The roof of Banqueting House in Whitehall offers a bird's-eye view of Westminster in late 1807. Through the smoke of countless chimneys juts Westminster Hall and the jumble of parliamentary buildings around it. Down Parliament Street in the centre it is just possible to see Old Palace Yard, half hidden by the bulk of Westminster Abbey. Crane your neck and you might be able to glimpse William Wilberforce's house, the epicentre of the parliamentary campaign for the abolition of the British slave trade, which concluded only a few months before the engraving was done. A well-informed celebrity spotter might also look towards the higher ground beyond the River Thames, knowing that somewhere along the horizon lay the village of Clapham, home of the pious coterie known to contemporaries as the ‘Saints’ and to posterity as the Clapham Sect. The notion that this small group and its spheres of activity formed the main point of contact between Evangelicals and British public life was once a historiographical staple. Such ideas drew on decades of hagiographical commentary, and in particular on the affectionate 1844 retrospective in which Sir James Stephen (1789–1859) coined the term ‘Clapham Sect’. Stephen himself was brought up at the centre of that milieu, and his essay was deeply personal, as well as being avowedly ‘whimsical’, not least since those he eulogized did not all live there at the same time. It was also selective, excluding figures who were impeccably pious but whose faces did not fit. Nevertheless, the idea that this ‘faithful band’ changed the complexion of British politics and culture proved attractive to academic and popular commentators alike well into the twentieth century, and for obvious reasons. Around William Wilberforce (1759–1833) and his friends they wove a grand tale of national sin and humanitarian redemption: a narrative that allowed the British to see theirs as an empire of godliness as well as guineas and gunboats. The publication of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery in 1944 punctured this self-satisfied story. Since then the scholarly pendulum has swung markedly away from heroic narratives, even if popular biographers, confessional writers and film-makers remain fascinated by them. Academic accounts of anti-slavery now tend to eschew eminent personalities, focusing instead on grassroots abolitionism and the agency of enslaved people.