The Book of Books (27 page)

Thanks partly to them, her work prevailed. First in mid-nineteenth-century America, then in Britain and now across the world, she is acknowledged in ever more secular circles for what she was: a bold, fearless Christian radical whose work fed the early flickerings of feminism.

 

Mary Wollstonecraft came out of one English Protestant Christian inheritance. William Wilberforce out of another. Both were tutored by the King James Bible. Both had a resounding impact on the character of the world we now live in. She emerged into her wider world through the route of divine reason. In that way she can be seen as widely allied to the many debates which grew into the Enlightenment Project. He emerged through conversion, a state of transition into Christianity reported on from the time of Jesus Christ Himself and most famously recorded when the young Jewish Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus met his sudden conversion to Christianity.

In a sense, Mary Wollstonecraft's Christian route could be seen as a new progression and one capable of further development in an increasingly scientific, questioning, analytical world. William Wilberforce's conversion took root in the deep past, in the origin of faith itself. Both cases seem to prove that whatever victories the Enlightenment won, snuffing out the reforming zeal and intellectual vigour of Bible-based Christianity was not one of them.

Wilberforce's greatness lay in his success, over many years and despite often violent and virulent opposition, in leading forces which eventually pushed through the Parliament at Westminster an Act which abolished the slave trade in 1807. His continuing work and iconic place in Parliament meant that he was also a
major instrument in the abolition of slavery itself a generation later.

It was widely acknowledged, not least by Wilberforce himself, that he was by no means alone in leading this campaign. Nor was he the originator. In England, men like Clarkson – a key anti-slavery campaigner – had begun to work for the abolition of the slave trade several years before Wilberforce's interest was enlisted. And the final abolition of slavery itself, though it formally began in the London Parliament, needed the efforts of many in the United States and the West Indies, including many influential former slaves.

Yet Wilberforce played a unique and an essential role. There had to be that Act of Parliament to get the movement going. He did it out of a passionate Christianity. One of his religious disciplines was the daily reading of the King James Bible.

He was born in 1759 into a secure and long-established trading family in the port of Hull, in Yorkshire in the north of England. His family was wealthy but not aristocratic. Their substantial home was in the middle of the city's energetic business quarter with trading ships moored literally at the end of the garden. A narrow, teeming High Street was directly outside the front door. The Wilberforce family tree had long Yorkshire roots and claims were made that it had played a valiant part in the Battle of Hastings. He was the third of four children, two of whom died in childhood: and he too was feared for. He was and was to remain fragile, his eyesight was always poor, his full adult height was five feet four inches. From an early age his melodious speaking and singing voice was applauded.

He went to a superb grammar school in Hull and then, after the unexpected early death of his father at the age of thirty-nine, he was housed with relations in the south, near London. He was hauled back north a couple of years later by his mother and packed
off to a mediocre boarding school like most boys of his background and class. From there to Cambridge University. This saw the beginning of a life of luxury, profligacy and idleness which moved to London when, at twenty-one, through money and oratory he acquired a seat in Parliament and became the Member of Parliament for Hull.

Mary Wollstonecraft struggled and then fought her way through a petticoat world that dismayed and devalued her. Hers was a landscape in which the best she could hope for was to be a companion to a rich lady or a governess to a rich family's children. She saw polite society through spoiled women whose lassitude angered her and the rest of society through degraded women whose plight angered her even more. She saw the arrogance of privilege and the abyss of poverty.

Mary finally managed to balance herself somewhere between the two, finding fulfilment in the public arena. She worked hard and read hard and met men (it was mostly men), whose manner of thinking was affiliated with the more extreme direction of Enlightenment thought. So although her circumstances taught her of a country ruinously and ruthlessly divided and riven by class, wealth and birth, her lifeline – her rational Christianity – and her companions – Dissenters and radicals – enable us to see her as part of that tide of enlightened religion.

Wilberforce's England was spectacularly unenlightened. It festered with inherited wealth and position, pagan in all but tokenistic outward observances, squalid, riotous, publicly immoral, gaming, drunken and almost insanely extravagant.

As a youth at Cambridge and particularly in London, he came up against an Anglo-Saxon version of Sodom and Gomorrah. The aristocracy and the industrial nouveau riche were bloated with treasure which their younger element seemed bent on losing at gaming tables. Fortunes which had been accumulated through
generations were lost on the throw of dice. And the poor were not only oppressed but only just finding enough air in the gutters of a polluted metropolis.

Like several of the most passionate and effective converts to Christianity, Wilberforce before his conversion lived in, even basked in, a world he would later regard as sinful, slothful, unjust and intolerable.

The Anglican Church had returned to the indolent and corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church which the Reformation had attacked. The King James Bible was often little more than a convenient calling card. For the upper classes and the lower aristocracy a pious, even a counterfeiting public observance and the swearing of oaths got you on to what would later be called a ‘gravy train'. It was a way in to more wealth for those who came from wealth but were not fortunate enough to be the eldest son – who would inherit the entire estate – or the daring son – who could be bought a commission in the army or the navy. The Church was fat with cash from the strictly enforced tithing tax (10 per cent of income) from truly massive land and property holdings and from the flow of endowments. Be well born. Go to Oxford or Cambridge. Enjoy all that could be bought. Get any old degree and the Church was your oyster.

There were exceptions. There were those of good family who were of good faith. There were valiant parish priests, scholarly bishops and upright archdeacons. But that was not the character of the Church that Wilberforce would have seen. He had enjoyed a taste of the other Church, the Methodists, when, as a boy, he had stayed with his uncle and aunt in Wimbledon near London. There he had seen the strict piety, the rule of Christian conduct, the practice of a deeply held faith; but his mother had hauled him out of that. She was afraid that he might be permanently stained by this lower-class Methodism and therefore unable ever to take his
place in society. Ironically, her intervention enabled him to become a Member of Parliament where he did his great work.

Wilberforce, though, would be more likely to know and to be, by class and inclination in those days, at ease with the likes of the Beresford family, for example. William Hague points out in his biography of Wilberforce that one of the Beresfords ‘had cumulatively received £350,000 from his Church living' (i.e. £350,000 in eighteenth-century money – multiple millions today); ‘another lucky member of this not notably religious family received just under £300,000, a third £250,000 and a fourth, with four “livings” simultaneously, £58,000. In total, through eight clerics, this entrepreneurial Anglican family obtained £1.5 million [in eighteenth-century money] from the Irish [Protestant] Church.' It was money that could have built a city.

One relative of the Prime Minister Lord North gained the see of Winchester and received £1.5 million over his lifetime and secured thirty livings for other members of his family. The work in the parishes was done by lower clergy who would receive a shilling a day and supplement this by farm work, teaching or any other way they could. This was widespread. The Church of England was a smug, unassailable scandal which dressed itself in establishment respectability: many of its leading figures were no better than scoundrels primped out as benefactors.

Jane Austen gives us a glimpse of this. Later in the nineteenth century, Trollope was to manufacture an enjoyable satirical world out of these corruptions. The Church remained for the well-off just another way in which to get richer. In his wild oats young manhood, Wilberforce saw none of that: indeed he went along gaily with the huntin', shootin' and fishin' clergyman whose rectory often dwarfed the village church. The execution of holy office was as much theatrical as theological and had very little to do with preaching on the shores of Galilee.

We are all coloured by the company we keep and Wilberforce's metropolitan clique circled around the fashionable gentlemen's clubs. William Wilberforce belonged to the Goosetree, perhaps the most exclusive. The chief occupations were drinking and gambling, gambling above all, night and day. In one uninterrupted seventy-two-hour session, the famous politician Charles James Fox, twenty-five, and his younger brother lost £32,000. Young aristocrats lost their entire estates through this fashionable addiction to gambling which for a time besotted many of the aristocracy and the wealthy. Walpole wrote: ‘the young men lose five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds in an evening. Lord Staverdale, not one and twenty, lost £11,000 last Tuesday but recovered it by one great hand at Hazard.' They would gamble on anything and clubs kept a Betting Book for the more outrageous and bizarre bets.

This was the Enlightened world of the young William Wilberforce. Tempered, it must be said, by political company including William Pitt, his closest friend, a man very soon to become the youngest ever Prime Minister. But for most of them, political discussion appears to have been the diversion in the intervals between the serious business of hedonism.

This was made more gaudy and uncontrolled by the prevalence of prostitution in the capital – about 50,000, many of them children, lining the streets in regiments outside the gentlemen's clubs. Add to that number the recorded assortment in 1796, of ‘Thieves, Pilferers, Embezzlers . . . Cheats, Rakes, Burglars, Highway Robbers, PickPockets, River Pirates, Swindlers and Dealers in Base Money' and you have over 15 per cent of the London population engaged in crime, most often starved into depravity. It was ‘Babylon'. But Wilberforce had experienced an alternative London.

Wilberforce had a crucial childhood experience of the kind and dutiful face of Christianity in Methodism in an outer London suburb. Though his mother as she saw it rescued him from a
Methodist fate (which, she thought, would have made him an outcast in high society), there was always an attachment to the industry and godliness of the people of that childhood time in the south of England. But when he was taken back north to his home, as he wrote: ‘as much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make anyone else studious.'

The establishment thought Methodism lower class, but its fear was that it would take over. Its distaste for Methodism lay in an abhorrence of enthusiasm. An example of this is a sentence from the Duchess of Buckingham, who said of the Methodists: ‘It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl upon the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.'

The turning point came when Wilberforce was a roué of twenty-five. He set out on a Grand Tour of Europe with his mother, his sister, two sick cousins and a remarkable scholar Isaac Milner, whom Wilberforce took along as a companion and tutor. Isaac was the younger brother of the headmaster who had taught so successfully for two years in Hull Grammar School. He had lost his place in Hull society and his job in the school when he declared himself to be a Methodist.

Isaac, son of a journeyman weaver, went to Cambridge where he became the first Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy, and, according to some, it was believed ‘the university, perhaps, never produced a man of more eminent abilities.' He was not a rich man and Wilberforce's offer gave him the unexpected chance to see Europe. Over weeks of travel, their conversation appears to have been an education for Wilberforce. When he persuaded Milner to discuss religion, it became a revelation.

Wilberforce came across a book by Philip Doddridge –
The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul
. Milner told him: ‘It is one of the best books ever written. Let us . . . read it on our journey.' Many
years later, Wilberforce wrote to his daughter: ‘you cannot read a better book. I hope it was one of the means of turning my heart to God.' Doddridge based his work on that of Richard Burton, an English Puritan minister in the seventeenth century, who saw the Bible as the source and strength of life.

Wilberforce went back to Tyndale's Greek translation of the New Testament and then he turned to the King James Bible. He suffered agonies not as it seems of doubt but of guilt and strain as he fought to slough off the old skins. He emerged as a devout, rigorous student of the Bible, a disciplined Christian. From what we read of his illness it had symptoms in common with a severe nervous breakdown.

He consulted others. John Newton, the slave-ship owner turned priest, author of ‘Amazing Grace', and William Pitt his friend, who supported him in this unexpected but implacably serious endeavour. Eventually, he saw his way through and he wrote: ‘surely the principles as well as the practices of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.'