Milner

Queens’ MS 61. Four letters by William Wilberforce concerning the Valdour community.

William Wilberforce and Isaac Milner

Best known for his role in bringing about the abolition of the slave trade, William Wilberforce (1759–1833) is linked to Queens’ through his close friendship with Isaac Milner, whom he came to know when a pupil at Hull Grammar School. There, the young Wilberforce was taught by Isaac Milner and his brother Joseph (who was the school’s headmaster).
Wilberforce subsequently became a student at St John’s Cambridge (1776), shortly after Milner had graduated from Queens’. It was primarily through the influence of Isaac Milner, with whom he travelled on two extended continental tours, that Wilberforce became an evangelical Christian. From this followed a resolution to abandon his previously dissolute lifestyle and commit himself wholly to the service of God through philanthropy and political campaigning. Although it was through such campaigning that both Milner and Wilberforce gained reputations as reforming evangelicals both remained stalwart champions of church and state.

The letter on display here is from a small volume that probably came to Queens’ library as part of, or with, the books from the Milner bequest.

Motivated by his evangelical, Protestant Christian beliefs, William Wilberforce campaigned on a great many causes. One of these was to achieve financial support for the Switzerland based Vaudois community (also known as the Waldensians), a persecuted religious group linked to Protestantism, whose origins predated the Reformation. The letter on display relates an attempt by Wilberforce to canvass financial support from the British government, whose longstanding policy to assist the group had gone into abeyance at the time of the French revolution.