by Julia Markus
An integral part of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s early life was the fact that her own father suffered emotionally and financially when the will of his grandfather Edward of Cinnamon Hill was contested during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. What has never been emphasized is that all of the contesters were illegitimate, and what has never been mentioned is that six of them early on were quadroon. From the illegitimate Caucasian branch of the family, Richard Barrett led the legal battles; Thomas Peters represented the quadroon.
Edward of Cinnamon Hill had done his best to avoid this eventuality. He had spent more than four years creating his will after the last of his sons, George Goodin and Samuel, had died. He was generous to Samuel’s illegitimate sons, though he never referred to them as his grandchildren. He left his fortune to his surviving child, his daughter Elizabeth Barrett Moulton, and to his legitimate grandchildren Edward (the poet’s father), Samuel (her uncle), and Sarah (who died young).
Edward of Cinnamon Hill had a stipulation in his legacy. It was that his daughter Elizabeth Barrett Moulton and her children add another Barrett to their last name. In generation after generation of Elizabeth Barretts, his daughter became the first Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett. Her husband, the poet’s grandfather Charles Moulton, would have to agree to this change, and he did. By 1789, seven years after she married Charles, her marriage had failed. Charles Moulton became a lieutenant of the Trelawny Militia around that time. Sixteen years later he was probably a slave merchant in New York. The will of Edward of Cinnamon Hill alluded time and time again that his daughter’s inheritance was hers, not her husband’s, and that she and her children were living and could continue to live on her father’s estates “at all times whilst she lives separate and apart from her husband or at any time during widowhood.”
Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, the poet’s father, seemed never to have had more than a biological father. One wonders how he would have felt with Moulton as his last name, particularly since his father continued to procreate and to give his children familiar Barrett Christian names. In England, in the county of Cambridge, Frances Petite bore Charles Moulton two children, named Henrietta and Charles Washington. They were granted use of the Moulton name before Charles left England and returned to Jamaica. In Middlesex, he had another mistress, Louisa Cohen of Portland Road, who bore him two sons, William and Samuel. This family lived eight miles north of Richmond, Yorkshire, where Edward’s mother, the first Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett, lived with Mary Trepsack, “Treppy.”
By the 1810s, Charles settled down, purchased Wakefield Jamaica, and lived with Jane Clark of St. Ann, “a free woman of color who bore him a son, James Moulton.” As Jeannette Marks succinctly phrased it in her study of the Jamaican Barretts, “The vital records for the living Charles Moulton continue, many years after the Barretts were content to have it understood he was dead.” He did die in Jamaica in July 1819, and Charles John, “Stormie,” because he bore the same Christian name as his grandfather Charles, was awarded a thousand pounds when he reached maturity on December 21, 1835.
Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, the poet’s father, was born in 1785, the second child and first son of Elizabeth Barrett and Charles Moulton. He enjoyed a privileged early childhood as the grandson of a man of great wealth in the Caribbean. In her book on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Forster described the beauty of Cinnamon Hill. Later owned by Johnny Cash, “It stood, and still stands, halfway up a hillside rising above the coastal plain stretching from Montego Bay to Saltmarsh Bay. Surrounded by trees, it has even thicker woods and higher hills behind, and in front, far off, the long rollers of the Caribbean break in a thin white line on the coral reefs.… In Edward’s day there was an English lawn lovingly maintained in front of the house and a garden in which English lilacs mixed with the spice trees.…” Still, she concluded, “No child, however privileged or protected, could escape knowing about the savageries of slavery. The sugar cane, its green swathes forever rustling in the trade wind breezes, was harvested at the cost of floggings and brutal suppression. Thirty-nine lashes of a thick cattle whip was the standard punishment for any misdemeanour and spiked dog collars could be forced onto slaves who had tried to escape. More haunting than any of the bird songs was the long, mournful, eerie blast on the conch shell that signified the hunt for an escaped negro. Edward, leaving this life at the age of seven, had memories which were impressionistic, fragmented, heavily influenced by his own immature perceptions.”
As was normal for a child of colonial wealth, Moulton Barrett was separated from his mother and sent to England for his education, enduring the two-month boat trip at the age of seven along with his siblings, Sam and Sarah. (Sarah was the subject of Thomas Lawrence’s famous portrait of the child, Pinkie.) Edward sent his mother a souvenir of that trip—his tear-stained glove, a story that would one day impress his daughter Elizabeth. (The small glove of good linen is today in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library.) Her own mother, Mary Moulton Barrett, gave it to the future poet because she “expressed a wish to possess this glove.” And Mary went on to explain: “Papa when on board the ship Elizabeth sailing for England in the year 1792 gave this glove, with his tears, to Doctor Archer, with strict charges to deliver it unto Betsey’s [his mother’s] own hands.”
Arriving in England the children must have felt as dismal as the weather, as well as confused by a society so completely antithetical to the West Indies they had known. Moulton Barrett, the future country gentleman, did not adapt readily to this life. Sent to Harrow, he soon withdrew. According to Robert Browning, the reason was that he fagged for a boy who beat him for burning toast. This was a traumatic experience for him. What must it have been like for one raised in utmost luxury at Cinnamon Hill, the young master of his own slaves, the heir to incredible wealth, to face the cold halls of Harrow, and to find himself a slave, a fag, whipped if he disobeyed an upper-classman. His mother had arrived in England by then and, according to Jeannette Marks, had withdrawn him to be educated at home. Edward went on to Trinity College in Cambridge in 1801 but didn’t take a degree.
During all this time in England he spent holidays at the home of wealthy business associates of his grandfather, the Graham-Clarkes. John Graham-Clarke was at the time the guardian of Thomas Peters and the other quadroon children of George Goodin Barrett. This dead uncle of Moulton Barrett’s was the first in any known will to leave property to such children. Others bought their children’s freedom and stopped there. George Goodin had made his quadroon son Thomas, as well as his father, Edward of Cinnamon Hill, executor of his will. Moulton Barrett could not have frequented the Graham-Clarkes’ as much as he did without being constantly reminded of the mixed blood of his first cousins.
By the time he was nineteen, he wished to marry the Graham-Clarkes’ oldest daughter, Mary, who was twenty-four. They had known each other for years. He was so close to the Graham-Clarke household that he seemed in spirit if not in blood to be continuing a Barrett propensity to mate within the family. His guardian, James Scarlett, at first thought him too young, but when he met Mary he was charmed and considered Edward quite lucky. In marriage and within the circle of his own wife and children, Moulton Barrett came into his own, developing into the country gentleman and patriarch that has come down to us.
JOHN GRAHAM-CLARKE (1736–1818) C.A. 1795. EBB’s maternal grandfather, who was a businessman and merchant, had industrial interests, plantations in Jamaica, and trading ships in the West Indies. From his first wife he inherited a brewery. He had nine children by his second wife, the oldest of whom, Mary, married EBB’s father.
ARABELLA GRAHAM-CLARKE (1760?–1827) CA. 1785. EBB’s maternal grandmother and John Graham-Clarke’s younger second wife.
Why didn’t Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett want his children to marry? One reason given has been that he desired to keep his children at home and under his control. This was certainly true. Another has been that he had an unease about his children’s sexua
lity. A father who insists on his daughters’ purity is not an unfamiliar type. One who insists that his sons not marry is a unique type. If it were abstinence the father required of the sons, Jamaica was hardly the place to send them on business for months or years at a time. Beautiful and compliant women were for the asking, not to mention the curse of generations of proper planters, men and women, demon rum—and opium. The shift from Wimpole Street to Cinnamon Hill, from the harsh Atlantic to the soft trade winds of the Caribbean, was sybaritic. His hard-drinking son Sam had not escaped the temptations open to him in a transplanted African culture just loosened from the bonds of slavery. He died there. Edward knew well what Jamaica implied to the white men of his class. So did his eldest daughter. At the time of her honeymoon she feared Stormie’s departure. Wasn’t there another career he could undertake? If it was his sons’ virginity the father demanded, if that was what constituted what Elizabeth called his one area of peculiarity, he certainly insisted they travel to the wrong place.
The absolute consequence of not allowing your children to marry is having no legitimate grandchildren, no legal heirs. Eleven children reached adulthood. Had each had half the number of children his or her parents bore, there’d be the possibility of sixty-six grandchildren. It seems that what Edward did not want to do was to carry on the Moulton Barrett line. When Bro, the first son, was born, the Negroes in Jamaica were given a holiday; when Henrietta was born, Treppy reported back to Elizabeth Barrett Waite Williams that the family was grieved at the birth of another girl. The male line, as Jeannette Marks pointed out, was important enough to be counted: Septimus (Sette), Octavius (Occy)—eight Barrett sons. This was not, early on, a line bent on extinction. What we have by the time the children were adults is the singularly peculiar fact that a Victorian father and the surviving heir of Edward of Cinnamon Hill not only wished his daughters to be spinsters, but wished all of his sons to remain bachelors. He did not want them to have, in terms of his grandfather’s will, legitimate heirs “out of their own bodies.”
Why? Moulton Barrett might very well have either learned after his children were born or become increasingly concerned with the possibility that he had mixed blood. After his wife died in 1828, and his beloved mother soon after, did Treppy have more tales to tell? Certainly, during the long years of the contested will, Edward was brought in daily reminders of the mixed blood in the Barrett line, the underside of the system that brought him wealth. Yet it was the lineage of his father, Charles Moulton, that affected his own.
Jeannette Marks concluded that although there was some possibility of African blood in Robert Browning’s line, there was no official documentation that Charles Moulton, Edward’s father, Elizabeth’s grandfather, had black blood. She tells us that Elizabeth’s inclusion among the writers who have such blood, in What the Negro Thinks (1929) by Robert Russa Moton, for example, was erroneous. Then she quotes a section from the love letters, one that has been there to read since the end of the nineteenth century. Where is the scholar or historian or biographer who has not read these words—including this writer. Jeannette Marks quotes them in order to overlook them once more, but what they say is quite clear. In the passage, Elizabeth Barrett tells her future husband what he must know. He must know what’s in a name. She called herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, often signed her letters EBB. The oldest legitimate grandchild of Charles Moulton did not use “Moulton.”
“My true initials are E.B.M.B.—my long name, as opposed to my short one, being: . . Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett!—there’s a full length to take away one’s breath!—Christian name . . Elizabeth Barrett:—surname, Moulton Barrett. So long it is, that to make it portable, I fell into the habit of doubling it up & packing it closely, . . & of forgetting that I was a Moulton, altogether. One might well write the alphabet as all four initials. Yet our family-name is Moulton Barrett, & my brothers reproach me sometimes for sacrificing the governorship of an old town in Norfolk with a little honorable verdigris from the Heralds’ Office—As if I cared for the Retrospective Review! Nevertheless it is true that I would give ten towns in Norfolk (if I had them) to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave!—Cursed we are from generation to generation!”
The poet herself believed she had African blood through her grandfather Charles Moulton. And she linked that fact to being “cursed from generation to generation,” a sentiment of her father’s. Rather than being her grandfather’s theoretical heir, she would prefer “to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave!”
Jeannette Marks described the Creoles of mixed blood as often particularly attractive, unusually intelligent, and of a high nervous susceptibility. The irregularity of Elizabeth Barrett’s features, seen clearly in verbal and photographic pictures, is notable—what she herself called her lack of nose, her overgenerous mouth. One can consider the effect of the face, dominated by those deep, searching eyes, as quite exotic. There was nothing in her features to mitigate her own belief in her African blood. One doesn’t see in portraits the dark complexion she and others often described, a complexion she had in common with her father. “I am ‘little and black,’ ” she told Haydon. Anne Thackeray wrote, “She is very small, she is brown …” Thomas Chase described her “dark complexioned face” compared to Robert’s “rather dark complexion.” She was not proud of this lineage “of the blood of the slave.” She was much too close to its ramifications, both in moral and in family matters. Yet in the high pitch of her creative intelligence and her nervous susceptibilities, she may have left the world a body of poetry that to some extent merged disparate cultures into a unique and increasingly radical voice.
The impetus for “The Runaway Slave,” the passion behind it, was a particular evil of slavery. The poem exposed the rapes and mixed blood that resulted, and the psychotic disorientation this could engender. Had Elizabeth, with the eerie closeness of an oldest daughter to a once-devoted father, “written out” her father’s deepest, most unspoken fear? Was there, in her poor father’s peculiar imagination and in his Christian conscience, the possibility that among his grandchildren he might someday be faced with one who was not of the slave master’s race? Was he suffocating that dark-skinned grandchild by not allowing his children the slightest romantic interest?
He had married at nineteen, surrounded by his Creole connections, and begun his family in a mansion of his own imagination at a time when his wealth made his world impenetrable. This was before he understood the dangers of the ongoing lawsuit and while his mother, the Graham-Clarkes, James Scarlett, and perhaps Treppy had some influence over him. As he reached middle age, did he then try, in his accustomed secretive way, to control what he would consider the sins of his own father from working themselves out on another generation?
RICHARD BARRETT (1789–1839). Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett’s illegitimate first cousin, upholder of slavery, and three-time Speaker of the House of Assembly in Jamaica. He died suddenly, perhaps murdered, in the newly emancipated Jamaica of 1839. “A man of talent & violence & some malice, who did what he could, at one time, to trample poor Papa down,” EBB wrote of him on January 12, 1842. “He was a handsome man . . after a fashion.… Still it was a face that I, as a child, did not care to look upon.”
By the 1830s, Moulton Barrett’s world was crumbling. The outlawing of slavery was the death knell to his way of life. In 1833 his cousin Richard Barrett, the prominent Jamaican assemblyman, once the nemesis of the lawsuits, was sent to England to speak against emancipation at A general Meeting of Planters, Merchants, and others Interested in the West-India Colonies, assembled at the Thatched-House Tavern on May 18, 1833. Jeannette Marks considered his speech “one of phenomenal ability.” But toward what end? He told his audience, “I was under the galley at the House of Commons when Mr Stanley made his speech which introduced his resolution for Emancipation.” That was four days before, on May 14. Stanley’s speech “proceeded from one topic or reproach to another; holding up the Colonists to universal odium.
” It was “as if the act of spoilation he contemplated was not sufficiently dreadful, at the instant that he proposed his project to plunder us of our property, he consigned our name to everlasting infamy. Hundreds of thousands of petitioners, and the multitude of electioneering pledges, had not done enough to predicate our cause; but the Right Honourable Secretary must crown our injuries by borrowing the errors, the prejudices, and the abuse of the petitioners.” The evil of slavery was being blamed not on England itself but on the Creole planters.
There was little sympathy for Richard Barrett’s view that “There is not a peasant in the world that walks abroad with a more contented countenance and a more confident bearing than the Colonial Slave.” But even this prominent Jamaican politician had moments of doubt:
“It must be confessed that the requisition of the Colonial Minister to discontinue the flogging of women has not been obeyed.… This part of Mr Stanley’s speech was received with loud applause.… I own that for a moment I felt ashamed that I was a Colonist. I was restored to my self-esteem by recalling that these Gentlemen of the House of Commons probably thought only of the delicate and accomplished wives and daughters of the higher ranks, or the retiring modest of the middle orders, and the virtuous and chaste female of the lower; for I remember that within a very few years whipping was the common punishment of women confined [to prison].… I do not (God forbid that I should!) vindicate the corporal punishment of women; but of this I am convinced, that the women of Jamaica, and I do not mean to deny them a sense of shame, would rather suffer the really light switching which is now the usual punishment of their faults than to have it replaced by the fieldstocks, by the tread mill, by the solitary confinement, or any other ingenious mode of protracted torment, which the lovers of the negro race have discovered.”