Belle

by Paula Byrne

  The newspapers recorded a poignant aftermath. In the pregnant silence that followed Mansfield’s words, the ‘Negroes in Court … bowed with profound respect to the judges and shaking each other by the hand, congratulated themselves upon their recovery of the rights of human nature and their happy lot that permitted them to breathe the free air of England’.18

  The wider black community was triumphant, and a ball was held for two hundred at a public house to celebrate the victor. A toast was made to Lord Mansfield.

  Meanwhile, the sugar planters were furious. One Jamaican planter predicted that hordes of slaves would immediately make their way to England, copulate with lower-class women, and ‘mongrelise’ the English so that they would eventually look dark-skinned like the Portuguese.19

  The press reported that Mansfield had outlawed slavery in England. The Morning Chronicle spoke of how slaves could now ‘breathe the free air of England’. This would become an essential part of the rhetoric of the abolition movement. William Cowper, in his widely read 1785 poem The Task, invoked the image:

  We have no slaves at home – then why abroad?

  And they themselves, once ferried o’er the wave

  That parts us, are emancipate and loosed.

  Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs

  Receive our air, that moment they are free,

  They touch our country and their shackles fall.

  That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud

  And jealous of the blessing.20

  Though Lord Mansfield did not actually use the phrase ‘breathe the free air’ in his judgement, it was generally felt that the principle had been adhered to. The great abolitionist Thomas Clarkson would later write:

  The great and glorious result of the trial was, that as soon as ever any slave set his foot upon English territory, he became free … the names of the counsellors Davy, Glynn, Hargrave, Mansfield, and Alleyne, ought always to be remembered with gratitude by the friends of this great cause.21

  The Somerset ruling was truly the beginning of the end of a terrible era. Just a month before the case came to court, a black woman, named Bell or Belinda, had been deported from Scotland to Antigua to be sold as a slave as punishment for murdering her baby. She would be the last person to be legally sold back to slavery from the British Isles, though stories abounded (and made their way to Granville Sharp) of slaves still being sold in England many years after the Somerset case.

  But the tide of public opinion had changed. A great moral question had been resolved. On English soil, no man was a slave. Mansfield, whether he liked it or not, was perceived as the man who had made slavery illegal in England. It was the first step towards emancipation.

  Was Mansfield’s ruling affected by his relationship with Dido Belle? She was only a child at the time, though a much-loved child. In his darkest moments he may have contemplated the genuine possibility that she could be abducted in London and sold into West Indian slavery. The owners and merchants, who were furious with him, certainly gossiped that his ruling was affected by his love for Dido. When the impending judgement was being discussed, the owner of one estate in Jamaica remarked that Mansfield would rule against them: ‘No doubt [Somerset] will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.’22

  This gossip about Dido and the Mansfield family’s affection for her is of great significance. The anonymous Jamaican planter and his kind feared – and history would prove their fears well-grounded – that this was the beginning of the end. After confirmation that there could be no such thing as slavery in England, the next step would be the abolition of the slave trade, and ultimately of slavery itself. They could see the argument about freedom on English soil and in English air being extended to English ships, and even British colonial territories.

  The muttering in London about Mansfield’s decision being swayed by his relationship with Dido makes his ruling all the more extraordinary, given how determined he always was to separate the personal from the professional, and to refuse to allow his own prejudices and connections to influence his legal judgements. He had shown this when prosecuting the leaders of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, a ‘painful task’ in the light of his family connections, but one that he had performed without favouritism or leniency, doing his duty ‘with firmness and moderation’.23 Equally, he had experienced the anguish of a slur on his reputation in the business of the alleged toast to the Old Pretender. There would have been many advantages for him in siding with the planters. Nobody could then have said that he was under the influence of little Dido. Mansfield dined with British merchants in his London home (which may be how the Jamaican planter got to hear about Dido’s presence in his household), and we have seen that he included them in his courtroom to advise in many commercial cases, and that he was regarded as being hugely favourable to their economic interests. Yet he did not flinch from coming to the judgement that the gossip-mongers said he would. In doing so he was perceived to have chosen the cause of his own black niece over that of the merchants and planters who had made the nation rich.

  Little wonder that, some years later, Mansfield endeavoured to minimise the impact of his ruling: ‘Nothing more was determined, than that there was no right in the master forcibly to take the slave and carry him abroad.’24 He remained deeply concerned about the public misinterpretation of his ruling. But by then it was too late. Both sides, the slaves and the planters, thought he had made slavery in England illegal.

  A Bristol merchant, John Riddel, wrote to Charles Stewart telling him that he had lost one of his slaves as a result of the ruling: ‘he had rec[eive]d a letter from his uncle Sommerset acquainting him that Lord Mansfield had given them their freedom & he was determined to leave me as soon as I had returned from London which he did without even speaking to me’.25

  Granville Sharp had stayed away from the Somerset trial for fear of antagonising Mansfield. He wrote in his diary that Somerset came to tell him the great news that ‘judgment was today given in his favour’. Sharp noted: ‘Thus ended G. Sharp’s long contest with Lord Mansfield, on the 22nd June, 1772.’ This was not to be.

  11

  The Merchant of Liverpool

  ‘Am I not a man and a brother’: anti-slavery pendant designed by Josiah Wedgwood, now at Kenwood House

  Throughout this large-built Town every Brick is cemented to its fellow Brick by the blood and sweat of Negroes.

  William Bagshaw, 1787

  The cold wind whipped across the River Mersey as young Billy Gregson set off to work as a rope-maker in the town of Liverpool. It may not have been the most glamorous of jobs, but it paid a wage, and rope-makers were very much in demand in a city of shipbuilders. Ships of all sizes lined the Mersey, most of them exporting coal, salt, lead, iron and textiles to Ireland, others carrying vast quantities of cheese to London.1 Billy walked past the Custom House, Blackburne’s saltworks and the glasshouses to reach the ropewalk. Ropewalks were harsh sweatshops, and frequently caught fire, as hemp dust forms an explosive mixture. It was back-breaking, dangerous work, but Billy had plans. One day he would own his own ropewalk, and be his own master.

  Billy Gregson came from humble origins. His father John was a porter, but Billy would rise to become Mayor of Liverpool, and a wealthy merchant and banker. His sons would carry on his legacy. He loved Liverpool, and he never left. It was a place where you could escape your past and recreate yourself. Liverpool, with its mercantile, cosmopolitan edge, looked firmly to the future.

  From its humble origins as a small fishing village, Liverpool had become a large, elegant Georgian town with fine streets and houses, looking out on the River Mersey. It was a booming, lively place, with grand shops, pleasure gardens and parks. It boasted sea baths and a tree-lined ‘Ladies’ Walk’. The Theatre Royal was one of the finest outside London. There were libraries, numerous coffee houses and drinking clubs. One visitor described it as ‘London in miniature’.2 A local guide called it the ‘first
town in the kingdom in point of size and commercial importance, the metropolis excepted’.3

  Perhaps the most impressive building in town was the new Liverpool Exchange, designed by John Wood, now Liverpool Town Hall. By the 1750s, Liverpool’s trade had burgeoned to such an extent that a new town hall was decided upon, both to accommodate the needs of its merchants and as a demonstration of their prosperity. It was to be the heart of the city, town hall, exchange and assembly rooms combined.4

  The Exchange was a huge stone rectangular building constructed around a central courtyard surrounded by Doric colonnades. Most of the building was destroyed by a fire in 1795, and today it is surmounted by a large dome. The interior was multi-purpose, with commercial business on the ground floor, while the higher storeys housed the mayor’s office, courtrooms, council chambers and two elegant ballrooms and drawing rooms. A carved frieze on the exterior illustrates Liverpool’s trading routes and includes lions, crocodiles, elephants. But in the centre of the frieze is a chilling reminder of Liverpool’s guilty past. There, set in stone, alongside the exotic animals, are African faces. Liverpool’s Georgian renaissance, its wealth, architecture and culture, was mostly built on slaves.

  By the mid-eighteenth century the city had made itself the capital of the slave industry, overtaking rival ports London and Bristol to become the most successful slaving port in the Atlantic world, dispatching more than a hundred ships to Africa annually. It is now estimated that in total almost 1.4 million captives were taken from Africa on Liverpool slave ships, with more than 200,000 of them dying during the voyage into slavery.5

  The world’s first commercial wet dock was built in Liverpool in 1715.6 The trade in slaves and ships brought huge economic prosperity to the area, with workers engaged in occupations such as rope-making, shipbuilding, carpentry, ironwork, sailmaking and painting. There was ample work, too, for clerks and runners in the offices of insurance agents, brokers and customs officials. It was a city where men such as Billy Gregson could rise to the top. By the time he was forty he was one of the foremost merchants of Liverpool. He would make his vast fortune in the slave trade, and would be a major figure in one of the most notorious stories surrounding the trade in human flesh.

  Liverpool was ideally situated for exporting manufactured goods to be bartered for slaves in Africa: it had excellent transport connections, principally through rivers like the Mersey and Weaver, and through the growing canal network to Manchester, Lancashire and beyond to Yorkshire, and south to the growing industrial Midlands. Textiles came from Lancashire and Yorkshire, copper and brass goods from Warrington, north Cheshire and Staffordshire, guns and ammunition from Birmingham. Metal handcuffs, leg irons, chains and manila hemp were exported to be used on slave ships and in sugar plantations.

  Liverpool began custom-building slave ships around 1750. They were expensive, and it was not unusual for slaving voyages to be funded by syndicates of ‘part-owners’ who invested a portion of the necessary capital to buy and/or fit out a ship, in return for a percentage of the profits from the return cargo. Venture syndicates like these also ensured that the cost of failure was shared.

  The slave trade relied heavily on credit, and its risks meant a growth in maritime insurance, focused at Lloyds of London. Regional banking emerged at precisely this time, with Liverpool slave-trading merchants forming Heywoods Bank, which later became part of Barclays. By the time Billy Gregson became Mayor of Liverpool in 1762, he owned his own ropewalk and was an insurance broker involved in two firms.7 By 1779 these two insurance partnerships had dissolved. Gregson moved into banking, and had his own bank by 1790. His four sons followed him into the business, while his only daughter married into another Liverpool merchant family.

  Tragedy struck the family in 1781, when Billy’s eldest son, also named William, died on passage to Lisbon, where he was going to recover his health.8 That very same year, via a syndicate, Gregson bought a slave ship called the Zorg.

  12

  A Riot in Bloomsbury

  The Gordon Riots, 1780

  On Friday, 2 June 1780 a young aristocrat glanced into his looking-glass and made the final adjustments to his hat, pinning a silk blue cockade to its brim. He then set off for St George’s Fields, where he found a crowd beginning to gather. Its members wore the same blue rosettes, and carried large blue flags with the words ‘No Popery’ emblazoned on them. They cheered when they saw their leader. He was Lord George Gordon, a radical politician and head of the London Protestant Association, and in his hand was a petition for the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which had removed some of the restrictions on Catholics, and which many saw as dangerous. The crowd, by now between 40,000 and 60,000 strong, marched on the Houses of Parliament. As they went, their numbers swelled. They attempted to force their way into the House of Commons, but without success.

  There followed an orgy of plunder and arson in London. Ignatius Sancho, one of London’s most famous Africans, had his own shop, selling sugar, tobacco and tea, at 19 Charles Street, Westminster, just a few hundred yards from the Houses of Parliament. He was shutting up at five o’clock on the evening of 6 June when the ‘lunatic’ Gordon and the mob rushed past his shop with a clatter of swords and shrieks of ‘No popery!’ Sancho commented on ‘the worse than Negro barbarity of the populace’.1

  The rioters sacked and burned religious buildings. They stormed Newgate Prison and released its inmates. Then they turned to private houses and individuals. High on their list was Lord Mansfield. And they wanted him dead. They took a rope to hang him with.

  Mansfield was known for his religious toleration, once stating, ‘My desire to disturb no man for conscience’s sake is pretty well known.’2 He was thought to have been influenced by his surrogate father, the poet Alexander Pope. Pope’s parents were converts to Roman Catholicism, and Pope saw himself as a Catholic humanist. There was a common perception that Mansfield favoured Dissenters and Roman Catholics, and some accused him of being not only a Jacobite but a Papist. At the time of the Catholic Relief Act there had been numerous caricatures associating him with Papist sympathisers. The rioters had made him one of their chief targets, and they intended to show no mercy.

  In the early hours of Tuesday, 6 June, a mob marched to Mansfield’s townhouse in Bloomsbury. They smashed the windows, broke down the door and stormed through the house, flinging his elegant furniture into the street, where they made a bonfire and set it alight. While the crowd outside chanted ‘Huzza’, the intruders hurled out manuscripts, notebooks, papers and deeds from Mansfield’s precious law library. They ransacked the library shelves, flinging thousands of volumes into the flames. The fine pictures that hung on his walls were grabbed and torched. As a final act of insult, they hurled his wig and court robes into the fire, again shouting ‘No Popery!’3 They looted Mansfield’s fine wine cellar, distributing the bottles to the populace. Some of the looters made off with Lady Mansfield’s brand-new set of china. Others took silver and tried to sell it to the nearest pawnbrokers.

  Lady Mansfield and her adopted daughter Elizabeth escaped through the back door. Newspapers failed to mention Dido’s presence in the house – as so often, she was airbrushed out of history. But there is no reason to doubt her presence, given her role as companion to young Elizabeth. The young women must have been utterly terrified, and have dreaded what might happen to their adoptive father: Mansfield refused to be cowed, and resolved to stay put.

  His loyal manservant Dowse knew better. He could see how angry the crowd had become. They were carrying blazing torches, stopping every carriage in the street, smashing their windows and insisting that those within declare their allegiance with an oath of ‘No Popery’. Dowse insisted that his Lordship leave without delay, and begged him to disguise himself in an old greatcoat. In his hurry, Mansfield forgot to change his wig, and was immediately recognised. ‘There goes that old rogue Mansfield,’ the mob cried, and ran to spread the word. Mansfield remained cool, waited for his opportunity and managed to esc
ape ‘without being thrown into the flames’.

  Furious that Mansfield had escaped, the rioters set off for Kenwood to torch his house, but the militia was waiting for them, and ‘received them so fiercely that they desisted’. The man who had sent the troops in was none other than Elizabeth Murray’s father, Lord Stormont.4 He had returned from his ambassadorial posting in Paris by this time, and was now a government minister. At the height of the riots he wrote to King George III with a report from the front line, explaining that his uncle’s townhouse had been ransacked and his own London home was threatened. Furthermore, ‘Knowing that Kenwood is threatened with the same Destruction I have wrote to Lord Amherst for a Detachment of Light Horse to be sent there to guard the Avenues.’5 He clearly knew not only that the house that would one day be his, but also his own daughter and her cousin, were in dire danger. Fortunately, though, there was some local loyalty to the Mansfields in Hampstead. The proprietors of the Spaniards Inn, close to Kenwood, kept the mob supplied with ale until the dragoons arrived to protect the house.

  It was generally agreed that Lord Chief Justice Mansfield had been one of the prime targets of the rage of the mob, and that in destroying the papers and manuscripts of the great judge, ‘the whole work and labour of his life’,6 they had created an irreparable loss. If there ever was a written speech for Somerset’s case, it would have gone up in flames that night.

  The army was called in to quell the riots, by the end of which around five hundred people were estimated to have died. Thirty of the rioters were executed, and Lord George Gordon was clapped into the Tower and tried for high treason. Thanks to a strong defence by his cousin Lord Erskine, he was acquitted on the grounds that he had had no treasonable intent. Remarkably, Lord Mansfield presided over the trial, and steered the jury to consider that the circumstances were favourable to Gordon, instructing them that if there was any doubt he should be set free. Mansfield waived his right to indemnity for his losses – which were reported to have exceeded £30,000. He explained that, ‘Besides what is irreparable, my pecuniary loss is great. I apprehended no danger and therefore took no precaution. But, how great soever that loss may be, I think it does not become me to claim or expect reparation from the state.’7