Wilberforce, SAMUEL, was born at Clapham, on September 7, 1805, the third son of William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery philanthropist. Of his father's letters to him after his twelfth year 600 are extant, many of them inculcating the duty and solemnity of private prayer. By his father too he was early taught to express himself clearly upon prescribed subjects. In the 'Union' debating society at Oxford, formed just before he entered Oriel College, aged eighteen, he cultivated this habit, so that in after life eloquence was one of his most marked personal gifts. In 1826 he graduated with first-class honours in mathematics and second-class in classics. On June 11, 1828, he married Miss Emily Sargent, whose younger sister married H. E. (afterwards Cardinal) Manning, and through whom he inherited Lavington in Sussex. On December 21 he was ordained curate in sole charge of Checkendon church, near Henley, and in 1830 became rector of Brightstone, Isle of Wight (Bishop Ken's parish 1667-70). His zeal and his thorough sympathetic mastery of his parochial work there soon made him one of the foremost clergymen in the island, of the north-east of which he became rural dean in 1836, and prepared him for the efficient discharge of the important offices to which he was in rapid succession called. A successful tour in Devon and Cornwall in 1839 on behalf of the S.P.G. brought him into further notice, and the same year he became archdeacon of Surrey. In 1840 he was appointed rector of Alverstoke and canon of Winchester, and an anti-slavery speech so impressed the Prince Consort, who was present, that the following year he was made one of the prince's chaplains and preached at court. Before that, however, the great sorrow of his life had befallen him in the death of his wife. In March 1845 he was appointed Dean of Westminster, and in October, on the eve of Newman's reception into the Church of Rome, Bishop of Oxford. Beginning his episcopate at such a crisis, immersed shortly thereafter in the sea of difficulties raised by the pro- motion of Dr Hampden to the bishopric of Hereford, distressed by the Gorham judgment, involved in the troubles connected with Essays and Reviews and Bishop Colenso, in all which controversies he took an active and prominent part; deeply wounded too by the secession to Rome of his three brothers, his only daughter, and his son-in-law, and by the early death of his eldest son, he nevertheless so governed the diocese for twenty-four years as to deservedly earn the title of the 'Remodeller of the Episcopate.' He has been regarded as the representative member of the bench of bishops, almost of the English Church, during the third quarter of the century, and with him the new order of bishops may be said to begin. Watchfulness and work, not pomp and ease, were his characteristics. His confirmations were made opportunities of lasting impressions, his ordinations seasons of true devotional preparation. He instituted Cuddesdon training-college, and he was mainly instrumental in reviving Convocation as a synodical assembly after it had for nearly 150 years been a mere form. He claimed to belong to the school of the old Church of England, opposed alike to 'Puritan sourness and Romanising superstition.' The charm of his many-sided personality, his administrative capacity, his extraordinary power of work, his social gifts as a ready humorist and a brilliant conversationalist, and his gifts as an orator on the platform and in the pulpit, and as a debater in parliament, are universally acknowledged, but the man has been too much lost sight of in the versatile ecclesiastic, the devout Christian in the popular bishop. 'Too clever, too self-reliant . . . too persuasive, too fascinating in manner, too fertile in expedients . . . too facile,' he got the sobriquet of 'Soapy Sam,' but there was truth as well as wit in his own explanation of the name, that it was because 'he was always in hot water, and always came out of it with clean hands.' The tenderness of his family affection, his life-long devotion to the memory of his wife, and the depth and humility of his inner life are touchingly brought out in his too brief diary. He was neither a great theologian nor a voluminous author, but he edited Letters and Journals of Henry Martyn (1837), wrote along with his brother the Life of his father (1838), and himself wrote Agathos (1839), Rocky Island (1840), History of American Church (1844), and contributed to the Quarterly Review. In 1869 he was transferred to Winchester, and on 19th July 1873 was suddenly killed by falling from his horse while riding with Earl Granville, near Dorking. He is buried by his wife in Lavington Churchyard, of which his eldest son Reginald Garton became proprietor, his son Ernest Roland being Bishop of Newcastle 1882-95, and then of Chichester, and Albert Basil Orme canon of Winchester.
See Life (3 vols. 1879-82; vol. i. by Canon Ashwell, ii. and iii. by his son, R. G. Wilberforce); Bishop Wilberforce (1 vol. 1888), by that same son; Bishop Wilberforce, by Daniell in the 'English Leaders of Religion' series (1891); and the sketch by Dean Burgen in his Lives of Twelve Good Men (1888).