William carries on

This richly detailed and engrossing biography, a fine companion volume to William Hague’s life of Pitt, will still many arguments and feed others. Two hundred years ago the Act abolishing the slave trade was, as it remains, a beacon of humanitarian legislation, a defining moment when morality met commerce in open battle and won a famous victory. The anniversary has loosed a flood of opinions, apologies and accusations and too often the voice of William Wilberforce has been drowned.

Hague restores him to his proper place, as lynchpin of the movement, though he was certainly one man among many. Thomas Clarkson did far more research, for instance. Without Pitt, Grenville, Hannah More, Sharp, Equiano, James Stephen, Macaulay, the thousands of petitioners in Britain and the pressure from slaves and freed slaves, the Act would not have been passed. But Wilberforce introduced it in a landmark speech to the Commons in 1789. He stayed at the helm in years of turbulence and despair, seeing it through until, in 1807, the church bells rang out across the land for him.

It is neither fashionable nor sound these days to accord a famous figure a unique role, but sometimes there is no alternative. Wilberforce played the key part in parliament, and it was only through parliament that the trade could be abolished.

From early in his career Wilberforce’s reputation was attacked. It could be said that all assaults have since followed lines laid down by Hazlitt and Cobbett. Hazlitt wrote:

Mr Wilberforce’s humanity will go to all lengths that it can with safety and discretion, but it is not supposed that it should lose him his seat for Yorkshire, the smile of majesty or the countenance of the loyal and pious.