William Wilberforce and the Clergy: Religious Networks and Identities in Later Hanoverian Britain

Within a decade of his death, William Wilberforce was a victim of revisionist history at the hands of his own sons. As is the case with many prominent religious figures, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce hoped to claim their father as something he was not: higher and more inflexibly Anglican than he truly was. This thesis, however, the first major analysis of Wilberforce’s clerical network, demonstrates that while a devoted Anglican, Wilberforce was deeply intertwined with evangelicals of various ecclesiastical traditions. Drawing on his extensive corpus of diaries, and supplemented by a wide selection of correspondence and contemporary publications, the current project utilises a series of case studies to situate Wilberforce and his clerical associates within the wider religious landscape of the late Georgian period. These case studies identify those clergymen with whom Wilberforce shared the greatest affinities, explore the nature of his relationships with clergy, and indicate that an evangelical soteriological framework was both the motivation behind and the cement of such bonds. Further, the case studies provide a means to survey Wilberforce’s connection to the ecclesial body that each clergyman represents. The first chapter begins with Wilberforce’s inner circle, all Evangelical Anglicans. The second, however, disrupts the sons’ narrative by exploring Wilberforce’s attachments to nonconforming evangelicals before those on the episcopal bench, the focus of chapter three. The final chapter provides a snapshot of his relationship to those on the periphery of his orbit. These shifting ecclesiastical coalitions ebbed and flowed according to their perceived usefulness. An evangelical conception of redemption and justification was the sacrosanct ground upon which alliances stood firm (while alliances of convenience depreciated as Evangelical replacements became available), and it was the engine that drove Wilberforce and his associates not only in select undertakings, but all of their various endeavours.