by H. G. Parry
It was not too different from what Pitt had told Wilberforce himself only months ago, when the Saint-Domingue rebellion had raised the question of whether it was politically expedient to bring the bill forward that session. He still saw the sense in it. But there was a vast difference between advising the bill be stalled and refusing to support it once it was raised. One was strategy. The other was a betrayal.
“Besides,” Dundas added, “if we do go to war, we’ll need every bit of that revenue from the trade. You can’t tell me you haven’t made the same calculations yourself.”
“I made them. I don’t agree that we need that revenue. It would be useful, if it came from a less repellent source, but that can’t be helped.” He cut Dundas off, sharply, before he could reply. “There’s nothing more to be said. This isn’t a party matter; you’re perfectly free to vote according to your own conscience, and I’m free to vote according to mine. On this occasion, I’ve promised Wilberforce my support.”
“Mr. Wilberforce is a very respectable gentleman,” Dundas said. “But he is not the people of Great Britain. And you’re the head of the British government. Your conscience isn’t always going to be your own.”
It was a very different debate that night from the one held less than three years earlier. To some, it might not have seemed so. The main actors were the same on both sides, though both sides had strengthened their numbers and their arguments. Much of the evidence was the same, though it had grown and tangled and been elaborated upon over long months in the committee. The arguments were nothing new, nor were the strategies. But Pitt had years of practice in reading the timbre of the room, and it had changed. The spring of 1789 had been a promise: the long, dark winter of the king’s insanity had passed; the streets buzzed with outrage over the plight of the slaves; the growing fervor for reform in France was a glow and not a flame. This spring was a threat.
From the visible tension in Wilberforce’s tiny frame when he got up to speak, he knew it as well. His voice delivered the facts but imbued them with passion; it felt, as Wilberforce’s addresses to the House often did, as though each sentence was a personal plea meant for each listener’s ears alone. Pitt had studied rhetoric and oration almost as soon as he could talk. He knew there were speakers more consistent than Wilberforce, with better grasp of allusion and structure—not many, but a few. He was one of them. But he’d never heard anyone with more natural eloquence. Fox, in support, blazed with indignation. The walls chimed.
Yet the other side, lacking the heavyweight debaters, had numbers and self-interest to their credit. Feelings were running high. The Honorable Mr. Quincy, younger son of the Earl of Casterbridge and unbraceleted weather-mage, had been sent from the room during Fox’s speech as his frustration manifested in a burst of rain over the abolitionists; one or two of the MPs had come close to less magical fisticuffs. It wasn’t a matter of evidence now—the conditions of slave ships had been proven, painstakingly, over the last few years. It was a matter of greed—and, more dangerously, of fear.
“I must acknowledge that the slave trade is an unamiable one,” one speaker said, “but I will not gratify my humanity and my honor at the expense of the interests of the country, and I think it is our duty to not too curiously inquire into the unpleasant circumstances with which it is perhaps attended.”
Honor. Duty. The good of the country. They were the cornerstones of Pitt’s life; they always had been. He hadn’t thought he had any intention of withholding from the debate, but perhaps some secret part of him had wondered if Dundas was right, because to hear the argument put so baldly and so callously in the name of everything he believed in fired something deep inside him. He was very rarely angry, in the House of Commoners or otherwise. He was now.
And so, when it was time for him to speak, he stood. It was five o’clock in the morning of a very long night. The stars had burned away, and the candlelight was fading into the gray light of dawn. Dundas next to him gave a warning shake of his head. He ignored it.
He had been talking for almost an hour when Franklin Larrington, member for Millton, shot out of his seat unexpectedly.
“Mr. Speaker,” he called out. “Is this really the time for reforms of this kind? Does the honorable member forget that if Britain were to abolish the trade, France would only profit from it at our expense? At a time, I might add, when France’s expansion is already looking increasingly dangerous.”
The mention of France stirred the gallery and the House, as Larrington must have known it would. It was what loomed in everyone’s mind; Dundas and then Larrington had only put it into words. France was indeed dangerous; the times they were living in were dangerous, so dangerous that perhaps trying to do anything more than survive them intact was like trying to remodel a house in the middle of a storm. And yet hearing it, Pitt felt only the same, unexpected shot of defiance.
“I would ask the honorable member,” he replied, without missing a beat, “how this enormous evil is ever to be eradicated, if every nation is thus prudentially to wait till the concurrence of all the world shall have been obtained? There is no nation in Europe that has, on the one hand, plunged so deeply into this guilt as Britain, or that is so likely, on the other, to be looked up to as an example, if she should be the first in decidedly renouncing it. How much more justly may other nations point to us and say, ‘Why should we abolish the slave trade, when Great Britain has not abolished it?’ Instead of imagining, therefore, that by such an argument we shall have exempted ourselves from guilt, and transferred the whole criminality to them, let us rather reflect that on the very principle urged against us, we shall thenceforth have to answer for their crimes as well as our own.”
“That argument,” Larrington said, “assumes that enslaving the Africans could be considered a crime in the first place. Consider that they have shown themselves to be depressed by the hand of nature below the level of the human species. They use magic without constraint or care for the natural order of things. They have proven themselves naturally susceptible to our spellbinding. These facts, and the inferiority of their achievements in comparison to those of Great Britain, mark them as our natural slaves.”
It was the wrong tactic; Pitt didn’t need the muted notes of the walls to tell him that. Larrington could have pressed home his advantage by turning the argument back to France and the Revolution; instead, he’d taken Pitt’s lead and left that path entirely. Now they were arguing, once again, on moral grounds.
At once, in a way he couldn’t have explained, he was in tune with the House—not the members of Parliament, but the building itself. Its walls reached out to him, waiting and responsive. He knew that they would reverberate to his words with perfect precision. It was one of those moments that he experienced sometimes in the House of Commoners and nowhere else, when everything made perfect sense. His long-suppressed mesmerism flared in his chest, reminding him—as it so often did—that with a single push he could bend the entire House to his opinion. He ignored it, as he always did. But he tried to imbue his words with that same force of will.
“So have many of the honorable gentlemen argued,” he said. “I find it difficult, personally, to see evidence that the people of Africa are uniquely susceptible to dark magic in the fact that they are bound by a spell designed to bind them. One point cannot be denied: Africa does not have Europe’s great cities, nor her libraries, nor her technological advantages. But think of this. Why might not some Roman senator, reasoning on the same principles, and pointing to British barbarians, have predicted with equal boldness, ‘There is a people that will never rise to civilization—there is a people destined never to be free—a people without the necessary understanding for the attainment of useful arts, and created to form a supply of slaves for the rest of the world.’ Might this not have been said as truly of Britain herself as can now be said by us of the inhabitants of Africa?”
Wilberforce caught his eye from the independent benches and smiled. They’d been discussing this only that morning—yesterday
morning now, rather, for the candles had burned down as he’d talked, and the sun was beginning to rise behind the high windows above him. It was going to be a beautiful day. He kept the answering twinkle from his own eyes as he continued.
“We may live to behold the natives of Africa engaged in the calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate commerce. We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking in upon their land, which, at some happy period in still later times, may blaze with full luster. Then may we hope that Africa, though last of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy at length, in the evening of her days, those blessings which have descended upon us in a much earlier period of the world.”
Just then, the dawn was breaking. A shaft of sunlight speared through the arched windows that spanned the wall, causing the wisps of cloud to glow golden, and Pitt suddenly felt the light of it on his face. It was so appropriate to what he had just been saying that it seemed almost made for him.
Two lines from the Georgics came suddenly to mind, and he spoke them almost without thinking. “Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens adflavit anhelis, illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper”: And when the rising sun has first breathed on us with his panting horses, over there the red evening star is lighting his late lamps.
It was an easy and obvious allusion by his standards. He’d been trained in them by his father since he was seven. The rest of the House, however, didn’t know this, and he heard a few of them catch their breath audibly. The moment felt perfect: words, images, associations, and feeling, all bound together and shot through with a single fortuitous ray of light. He could have kept going, but he realized that he didn’t need to. That was it.
Pitt sat down to riotous applause, oddly distant from it but at the same time very satisfied. Soon, he knew from experience, he was going to feel as though he had climbed a mountain; at that moment, he felt only as though he were soaring at a very great height. Surely, he couldn’t help but think, after all this, they had done it. The bill had to pass.
And then, to his surprise, Henry Dundas got to his feet beside him.
“Honorable Speaker,” he said. “Both sides have spoken their cases very well, and to my mind there is a good deal of sense in the arguments of both. Clearly, this is not a case where both may be ultimately appeased. Might I, however, propose a third course of action, one which sees the concerns of both answered?”
“Proceed, Mr. Dundas,” the Speaker said.
Dundas did so.
Pitt turned to Dundas as the House dispersed around them. Dundas attempted a tight flicker of a smile, but it faltered under the cool, hard glare that Pitt was very well practiced in employing at will. In this case, it didn’t require a great deal of will.
“I know it’s not what you wanted,” Dundas said. It was almost an apology. “But it’s what I thought best.”
“Best for whom?” Pitt inquired, with more than a trace of sarcasm. The elation from the speech had well and truly faded. Disappointment and fatigue mingled bitterly in its place. “I’m sure not those with interests in the slave market, knowing how little you are influenced by such considerations.”
“You were never going to sell it to the House your way, Pitt,” the older man said. “You must have warned Wilberforce of that yourself. This is the closest you were ever going to get.”
“We’ll never know now, will we? Excuse me.” Pitt rose, cutting Dundas off before he could respond.
The debating chambers were flooded with sunlight now. It felt like mockery.
Finding Wilberforce by sight, as it turned out, was going to be difficult in the crowds in the halls outside the Speaker’s Gallery. Because he was very tired, and his magic still ran hot in his veins, just for once Pitt gave in and concentrated instead on the cascade of bloodlines around him. He ignored the strongest lines of magic—the water-mages, the weather-mages, the shadowmancers whose cold touch reminded him a little too much of the daemon-stone in his office. Wilberforce’s bloodline was so very unmagical even for a Commoner that it was like a speck of light through clouds. Because of this, it took Pitt moments to find him by the door, as usual in the company of a swell of people, including a fire-mage and a strong alchemist.
He wondered, just for once, what would have happened if he had used his mesmerism in the House as easily as he used the senses his magic gave him here. The thought was something else he allowed himself only when he was very tired.
Wilberforce, through his poor eyesight and animated conversation with four others, still needed no magic to pick out a friend from the crowd; he saw Pitt at once and waved him over with a brief but genuine smile. The others in question were abolitionists, of course. Hannah More was the braceleted fire-mage he had noticed, and Henry Thornton’s indistinct Commoner blood sang out beside her. The third member, the alchemist, was more of a surprise. It was Thomas Clarkson.
There was nothing terribly unusual about the magic: alchemy was a common enough Inheritance, after all. But Pitt had spoken to Clarkson—often, in the months when Wilberforce had been ill. He would have sworn that Clarkson was a Commoner, with a few strains of latent magic that hadn’t awoken. Either he had been astonishingly unobservant, or something had changed that wasn’t supposed to be able to change.
“I thought we had it this time,” Clarkson was saying. From the sounds of it, it wasn’t for the first time. His voice was fired with fury—or perhaps despair. “I really thought we did. Did Saint-Domingue teach them nothing?”
“I think,” Wilberforce said heavily, “it taught them to fear our victims rather than pity them.”
Pitt forced his attention from Clarkson’s bloodlines to his words. “I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. He couldn’t have controlled what Dundas did, but he still felt sick with guilt. “We knew it would be a difficult climate, but I did truly think we could do it.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Clarkson said. “All the eloquence was on our side. You two and Fox, united against bankers and traders and disgraced ex-colonels? The walls were going mad.”
“Eloquence doesn’t always win debates,” Thornton said, without quite his usual equanimity. “People want to be safe.”
“Safe.” Clarkson snorted. “And so we sit safely above the torture chambers, not venturing down to release the inmates, because we’re afraid of the screams.”
“Go home, Clarkson,” Wilberforce said, with sympathy but also a measure of exhaustion. The other man’s despair was so palpable it hurt. “There’s nothing more to be done here. We’ll talk it over tomorrow.”
“There isn’t very much more to say, is there?” Clarkson said. “It didn’t work.”
Wilberforce sighed as Clarkson and the other abolitionists left. Without them, he suddenly looked a good deal smaller. “Poor man. He’s close to giving up, I think. He’s been giving so much energy to this, with so much brilliance, for so long; he’ll burn himself up, if we’re not careful. Speaking of which, I thought you’d gone home.”
“Why would I want to do that?” Pitt said airily. He tried to ignore the pull of Clarkson’s magic departing. “It’s still half an hour until breakfast.”
Wilberforce smiled. “That was the best I’ve ever seen you. At the end I think you were actually inspired.”
“Well, if so, you were inspired from the beginning,” Pitt said, though he knew he didn’t mean quite the same thing by the word as Wilberforce did. “I meant what I told Clarkson. You have nothing for which to reproach yourself.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Not at all. I simply know that you wouldn’t be satisfied with a motion for gradual abolition.”
“Gradual! It’s morally right to stop the spellbinding, enslavery, and murder of thousands more innocents, but we should do it slowly and think about it some more for our convenience? When Dundas stood up and said—” He drew a deep breath. His usual faith in human nature and divine Providence was being sorely tested, and it hurt. “It wasn’t the result I hoped for,” he repeated.
“Thank you for not saying that it was better than nothing.”
“I assumed you’d been hearing that all night.”
“I’ve been saying that all night.” Wilberforce rubbed his forehead wearily and glanced at Pitt. “I need to cool down before I try to sleep. Would you mind terribly coming for a walk along the Thames with me?”
“Of course not,” Pitt said firmly. It was, after all, the least he could do. “I probably need it as much as you do.”
“That is a very kind untruth,” Wilberforce said at once. “It’s the last thing you need. It’s eight o’clock in the morning, it’s been a very long and hard-fought night, and you’ve never had any difficulty getting to sleep in your life. You could probably close your eyes and be asleep right now.”
This was so accurate he had to laugh. The laugh turned into a yawn, which made his untruth even less convincing.
“In that case,” he countered, “it’s a good thing that I have no intention of closing my eyes. As I said, it’s only half an hour until breakfast.”
Wilberforce clearly wasn’t fooled, but he just as clearly couldn’t bear to go home until he felt better, and he couldn’t bear to be alone. Pitt preferred to be alone, almost always, when he was closest to despair; Wilberforce, perhaps because he came closer to the brink than Pitt, needed someone to pull him back.
And he did seem to come back, at least a little, stepping outside into the sunlight away from the eyes and voices of the House of Commoners. Around them, the city was beginning to wake up; there were boats on the Thames, and faint voices calling across the water. The sky was clear blue against London’s gray stone.
“Dundas knew you wanted the trade to stop,” Wilberforce added as they reached the river. It was murky and stank of human waste and weed in the chill air, but the light caught it and reflected back on Westminster. “What was he thinking? Did he tell you he was going to do that?”