normal reaction of a provincial innocent on his first night in college. Yet Cambridge does seem to have been particularly open to a dissolute lifestyle at that time. A sermon preached in the university church a few years later bemoaned ‘the scandalous neglect of order and discipline throughout the University’, and one observer complained that ‘It disgusts me to go through Cambridge … where one meets nothing academic or like a place of study, regularity or example.’
In the very year of Wilberforce’s arrival, Dr Ewin, a local Justice of the Peace, was hoping, forlornly it seems, that ‘young men see the folly of intemperance … vice and disorderly conduct … we never were at a greater pitch of extravagance in living, not dining in the halls, neglect of chapel … and not without women are our present misfortunes’.
Even by the normal standards of a boisterous university, rioting and the breaking down of other students’ doors were particularly prevalent. One St John’s freshman wrote to his father about a series of riots, complaining that ‘they had broke my door to pieces before I could get hold of my trusty poker’,
and the Master of the College felt it necessary in 1782 to denounce ‘scandalous outrages’ and to make clear that ‘Whoever shall be detected in breaking down the door of any person in college … shall be rusticated without hope of ever being recalled.’
Wilberforce considered he had been introduced to ‘some, I think of the very worse men that I ever met with in my life’.
To any teenager of a purely pleasure-loving or disruptive disposition, then, there was much to look forward to alongside several years of academic indolence. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge was a great centre of intellectual ferment at this point: the numbers of students had declined mid-century, and the dons were ‘decent easy men’ who ‘from the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing … had absolved their conscience’.
Medical students preferred to study in Holland; religious dissenters went to Edinburgh; the old English universities had become sleepy, conservative, and ‘the starting line in the race for Church livings’.
A further temptation to academic inactivity for Wilberforce arose from his being a Fellow Commoner, less exalted than a nobleman in the class-conscious eyes of those times, but enjoying many privileges over the pensioners and sizars, who paid lower fees and were generally on their way to a career in the Church. Fellow Commoners paid extra fees to ‘common’ (i.e. dine) at the Fellows’ table, and were exempt from many lectures and studies, although St John’s had recently introduced new rules requiring them to be publicly examined twice a year. Even so, the tutors told Wilberforce he really need not bother with work: ‘Their object seemed to be, to make and keep me idle. If ever I appeared studious, they would say to me, “Why in the world should a man of your fortune trouble himself with fagging?”’
The result was that he did a certain amount to get through the exams, but, while shaking off within a year or so his initial and shocking companions, spent the rest of the time socialising: ‘I used to play at cards a great deal and do nothing else and my tutor who ought to have repressed this disposition, if not by his authority at least by his advice, rather encouraged it: he never urged me to attend lectures and I never did. And I should have had nothing, all the time I was at college but for a natural love of classical learning and that it was necessary for a man who was to be publicly examined to prevent his being disgraced.’
The resulting academic record was undistinguished: in the college exams of December 1776, his performance ‘would have been mentioned sooner if he had prepared himself in the whole of Stanyan’ (Greek history); in 1777 he was said to be due ‘some praise’, and later in the year ‘was good in the Classic’ and in 1778 ‘did well in Butler’ (Analogy of Religion).
But as to mathematics, which he later thought his mind ‘greatly needed’, he was ‘told that I was too clever to require them’.
Undeniably, however, he had a good time, without the truly excessive drinking, womanising and violence of some of his contemporaries, but falling happily into the category of ‘sober dissipation’,
as he described it himself. He was already ‘so far from what the world calls licentious, that I was rather complimented on being better than young men in general’,
but he was very quickly a popular figure, showing to full effect all the abilities of singing, conversation and hospitality which the years of Hull society had honed in him. Unprepossessing as he must have been in appearance, only five feet four inches tall, with an eyeglass on a ribbon, his life at Cambridge soon became a foretaste of his future residence at Westminster, with people always clustering around him and filling his rooms. Thomas Gisborne, who was to become a renowned writer, poet, moralist and natural philosopher, had the rooms next door to Wilberforce but was much more studious, remembering him in the streets ‘encircled by young men of talent’. Wilberforce apparently kept a great Yorkshire pie in his rooms (an unlikely journey for a pie before the days of refrigeration), and ‘whatever else the good things was, to console the hungry visitor’.
He lived, according to Gisborne, ‘far too much for self-indulgence in habits of idleness and amusement. By his talents, his wit, his kindness, his social powers, his universal accessibility, and his love of society, he speedily became the centre of attraction to all the clever and the idle of his own college and of other colleges. He soon swarmed with them from the time when he arose, generally very late, like he went to bed. He talked and he laughed and he sang, and he amused and interested everyone.’
In later life Wilberforce would deeply regret the waste of time. When he ought to have been ‘under a strict and wholesome regimen’,
he found that ‘As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make any one else studious.’
If he gained anything specific from his Cambridge years it was certain friendships which further broadened his horizons: William Cookson, the uncle of Wordsworth, who took him during vacations to the Lake District and gave him a lifelong adoration of that part of England, soon to become his regular fresh-air retreat; Gerard Edwards, an entertaining young landowner who would one day make one of the most important introductions of Wilberforce’s life; and Edward Christian, whose brother Fletcher would soon enjoy the lasting fame of leading the mutiny on the Bounty. Three whole years of card parties and late-night drinking went by until, as these friends began to leave Cambridge in 1779, Wilberforce turned his mind to what to do with the rest of his life.
Many of the options available were presumably fairly easily dismissed. He had no wish to go into the family business, now in the capable hands of Abel Smith, and in any case probably was not attracted to spending the rest of his life in Hull. While others in search of a career would have gone into practising law, he had no record of the necessary studious application and no need of the money either. The majority of his fellow Cambridge graduates would have gone into the Church, but at this stage in his life this would not have offered a remotely desirable lifestyle, and his early Methodism had left him with serious doubts about the established Church – his sons reported in their biography of him that while at Cambridge he briefly refused to declare his assent to the Articles of the Church. He could, of course, have been a gentleman of pure leisure, but to a man of twenty who so much enjoyed being a centre of attention and part of a lively community that would have been an unlikely and premature retirement.
Instead, he had resolved to be a Member of Parliament. There is no record of how he arrived at this ambition, or of the reaction of his friends and family to the news that he wished to enter politics, except his own statement that ‘At this time I knew there was a general election coming on and at Hull the conversation often turned to politics and rooted me to ambition.’
His family may well have been surprised: they had a tradition of civic, but not parliamentary, leadership; and his friends did not at this stage include the great swathe of would-be rulers of Britain with whom he would soon be acquainted. Yet there were present in his personality many of the essential components of a young political aspirant: ability to perform for an audience, an easy popularity, and an interest in the world beyond his own town or college. As for paying the expenses of an election, that was what that inheritance was for.
