Indeed, it is hard to see how the company could have made such profits without doing business with the slave traders who continued play a powerful role in West African commerce after 1807. That Matthew was chairman of the London Committee of Portuguese Bondholders shows that he had close links with a slaving nation. The goods that Forster and Smith is on record as taking out to Africa to trade for palm oil and other commodities are identical to those fingered in contemporary abolitionist reports as destined for the slave trade: iron, guns and powder, “machinery,” and cotton piece goods. Guns and powder could have been used on slave raids or in slave ships. Iron and machinery could have been euphemisms for slave manacles and collars. The latter continued to be openly manufactured for export in Birmingham long after 1807, according to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter in 1840. Cotton cloth was so popular in West Africa that there was an official exchange rate between it and the local slave price.
No historian of West African trade has so far been able to trace the origins of Forster and Smith—or indeed the identity of Smith. According to Martin Lynn, “The origins of the Forster & Smith partnership are unclear and there is no evidence as to who the ‘Smith’ was.” It is possible that the firm began life as a straight slaving operation and later covered its tracks. That Matthew’s family had an estate in the West Indies adds to that impression.
In her memoir of Letitia, Emma Roberts portrayed Maclean as a human rights crusader. No one, she averred, could appreciate better than L.E.L. his “chivalric energy” in suppressing the slave trade, his “philanthropic and unceasing endeavours to improve the condition of the natives of Africa,” and his efforts “to prevent the horrid waste of human life by the barbarian princes in his neighbourhood”—an allusion to the local practice of ritual executions. However, Roberts’s remarks, designed to protect her own role in encouraging Letitia’s marriage, were an intervention in a preexisting propaganda war. The truth was somewhat more complex.
Caught between eighteenth-century laissez-faire and Victorian hegemony, Maclean is a liminal, transitional figure, just like Letitia herself. His story too is mired in slipperiness and spin. His voluminous dispatches to the Colonial Office, now in the National Archives, are often as hard to interpret as the ambiguous poetry of L.E.L., their relationship to the truth as contentious. He frequently resorts to legalese and hairsplitting. Like Letitia’s, his survival depended on his capacity for equivocation.
Maclean proved himself a skillful tribal mediator in the Palaver Room at Cape Coast Castle, but he was much less confident in dealing with his remoter British masters. With them, he was placed in as impossible a position as Letitia was in her different world in London. She had to play the innocent in some circles and the sexualized woman in others. He had to keep both local tribal leaders and Forster and Smith happy, while convincing the Colonial Office of his commitment to abolition.
From his own perspective, Maclean’s career was far from certain, even despite his local successes in promoting peace between the Fante and Ashanti. In his youth he had joined the army in the uncertain period after Waterloo, and had only been commissioned into the Royal African Corps, then regarded as the last resort of no-hopers, after a failed earlier career in two other regiments. London expected Maclean to police its antislavery laws, but its mandarins did little to make him feel appreciated. They constantly required him to defend himself against suspicion and paid him a pittance. In contrast, he was love-bombed by Matthew Forster and the merchant committee.
Maclean’s relationship with Matthew offers curious parallels with that between Letitia and Jerdan. It was ambiguous as to who was the client and who was the patron. In both cases, the one who held the economic power made a great play of flattering the public figure on whom he depended. That Matthew Forster was two decades older than Maclean adds to the parallel.
Two surviving artifacts, now in a private collection, reveal the extent to which Matthew and his fellow merchants were determined to bludgeon Maclean into submission through flattery. The first is a portrait that must have been commissioned during Maclean’s London sojourn in 1836–38. It shows the governor in his red army coat and grand gold epaulettes. In his hand is a scroll on which appears the elephant and castle crest of the African Company of Merchants, together with the date, 1751, at which that organization was incorporated. Given that the company was disbanded in 1821 because it was too identified with the by then outlawed slave trade, no symbol could indicate more forcefully that Maclean was being presented as in hock to the merchants, who continued to feel connected to their ancestral organization. The governor’s oddly sensitive face contrasts with his uptight uniform. His chin is awkwardly off-center in his collar.
The second artifact is yet more telling, an even clearer indication that Matthew Forster’s efforts to cultivate the governor knew no bounds. A crushingly over-the-top gift, it is a silver table centerpiece of grandiose proportions, imposing and highly wrought. Over two feet high, and set on a mirrored ground designed to make it sparkle all the more, it consists of two tiered bowls, with elaborate foliate decoration, held up by undulating plant stems and negro putti. At the top is the elephant and castle crest of the African Company of Merchants, surrounded by flags bearing the names of the various British forts on the West African coast (see plates).
The inscription states that it was given to Maclean by the merchant committee with gratitude, although it gives no date. On examination, the hallmark reveals it was made by Garrard’s in 1836, the year Maclean arrived in London and met Letitia. The extraordinary craftsmanship suggests that it was designed by the leading silver sculptor of the day, Edmund Cotterill, who worked for Robert Garrard at that time. In 1842–43, he was commissioned by Queen Victoria to make a centerpiece for Prince Albert, this time in silver gilt, at a fee of £1,200. This outsize bauble would have cost far more than Maclean’s annual income.
The inscription pays testimony to Maclean’s support of the merchants. It ends with a capitalized flourish stating that “victims were sacrificed in sight of the Castle walls”—an allusion to the governor’s attempts to discourage the practice of ritual killings, which he in fact managed with some diplomatic skill. Clearly Matthew was keen to promote Maclean as a force for moral regeneration and civilization. In reality, the West Africa merchant community took a much more relativistic line toward “human sacrifice.” In his memoirs, the Forster and Smith agent Brodie Cruickshank expressed acceptance of such “time-honoured customs, however repulsive they might be to an European,” pointing out that public executions still took place in England.
George Maclean’s uncomfortable position, caught as he was between the merchants and central government, is amply demonstrated by his dispatches to the Colonial Office. He frequently plays semantics as he ducks and dives over the allegations that he was willfully turning a blind eye to corruption. The 1824 legislation was so poorly drafted that it contained its own loophole. To be guilty of trading with slave traders, the defendant had to have “prior knowledge” of the eventual use to which his goods or services were destined. That could easily be denied, and frequently was.
Maclean himself often resorted to using ignorance as a defense especially in response to reports that slave ships docked at Cape Coast to buy supplies en route to picking up cargoes of slaves farther down the coast. During one such later controversy over a Portuguese ship, the Dos Amigos, he even declared himself ignorant of what constituted equipment for slaving, as he had received no instructions from the Colonial Office in London on the matter. London should surely have been able to rely on him—the man on the spot—for such information.
Maclean was less slippery when it came to a further piece of British legislation that came in during his tenure: the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. This law made not just slave trading but the institution of slavery itself unlawful in most areas of British control. Maclean made few bones about the impossibility of stamping it out. Indeed his incarce
ration and flogging of Kobina, Hansen’s slave, in 1835 suggests that he regarded maintaining the property rights of local slave owners as crucial to asserting his authority on the ground.
Varying degrees of slavery—including debt bondage or indentured labor, which was known by the euphemism of “pawnage”—were an age-old institution in West Africa, where there was little tradition of a wage economy. Domestic work was done by house slaves, although their situation as feudal family retainers was not dehumanized like that of plantation slaves in the Americas.
How could Maclean possibly make peace with the local people while at the same time setting himself against their traditions, which the Europeans who had settled in the area, such as Hansen (probably a Dane), had also adopted? It is hard not to suspect that Maclean’s cordial relations with the Ashanti were partly derived from a policy of minimal interference in their slave-trading activities. A young British naval officer, sent to police the West African ocean for slave ships in the early 1840s, was shocked by Maclean’s workaday attitude to slavery. He noted with amazement that the governor did not turn a hair when acting as executor for the will of a local merchant of British origin whose estate included substantial slaveholdings.
According to Maclean’s 1962 biographer G. E. Metcalfe, Maclean was alleged to have held slaves himself. Indeed, it is hard to see how any domestic work could have been done at the castle without them, although the workers there were referred to as “prisoners.” A proportion of those incarcerated in the former slave dungeons were there for debt. It would not be far-fetched to speculate that the cash-strapped governor had bought their labor on at a discount from a previous local creditor. In his memoirs, Brodie Cruickshank, the Forster and Smith agent who acted as Maclean’s secretary in Letitia’s time, frequently complained about the double standards that made what was acceptable back home indefensible in Africa. Imprisonment for debt, admittedly without hard labor, was still common in England.
One irony rarely mentioned at the time was that even so-called legitimate commerce in West Africa could not have functioned without local slave labor to work the palm plantations, and to transport commodities, which could only be done by bearers through the roadless bush. In 1849, Cruickshank openly proposed that it was necessary “to legalise the Slave Trade to a certain extent” because commodities could not, in his view, be “profitably produced…without slave labour being sanctioned.”
Maclean, then, was caught up in the slavery controversy throughout the period of his relations with Letitia and beyond. Initially, the Colonial Office grudgingly accepted his assurances that the merchants were not contravening the law under his watch. The in-house government lawyer at the time was Virginia Woolf’s grandfather Sir James Stephen. It took years for this upright intellectual with abolitionist sympathies to acknowledge that the wily merchants were actively lying when they reassured him that their aims were pure. Stephen was as bemused as his famous granddaughter when it came to the dark heart of pre-Victorian corruption. Not until 1840 did he finally conclude, “There can be no doubt that the merchants at Cape Coast, including among them the members of the Council, have been systematically engaged in violating, to a large extent, the Slave Trade Abolition Act.” As a result, the Colonial Office finally decided to send out a government inspector, Richard Madden, to Cape Coast to investigate the allegations.
Back in 1836, we return to Letitia as she is preparing for the dinner party at which she will meet her future husband. Far from inspiring hero worship, Maclean’s dour dispatches about his expedition against the rebel tribe initially left Letitia cold. She later admitted to Brodie Cruickshank that she was relieved to find Maclean younger and more fashionable-looking than his serviceable prose had suggested. Indeed, Maclean’s careful, legalistic communiqués to the Colonial Office bear out Bulwer’s impression of him as a “dry, reserved, hard-headed Scotchman, of indefatigable activity—not of much perceptible talent.” Maclean lacked the very quality that Letitia had in abundance: charisma.
Nevertheless, Letitia set about hooking the governor from the start, wound up by her friends like the clockwork doll in Hoffmann’s tale. According to Katherine Thomson, she dressed carefully for the dinner party, accessorizing her gown to flatter the Scotsman she was about to meet. “In her enthusiasm she wore a Scotch Tartan scarf over her shoulders. She had a ribbon in her hair, and a sash also of the Maclean Tartan; and she set out for the soiree in great spirits, resolved on thus complimenting the hero.” She had clearly scoured the haberdashery shops well in advance with Mrs. Thomson at her elbow.
Maclean is universally remembered as socially ill at ease in London. Mrs. Thomson recalled that “his dark-gray eyes were seldom raised to meet that of another.” But Letitia, who had made flirtation her life’s work, did all she could to draw him out.
Over dinner she made him the center of attention. She asked him about “African habits, African horrors, and African wonders—the sea, the coast, the desert, the climate, and the people.” Perhaps Kobina’s story featured in his answers. One can imagine her looking winningly at Maclean, then casting a semisatirical eye over her own Scottish getup as if to say, We both know this is absurd but I am doing it for you. Katherine Thomson later described Letitia’s manipulative charm. Her technique was to gush so exorbitantly that she created a secret bond of humor with the person she was flattering.
The governor could hold his own in dealing with seasoned Ashanti warlords, but he was, by his own admission, “unaccustomed…to ladies.” Englishwomen of Letitia’s conversational élan were outside his experience. Moreover, he was not immune to the cult of literary fame. Letitia later discovered that “portraits of distinguished authors” were hung on the walls of Cape Coast Castle.
Maclean was also, as Katherine Thomson coyly recalled, “much struck by her appearance.” By 1836, whatever personal attractions Letitia had ever possessed were in reality fading fast. The publisher Henry Vizetelly found her “most unattractive…a pale-faced, plain-looking little woman, with lustreless eyes, and somewhat dowdily dressed, whom no amount of enthusiasm could have idealized into a sentimental poetess.” Another witness, who also met her around this time, remarked on her “plainness of looks and diminutiveness of form.” She looks tired and drawn in a portrait made in 1837, her hair slicked down under a band.
Tired and drawn: Letitia in 1837 by John William Wright
Yet Letitia knew that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. She had spent a lifetime perfecting her talents for audience manipulation. Maclean was smitten. Further meetings followed at the Hampstead mansion under Matthew’s watchful eye. The Liddiards invited Letitia and Maclean to go to Hamlet with them on January 13, a bad performance by an American actor, apparently, but a “pleasant evening” nonetheless. By now, Maclean was getting friendly with Whittington too, who joined his sister and the governor for a walk in Hyde Park with the Liddiards on February 14. Maclean then left to pay an extended visit to his relatives in Scotland, but a provisional understanding between the couple had apparently been reached.
Now that her marriage and departure were on the horizon, Letitia’s first thought was for Whittington, to whom she had been bonded since childhood. She was concerned as to how her brother, who had lost his curacy, would cope without her. When the secretaryship of the Literary Fund, a writers’ charity, fell vacant, she focused her energies on getting it for him.
Election to the post required the support of as many high-status signatories as could be levied. With the help of her patroness Lady Blessington, Letitia succeeded in signing up a host of grand names, including that of the former prime minister Sir Robert Peel. The list of powerful, titled men Letitia secured confirms that Matthew Forster would not have been wrong to think she had useful contacts. Her biographer Blanchard later pointed to the willingness of elite men to offer their support as proof of her unblemished position in society. It was nothing of the sort. Rather, it was a throwback to the courtesan�
�s traditional informal access to male power.
The ever-present Jerdan had long since been involved with the Literary Fund and was on the committee. He also added his name to Whittington’s slate and mustered his contacts. He must have been as keen as Letitia was to settle her penniless brother.
“You are canvassing for us do let me work for you—send me any books,” Letitia told Jerdan on March 8, 1837, offering her services in lieu as an unpaid reviewer for the Gazette. Her faith in Jerdan’s influence, however, proved as misplaced as ever. The following month, the Literary Fund instituted an inquiry into his suspected misappropriation of funds destined for the charity.
During this period, Letitia was less and less able to keep her social mask in place. Henry Chorley, of the Gazette’s rival The Athenaeum, witnessed its slippage when he called on her to offer his support for Whittington’s candidacy. “It was, for both of us, an awkward visit,” he recalled:
She received me with an air of astonishment and bravado, talking with a rapid and unrefined frivolity, the tone and taste of which were most distasteful, and the flow difficult to interrupt. When, at last, I was allowed to explain my errand, the change was instant and painful. She burst into a flood of hysterical tears.
Letitia had previously published anonymous barbs against Chorley. She burst into tears because the sympathy of an erstwhile enemy made it humiliatingly clear that she was no longer considered a player but an object of pity. By 1837, male litterateurs had belatedly discovered a new vein of patronizing compassion for the woman they had previously regarded as unsexed. As Leigh Hunt put it, “I believe she is very timid at least, & lives in perpetual fear of what the world will say of her. Besides, she has suffered, & is, I understand, very generous to her relations; and for these reasons, I think you will appreciate, that the good ought to comfort & praise her as much as they can.”
L.E.L. Page 27