Collections & Archives Assistant Ian Gregory is currently transcribing entries from our historic visitors’ books and reports on another visit of note he has come across:
The theory of evolution was one of the biggest, most radical ideas of the nineteenth century. It is still controversial in some areas today.
On 4 September 1844, an Archdeacon Wilberforce signed into our visitors’ book at Chatsworth. There were two brothers called Wilberforce who became Archdeacons close in time to this. Their father, William, had become famous for campaigning against the slave trade. One of his sons would gain notoriety for opposing Darwin’s theory of evolution. While he didn’t give his forename, it is the latter son – Samuel – who visited Chatsworth in 1844, along with some of his wife’s relatives.
Samuel Wilberforce was born in 1805. He was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he befriended the future Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. In 1839 Samuel became Archdeacon of Surrey. In 1841 he became chaplain to Prince Albert. In 1845 – the year after his visit to Chatsworth – he was made Bishop of Oxford.
In 1860 the British Science Association set up a debate on evolution. The setting was the Oxford University Museum. Samuel was among the speakers against evolution. His opponents included Thomas Henry Huxley, a prominent defender of Darwin’s theory. There is an often repeated story that Samuel asked Huxley “is it on your grandfather or grandmother’s side that you are descended form an ape?” Huxley supposedly shot back saying he would rather be related to an ape than to a man who used his talents to defend falsehoods. The trouble is there is no contemporary record of this exchange. Today scholars doubt if the two men said these things.
In 1860 there was far less evidence to support Darwin than there is today. Some rational thinkers accepted that Genesis wasn’t historically accurate, but favoured theories other than Darwin’s to explain how life came to be. It has been claimed that Huxley and the Darwinists won that Oxford debate. Today many historians see the outcome as moot.
In 1873 Samuel Wilberforce set off to visit Gladstone at Holmsbury St Mary, a village in Surrey. Samuel never made it. He met with a riding accident and died as a result of it.
Darwin himself visited Chatsworth just a year later, in 1845, to see Joseph Paxton's Great Conservatory.
Image: Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. Photograph by Julia Ma licensed under CC by 4.0
