slave-trade question, offered to provide for him. The rumour that Brougham offered him the bishopric of Calcutta (Letters of Canon J. B. Mozley, p. 25) does not seem to rest on any solid foundation; but in April 1832, after Wilberforce's return from the continent, Brougham presented him to the living of East Farleigh in Kent. This preferment he accepted against the advice of Newman and Froude (Letters and Correspondence, ii. 143; Autobiography of Isaac Williams, p. 39), and held for eight years. Within a few months of his institution he married Agnes Everilda, daughter of Francis Wrangham [q. v.], archdeacon of the East Riding. After bearing him two children his wife died in November 1834, and on 29 July 1837 he married again. His second wife was Jane, daughter of Digby Legard, and he lived happily with her till she died childless in 1853.
In 1840 Wilberforce exchanged the living of East Farleigh for that of Burton Agnes in Yorkshire. The following year Archdeacon Wrangham, the father of his first wife, resigned the archidiaconate of the East Riding, and Wilberforce was appointed in his stead. It was the last preferment that he was to receive in the church of England.
Newman's influence over Wilberforce did not survive their joint tutorship of Oriel, and from 1834 Wilberforce was thrown much into the company of his brother Samuel, in collaboration with whom he wrote the ‘Life’ of their father, published in 1838, and edited their father's ‘Letters’ which appeared in 1840. But about 1843 he began a correspondence which was to exercise a crucial effect on his career. Henry Edward Manning [q. v.] had in June 1833 been presented by Wilberforce's brother Samuel to the rectory of Lavington. In the November following he married Caroline Sargent, two of whose sisters were married respectively to Wilberforce's brothers Samuel and Henry William. In 1837 Mrs. Manning died, and a few years later the future cardinal was led by Robert Wilberforce's reputation for theological learning and for disinterestedness to turn to him as to a confessor for relief from the doubts as to the sufficiency of the church of England for salvation which had already begun to beset him. Over a hundred letters were written during this period by Manning to Wilberforce—most of them bearing the caution ‘under the seal’—in which Manning revealed his whole mind to his correspondent, while recognising, in the words of his biographer (Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, i. 502), ‘Robert Wilberforce's intellectual superiority and deeper reading.’ At first Wilberforce replied with arguments, afterwards with pleas for delay in the act of secession which he saw Manning was contemplating, and for some time he was successful. ‘I will take no step,’ writes Manning at the beginning of 1850, ‘none that can part me from you, so long as I am able in conscience to be united as in love, so in labours with you.’ But the Gorham judgment was pronounced in March of the same year, and was considered by most of the tractarians to assert the right of the crown to decide the teaching of the church of England in matters of faith as well as of discipline. Gladstone (Purcell, i. 539 sqq.) tried to induce the leaders to enter into a covenant not to take any overt step for a certain specified time, or to announce their intention of doing so. Gladstone seems to have convinced himself that Wilberforce among others would be willing to sign such a covenant. It was, however, promptly rejected by Manning; and in May 1850 a declaration appeared bearing the names of Manning (then archdeacon of Chichester), Wilberforce, and Dr. William Henry Mill [q. v.], regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, explaining the sense in which alone the signatories were willing to admit the royal supremacy in matters of religion. They stated clearly that ‘we do not, and in conscience cannot, acknowledge in the crown the power recently exercised to hear and judge in appeal the internal state or merits of spiritual questions touching doctrine or discipline, the custody of which is committed to the church alone by the law of Christ’ (Purcell, i. 541). A copy of this declaration was sent to every clergyman and layman who had taken the oath of supremacy. It met, however, with no response, and the result was to drive the two principal signatories a step further forward in the way of secession. ‘If you and I had been born out of the English church,’ writes Manning to Wilberforce in December 1850, ‘we should not have doubted for so much as a day where the true church is;’ and on 6 April in the following year Manning was received into the church of Rome. The change, though it did not lessen the intimacy between the two, yet altered their relative positions. Henceforward Manning, instead of seeking Wilberforce's advice, assumed the part of teacher. The revival of the church's synodical action in convocation seemed for some time to offer to Wilberforce a via media which he could follow, and his brother, the bishop of Oxford, who as early as 1850 had seen reason to dread his brother's secession, did all that he could to keep him steadfast in Anglicanism (Life of Samuel Wilberforce, ii.
