Yorkshire Almanac Having paid £1.5M (modern) in bribes to voters, William Wilberforce is elected MP for Hull

11 September 1780: Having paid £1.5M (modern) in bribes to voters, William Wilberforce is elected MP for Hull

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James Stephen. 1853. William Wilberforce. Essays in ecclesiastical biography, 3rd Ed., Vol. 2. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

William Wilberforce was born at Hull, on the 24th of August, 1759. His father, a merchant of that town, traced his descent from a family which had for many generations possessed a large estate at Wilberfoss, in the East Riding of the county of York. From that place was derived the name which the taste or the caprice of his later progenitors moulded into the form in which it was borne by their celebrated descendant. His mother was nearly allied to many persons of consideration, among whom may be numbered the present Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Winchester, and the members of that great London banking house of which Lord Carrington was formerly the head…

The father of William Wilberforce died before his son had completed his tenth year, and the ample patrimony which he then inherited was afterwards largely increased on the death of a paternal uncle, to whose guardianship his childhood was committed…

[But] ‘If I had staid with my uncle I should probably have been a bigoted, despised Methodist.’ His mother’s earlier sagacity foresaw what her son’s later experience discovered, and by her he was withdrawn from Wimbledon, and initiated into the amusements and luxuries of his native city.

The escape from methodism, bigotry, and contempt, was complete. The youth sang, danced, and feasted with the wealthier inhabitants of Hull, endured their card parties, and admired their strolling players; and, lest these spells should be too weak to cast out the Whitfield spirit from his mind, he was committed by the same maternal prescience to the care of a professional exorcist of such demons. He was a sound and well-beneficed divine, a polished gentleman, an elegant scholar, and master of the endowed grammar school of Pocklington. To him his pupil was indebted for some general knowledge of polite literature, and for an intimate acquaintance with the best dinner tables in that part of the county of York. From this easy thrall he passed, at the age of seventeen, to St. John’s College, Cambridge…

No better choice could have been made, if the object of his residence at the University had been to repress any aspirations towards scholarship of a higher order. His companions were hard-drinking licentious youths, whose talk was even worse than their lives. His teachers did their best to make and to keep him idle. The single problem proposed for his solution was, “Why so rich a man should trouble himself with fagging?’ and no Johnian Archimedes could find the answer. Euclid and Newton were abandoned for whist, and Thucydides for such other pastimes as collegiate dulness loves best. With a great Yorkshire pie crowning his table, and with wit, drollery, and song ever flowing from his lips, the child of fortune passed through his academical course, the centre of that never-failing crowd, whose aim it is to eat without cost, and to be amused without effort.

That complete and generous education which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both public and private, of peace and war, was not to be acquired under such teachers or among such associates. Yet scarcely had Mr. Wilberforce shaken off that alliance, than he entered on one of the noblest and most difficult of those offices. Within six weeks from the sumptuous celebration of the day on which he attained his majority, he found himself, by the expenditure among the electors of Hull of more than 8000l., their representative in the House of Commons.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Wilberforce’s sons’ excuse is the customary one of corrupt politicians, that they were all at it – generalised fraudulent elections, rather than individual electoral fraud, were to blame:

[O]n the 11th of September he was engaged in all the bustle of a sharp contest. Against him were arrayed the interest of Lord Rockingham, the most powerful nobleman in the county; that of Sir George Savile, its wealthy and respected representative, himself a frequent resident at Hull; and that of government, always strong at a sea-port. To these he could oppose nothing but the personal influence and independent character of a young man of twenty. Yet such was the command he had established over the affections of his townsmen, that, at the close of the poll, he numbered singly as many votes as his opponents had received together. The numbers were,

Lord Robert Manners 673
David Hartley 453
William Wilberforce 1126

This election cost him between £ 8000 and £9000.

By long-established custom, the single vote of a resident elector was rewarded with a donation of two guineas; four were paid for a plumper; and the expenses of a freeman’s journey from London averaged £10 a piece. The letter of the law was not broken, because the money was not paid until the last day on which election petitions could be presented. But the more matured judgment of Mr Wilberforce condemned the custom to which he now conformed; and rather than so enter parliament, with his later principles, he has declared that he would have remained always a private man (Wilberforce 1839).

As I don’t think Wilberforce actually said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

The Bank of England’s inflation calculator translates the range £8000-9000 in 1780 to £1,468,444.44-£1,652,000.00 in 2020.

This was a recurring expense:

Wilberforce’s account with Smith, Payne and Smith’s bank suggests that the 1784 election cost him £8,800 of which he had to meet all but £1,000 himself (Ward 1989).

Although Wilberforce subsequently became an abolitionist, his victory over Hartley weakened the cause in the Commons:

David Hartley, then a member of parliament for Hull, and the son of Dr. Hartley who wrote the Essay on Man, found it impossible any longer to pass over without notice the case of the oppressed Africans. He had long felt for their wretched condition, and, availing himself of his legislative situation, he made a motion in the House of Commons, “That the Slave Trade was contrary to the laws of God, and the rights of men.” In order that he might interest the members as much as possible in his motion, he had previously obtained some of the chains in use in this cruel traffic, and had laid them upon the table of the House of Commons. His motion was seconded by that great patriot and philanthropist, Sir George Saville (Clarkson 1839).

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Comment

Wilberforce’s sons’ excuse is the customary one of corrupt politicians, that they were all at it – generalised fraudulent elections, rather than individual electoral fraud, were to blame:

[O]n the 11th of September he was engaged in all the bustle of a sharp contest. Against him were arrayed the interest of Lord Rockingham, the most powerful nobleman in the county; that of Sir George Savile, its wealthy and respected representative, himself a frequent resident at Hull; and that of government, always strong at a sea-port. To these he could oppose nothing but the personal influence and independent character of a young man of twenty. Yet such was the command he had established over the affections of his townsmen, that, at the close of the poll, he numbered singly as many votes as his opponents had received together. The numbers were,

Lord Robert Manners 673
David Hartley 453
William Wilberforce 1126

This election cost him between £ 8000 and £9000.

By long-established custom, the single vote of a resident elector was rewarded with a donation of two guineas; four were paid for a plumper; and the expenses of a freeman’s journey from London averaged £10 a piece. The letter of the law was not broken, because the money was not paid until the last day on which election petitions could be presented. But the more matured judgment of Mr Wilberforce condemned the custom to which he now conformed; and rather than so enter parliament, with his later principles, he has declared that he would have remained always a private man (Wilberforce 1839).

As I don’t think Wilberforce actually said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

The Bank of England’s inflation calculator translates the range £8000-9000 in 1780 to £1,468,444.44-£1,652,000.00 in 2020.

This was a recurring expense:

Wilberforce’s account with Smith, Payne and Smith’s bank suggests that the 1784 election cost him £8,800 of which he had to meet all but £1,000 himself (Ward 1989).

Although Wilberforce subsequently became an abolitionist, his victory over Hartley weakened the cause in the Commons:

David Hartley, then a member of parliament for Hull, and the son of Dr. Hartley who wrote the Essay on Man, found it impossible any longer to pass over without notice the case of the oppressed Africans. He had long felt for their wretched condition, and, availing himself of his legislative situation, he made a motion in the House of Commons, “That the Slave Trade was contrary to the laws of God, and the rights of men.” In order that he might interest the members as much as possible in his motion, he had previously obtained some of the chains in use in this cruel traffic, and had laid them upon the table of the House of Commons. His motion was seconded by that great patriot and philanthropist, Sir George Saville (Clarkson 1839).

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29 September 1830: Tory Radical Richard Oastler: “free” white workers in the Bradford mills are worse off than their enslaved black counterparts in the colonies

23 January 1640: Andrew Marvell’s father drowns in the Humber at Hull

27 July 1822: An inquest at York finds that John Furnel of the Queen’s Regiment of Foot died of flogging and resulting illness

19 October 1775: Mayor Joseph Outram lays the first stone of Hull’s first dock and customs quay, dooming the town’s walls and commencing its great expansion

18 January 1966: Barbara Castle (Lab.) swings the Hull North by-election with a bridge over the Humber, convincing Harold Wilson that he has the momentum to win a general election

24 September 1862: Having bet his shirt on blockade-running to the Confederates, Hull mayor Zachariah Pearson tells of his ruin by Lombard Street and Abraham Lincoln

19 July 1806: At home with Hull MP and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce at Broomfield House, Clapham Common

23 April 1642: Having promised parliament to safeguard for it Hull’s crucial arsenal, John Hotham tells it how today he shut the gates of Hull to Charles I

30 May 1835: The (Tory-dominated) Leeds Corporation gives its assets to three cronies to prevent their being inherited by the new (Whiggish) town council created by the Municipal Corporations Act

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Comment

£7K was about £0.75m in May 2024 – chicken-feed for Covid-era embezzlers.

They were not the only beneficiaries:

When the functions of the late Corporation of Leeds were about to cease, by virtue of the Municipal Bill, the members voted to Mr. Adolphus jun., the son of the eminent barrister and Deputy Recorder of that Corporation, the sum of one hundred guineas, in testimony of their esteem, and as a small but grateful record of their estimation of his services. Mr. Adolphus refused to accept the tribute, excusing himself upon the plea that he could not ???? to himself the idea of allowing the last act of the corporation to be that of giving a sum of money to one of its legal advisers (Morning Post 1836/04/06)

The Spectator has a follow-up (Gale doesn’t have Leeds Mercury scans for 1836!):

The Solicitor-General has given his opinion, that the conduct of the old Leeds Corporation, in alienating their funds, was illegal and fraudulent, and that the seven thousand pounds may be recovered on an application to the Court of Chancery. We are sure the burgesses of Leeds will require their Council to institute proceedings for the recovery of the property without delay, if the old Corporation should have the audacity to persist in their wrongful act, and that the borough will support the Council in those proceedings.—Leeds Mercury.(Spectator 1836/04/09)

This was during the period of Whig rule nationally 1835-41 under Viscount Melbourne, and there is probably a Tory response to the Solicitor General somewhere. But what happened eventually? Were there sanctions for the guilty members of the Corporation? Who were they? For that at least John Mayhall has the answer:

LEEDS CORPORATE BODY, 1834-5.
MAYOR: Griffith Wright.
RECORDER: Charles Milner.
DEPUTY RECORDER: John Leycester Adolphus.
ALDERMEN:-Henry Hall, George Banks, Christopher Beckett, William Hey, Benjamin Sadler, Thomas Beckett, Thomas Blayds, Ralph Markland, Rt. William Dinsey Thorp, Richard Bramley, Joseph Robert Atkinson, William Perfect.
ASSISTANTS:-Jonathan Wilks, Joseph Ingham, John G. Uppleby, Fountain Brown, Michael Thomas Sadler, Joseph Henry Ridsdale, William Wilks, Joseph Mason Tennant, William Hey, junr., John Wilkinson, Charles Brown, William Waite, Benjamin Holroyd, William Osburn, junr., John Upton, William Gott, Thomas Motley, Francis Chorley, Robert Harrison, John Cawood, William Milnes, Thomas Charlesworth, George Hirst.
TOWN CLERK: James Nicholson.
CORONER: Robert Barr.
CHIEF CONSTABLE: Edward Read.
DEPUTY CONSTABLE: James Ingham.
SERJEANT AT MACE: George Hanson.
CLERK OF THE MARKETS, AND BILLET MASTER: James Fairclough.
BEADLE: J. Handley.
CAPTAIN OF THE WATCH. Benjamin Wool.
GAOLER: James Lancaster
TOWN’S CRIER: Benjamin Spencer.
(Mayhall 1860)