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David Brion Davis, one the greatest recent historians of Atlantic slavery and its abolition, once suggested that "few biographical subjects are so treacherous as William Wilberforce". Davis did not, of course, mean that Wilberforce himself was "treacherous" - though there has been much dispute over whether he was really so unwaveringly high-principled as admirers thought. Rather, the multiple contradictions and ambiguities of a great crusader who was also so conservative, the "Saint" who was so adept at political plotting, the liberator who put his name to so many repressive or illiberal acts, have always made him singularly hard to understand, to decipher or sum up.
Generations of historians have tried. There have been at least 20 biographies, as well as dozens of studies of the anti-slavery movement with him at the centre. The first was produced in 1838 by his sons Robert and Samuel. A massive five-volume affair, it nonetheless made cuts and alterations that removed controversial opinions. It was so ungenerous to other leading Abolition campaigners that one, the aged Thomas Clarkson, in many later eyes the movement's true hero, was moved to write an angry rebuttal.
Wilberforce's life seems, since then, to have attracted writers who doubled as political actors. In that, William Hague is the latest in a long line. The most important 20th-century biographies were by Reginald Coupland and Robin Furneaux, Lord Birkenhead. Both adopted a stance...