Jane Ridley
The Righteous Reformer
William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner
By William Hague (HarperPress 592pp £25)

Once barely noticed, the history of the anti-slavery campaign has gathered such momentum that it has now become the central narrative of Our Island Story. The hero of this tale is William Wilberforce, and a new biography is overdue. Wilberforce's struggle to ban slavery has been dramatised in the biopic Amazing Grace. Now, nicely timed for the bicentenary year, William Hague has written his life.

The story of William Wilberforce (1759-1833) is an extraordinary one. The heir to a Hull merchant's fortune, he became an MP at the age of twenty-one, was best mates with the younger Pitt and a rich young man about town until the age of twenty-six, when he underwent a classic Evangelical conversion experience and vowed to dedicate himself to moral reformation. Influenced by John Newton, the ex-slaver sea captain turned abolitionist man of God, and also by Pitt himself, Wilberforce resolved to work within the world rather than withdraw into private life. Encouraged by Pitt, he introduced a motion for the abolition of the slave trade in 1789, making an epic three-and-a-half-hour speech: henceforth it became the leading crusade of his life. He was not yet thirty.

Hague tells this story of youthful success vividly and with empathy - after all, his own life story is not all that different: he too is a Yorkshireman who became a star speaker and political prodigy. Wilberforce's greatest political asset was his parliamentary oratory, and Hague analyses this illuminatingly. He has an innate understanding of parliamentary manoeuvres, of the energising effect of the election campaigns that Wilberforce fought as a member for the high-prestige county seat of Yorkshire. He is good, too, on the enduring and rather touching friendship between Wilberforce, who was a tiny five foot four, and Pitt, who stood a foot taller.

There are tricks which Hague misses. For example, it's surely significant that Wilberforce, along with other anti-slavers, came from Hull, which traded with the Baltic, while pro-slavery MPs such as Bamber Gascoyne were Liverpudlians, defending their vested interests in the Atlantic slave-trade triangle. Also, when Wilberforce was on the brink of launching his abolitionist campaign his health broke down. He seems to have suffered from a stress-related illness, usually diagnosed as ulcerative colitis, and for the rest of his life he was a martyr to this debilitating bowel disease. He treated it with opium, and became a lifelong opium addict. Hague tells us that this was the only medication available at the time, which is no doubt true; but he could have done more to explore the effects of long-term opium use on Wilberforce's mind and body. Wilberforce ate very little and counted his alcohol units (three glasses of wine daily and never more than six) as part of his Evangelical regime; but if he was meanwhile using opium this abstemiousness was slightly less of a feat.

Wilberforce was a man of great personal charm. Privately, in his diary, he agonised about his backsliding, his time-wasting or his failure to pray, but with his friends he was always gregarious, a wonderful conversationalist, the life and soul of the party. Hague tells endearing stories about Wilberforce's chaotic lack of organisation, his mountains of unanswered correspondence, the sacks full of letters which he would drag around with him to answer. His house was filled with guests all day long, and people queued to see him in the street. He travelled with a huge retinue of servants, many of whom were useless, but he could never bear to sack anyone. Hague paints a memorable picture of the veteran campaigner, prematurely stooped, pockets bulging with books and papers, scribbling feverishly as he sat listening to debates in the House. But Hague could do more to explain the contrast between Wilberforce and his acolytes, the Saints of the Clapham Sect - priggish, earnest killjoys who alas had far more influence on the moral tone of Victorian England than their leader.

Being a politician perhaps means that Hague is overly conscious of the importance of protecting privacy, or perhaps he's just too nice - but as a biographer he is strangely lacking in nosiness. It would be good to know more, for instance, about the sources of Wilberforce's almost inexhaustible income, much of which he gave away to charity, but none of which he earned. Then there's his marriage. His wife Barbara Spooner, the daughter of a Birmingham merchant, was eighteen years younger than him. Wilberforce proposed a week after they met and within six weeks they were man and wife. He was then thirty-seven. This is all a bit rum, but Hague tells us nothing about Wilberforce's previous sexual experiences or lack of them. Barbara disliked entertaining and was not much liked; Dorothy Wordsworth thought her shy, whiny and self-righteous. If the marriage worked, as Hague says it did, this needs a bit more explaining.

The truth is, Hague is not really interested in what went on in Wilberforce's bedroom or his medicine chest. This is straight political biography, the story of the life and times. Sometimes there's just too much about the times. Hague tells us, for example, that the eighteenth century 'saw the arrival of what has subsequently been termed the "Age of Enlightenment"', and he then laboriously explains what this was, going back to Isaac Newton & co (perhaps Wikipedia hasn't arrived in Yorkshire?). For Hague the life of Wilberforce is primarily the story of the campaign against the slave trade. Doggedly Wilberforce presented his motion year after year, but the anti-slavery cause was rendered hopeless by the French Revolution, and Wilberforce eventually triumphed only in 1807 after a campaign of almost twenty years. Hague gives a detailed and informed analysis of the skilled parliamentary manoeuvring and tactics that allowed Wilberforce to carry his great reform in 1807. For Hague, abolition was to a great extent the result of Wilberforce's ability to persuade Parliament of the moral case against slavery.

This is classic old-style Whig history - parliamentary-political, present-minded, handing out marks to those on the right side of progress. Never mind that Wilberforce's motives were religious not political. Play down the fact that Wilberforce sweated blood for slaves he had never seen, but supported Pitt's measures suppressing political protest, backed the Combination Laws banning trade unions and showed little interest in the child factory slaves in his own Yorkshire backyard. Guardianistas will trounce Hague for writing patronising white man's history which discounts the role of the Africans themselves, underestimating the impact of the slave rebellions in Saint-Dominique (Haiti), where the white men were massacred and the slaves formed their own republic. Abolishing the slave trade was a way of making a virtue out of necessity and recognising the reality that slavery was a high-risk liability.

But these criticisms are really beside the point. Hague is a politician, and he writes history in the way that politicians from Macaulay to Winston Churchill have always written it. This is history with a political purpose: to connect the present with the past. Free-flowing, authoritative and absorbing, he deserves to be read, partly as a counter to those politicians such as Tony Blair who have no sense of historical process, but above all because he tells a good story and tells it well.