In April 1784, George Nevill, 17th Baron Abergavenny, was approached to ask whether he would accept promotion to an earldom. In the wake of Pitt the Younger’s success in the general election, it was time for debts to be repaid and right at the front of the queue was John Robinson. Robinson had formerly worked for Lord North as a political agent but had chosen to switch his allegiance to Pitt and put all of his energy into securing Pitt a handsome victory. Robinson’s daughter was married to Abergavenny’s heir, Henry, so the new peerage would ensure that Robinson would ultimately be grandfather to an earl.

Abergavenny had also made a political journey. Married back in the 1750s to a member of the Pelham clan, he had naturally found himself within the orbit of the Old Corps Whigs and then of the Rockinghams. A consistent opponent of North and his handling of the American crisis, he had distanced himself from the former Rockinghamites who had entered the coalition with North and ultimately helped to bring the Fox-North administration down. So, the earldom was a double reward.

It might all have been very different, as exactly 37 years previously, while a student at Christ Church, Oxford, Abergavenny had narrowly avoided being tried for murder.

The story, as told in the press and in private correspondence, was that one of the Christ Church scouts (servants) named John or William Franklin (the papers could not agree which) had been found early in the morning of 4 April 1747 in one of the college quadrangles, badly bruised and with a fractured skull. His hair had been shaved and his eyebrows burnt off. There were also tell-tale indications of him having been very drunk.

What appeared to have happened was that a group of students, one of them Claudius Amyand, had been holding one of their regular shared suppers in their rooms, but had decided to entertain themselves by making Franklin, who seemed to have had a reputation as being somewhat eccentric, extremely drunk. The regular attendees had taken the prank (as they viewed it) so far, but things had become more extreme when they were joined by others, who had not been part of the original group. The newcomers were Abergavenny, Lord Charles Scott, a younger son of the duke of Buccleuch, Francis Blake Delaval and Sackville Spencer Bale (later a clergyman and domestic chaplain to the 2nd duke of Dorset). They appear to have handled Franklin very roughly – making fun of him by shaving his head – and to have left him so drunk that he was utterly incapable. According to Frederick Campbell, Abergavenny and Scott retreated to their own rooms at this point, leaving it to the remainder of the party to drag Franklin ‘out to snore upon the stair-case’. [Hothams, 42]

It was unclear what happened next, but it was assumed that after being abandoned on the stairs, Franklin had fallen down, fracturing his skull. On being discovered in the morning, Abergavenny’s valet took Franklin home, where he was examined by a surgeon, but nothing could be done for him. That there may have been a more sinister explanation for his injuries was, however, indicated early on by the news that most of those believed to have taken part in the drinking session had fled, and it was gossiped that the two most responsible for his injuries had been Abergavenny and Scott. [Ward, 169]

Certainly, the coroner’s jury considered that there had been foul play and brought in a verdict of ‘wilful murder by persons unknown’. Some observers took a different view. Frederick Campbell reckoned that it had been a joke that had been carried too far and he was certain that none of those in the frame would ever be convicted. He also added that ‘there was not three of the jury but was drunk’. [Hothams, 42] Horace Walpole’s sympathies, unsurprisingly, were also with the students, commenting: ‘One pities the poor boys, who undoubtedly did not foresee the melancholy event of their sport’. He had nothing to say about the unfortunate Franklin, who had lost his life. [Walpole Corresp, xix. 387] The only one of the group who seemed to have played no role in what had happened to Franklin was Amyand, who had quit the supper party early.

Had Abergavenny been charged with murder, he would have been able to apply to the House of Lords to be tried before them, in the same way that had happened to Lord Mohun in the 1690s and was to happen again soon afterwards to Lord Ferrers and Lord Byron.

In the event, there was no need for Abergavenny to face the prospect of a trial in Westminster Hall. While the coroner’s jury had concluded that Franklin’s death had been murder, the grand jury that sat on the case during the summer assizes refused to bring in the bill triggering a trial. The grand jury was said to have been made up of some of the principal gentlemen of the county and to have deliberated for several hours before reaching their decision. No doubt they were reluctant to agree to a trial of students from gentry (or noble) backgrounds, but they may also have been swayed by the convenient death of Lord Charles Scott just a few weeks before the assizes, which left the proceedings lacking a key witness (or a likely defendant).

Whatever his role had been, Abergavenny walked away unscathed. In 1761 he applied to be recognized as Chief Larderer at the coronation of George III and Queen Charlotte, and in 1784 he had his status enhanced with promotion to the earldom. Blake Delaval was also able to cast off whatever opprobrium had attached to him, and just two years after Franklin’s death stood for Parliament for the first time (unsuccessfully). He later represented Hindon and Andover and in 1761 was made a knight of the Bath. What happened, truly, on that night in April 1747 was never discovered and justice for Franklin – or at least a full explanation of what had happened to him – was never achieved.

RDEE

Further reading:

The Hothams: being the chronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and South Dalton…, ed. A.M.W. Stirling (2 vols, 1918)

Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (Yale edition)

W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford: University Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1958)

General Advertiser

Whitehall Evening Post

Every 30 January, the rhythm of the parliamentary session in the 17th and 18th centuries was adjusted to make way for the annual commemoration sermon, marking the death of Charles I in 1649. It usually fell to the most junior of the bishops to preach to the Lords in Westminster Abbey, while a senior member of the clergy would perform the same service for the Commons in St Margaret’s. Themed as they were around the subject of expiation for the sins of the nation, the sermons became steadily less well attended as the years went by and by the second half of the 18th century some, like John Wilkes, thought that they should be scrapped and replaced with a day of national rejoicing. Wilkes always made a point of staying away from the chamber on 30 January.

In a similar (though more celebratory) way, the date of the current monarch’s accession was also the occasion for the Members decamping from their chambers and heading across the way to listen to a sermon. For those living under George I, this took place on 1 August and the very first anniversary of his accession in 1715 was marked with an address by the newly minted bishop of Oxford, John Potter (1673/4-1747).

Potter’s background was unusual, though not entirely unique, for an 18th-century bishop. His father had been a linen draper in Wakefield and, more to the point, had been a nonconformist. Potter had been raised as such and educated at the local grammar school (now one of the constituent parts of the Wakefield Grammar School Foundation). From there he proceeded to Oxford, where he transformed himself into a high church Anglican, much to his father’s disgust. Although high church, and with a particular interest in patristics (the study of the early church), Potter remained a confirmed Whig and quickly attracted patronage from some extremely influential people.

From University College, where he had been an undergraduate, Potter proceeded to Lincoln College as a fellow and in 1699, the year of his ordination to the priesthood, he was appointed one of the chaplains to Bishop Hough of Lichfield and Coventry. In 1704, he traded up becoming one of Archbishop Tenison’s chaplains and was thought so closely tied to Tenison that he was known as his ‘darling scribbler’. Two years later, he achieved the key promotion to royal chaplain.

As a clergyman at Court and with close connexions to Oxford, it is perhaps not surprising that he came to the notice of the duke and duchess of Marlborough, and when the regius professorship of divinity became vacant at Oxford, he was their candidate for the place. In his way was the rival claim of George Smalridge, backed by Robert Harley and others, but in the end the Marlboroughs won out (as was so often the case) and in 1708 Potter became Professor Potter.

For the next few years, Potter focused his attentions on his role at the university, never apparently being considered seriously for any of the vacant bishoprics that came up. Indeed, in 1714 it was Smalridge who was promoted first, taking on the poverty-stricken bishopric of Bristol. However, soon after the accession of George I another opportunity arose following the death of Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury. Thus, when Bishop Talbot of Oxford was translated to Burnet’s vacant see, Potter was appointed to replace him at Oxford.

Potter’s 1 August sermon was his first major opportunity to make his mark in his new role. Unsurprisingly, he attracted criticism from Jacobite Tory opponents like Thomas Hearne, at that point still in post as one of the librarians at the Bodleian, but soon to be forced out as he was unwilling to take the oaths to George I. Recording the sermon a few weeks later, Hearne noted that it had been preached by ‘our present sneaking, poor-spirited, cringing, whiggish bishop’. The content, he thought, was ‘vile, silly, injudicious, illiterate, & roguish stuff, sufficiently showing what the author is’. [Hearne, v. 122] Hearne never lost an opportunity of deriding Potter using terms like ‘snivelling’ or ‘white-livered’ to describe him. [Hearne, vi. 123; ix. 360]

Potter’s chosen text was Psalm 20, verse 5: ‘We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners’. His theme, obviously enough, was the blessings the nation had received by the peaceful succession of the House of Hanover, and how narrowly they had avoided the prospect of civil war. Not only was the nation peaceful, he urged but he may also have had half a mind on his own significant progress when he argued:

Neither can there be any just complaint, that arts and industry, virtue and public services want suitable encouragement; where the way lies open for ever man to advance himself to the highest honours and preferments and after he hath enjoyed the fruits of all his labour in his own person, there is as great certainty… that he shall transmit them entire to his posterity…

As well as lauding the prospect before them under the house of Hanover, Potter also allowed himself some predictable venting against the horrors of life under a Catholic sovereign. Even other religions, he suggested, might be ‘kind and merciful’. He also trotted out the familiar theme of the importance of divine providence in settling King George among them.

Over the next few years, Potter developed his role in the Church, becoming a close associate of William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, and co-operating with him closely in opposing two pieces of government-backed legislation. He attracted attention for wading into the ‘Bangorian controversy’, criticizing the apparent Arianism of Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor. Even Hearne had to acknowledge that he did so ‘very deservedly’. [Hearne, vii. 82] He also became close to the Princess of Wales, the future Queen Caroline.

When George I died it was widely rumoured that Potter would be promoted to Bath and Wells. Although that proved not to be the case (he seems to have turned the promotion down) he was the person selected to preach the new king and queen’s coronation sermon in October 1727. Controversially, for a Whig, he used high church terminology to justify George’s claim to the throne by hereditary right. [Smith, 37] More controversially, for a Whig, he also emphasized the need for the new king’s subjects to give their ‘entire submission to his authority’.

It was to be another decade before Potter was finally rewarded with a richer diocese. On Wake’s death in 1737, it was Potter who became Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than Bishop Hare of Chichester, backed by Sir Robert Walpole. The translation was widely attributed to the queen’s personal intervention and came just a few months before her death later that year.

Potter may not be the best-remembered of 18th-century bishops, or indeed a particularly memorable Archbishop of Canterbury. Much more attention is paid to his younger son, Thomas, a Member of Parliament, associate of the so-called Hellfire Club and a generally archetypal Georgian rake. But Potter was important in showing that the Church of England was able to adapt in the period, adopt language used by the Jacobites to justify the Hanoverian monarchy and was open to advancing the son of a Yorkshire linen draper, and a nonconformist one at that, to the highest place in the Church.

RDEE

Further reading:
J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832
Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C.E. Doble
Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714-1760
The Theological Works of the most reverend Dr John Potter, late Archbishop of Canterbury

One of the seminal moments of Pulteney’s career occurred at the end of the parliamentary session on 31 May 1725 when he was dismissed from his post as cofferer of the household, on account of his opposition earlier in the session, most notably over the Civil List bill. There followed a period of opposition which ended only with the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole from the Treasury on 3 February 1742. Pulteney then entered the Cabinet, but consistent with his oft-repeated pledge not to take office, he did not take an administrative post. On 14 July, the penultimate day of the 1741-2 session, he was raised to the earldom of Bath, taking his seat in the Lords on the following day.

Pulteney lost a lot of popularity when entering the House of Lords, and he failed twice to attain major office in the years following: he was overlooked in favour of Henry Pelham, as first lord of the Treasury, upon the death of the earl of Wilmington in July 1743 and failed to construct a ministry when the Pelhams and most of their colleagues resigned in February 1746. From then on, his political career is deemed to have been over and he spent his time in ‘retirement’.

However, there was another side to Pulteney, related to the accumulation of power and influence. On the very day he took his seat in the Lords, a bill to prevent the marriage of lunatics received the royal assent. This was managed through the Commons by Pulteney’s long-term associate Phillips Gybbon and served to offer some protection to Pulteney’s investment in the reversion of the estates of the Newport, earls of Bradford.

The heir to the estates of Pulteney’s friend, Henry Newport, 3rd earl of Bradford (1683-1734) was Bradford’s illegitimate son, John Newport, whose mother Ann Smyth was on her deathbed. The reversion of Bradford’s estates had been granted to Pulteney (in return for paying for Newport’s maintenance and the debts of the third earl). Now Newport could not be married off by unscrupulous operators for the estates. Similarly, the third earl’s brother, Thomas Newport, who succeeded to the title as 4th earl of Bradford, was a certified lunatic.

The Bradford estates were destined for Pulteney’s son, William, Viscount Pulteney, who pre-deceased his father in June 1763. Sir Lewis Namier detailed the battle waged by Bath to become lord lieutenant of Shropshire following the accession of George III. Bath used his connexions with the new king and John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, to overcome the claims of his rival, Henry Arthur Herbert, created Baron Herbert of Chirbury in 1743 and promoted earl of Powys in 1748. In 1736 when Ann Smyth had petitioned for a bill to allow her son (at the time known as John Harrison) to be adopt the surname Newport, the first two-names on the drafting committee were Herbert and Pulteney, with Herbert managing the bill through the House.

The death of Viscount Pulteney did not end Bath’s interest in the Bradford estates. On 21 March 1764 a bill received the royal assent allowing the guardians of John Newport to make leases of his estates during his lunacy. It was managed through the Lords by Pulteney’s ally, Samuel Sandys, Baron Sandys, and through the Commons by John Rushout, the future Baron Northwick (son of Pulteney’s friend, Sir John Rushout, 4th bt.).

Bath turned 80 on 22 March, but continued to exhibit considerable vigour, sitting on eight of the 18 days remaining in the session, including on 2 April despite being begged by Lady Elizabeth Montagu ‘not to lose all this lovely morning in the House of Lords’ [https://emco.swansea.ac.uk/emco/letter-view/1297/]. Following the end of the session, Bath travelled to Shropshire, where he reviewed the militia at the end of May. Upon his return to London, he fell asleep in a garden, caught a fever and died on 7 July 1764.

The dynastic implications of Bath’s actions become clear if we look beyond the contemporary criticism levelled at him for leaving his estate to his elderly brother, General Harry Pulteney. In fact, the descent of the estates followed the intentions laid down by Henry Guy in his will of 1711 (which provided the basis of Bath’s wealth). Guy’s list of remainders ended with the male heirs of Daniel Pulteney, Bath’s cousin.

The ultimate beneficiary in 1767 was Frances Pulteney, daughter of Daniel and the wife of William Johnstone, who took the name Pulteney after Frances succeeded to the Pulteney estates. This William Pulteney succeeded his brother (Sir James Johnstone) as 5th baronet in 1794 and spent over 30 years as MP for Shrewsbury. His daughter and heir, Henrietta, was created successively Baroness Bath (1792) and countess of Bath (1803). Upon her marriage to Sir James Murray, 7th bt. in 1794 he also took the name Pulteney.

SNH

Burns first published his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in Kilmarnock in 1786 and, encouraged by his local supporters, arrived in Edinburgh in January 1787 to arrange a second edition. He quickly found a patron there in James Cunningham, 14th earl of Glencairn making an introduction through common Ayrshire connections. Both the earl and his mother, the dowager countess, strove to ensure that his poems would appear in a new edition from an Edinburgh publisher, with Glencairn putting Burns in touch with bookseller William Creech, Glencairn’s tutor during his Grand Tour, who agreed to produce it.

Glencairn encouraged Burns to dedicate the new volume to the Royal Caledonian Hunt, an elite social and sporting club. At a meeting on 10 January Glencairn persuaded the members of the Hunt to pledge to purchase 100 copies, bringing Burns £25 in advance. Glencairn also sent blank subscription forms to James Graham, marquess of Graham, in order to have them filled up by the ‘first Scottish names about Court’. He also enlisted William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, 3rd duke of Portland, to solicit subscriptions from other peers in London [Letters, i. 73]. Few English subscribers signed up, apart from the duchess of Devonshire and countess of Derby. When Burns’s revised Poems appeared in April, it was dedicated to the Caledonian Hunt, which headed the list of subscribers. Between them Glencairn and his mother pledged to purchase 24 copies, the countess dowager alone subscribing for sixteen.

Glencairn had succeeded to his peerage in 1775, and three years later was commissioned a captain of the Western Fencible Regiment, a temporary outfit raised to defend the Scottish west coast. Like many Scots, he was angered by Westminster’s unwillingness to trust the Scots with a more established domestic military force, on the lines of the English militia.

Elected one of the 16 representative peers in 1780, Glencairn quickly joined the patriot movement for an independent Scottish militia. In spring 1782 he witnessed the unsuccessful attempts of Lord Graham to promote a Scottish militia bill in the Commons. Glencairn took up the cause himself and was its main driver from the summer. He was in Westminster in June 1783 when Graham once again brought the Scots’ desire for their own militia before the Commons. However, the session was prorogued a month later without the militia bill having been introduced.

Glencairn supported the Fox-North coalition and voted for its East India Company bill in December 1783. He failed to be included on the Court’s list of representative peers for the general election, and was heavily defeated when standing as an independent. For the rest of his life he opposed William Pitt and his Scottish manager Henry Dundas. On 6 Dec. 1785 he was named to an Ayrshire committee tasked with countering Dundas’s planned diminution of the number of judges on the Court of Session. [Public Advertiser, 26 Dec. 1785] He was also a member of the Independent Friends, a society of Scottish Whigs. As he had done in 1784, Glencairn threw his interest behind the Opposition candidate in Ayrshire elections in 1789 and 1790, but without success.

Thus, when Glencairn met Burns in late 1786 he already had extensive credentials as a Scottish patriot and quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of Burns’s wish to project a genuine Scottish voice. Burns was solicitous of Glencairn’s opinion on his poems, especially those with political content. He submitted his piece on the American war, When Guilford Good, for Glencairn’s approval, worried that ‘my political tenets… may be rather heretical in the opinion of some of my best friends’ [Letters, i. 77]. Glencairn countenanced its inclusion in the Edinburgh edition, and would have agreed with Burns’s positive view of the Americans’ cause.

Burns and Glencairn also found common cause on the issue of the Scottish militia. Burns’s 1784 poem The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer urged the 45 Scottish MPs to fight back against an Act that had increased the excise on whisky. He felt that if the measure were allowed to continue, Scotland, already on edge because ‘Her lost Militia fir’d her bluid’ [blood], would be ready to resort to violence.

Burns did not have many years to enjoy his friendship with Glencairn and the earl’s death on 30 Jan. 1791 while returning from a trip abroad distressed Burns greatly. He composed a Lament, which concluded: ‘The mother may forget the child / That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;/ But I’ll remember thee Glencairn / And a’ that thou hast done for me!’. In 1794, Burns even named his newborn son James Glencairn Burns.

Another Ayrshire native and peer who encouraged Burns’s poetry in 1787 was Archibald Montgomerie, 11th earl of Eglinton, a fiercely proud Highlander. He had commanded a regiment in America during the Seven Years War and served as a representative peer for 20 years. James Boswell described him to Dr. Johnson as ‘a person who was as violent a Scotsman as he [Johnson] was an Englishman’ [Life of Johnson, iii. 170, 503]. In January 1787 Eglinton provided Burns with an unsolicited donation of 10 guineas [Letters i. 79, 84], and subscribed to 42 copies of his Poems, one of the largest individual subscriptions.

In 1796 all these connections were abruptly severed, beginning with Burns’s own death on 21 July, aged just thirty-seven. On 24 September Glencairn’s younger brother, John, the 15th earl, died childless, and the title became extinct. Eglinton died without a male heir on 31 October, and his distant cousin Hugh Montgomerie of Coilsfield (mentioned in The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer) succeeded him in the peerage.

CGDL

Further reading:
Ian McIntyre, Robert Burns: A Life (1995)
The Letters of Robert Burns, Vol. 1: 1780-89, ed. G. Ross Roy (1985)
J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (1985)
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (6 vols., 1934-1950)

In 1807, Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade – eighteen years after William Wilberforce first moved for abolition on 12 May 1789. The legislation sought to bring an end to the inhumane trips across the Middle Passage as well as the legality of the purchasing, transporting and selling of enslaved people. Slavery, however, continued, with an estimated 700,000 Africans still enslaved in the British West Indies when the Slave Trade Act came into force in 1808.

Accepting the continuation of slavery was a deliberate tactic of the abolitionist movement, which faced opposition from a significant pro-slavery lobby, the West India Interest, which saw an attack on slavery as an attack on their ‘property rights’. It was also the view of abolitionists that ending the slave trade would improve the conditions of the enslaved, and gradually lead to the end of slavery.

Abolitionists within Parliament re-emerged in 1823, after realising that the improvement of conditions for the enslaved they had envisaged after the 1807 Act’s passing had not materialised. Acting as the London Anti-Slavery Society, the abolitionists campaigned for the gradual emancipation of the enslaved population that remained in the British West Indies.

The Society was led in the Commons by Thomas Fowell Buxton. On 15 May 1823, Buxton urged Parliament to end the ‘repugnant’ state of slavery which went against ‘the principles of the British constitution’. He voiced his hopes that his speech ‘commenced that process which will conclude, though not speedily, in the extinction of slavery throughout the whole of the British dominions’.

‘Not speedily’ was a fitting assessment of the following ten years. Abolitionists were again faced in Parliament with the strength of the West India Interest, many of whom directly owned plantations and enslaved people. As well as advocating for the continuation of slavery, the West India Interest lobbied for the retention of protective duties on sugar and coffee grown using the labour of enslaved people. In the face of this pro-slavery lobby in Parliament, the Anti-Slavery Society adopted a gradualist approach to abolition.

Although public opinion had shifted considerably to align with the rhetoric of the abolitionist movement during the 1820s, it was not until the appointment of the Whig government of the 2^nd Earl Grey in November 1830 that abolition became a real prospect.

However, with emancipation seemingly on the horizon, some abolitionists became frustrated with the gradualism that had characterised the movement. Inspired by voices outside Parliament such as Elizabeth Heyrick, the Agency Committee was formed in 1831. It contained many younger abolitionists who now called for immediate emancipation. Additionally, the Christmas Rebellion (also known as the Baptist War) of 1831-2 saw around 60,000 enslaved people in Jamaica rise up against the plantocracy. Reports of the brutal suppression by colonial authorities reached the House of Commons, where immediate emancipation was called for to avoid further bloodshed and civil war in the colonies.

At the 1832 general election (the first to take place under the reformed electoral system), the Agency Committee sought to capitalise on widespread public backing for the abolitionist cause by securing pledges from candidates for the immediate abolition of colonial slavery. Over 200 candidates who had taken the pledge were elected to the Commons. At the same time, representatives of the West India Interest had diminished in numbers. Rotten boroughs, where planters had previously placed allies to strengthen the pro-slavery lobby in the Commons, had mostly been eradicated through parliamentary reform.

Although weakened by the 1832 election, the West India Interest maintained one of their core principles – the demand that slave owners receive compensation for the abolition of slavery. George Canning – then Foreign Secretary and leader of the Commons – had outlined this argument in 1823, when he advised MPs that

this House is anxious for the accomplishment of this purpose, at the earliest period that shall be compatible with the well-being of the slaves themselves, with the safety of the colonies, and with a fair and equitable consideration of the interests of private property.

Although the previous under-secretary at the Colonial Office, Viscount Howick, had dismissed these claims and developed his own scheme for emancipation, the appointment of Edward Smith-Stanley (later the 14^th Earl of Derby) as Colonial Secretary in 1833, and the resignation of Howick, led to a new plan for abolition.

The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on 28 August 1833. It had two major caveats, intended to appease the pro-slavery lobby and simultaneously frustrate the hopes of immediate abolitionists. Firstly, West Indian slave-owners were to collectively receive compensation of £20 million to account for the ‘confiscation of [their] property’. This amounted to 40% of government spending in 1833. The formerly enslaved population received no compensation.

Secondly, the enslaved population of the British West Indies were not immediately emancipated. Children under the age of six were to be liberated, but adults were forced into a system of ‘apprenticeship’ – unpaid labour for their former owners – for up to six years. The apprenticeship system was eventually abolished in the British West Indies on 1 August 1838.

JMPB

Further Reading:

Nick Draper, Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society At The End Of Slavery (2013)

S. Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009)

P. E. Dumas, Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition (2016)

C. Hall, K. McClelland, N. Draper, K. Donnington & R. Lang, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (2014)

D. Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)

M. Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (2020)