Within a decade of his death, William Wilberforce became a victim of revisionist history at the hands of his own sons. In their classic five-volume biography, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce portrayed their father as something he was not: higher and more inflexibly Anglican than he truly was. After his ‘Great Change,’ however, Wilberforce was doggedly convinced that serious, evangelical religion was nothing to tone down. That his sons attempted to soften this propensity appears undeniable.
Unfortunately, most studies of Wilberforce have relied heavily on this work rather than mining his own writings. While Wilberforce has been the subject of much research, little of it has been dedicated to understanding his religious identity, which, I contend, is crucial to make sense of Wilberforce personally, the Clapham Sect generally, and even evangelicalism broadly.
Drawing on Wilberforce’s extensive corpus of diaries, this paper demonstrates that while he preferred a vital, yet polite religion, Wilberforce repeatedly attended and supported enthusiastic, irregular ministries. To use Bebbington’s quadrilateral, the weight of conversionism, biblicism, activism, and especially crucicentrism was such that it pulled Wilberforce and revivalists into closer association than one might expect.
Beyond his connection to John Newton, throughout his life, Wilberforce acquired a seemingly haphazard and colourful assortment of ecclesiastical attachments. In 1786, over a period of four months, he attended the preaching of the Calvinistic Methodist itinerant from Lady Huntingdon’s connexion, Henry Peckwell, no less than fourteen times—something deliberately expunged from the official Life. Dragging along his Claphamite companions, Wilberforce was taken by the ‘vehement, and energetic, and impassioned’ preaching of Baptist pulpiteer, political author, and cultural icon, Robert Hall in 1804. He crawled through a window to hear the Scottish pulpit celebrity and moral philosopher Thomas Chalmers, who took London by storm in 1817. To the dismay of the Establishment clerics in Bath, Wilberforce attached himself to the Congregationalist minister William Jay for over forty years, hosting him, reading his sermons, and even sharing the eucharist with the dissenting clergyman.
William Wilberforce loved ‘to dwell on those great and essential doctrines on which he agree[d] with his fellow christians of other parties, rather than on those minuter and more contentious points of difference, which are the subjects of such unhappy divisions among those who profess allegiance to the same Saviour; who trust in the same redeeming blood and sanctifying spirit . . . and who hope to live together hereafter in the same blessed society, and to join in the same song of praise for evermore.’
This was the evangelical anthem, as expressed by her most prominent son that never donned a ministerial robe. It was a refrain that cut across the divide between regular and revivalistic ministries. In his own eyes, Wilberforce clearly saw, and simply followed a cruciform spirituality which eroded historic factionalism, allowing him to redraw the lines (following the likes of Wesley, Whitefield, and Newton before him), creating a broad and informal network of like-minded leaders that crossed traditional denominational boundaries, and impacted the wider world.