A model of rectitude
Philip Ziegler
William Wilberforce Robin Furneaux (Hamish Hamilton £6.00)
Statesman, Orator, Philanthropist, Saint, one of the greatest Parliamentarians in a great age, a friend of Pitt and Burke, of Fox and Canning — he did more than any other man, by his eloquence and courage, his industry and pertinacity, to bring about the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. No Englishman has ever done more to evoke the conscience of the British people and to elevate and ennoble British Public life.
To begin with an obituary may seem a somewhat topsy-turvy approach to biography, but Robin Furneaux is amply justified in thus launching his enjoyable and intelligent study of William Wilberforce. An epitaph records not so much what a man was as what he wished people to believe he was. If not a lie, it is at least a euphemism. Yet Wilberforce for all his adult life, devoted himself to being what he professed to be, to making his image the reality. He was far from faultless, yet of hyprocrisy, that archetypical gravestone malady, he was singularly free. His standards were, indeed, inflexible, and he weighed all humanity in the same, austerely simple balance. Lord Furneaux mentions in this context the celebrated review of Lady Chatterley's Lover in a sporting magazine which described it as "an interesting account of the life of a gamekeeper." Wilberforce's outlook was similarly if more sublimely blinkered. Of Swift he exclaimed: "What a thoroughly irreligious mind. No trace of Sunday to be found in his journals or letters." The Fortunes of Nigel he held to be the best of Scott's novels — "I mean the more moral in its tendency." Castlereagh would never have been driven into insanity and suicide if he had rested on the Sabbath. He applied the same rigid tests to his own life, recoiling in dismay whenever he detected any tendency to derive pleasure from social diversion or lusts of the flesh. He reproached himself for devoting to writing to his fiancee time which would have been better saved for political crusades, and still more for loving her with improper relish — "Alas! What cause for deep humiliation do I find in myself on looking back over the last fortnight at Bath, sadly too sensual about Barbara." This daunting rectitude did not endear him to all his contemporaries. He was anathema to many who either disliked his views or felt he did not press them with sufficient vigour. John Rickman described him as "the verminous Wilberforce . . . Oh! Smithfield and fiery faggots for that Holy Man! I would willingly exalt him into a martyr." While Cobbett rhapsodised about a dream America: "A hundred brace of woodcocks a day — think of that! And never to see the hangdog face of a tax-gatherer. Think of that! . . . No Castleses and Olivers . . No Cannings, Liverpools, Eldons, Ellenboroughs or Sidmouths . . . No squeaking Wynnes. No Wilberforces. Think of 'that! No Wilberforces!"
It is a particular strength of Lord Furneaux's book that he conveys not only Wilberforce's massive if somewhat chilling virtues, but also his charm and sense of fun. He was an excellent singer and mimic, a superb conversationalist who knew how to listen as well as talk. The irreverent young man who noted regretfully that "Archbishops in England are not like Archeveques in France; these last are jolly fellows . . . who play at billiards, etc., like other people," was soon to
be lost in the Saint and crusader, but he never suppressed the gaiety which so endeared him to his friends. His generosity was endless: no touch was softer, no creditor more forebearing, and even though he was a founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals he never doubted the truth — occasionally obscure to Englishmen — that human beings came first. It is, of course, by his campaign for the abolition of the slave trade and subsequently for the emancipation of the slaves that he is today remembered. It is hard now to conceive an age in which men of intelligence and good-will would defend this odious principle,
let alone the atrocities committed in its name, yet Wilberforce was up against not only
powerful vested interests but friends and colleagues who genuinely felt that the evil was slight and the perils of abolition vastly greater. His finest hour came early in 1807 when the House of Commons finally voted for abolition by two hundred and eighty three votes to a mere sixteen. Lord Furneaux ad mirably describes his final triumph, the noble panegyric of Sir Samuel Romilly and the moment when the whole house rose and cheered while Wilberforce sat in-silence, tears streaming down his face. "Well, Henry," Wil berforce asked Thornton cheerfully as the members left the House after the debate, "What shall we abolish next?" "The lottery, I think," replied the latter after a pause for .serious consideration.
Part of the price of being an Abolitionist in the early days was that many of one's allies inclined to Radicalism. From the early 1790s, suggestions for reform of any kind were, indeed, held to smack of revolution. For Wilberforce this was peculiarly painful. As Lord Furneaux puts it, he was "a Tory through and through; he never shed the political ideas he had inherited from Pitt and his religion intensified his conservatism, for every reform had to be weighed against the encouragement it might offer to revolution, chaos, and, worst of all, atheism." On almost every major issue of social policy he was a conservative if not a reactionary. Trades Unions were "a general disease in our society" and should be checked "by laws against combinations"; the use of spies and agents provocateurs by the government was repugnant but there was no need for an inquiry; habeas corpus must without doubt be suspended.
Lord Furneaux makes sense of these divergent strands and presents a Wilberforce who is coherent and comprehensible. This is a splendid book, written with wit and style, thoughtful, perceptive and scrupulously objective. The author is never slow to point out when his hero is ridiculous yet eschews cheap Jibes and easy cynicism. This is an impressive exercise in sympathetic understanding based on much hard work and sensitivity.
Not to make one qualification would, however, be to judge this book by far lower standards than it deserves. Lord Furneaux's reading has been massive, but it has centred largely on William Wilberforce, and his grasp of the historical background seems sometimes flimsy. We have here not Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark but the Prince of Denmark without Hamlet, so that events are not merely described from Wilberforce's point of view — which is fair enough — but portrayed as if Wilberforce were always the main protagonist. A trifling example comes when Wilberforce had his only meeting with the future Queen Victoria, described here as the time when, "he met the child whose reign was to be so influenced by him." Such a view of their encounter would hardly have occurred to anyone with a less exclusive interest in his subject. I much look forward to Lord Furneaux's next biography. To hail a very good book is all the greater pleasure if an even better one is on the way.
Philip Ziegler, the historical biographer, is presently engaged on a life of Melbourne.
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