Peter McLagan senior was born in 1774 in Moulin, Perthshire. He was the son of a tenant farmer, John McLagan, and Girzel ‘Grace’ McLagan, née McInroy. McLagan senior had travelled to Demerara (modern-day Guyana) by around 1797, where his uncle, James McInroy, was an enslaver, merchant trader and plantation owner. McInroy was a founding partner of McInroy, Sandbach & Co., part of the ‘mercantile conglomerate’ that later became Sandbach Tinné & Co.

McLagan senior managed the enslaved labour forces on several plantations on the Essequibo coast during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, most of which were owned by (or financially connected to) McInroy, Sandbach & Co. Two of these plantations were the Coffee Grove and Caledonia estates. In 1820 467 enslaved persons were recorded on both estates, where a mixture of coffee, sugar and cotton were grown. The slave-produced coffee, sugar and cotton (and rum) was exported primarily to the UK, where it was distributed by the Liverpool and Glasgow partner branches of McInroy, Sandbach and Co.

McLagan senior managed Coffee Grove and Caledonia as a joint enterprise from at least 1804. By 1815 he had made sufficient income to become a co-owner of the estates and a partner (with a 5% stake) in McInroy, Sandbach & Co. He sold out of McInroy, Sandbach & Co. in 1821, when his 5% share was worth at least £12,500, but continued to own Coffee Grove & Caledonia until at least the late 1830s. In 1829 his 50% stake in these plantations (his co-owner was Samuel Sandbach) was valued at £31,200 (for more on calculating wealth in modern terms see below).

Outside of plantation management on the Essequibo coast, McLagan senior lived in the elite Kingstown district of Georgetown from at least 1814, probably at a property he owned on Water Street. A Presbyterian, in 1815 he was a founding committee member and benefactor of St Andrew’s Kirk, Georgetown. Two years later he purchased a second Georgetown property in the Cummingsburg district.

Although he did not marry until his return to the UK, McLagan senior was the father of two sons born in Demerara, John (1821-1850) and Peter junior (1823-1900). The latter served as MP for Linlithgowshire between 1865 and 1893, and a number of contemporary sources indicate he was of African or Caribbean heritage. No formal record identifying either boy’s mother has yet been discovered. However, between 1820 and 1823, McLagan senior purchased a Barbadian-born enslaved woman named Filly and her three children (Henrietta, Joe and Robert) from another domestic residence in Georgetown.

Filly and her children were enslaved at McLagan’s senior’s Water Street residence between 1820 and 1823, where they continued to live until at least August 1834. Filly, whose story I’ll explore in the next article in this series, may have been John and Peter’s mother, or possibly their wet nurse. Alternatively, the timing of her sale to McLagan senior, and the birth of his two sons, may have been a coincidence.

McLagan senior left Demerara with his two sons John and Peter in June 1825 on board the Boode. The boat, which was owned by McInroy, Sandbach & Co., was loaded with an extensive cargo of sugar, rum, cotton, coffee and ‘one pipe’ of madeira wine. McLagan senior and his children arrived in Liverpool in August 1825, following which they lived between Perth and Edinburgh. In 1827 McLagan senior married Elizabeth Hagart Steuart. The family subsequently moved to 77 Great King Street, Edinburgh. Elizabeth died in November 1833.

Over the following three decades McLagan senior played a limited role in Scottish public life. Politically he was a Conservative: he was probably the Peter McLagan who signed the Edinburgh anti-reform petition in April 1831, and in the later 1830s he offered some financial assistance to Conservative electioneering efforts. He supported the authority of the Court of Session over rights of patronage in the Scottish church in the lead up to the Disruption, and remained a member of the Kirk following the establishment of the Free Church.

By January 1836 McLagan senior had been awarded extensive ‘compensation’ under the terms of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act for formerly enslaved persons at his Water Street residence and Coffee Grove and Caledonia estates in British Guiana (formerly Demerara). On 14 December 1835 he received £189 0s. 3d. for Filly and her two surviving children (Joe and Robert), who continued to live at Water Street. On 18 January 1836 he was awarded a share (probably 50%) of £21,480 10s. 10d. for 407 formerly enslaved persons on the Coffee Grove and Caledonia plantations.

In 1842 McLagan senior purchased the Pumpherston and Calderbank estates in Linlithgowshire (modern West Lothian), which covered around 1,000 acres. Following this he referred to himself as a ‘landed proprietor’ in official documentation. That said, he continued to live primarily in Edinburgh, while entrusting the management of the estates to his son, Peter McLagan junior. McLagan senior died of a ‘disease of [the] heart’ in April 1860, aged 85, at his Great King Street residence.

An exact probate valuation for McLagan senior’s estates has not yet been discovered. However, in a subsequent interview, Peter McLagan junior claimed that his father had been ‘worth £100,000’ at his death. While this may have been a retrospective embellishment, it is in keeping with McLagan junior’s own place in Britain’s ‘Upper 10,000’ by the 1870s.

If McLagan senior had died with an estate worth around £100,000 in 1860 it would have comfortably made him one of the richest 10,000 people in the UK, and one of the 1,000 richest people in Scotland. Trying to make modern comparisons of estate values and personal wealth of historic figures is an imperfect science. However, the online historical financial tool MeasuringWorth does offer some comparative figures. It suggests that dying with an estate worth £100,000 in 1860 is equivalent to leaving assets with a ‘relative income’ value of around £128 million in 2025.

Check back for the next article in the series in early 2026. To read the first article in Martin’s series click here

This article reflects ongoing research into Peter McLagan (1865-1900). The author would like to thank Dr Alison Clark for sharing her research on McLagan senior and Sandbach Tinne & Co. and the participants of a workshop on Peter McLagan held at the National Archives in October 2025. If you would like to discuss this article and the sources used, please contact Martin at mspychal@histparl.ac.uk.

Suggested Reading

A. Clark, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Empire, 1790-1838: Scottish Traders in the Southeast Caribbean: Slavery, Cotton and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co.’, PhD Univ. Edinburgh (2024)

M. Al Nasir, Searching for My Slave Roots: From Guyana’s Sugar Plantations to Cambridge (2025)

M. Al Nasir (ed.), ‘Sandbach Tinne Collection’, Cambridge Digital Library

D. Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021)

N. Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (2013)

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

‘Peter McLagan’, Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/41631

E. A. Cameron, ‘McLagan, Peter (1822/3-1900)’, Oxford DNB (2023), www.oxforddnb.com

Scotlands People, ‘Our records: Peter McLagan (1823–1900, British Liberal Party politician and Scotland’s first black MP’ (2022)

Peter McLagan (1823-1900) represented the Scottish county of Linlithgowshire between 1865 and 1893. A Liberal MP for most of his career, he was regarded as one of Britain’s ‘leading agriculturalists’ and on his retirement was the longest serving Scottish member. At the time of writing, McLagan is thought to be the seventh Black MP to sit in the Commons, and the first to represent a Scottish constituency*. He is currently considered the tenth MP elected to Parliament from a ‘minority ethnic’ group (as defined by the UK Parliament in a 2023 briefing).

I’ve been researching Peter McLagan for the House of Commons 1832-1868 project as part of my wider research into Scottish county politics during the period. In this series of articles I’ll explore McLagan’s personal, political and professional life, the biographies of key family members and the McLagan family’s colonial connections, particularly to the British Caribbean and slavery. My research builds on that already completed on McLagan by the historians Sybil Cavanagh, David Main, the National Records of Scotland and Dr Alison Clark, as well as Professor Ewen Cameron, who wrote McLagan’s entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Identifying the ancestry and ethnicity of historical figures can be a difficult, often contingent and imperfect process. Archival sources such as birth records might not exist, or may contain deliberately incorrect information, particularly when the person in question had legally been considered ‘illegitimate’ at birth (born outside marriage). Without formal records, a person’s ethnicity might be extrapolated from their birthplace, historical knowledge about their family and wider social networks, visual imagery (e.g. portraits, caricatures or photographs) or fleeting remarks discovered in a diary, court case or newspaper.

It is by employing a combination of these approaches that historians have identified, and continue to uncover, Black participation in numerous historic British institutional and social settings. While such discoveries are of importance in their own genealogical and biographical right, they are also of major significance in complicating assumptions (written or unwritten) about British society in the past, and providing new ways for researchers, students, teachers and readers to conceptualise British history. In this regard, McLagan’s story is an example of Black elite participation in nineteenth-century British politics, and adds an important Scottish dimension to evolving understandings of Black presence in Victorian Britain.

Such discoveries have increased over the past decade as Black British history has become an integral aspect of curriculums and research in schools and universities, and the digitisation of genealogical records and newspapers has allowed for new methods of source interrogation. Histories of politics and the UK Parliament are no exception, as demonstrated by Helen Wilson’s ground-breaking research into Black participation in British politics between 1750 and 1850, Gillian Williamson’s discovery of the earliest known Black voter in the UK at the 1749 Westminster by-election, and Amanda Goodrich’s biography of the father of Henry Galgacus Redhead Yorke, MP for York between 1841 and 1848.

As no formal birth records exist for McLagan, his status as a Black MP is based on a number of considerations. We know from his entry in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion from 1865, and a number of his public statements thereafter, that he was born in Demerara (now Guyana). In modern terms the ethnicity of his father was White British. However, at no point during his life did McLagan disclose the identity of his mother. There are also, at present, no known official or unofficial records that confirm who she was.

In addition to comments on his birth in Demerara, a number of contemporary statements were made about McLagan’s nationality and ethnicity. During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was ‘not a Scotchman’ and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan’s racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military.

There was little further public comment about McLagan’s ethnicity until the publication of the 1885 Popular Guide to the New House of Commons. In the guide, McLagan was described as ‘a creole, born in Demerara’. While ‘creole’ may just have been employed in this sense to describe someone of European descent born in the Caribbean, it led to a number of racist descriptions of McLagan in the press. For instance, in 1888 the Sheffield Independent welcomed the prospect that McLagan faced defeat at the next election on the basis that he ‘was not only born at Demerara – he is not even a white man’.

On his retirement in 1893 journalists deployed a range of racist descriptions in their potted biographies of McLagan. The Western Morning News stated he was ‘one of the swathiest [sic] men in the House of Commons’, the Newcastle Journal reported on his ‘dark complexion’, the Dundee Courier suggested that he was ‘in appearance a little heavy, Dutch-looking man’, and the Penny Illustrated Paper stated that his ‘sensible honest face bore traces of the dark blood which flowed in his veins’.

In addition to these newspaper reports, there are a number of contemporary portraits, caricatures and photographs of McLagan. As well as the cartoon noted above from the 1868 election, he was caricatured standing upright as ‘the judicious McLagan’ by Punch in 1888, and in a head and shoulders profile etching in the Linlithgowshire Gazette following the 1892 election. He was also the subject of an etching [Figure 1], which was probably published at an earlier stage of his parliamentary career, potentially following the 1865 election. The image, which is pictured above, was recently discovered by a descendant and is now held by West Lothian Council Museums and Archives Service.

McLagan was also captured in at least four known photographs. There are two side profiles of McLagan that probably date to the 1880s, one of which held by the Hulton Archive can be viewed here. McLagan also appears in two photographs taken in December 1887 during the foundation stone laying ceremony for Victoria Halls, Linlithgow. McLagan laid the foundation stone at the ceremony in full masonic attire (he was the Linlithgowshire provincial grand master), and is pictured at the centre of a group photo of local dignitaries in front of Linlithgow Palace Fountain [Figure 3]. In a second, remarkable, group photo of the laying of the foundation stone, McLagan can also be seen under a set of pulley chains, staring directly at the camera with a somewhat bemused look on his face [Figure 4].

Considered together, these sources suggest that McLagan’s mother was probably of Black Caribbean or Black African descent. To explore why this was likely to have been the case, the next articles in the series will focus on McLagan’s family.

The first will discuss McLagan’s father, Peter McLagan (1774-1860), who enslaved over 400 people on his plantations and personal estate in Demerara. McLagan’s father was awarded a share in over £20,000 (around £2.5 million today) in compensation for persons formerly enslaved on his plantations and personal estate following the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean in 1833. Along with the profits of a three-decade career in Demerara, McLagan’s father invested this compensation into estates in modern West Lothian, which allowed McLagan to establish himself as one of Scotland’s leading agriculturists, shale oil proprietors and longest-serving MPs.

Following this I will explore the potential identity of McLagan’s mother. Recent research by Dr Alison Clark has suggested that McLagan’s mother may have been Elizabeth Games or Elizabeth Goodwin, two ‘free women of colour’ that McLagan senior made property transactions with in Demerara in 1817.

My research into the enslaved persons on McLagan’s father’s estates has also identified a Barbadian-born woman named Filly (b. c. 1789/90), another possible candidate to have been McLagan’s mother. Filly, and her three children, Henrietta, Joe and Robert, were enslaved on McLagan’s father’s personal residence on Water Street, Georgetown, between 1820 and 1823, just before McLagan was born. While McLagan and his father left Demerara for Scotland in 1825, Filly and her children continued to live on McLagan’s father’s residence as enslaved ‘domestic servants’ until at least 1834.

To read the second article in Martin’s series click here. To find out more about the House of Commons 1832-1868 project click here.

MS

* I use Black as a category of ethnicity in its modern sense to refer to people of African and Caribbean heritage. This contrasts with contemporary nineteenth-century British discourse, and some twentieth century political and historiographical contexts, where ‘black’ was also used as a term to refer to persons of non-African and Caribbean heritage, particularly people of South Asian descent.  It also understands race as a cultural, social and political phenomenon.

The author would like to thank Sybil Cavanagh for sharing her unpublished research on McLagan, and several quotations which have been used in this article.

Suggested Reading

E. A. Cameron, ‘McLagan, Peter (1822/3-1900)’, Oxford DNB (2023), www.oxforddnb.com

D. W. Main, ‘The Remarkable Career of Peter McLagan MP’, History Scotland (April 2021)

Scotlands People, ‘Our records: Peter McLagan (1823–1900, British Liberal Party politician and Scotland’s first black MP’, (2022)

A. Clark, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Empire, 1790-1838: Scottish Traders in the Southeast Carribean: Slavery, Cotton and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co.’, PhD Univ. Edinburgh (2024)

H. Wilson, ‘The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, History of Parliament (2022)

J. Baker, ‘1833 Slavery Abolition Act: The Long Road to Emancipation in the British West Indies’, History of Parliament (2024)

‘C. Bressey, ‘The Next Chapter: The Black Presence in the Nineteenth Century’, in G. Gerzina (ed.), Britain’s Black Past (2020), 315-30

H. Adi, African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (2023)

K. N. Abraham & J. Woolf, Black Victorians (2023)

T. Scriven, ‘‘The Black Prince of Baker Street’ and the Black Presence in Britain, 1837–1849’, History Workshop Journal (2024)

D. Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021)

P. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984)

A. Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1772-1813 (2019)

D. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (2018)

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

N. File & C. Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 (1981)

In 1756 William Murray left the House of Commons after 14 years as MP for Boroughbridge, having been appointed Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, and created Lord Mansfield. He was therefore a highly experienced judge by the time he made his ruling in the case of Somerset v Stewart on 22 June 1772. This dealt with the imprisonment of James Somerset, an enslaved person under the ownership of Charles Stewart. Although Mansfield had not wished it to be so, his decision was seen as a judgment on the legal status of slavery in England.

Prior to the Somerset decision, although slavery was rife within the British colonies, the status of slavery in England itself was disputed. Previous high-ranking law officers had left contrary opinions on the matter. In 1696 the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Holt, in the case of Chamberlain v Harvey, had ruled that ‘no man can have property in the person of another while in England’. Yet 23 years later, the West India lobby, opposed to Holt’s previous statement, obtained an unofficial opinion from the Attorney General Philip Yorke and the Solicitor General Charles Talbot:

We are of opinion that a slave, coming from the West Indies to Great Britain or Ireland, with or without his master, doth not become free; and that his master’s property or right in him is not thereby determined or varied; and that baptism doth not bestow freedom upon him, or make any alteration in his temporal condition in these Kingdoms. We are also of opinion that his master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations. – Yorke-Talbot Opinion, 1729

It is with these conflicting statements in mind that we need to understand the significance of the Somerset v Stewart decision.

Charles Stewart (or Steuart), a Scottish merchant who had become a cashier and paymaster of customs in Boston, Massachusetts, came to England on business in 1768/9, bringing with him James Somerset, an enslaved person under his ownership. During their time in England, Somerset was baptised, with three abolitionists – Thomas Walkin, Elizabeth Cade and John Marlow – acting as godparents. As the Yorke-Talbot opinion suggested, there was a belief, which their opinion disagreed with, that the baptism of an enslaved person made them free. Somerset eventually escaped Stewart’s service in October 1771, evading recapture until the end of November. He was taken to a ship anchored in the Thames – the Ann and Mary – and detained there for the purposes of being shipped to Jamaica to be resold as a slave.  His godparents intervened, issuing a writ of habeas corpus, a legal procedure under which a prisoner would be brought to court to decide whether they had been lawfully detained. Somerset was duly brought before the Court of King’s Bench on 9 December 1771.

The case eventually began in February 1772, heard by three judges with Mansfield presiding as Lord Chief Justice. Somerset was released pending the hearing, and in that time met with the famed abolitionist Granville Sharp, who had previously issued writs of habeas corpus for similar cases to resolve the uncertainty surrounding slavery. Although he supported Somerset’s case, he did not represent him; Somerset was instead defended by a team of barristers led by the sitting MP for Middlesex, John Glynn. 

The defence sought to frame the judgment on the basis that a ruling in favour of Stewart would set a precedent for legalising enslavement across the British Isles. Francis Hargrave, in this his first case, exemplified this position during proceedings, stating that ‘the question is not whether slavery is lawful in the colonies… but whether in England?’ Another main point of contention from the defence, articulated by John Alleyne, was that due to Stewart’s ownership of enslaved people being legalised through municipal law in America, his ownership of James Somerset did not hold sway in ‘a country where such municipal regulations do not subsist.’

The lead counsel for Stewart, John Dunning, who was also a sitting MP, sought to challenge Alleyne’s argument. He posited that although municipal regulations were not binding in a different country, there were relationships similar to Stewart and Somerset’s of an equivalent status that could be transposed: ‘I have not heard, do I fancy, is there any intention to affirm, the relation of master and servant ceases here?’ William Wallace also questioned what the implications of setting Somerset free would be for the lucrative industries in the colonies that were dependent on the labour of enslaved people. He argued that ‘the Court must consider the great detriment to proprietors… that many thousands of pounds would be lost to the owners, by setting them [enslaved persons] free.’

On 14 May, Mansfield adjourned the final session before his judgment was to be given. As in previous cases he had presided over, Mansfield strongly recommended that an agreement between the parties be reached before an opinion was given, but it seemed that both sides were committed to a judicial resolution. Reluctant to give a judgment on the legality of slavery in general, Mansfield narrowed the remit of his judgment. Rather than answering questions on the morality of enslavement, or the potential detriment to British commerce, Mansfield stated that his decision would be based on ‘whether any dominion, authority or coercion can be exercised in this country, on a slave according to American laws?’

The Court of King’s Bench’s decision was finally read by Mansfield in Westminster Hall on 22 June 1772. The Morning Chronicle reported the day after the decision that ‘Lord Mansfield in a written speech, as guarded, cautious, and concise, as it could possibly be drawn up, delivered the unanimous opinion of the whole court…’ Within the parameters he had previously proposed, Mansfield asserted that ‘so high an act of dominion must be recognized by law of the country it is used.’ As the dominion over another person that slavery imposed was not supported by English law, Mansfield declared:

Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England.

James Somerset was therefore released.

Although this declaration created a judicial decision against the institution of slavery in England, the parameters Mansfield had set greatly narrowed the impact of Somerset’s release. The precedent set by this case was that the actions of Stewart to detain Somerset against his will to deport and sell him into slavery were not supported by English law. However, this did not outlaw the existence of slavery in the colonies, or the existence of domestic servitude. Rather it stipulated that the level of dominion over another which Stewart had tried to enforce – the forced deportation of an individual for the purpose of selling them as a slave – was unlawful in England.

Despite Mansfield later stating in 1785 that his decision went ‘no further than that the master cannot by force compel him [the slave] to go out of the Kingdom’, this judgment was seen by many as a boon to the emerging abolitionist campaign, posing the question, if slavery in its fullest extent could not be legal in England, why was it still legal in the colonies? With the emergent anti-slavery rhetoric gaining more traction, the West India Interest saw for the first time that there was unified opposition to the status quo. New tactics were needed to counter fears that Somerset v Stewart could eventually destabilise the practice of colonial slavery.

JMPB

Further Reading:

Somerset v Stewart, 1 Lofft 1, 1772

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

N. S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (2013)

E. L. Wong, ‘Emancipation after “the Laws of Englishmen”, in Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (2009), 19-76

D. J. Hulsebosch, ‘Nothing but Liberty:” Somerset’s Case” and the British Empire’, Law and History Review 24, 3 (2006), 647-657

S. Swaminathan, ‘Developing the West Indian Proslavery Position after the Somerset Decision’, Slavery and Abolition, 24, 3 (2003), 40-60

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)

The 4th earl of Abingdon, is probably best known as one of the 18th century’s more talented amateur musicians. He was a flautist and a composer of some talent, and also played an important role in patronizing Joseph Haydn in England. When not playing the flute or composing he was a passionate follower of the turf and breeder of prized race-horses. His most celebrated horse was the eccentrically named ‘Potoooooooos’. The story was that he had wanted the stable lad to call the horse ‘Potato’ or ‘Potatoes’ but the boy misheard and wrote the name down as Pot followed by eight Os. Abingdon was amused, and kept the name.

Abingdon’s contribution to Parliament is less well remembered. When noticed he is normally dismissed as an ‘eccentric’ or recalled because of a very public spat with Edmund Burke. As a lively and combative speaker in the House of Lords, however, he probably ought to be better known. He certainly had his hobby-horses, the Bishops being one. He found pretty much any opportunity to insult the bench, even finding time in a speech on the Lords responding to a motion relating to rat poison to refer it back to his spiritual colleagues.

Although at heart an independent, Abingdon had his friends and allies. He met John Wilkes while travelling on the continent. The two visited Voltaire together and remained on close terms thereafter. Abingdon worshipped Pitt the Elder (Chatham) and was a loyal follower of the man who inherited Chatham’s mantle, the 2nd earl of Shelburne. Having also been a firm friend of the marquess of Rockingham, though, Abingdon grew to detest Charles James Fox, largely because of Fox’s decision to enter government with Lord North, whom Abingdon also none too cordially loathed.

The issue which particularly energized Abingdon was the war with America. Abingdon was a firm opponent of the conflict and at every opportunity argued for a cessation of hostilities. While he had not been to the colonies himself, he had close links with many that had. His countess, Charlotte Warren, was the niece of James De Lancey, a lieutenant-governor of New York, while one of her sisters was married to New Jersey-born Colonel Skinner. The Skinners’ daughter would later marry Henry Gage, 3rd Viscount Gage, son of one of the most prominent British commanders of the opening stages of the American war. Via the Warrens Abingdon also had links to Antigua, where the family owned plantations. It was perhaps this that later persuaded him to adopt a pro-slavery stance, in spite of the remainder of his rhetoric, which was all about freedom and the constitution.

One point concerning the conflict that exercised Abingdon especially was the treatment of American prisoners of war. On 11 December 1777 he rose in the Lords objecting to a motion to adjourn proceedings pointing out that he had only just come up from the country to attend Parliament and was surprised they intended to curtail their deliberations so soon. Laying into the ministry for the conduct of the war, he turned his attention to the poor conditions in which American prisoners were being held in English prisons. Pointing out that ‘humanity has ever been the characteristic of Englishmen’ he now worried that ‘our national character is now stamped with inhumanity.’ [Cobbett, xix. 593; Greene, 227] He went on to highlight one particular example of abuse. Many of the Americans, he noted, objected to being inoculated for smallpox on religious grounds. Despite this, one prisoner had been inoculated and then locked in a cell with five more who had not had the disease. They protested against being forced to share their space with him, but ‘neither fears, nor tears nor prayers’ succeeded in having the man removed. This, Abingdon conceived was an example of the kind of abuse they were facing, and which surely called for punishment, prompting him to pose the question:

what is civil society, but a public combination for private protection?

(c) Trustees of the British Museum: 1868,0808.6382

He then moved for an address for the House to have sight of the orders given to the various gaolers dealing with the prisoners of war.

Abingdon was not done with the issue. In January, the newspapers reported that he had set on foot a subscription for the relief of distressed colonials in English prisons and he returned to the topic in the Lords again at the end of March 1778 when he declared the treatment of the prisoners ‘equally barbarous, unconstitutional, and illegal’.

Abingdon’s speeches were often carried in the press. Like Wilkes, he often sent his orations to the papers for publication. Not all were complimentary. The Morning Chronicle of 1 April 1778 carried a report of his latest effort, dismissing it as being in that:

bold and peremptory style of accusation and charge, which generally distinguishes the Earl’s harangues.

While Abingdon never tired of raising issues that mattered to him, his frustration with the administration was more than apparent. A few days after his latest contribution on the war, he complained of how hard it was for the opposition to be heard, concluding:

These dead majorities will be the ruin of this nation. Let the question be what it will, though the salvation of the country depend upon it, if it be moved by the minority, it is sure of a negative…

Abingdon rejoiced in the eventual fall of North, and then (ultimately) of Fox North and had the satisfaction of seeing the son of his hero, Chatham, made Prime Minister. Always strident, he spent time in prison for libel in the 1790s, emulating his friend, Wilkes, which no doubt encouraged yet another of his leitmotifs: the evils caused by too many ‘pettifogging’ lawyers. He was still complaining about them in his final oration in the Lords just a few weeks before his death.

RDEE

Further Reading

Cobbett, Parliamentary History xix

Jack P. Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2013)

Derek McCulloch, ‘The Musical “Oeuvre” of Willoughby Bertie, 4th earl of Abingdon’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle xxxiii (2000)

The Despard conspiracy occurred in early 1802 and was led by Colonel Edward Marcus Despard (1751-1803), an Irish army officer and Catherine’s husband. They had met possibly in Jamaica or while Edward was stationed at the Bay of Honduras (now Belize), where he fought in the Spanish Main. During this period, Edward became an elected administrator in Belize. Still, he became highly unpopular with the mahogany loggers and enslavers because he instituted a land lottery to distribute the land fairly. In Jamaica, he was an engineer responsible for infrastructure works. He fought in Nicaragua alongside Nelson and then administered in Belize. In all these places and through their experiences, he fostered a genuine empathy and commonality across race, class and gender. Catherine’s story is less well-known. Her mother’s will has been identified, confirming she was born in Jamaica. Her mother, Sarah Gordon of St Andrew’s Parish, a free Black woman, died on 25th Jul. 1799. 

Catherine and Edward’s marriage does not appear in the records in any of the parishes in Jamaica, indicating either that they were married in Belize or were not officially married. However, throughout their time in England, only Edward’s family struggled with them being married, writing both Catherine and their son John Edward Despard (c.1780-1836) out of the family tree. Catherine was, however, repeatedly referred to as his wife in newspapers, letters and by their friends. Catherine’s story is indelibly tied to Edward’s. Edward was called to London because of complaints about his land lottery. The system did not recognise race or class when dividing land rights; this did not favour the Baymen (mahogany loggers who owned enslaved peoples). The Baymen were angry that they were seen in common with the “lowest mulatto or free negro”. Edward kept land in common ownership and tried to keep food prices low so that poor people could buy it. In 1790, Lord Grenville recalled Edward to London, and he, Catherine and their son sailed for England. 

The Despards arrived in London in 1790, and Edward attempted to settle his dispute with the Government over what he saw as his unfair dismissal. He believed that he was deserving of compensation for unpaid earnings. The Government disagreed. This conflict took two years to resolve and ended with Edward not being charged or receiving any payment. Meanwhile, he was pursued with lawsuits by the Baymen and spent two years in debtor’s prison (1792-4). In 1795, Edward was again arrested for referring to himself by the title citizen when a police constable stopped him at a riot in Charring Cross, one of many forms of protest seen during the summer of 1795. There had been instances of crowds gathering outside Downing Street or surrounding the King in procession to parliament. The riot in Charing Cross was an extension of this unrest, and by October, the Government introduced the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act. Edward was politically active and was seen as a threat by the Government. He was a member of the London Corresponding Society (LCS), a federation of reading and debating clubs that agitated for democratic reform of parliament by petitions and demonstrations. He was a prominent figure in discussions held in 1797 involving plans for a French-supported rebellion in Ireland. He was involved in radical groups, including LSC, the United Irishmen and the United Britons. Catherine’s role in these schemes is unknown. The LCS does not appear to have had female members, but it did support Women’s meetings, and women attended their demonstrations. However, from her closeness to Edward throughout his multiple incarcerations and her fervent advocation for his improved treatment, it may be fair to assume that she at least supported her husband’s actions and beliefs. The plot for which he was imprisoned for the final time was regicide. The aim was to have George III’s carriage fired upon by a stationary cannon while on its way to Buckingham House (Palace). Once the King had been assassinated, the plotters would seize the Bank of England and incite a military rising of the Third Grenadiers stationed at the Tower of London. Edward was arrested in 1802, and his execution occurred on 21^st February 1803.  

Catherine and Edward were staunch abolitionists; they advocated for the working class and common land not to be enclosed. When Catherine arrived in London, Europe was in a state of fomenting unrest and radical politics. London’s Black population was not exclusively made up of servants and service members. It is clear from her letters that Catherine was educated. Her fluent, thorough, persistent style and beautiful penmanship exude a well-read and confident communicator. At the gallows, Edward’s final words, delivered to a crowd estimated to have amounted to 20,000 people, were a collaboration between them. She had been back and forth for days, helping him write his speech, his petitions for mercy and carrying papers. Famously, Sir Richard Ford, the Chief Magistrate of London, wrote to Lord Pelham, Home Secretary, on the night of the execution, said of her, “Mrs Despard has been very troublesome, but at last she has gone away.” Catherine had launched a campaign advocating for better treatment of her husband and his fellow inmates beginning in 1798. Her activism incited a debate in the House of Commons about the suspension of Habeas Corpus, in which MP John Courtney read one of her letters in the chamber. Catherine wrote to Sir Francis Burdett, MP, who was known for his opposition to war and political prosecutions. Eliciting the support of influential politicians shows political shrewdness and an understanding of political power.  

The gallows speech expresses a deep concern for the principles of equality. They use the rhetorical device of threes; he stated, “[I] served my country faithfully, honourably and usefully”. This echoes the cry of the French Revolution liberté, égalité and fraternité. They use the address’ citizen’, intended to strip away hierarchical titles such as Sir, My Lord and My Lady. This term was already internationally recognised within radical speech as expressing affiliation with the Revolution and the collective humanity of all people. The sheriff threatened to stop Edward’s speech at the use of the phrase ‘Human Race’ because it was deemed too inflammatory. Edward and Catherine’s perception of the human race differed from what was being established politically and scientifically: a strict hierarchy between races and classes. 

The late eighteenth century was a politically turbulent period. There was political unrest in Britain from radicals who sought democratic reform, republicans who called for the end of the monarchy, abolitionists who fought for the end of the slave trade and emancipation of the enslaved, and loyalists to either the King or parliament. The continuing wars strained the British economy, which helped create discontent within the general population. Catherine was part of a political milieu that included the abolitionists Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797) and Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757-1791), the radical author Henry Redhead Yorke (1772-1813), Cato Street conspiracist William Davidson (1786-1820) and the radical preacher Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835/6). Catherine could not gain her husband’s freedom, but she was disruptive. She did not stay in her place and play the forlorn wife; she instead campaigned, wrote and organised.  

HW

Conner, Clifford D. Colonel Despard: the Life and Times of an Anglo-Irish Rebel. Pennsylvania: Combined. 2000 

“EXECUTION OF COLONEL DESPARD, ….” Morning Post, 22nd Feb. 1803. British Library Newspapers. 

Gerzina, Gretchen. Black London: Life before Emancipation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1995.  

Gillis, Bernadette M.’ A Caribbean Coupling Beyond Black and White: The Interracial Marriage of Catherine and Edward Marcus Despard and Its Implications for British Views on Race, Class and Gender during the Age of Reform.’ Masters, Duke University, 2014.  

Jay, Mike. The Unfortunate Colonel Despard. London: Bantam Press, 2004. 

Linebaugh, Peter. Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. University of California Press, 2019. 

Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. 

The National Archives of the UK (TNA), Home Office (HO) 42/43/127. Folios 291-293. 1798. 

On 29 and 30 September the opening of Bath’s historic (Upper) Assembly Rooms was marked with a conference over Zoom, followed by a live event in the Assembly Rooms where conference participants were able to experience a display of dances from the Ridotto, which had opened the Rooms precisely 250 years before in 1771. We welcome back one of the speakers, Jemima Hubberstey, a doctoral candidate at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to offer some reflections on the event.

To celebrate the 250th anniversary since the opening of Bath’s Assembly Rooms on 30 September 1771, Bath 250 brought together researchers, heritage practitioners and performers, to reflect on the many different histories of Bath and its Georgian heritage. Rather than considering the Assembly Rooms in isolation, the conference’s focus on the social life of the rooms allowed for many cross-disciplinary conversations, and revealed the broader contexts and networks in which the rooms – and Bath society itself – was situated.

Rather than simply reiterating well-rehearsed aspects of Bath life such as the high society parties and the bathing rituals, the conference explored the often-overlooked histories of the Assembly Rooms and Georgian Bath. Each of the papers took a nuanced approach when considering how Georgian visitors experienced the polite world of Bath, tracing not only the experiences of the social and political elites, but the people behind the scenes and the businesses who catered to the flocks of Georgian tourists, such as the boarding houses, companies selling Bath water, rival undertakers, and disorderly sedan chairmen.

The opening keynote by Hannah Greig sparked off the conference as she examined the Assembly Rooms as a ‘temple of sociability’ and placed them in the context of high society parties. Highlighting the differences between public assembly rooms and the lavish private parties hosted by some of Britain’s aristocratic elite, Greig demonstrated the way in which the plentiful activities reflected not only Georgian society’s insatiable appetite for different entertainments throughout the social calendar, but the way in which sociability itself was hierarchical and sometimes exclusionary. Anticipating later discussions at the conference, Greig also shared diaries and letter extracts from members of the Georgian elite who were less enamoured with Bath and the social obligations expected of them.

Considering Bath as a performance space was a key theme that emerged from the conference. Papers explored the Assembly Rooms as a site in which a rich variety of dances, music, and concerts were performed (there was even a pre-recorded harp recital performed by Maximilian Ehrhardt). Some papers also considered Bath as a theatre for celebrities to be seen, which on some level, allowed them to capitalise on their fame to promote their careers. Yet other papers also explored the performative aspects of Bath society, such as the obligation to perform politeness in public settings or perform as unwilling actors in courtship rituals.

As several papers explored, social performances could also offer opportunities to foster support and allegiance, as politicians and their often equally strategically influential wives took advantage of the informal political networking opportunities outside of Parliament. Politics did not end at the end close of the parliamentary session and, in fact, improved roads between London and Bath meant MPs and members of the Lords could even take breaks mid-session for their health. Papers drew attention to Bath’s integral role within eighteenth-century politics, as well as the way in which the city was a melting pot in which a range of figures across the social and political spectrum could find themselves jostling in the same spaces.

Several papers also considered Bath beyond its sandstone walls. A couple of papers examined architectural plans for Bath and reflected on alternative visions of what Bath could have looked like and suggested reasons these projects were changed or never built at all. Papers also explored the broader economic contexts in which Bath was situated: one paper importantly drawing attention to the fact that the wealth from subscribers – which had financed the Assembly Rooms – was derived from plantations. Papers also examined interpretations of Bath beyond the eighteenth century, whether it was the influence Bath had in spa towns throughout Europe in the nineteenth century, or the Edwardian interpretation of Bath in the 1909 pageant.

The rich array of papers demonstrated the multiplicity of narratives and stories to be told from the same architectural space, and it is fitting that the roundtable discussion should have questioned the dominant narratives within the heritage sector. Olivette Otele called for Bath’s decolonising and slavery projects to collaborate and generate further discussions about the complex histories of Bath, using it as an opportunity to reshape our communities and narratives of the past. Oliver Cox suggested that a ‘new politeness’ could animate eighteenth-century spaces, highlighting the importance of conversation and collaboration between academia and the heritage sector in order to share challenging narratives and make them accessible and engaging for modern audiences. Rounding off the discussion, Tom Boden highlighted the National Trust’s mission to change the experience of the Assembly Rooms so that they bring to life a range of stories of the past and engage modern visitors to create new experiences.

Transitioning from computer screens to the Assembly Rooms themselves, the in-person event at the end of the second day allowed participants to immerse themselves into the famous architectural space and re-enact eighteenth-century sociability and performance. Jonathan Foyle gave a fascinating keynote lecture on the architectural influences on John Wood the Younger’s design for the Assembly Rooms, before Hillary Burlock gave a talk on the Ridotto Redux in 1771 and the different sorts of dancing and music in Georgian assembly rooms. The conference ended with a demonstration from the Bath Minuet Company, a fitting way to celebrate the 250th anniversary by bringing eighteenth-century dance alive once more in the hallowed rooms.

JH

The Conference was organized by: Hillary Burlock (Queen Mary, University of London), Elaine Chalus (Liverpool University), Oliver Cox (Oxford University), Robin Eagles (History of Parliament) and Rupert Goulding (National Trust); the conference webinar was managed by a team at the University of Liverpool, and the conference received support from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Early Dance Circle, and the Royal Historical Society.

Since 2015, there has been a major public debate centred around the wording of the Melville Monument in Edinburgh’s St Andrew Square, upon which a statue of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742–1811) rests. He was a trained lawyer and lord advocate in Scotland and went on to become one of the most powerful politicians in eighteenth-century Britain. He was MP for Edinburgh and Midlothian, first lord of the admiralty, home secretary and the first secretary of state for war. The original inscription on the Melville Monument provides details of his career but does not mention his role delaying the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, known euphemistically as the era of ‘gradual abolition’.

Much like the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, England, the Melville Monument has become a proxy for wider discussion about the role of Scots in the Atlantic slave economy. Also like Edward Colston, the published work of historians has been clear about his role. This historiographical orthodoxy around Dundas – established by Roger Anstey (1975), David Brion Davis (1975), Roger Buckley (1975) and G.M. Ditchfield (1980) – has never been revised. As Home Secretary (1791-4) in Pitt’s First Ministry, Dundas was crucial in helping delay the abolition of the slave trade in April 1792, and once again as the Scottish parliamentary manager in March 1796. In the context of the war with Revolutionary France after 1793, Dundas’ motives to delay lay in imperial defence (especially the recruitment of enslaved Africans for West India Regiments), and to placate the powerful West India interest in Parliament.

Historians of slavery and abolition such as Seymour Drescher endorse this orthodoxy, while biographers generally take a more sympathetic approach. Michael Fry’s Dundas Despotism (1992) did not really attempt to address Dundas’s culpability in delaying abolition – devoting around a page in total to the controversy without examining the entirety of his activities across the period 1792 to 1807. Fry subsequently ignored Dundas’s role in gradual abolition in an Oxford Dictionary National Biography entry (2004), and a more recent ODNB update (2021) attributed the delay to the House of Lords (who did, in fact, block abolition in the summer of 1792). This historiographical context is crucial: historians of slavery and abolition are unequivocal that Dundas was integral to the political delay of the abolition of the slave trade after 1792, whilst some biographers have taken a more positive view.

Much journalistic commentary followed around the proposed wording of the Melville Monument, including a televised debate on Channel 4 News in 2018. The Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 provided further impetus and politicians were compelled to act. Edinburgh City Council quickly agreed on 11 June 2020 to recontextualise how Dundas was represented in civic space as did Toronto City Council in Canada who voted to rename ‘Dundas Street’ in July 2021. Some of the story was covered by the BBC Scotland programme ‘Scotland, Slavery and Statues’ in October 2020. The recontextualization of the Melville Monument is broadly consistent with academic historiography, yet completely at odds with some journalistic outputs. Indeed, it was previously claimed that Henry Dundas was a ‘genuine opponent of the slave trade’, rather than someone who helped delay abolition for vested interests. If this was true, the recent civic recontextualizations were an injustice. Indeed, historian T.M. Devine called the wording ‘bad history’ in October 2020.

I had no role in recontextualising the Melville Monument but had been independently researching the West India interest and gradual abolition since 2018. Aware of the controversy, I set out to test the two views of Henry Dundas with empirical evidence, as either prolonging the slave trade for vested interests, or as a pragmatic abolitionist easing its passage. I read all relevant historiography published by historians of slavery and abolition, as well as biographers. I read hundreds of pages of Hansard which contain Henry Dundas’ contributions in the House of Commons, as well as abolitionist responses. I examined holdings in Scottish archives and libraries, including the Dundas family papers. The National Records of Scotland had purchased these papers for £1.35m in 2012, and so were fully open to researchers. In England, I examined the Dundas correspondence held by the Weston Library, Special Collections at the University of Oxford and his correspondence with Prime Minister William Pitt, held by the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester.

It became clear Henry Dundas’ collaborations with the parliamentary West India interest had both substance and longevity. Whilst examining the West India Committee records in the University of the West Indies, St Augustine in Trinidad in 2016, I discovered evidence of Dundas’ collaborations with Glasgow-West India merchants. Historians Christer Petley and Katie Donington also revealed in recent works that Dundas was in negotiations with the metropolitan West India interest from 7 April 1792. I discovered important new evidence of how that alliance worked in both the metropole and the colonies, the purpose of it, and how it was perceived at the time.

Whilst Henry Dundas destroyed much of his personal archive in 1802-3, it became clear from inward correspondence that West India merchants, planters and enslavers approved of his actions at various points and they expressed this both publicly and privately. Comparing Dundas’ parliamentary actions with M.W. McCahill’s (2014) published correspondence of Stephen Fuller, Jamaica’s agent in London, added fresh insights to activities and how the alliance operated at certain points. Moreover, it also became clear that the abolitionists were not just suspicious of his actions but vehemently opposed: for example, Dundas was viciously criticised by abolitionist MPs such as Charles James Fox in the House of Commons, and by contemporary pamphleteers such as ‘Howard’ in 1795. This type of evidence undermined the view that Dundas was viewed by contemporaries as an opponent of the slave trade.

The subsequent article, which I will be discussing at the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 12 October 2021 therefore, took an unusual approach. The historiographical orthodoxy was unequivocal on Dundas’ culpability, and while my research added important parliamentary and imperial context, it also addressed public debates. If Henry Dundas were ever a pragmatic abolitionist, that pragmatism was designed to prolong the trafficking in enslaved people from Africa in order to support government and propertied interests. In this sense, academic historians have a responsibility to both peer-reviewed outlets but also to inform wider public debates. Even if the academic historiography is broadly in agreement, the memorialisation of individuals involved with the Atlantic slave economies still has the capacity to initiate public debate and political controversies in 21^st century Britain.

SM

To find out more Stephen’s full-length paper ‘Henry Dundas: a ‘Great Delayer’ of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’ is available here. Stephen will be taking questions about his research between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday 12 October 2021.

To register for this virtual seminar, please follow this link and click on ‘Book now’. If you cannot attend this session but wish to submit a question to Stephen, please send it to seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

Late in September 1665, the Great Plague of London claimed its most famous victim. ‘I hear for certain this night’, wrote Samuel Pepys, ‘that Sir Martin Noell is this day dead of the plague in London, where he hath lain sick of it these eight days’ ( The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. R. Latham, W. Matthews (Oxford, 1971), vi. 245). The name Martin Noell has long since slipped from the national memory, but by the time of the Restoration in 1660 he was the best known, certainly notorious, entrepreneur and financier in all of England.

Noell’s rise to fame and fortune epitomised the transformation that had occurred in English maritime commerce and colonial enterprises since the early 1600s. The younger son of a Stafford mercer, he used his elder brother’s business connections in London, and his own marriage to the daughter of a wealthy City draper, to break into the burgeoning trade with the colonies across the Atlantic. While never straying too far from his London counting-house, he had established himself by the late 1640s as one of the merchant-planters on Barbados, the island at the centre of England’s sugar boom. Noell’s rapid climb from provincial nobody to metropolitan venture-capitalist, though eye-catching, was not unusual among the so-called ‘new merchants’ – men from outside of London’s established mercantile elite, often from small-town backgrounds, who had come to dominate the transatlantic trade in sugar and other colonial merchandise.

The new merchants were well-insinuated with the radical faction in Parliament that executed Charles I in 1649 and established a republican state. With friends in high places, Noell won large government contracts for collecting a range of customs and sales taxes, from which he skimmed a healthy profit. Noell’s friend and business-partner Thomas Povey thought that he had ‘swollen into a much greater person by being a farmer [i.e. collector] of the customs and excise’ ( British Library, Add. ms 11411, f. 39v.). Duties on salt were probably Noell’s biggest domestic earner. As a tax-farmer on salt and an investor in salt-production, he made money from both ends of the industry. Oliver Cromwell’s son and heir Richard Cromwell was not exaggerating when he styled Noell ‘the great salt-master of England’ ( The Correspondence of Henry Cromwell, 1655-9 ed. P. Gaunt (Camden Society ser. 5, xxxi), 308.)

But Noell’s most marketable asset by the mid-1650s was his value to the house of Cromwell – Britain’s new ruling family. He used his financial resources to make substantial loans to Cromwell’s government to cover its day-to-day running costs and keep the wheels of state turning. In fact, it is likely that the Cromwellian regime depended more upon Noell for ready cash and credit than upon any other individual. Not only that, Noell acted as private money-lender to Protector Oliver himself. Noell’s status as Cromwell’s personal paymaster rendered him (in Povey’s words) ‘considerable everywhere…a person of the most spacious interest of any merchant or citizen [in England]’ (British Library, Add. ms 11411, ff. 41v, 65v.).

Noell’s money bought him political influence. He and Povey were closely involved in directing government policy on the Caribbean colonies, particularly Barbados. And Noell played a leading part in organising and financing Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ of 1655 against the Spanish colony of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). One well-informed observer identified Noell as ‘he who suggested the design of the West Indies’ to Cromwell.

In the event, the Western Design was a fiasco – partly because profiteering by Noell and other contractors had deprived the expedition of vital supplies and equipment. Repulsed from Hispaniola with heavy losses, Cromwell’s troops took Jamaica as a consolation prize. Not that Noell was complaining. He had taken his usual cut regardless, and he was further rewarded with a grant from Cromwell of 20,000 acres on England’s new colony. The seizure of Jamaica would provide a massive boost to the English sugar-industry and to the slave trade that sustained it.

Noell’s plantation in Barbados was well-supplied with enslaved Africans to work the sugar-canes. But it was what he euphemistically termed his ‘Christian servants’ on the island, and the circumstances of their presence there, that landed him in trouble with his fellow MPs following his election for Stafford to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in 1659. Noell was forced to defend himself against accusations in the House that he had violated English ‘liberties’ as a contractor for transporting royalist prisoners to indentured servitude on Barbados. The victims of his ‘most unchristian and barbarous usage’ alleged that they been ‘bought and sold…from one planter to another…as horses and beasts’ (Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J. T. Rutt (1828), iv. 255-73). Noell admitted transporting prisoners to the island, but denied that he had effectively sold them into slavery or that they had been harshly treated. Indeed, he claimed that labour conditions for indentured servants on Barbados were better than those of the ‘common husbandman here’. The really hard work, the ‘grinding at the [sugar]-mills and attending at the furnaces or digging in the scorching island’, was mostly undertaken by African slaves, he insisted – and as he well knew, no one in the Commons cared about them.

Noel shrugged off his grilling in the House, and he would emerge from the downfall of the protectorate and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 similarly unscathed. Pepys was surprised in 1662 to hear that Noell had been knighted, but he conceded that the former Cromwellian was still ‘a very useful man’ (Pepys Diary ed. Latham, Matthews, iii. 190.) In 1663, Noell invested heavily in England’s foremost slave-trading venture, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, and he and Povey lobbied the crown hard during the early 1660s for the establishment of a royal-sponsored West Indian company ‘for the better regulating and improving of foreign plantations’(British Library, Egerton ms 2395, ff. 107-12, 270-2; Add. ms 22920, f. 22.). Noell’s debts at his death in 1665 amounted to over £30,000 – millions in today’s money – and included the sum of £1,747 he owed ‘on a contract’ for slaves (London Metropolitan Archives, CLA/002/01/002, f. 156v; CLA/002/02/01/0500.).

Through his loans and counsel to the Cromwellian regime, Noell did more than anyone of his day to draw the state into the hitherto largely private business of colonisation and trade in the Atlantic. Securing Britain’s base in the Caribbean would prove vital in the march to global empire and represents Cromwell’s, and Noell’s, most enduring legacy to the nation – one that we are still struggling to come to terms with today.

D.S.

Further reading:

The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. R. Latham, W. Matthews (Oxford, 1971).

The Correspondence of Henry Cromwell, 1655-9 ed. P. Gaunt (Camden Society ser. 5, xxxi).

Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J. T. Rutt (1828), iv. 255-73; available online at https://www.british-history.ac.uk/burton-diaries

As noted in the first blog, the transportation of slaves from West Africa grew proportionally with the development of the Caribbean as an important component of the English colonial economy; and as noted in the second, there was a lively political discourse in 1640s and 50s England centred on liberties and slavery, even if much of it was rhetorical. Only on occasion did the compartmentalized worlds of English liberties and overseas slavery collide in Parliament, much to the discomfort of MPs.

One such episode came in March 1659. Unhelpfully to the Cromwellian government, the chairman of the committee of grievances, Thomas Tyrrell MP, brought before the House a petition by Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, two men claiming to speak for 70 more ‘freeborn people of this nation’. They had been transported in 1655 to Barbados for their part in a royalist rising in the west of England. Their petition described their nearly six-week voyage from Plymouth to the island, where as ‘the goods and chattels’ of English government officials they had been sold, each for over half a ton of sugar, and put to work in the sugar mills and furnaces. They had been transported, as the custom was with most white labourers sent to the colonies, as indentured servants, a status which was supposed to offer them certain protected conditions of service.

Indentured servitude was the dominant form of master-servant relations in the West Indies outside slavery. In most respects this form of service encouraged grossly uneven bargains favouring the masters, but English servants without capital secured a passage to an overseas region of economic growth otherwise completely beyond their means. No doubt a minority made good in the West Indies.

The 1659 petitioners complained that whatever assurances had been given them in 1655, in fact they had been sold into slavery. The petition provoked a range of reactions in the chamber when it was read. A number of serving MPs had been involved in suppressing the 1655 rising, and had pertinent things to say about the circumstances of the transportation.

Some reminded colleagues of the threat to the state which the petitioning cavaliers had represented in 1655; others were keen to remind MPs that none were sent to the colonies ‘without their consent’. An old soldier, Richard Browne, won the sympathy of the House when he complained that as a victim of the cavaliers his own petition should be heard instead of theirs. One Member insisted that the lot of the indentured servants was not all that hard – ‘they were civilly used, and had horses to ride on’ – and was keen to point out that in fact the work was mostly done by the black slaves.

More were affronted that exiled cavaliers had been allowed to petition at all, and some republicans in the House applauded that; but the leading republican, Sir Henry Vane, who incidentally had colonial experience as governor of Massachusetts, 1636-7, argued that hostility to the king’s cause should not blind MPs to the barbarous treatment of the petitioners.

Whatever barely-contained political differences between them simmered away in this Parliament, republicans and rigid Presbyterians could unite in criticism of the Cromwellian government for making slaves of the petitioners. ‘I would have you consider the trade of buying and selling men’, urged the Cornish Presbyterian Hugh Boscawen. Referencing St Paul, whose Roman citizenship had protected him from the fate of slaves in Rome, Boscawen asserted the rule of law and protections of prisoners after trial: ‘A Roman ought not to be beaten. We are miserable slaves if we may not have this liberty secured to us.’ But this fell a long way short of an expression of human rights: it was the degradation of white transportees that appalled him, not the existence of black slavery in Barbados.

Most of the parliamentary day was devoted to this debate, but as with many debates in 1659, this one petered out with nothing resolved. The surviving evidence suggests that as a result of this debate, no perceptions had been modified. A week later, the Presbyterian MP, Arthur Annesley, in a speech complaining about the scale of the national debt, predicted that if nothing was done about it, ‘our children shall … be bond slaves’. This was a speech in the idiom of 1640: the size and cost of government threatened English liberties in England. It would be many decades before brutal slavery beyond England’s shores began to trouble parliamentarians.

S R

Further Reading

Paul Lay, Providence Lost. The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (2020)

Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s bid for Empire (2017)

Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J. T. Rutt (4 vols 1828), available online here