The Quality of Mercy: A Novel

by Barry Unsworth

  When the case was resumed, counsel for Evans continued to argue the irrelevance of colonial laws in regard to persons living in Britain, whatever their condition or the color of their skin. When Jeremy Evans set foot in England, from that very moment he had become possessed for the first time since being sold into slavery of rights that were common to all mankind. In England, where liberty was so highly valued, was regarded in fact as a precious birthright, how could it be permitted that he, or any man, should be seized and bound and carried away out of the realm?

  Ashton had conferred with Harvey and Compton as to whether Evans should be called on to speak for himself, but it was thought that he might be too assertive, or even combative, to gain the sympathy of the court. Once brought to England, he had not accepted his lot; he had run away, sought his own freedom. He had resisted to the best of his strength the attempts to take him by force—it had needed three hireling slave-takers to subdue him. He was not meek in his bearing, he stood up straight and met the eyes of those who questioned him. All of this, it was feared, might go against him. He was useful as a presence in court, a victim of injustice, unoffending, ill used and helpless. But in the end they decided against calling on him to speak on his own behalf. Harvey even went so far as to advise him to keep his eyes lowered and his head hanging down a little while he was in the courtroom.

  The counsel for Bolton and Lyons, finding no convincing argument for the subordination of British law to the laws of slave-owning communities in America and the West Indies, sought to claim that this lack favored their case. Since there was no law in England prohibiting slavery, it should be clear to any view not obscured by bigotry or prejudice that the practice was legal. Moreover, if once the slaves learned that in England they were free, they would come flocking in vast numbers and overrun the whole country, to the grave detriment of the economy and the ruin of the sugar trade, as there would be no one left to work in the plantations. This frightening prospect caused some stir in the court, which Compton endeavored to allay by requiring his learned friends of the defense to enlighten him as to the means by which the slaves, captive and destitute as they were, would be able to undertake such a journey—a question to which no coherent answer was forthcoming.

  The Lord Chief Justice made few interventions in this debate. He was still very much hoping, even at this late stage, that Messrs. Bolton and Lyons, seeing that things were going against them—and it was clear that they were—would relinquish their claims of ownership in Evans and withdraw from the case, or that something else might occur that would deliver him from the looming duty of a verdict. Further delays would do nothing to help matters. During the adjournment he had sent people to one of the witnesses of the assault, a widow of some means named Mary Dunning, in an attempt to persuade her to purchase Evans and free him, but she had indignantly refused on the grounds that it abetted the practice of slavery, of which she was a convinced opponent.

  As the time passed and the proceedings drew to a close, it became clear that a verdict would have to be delivered, that he would have to commit himself to a judgment. He worried that his words, if not extremely well chosen, would set at liberty what had been computed at fifteen thousand blacks at present in condition of slavery in Britain, at a cost to the owners of more than £700,000, his clerks had estimated. A flood of actions would follow, disputes over settlements and wages, claims of coercion against the masters. It was a nightmare. A number of these same owners were members of his club, with whom he took coffee or played faro.

  Westminster Hall was packed with spectators when the day appointed for the judgment arrived. The public galleries were crowded with black people, awaiting words which they knew would affect them closely. Reporters from most of the major newspapers waited in the body of the court to take down the words of judgment verbatim. Slave owners too were there in good number. To this audience, silent with expectation and tense with conflict, the Chief Justice uttered his ruling in the case of Jeremy Evans.

  He had thought long and carefully in preparing the terms of his decision. The only way he could see out of the dilemma was to confine his remarks strictly to the particular situation of the plaintiff, avoiding all reference to the wider issue of slavery as an institution and restricting his judgment to the specific issue of whether it was legal to take a slave by force out of the country.

  The only laws to be enforced, he told the court, were those of the country where the cause of the action occurred. No justification for the seizure of Jeremy Evans could be established by a negative, by the absence of a law forbidding it, as the defendants had attempted to do. Only positive law could be brought to bear in such a case, and there existed no law that could confer the power claimed by the defendants. It was a power never in use in England that a master should be allowed to take a slave by force to be sold abroad, whether the slave had deserted his service or for any other reason.

  He sat up taller in his high-backed chair and raised his voice for the final words of the judgment: “The cause set forth by the defendants cannot be said to be allowed or approved by the laws of this kingdom. Therefore the man must be discharged.”

  There was an outburst of applause at these words from the crowded galleries, and this had to be hushed by the court attendants, and silence restored while the judges descended from the bench. Ashton had been disappointed by the narrowness of the Chief Justice’s wording, though in some part of his mind he had been prepared for it. All the same, the victory was there: Evans walked free; no longer would anyone be allowed to return black people by force to the plantations. It would continue to be done, he knew that, but no one could ever again claim that it was lawful. As he rose to shake hands with Evans and his lawyers, both of whom were beaming with delight, and with the various friends and well-wishers who had attended the trial from the first day, he allowed himself to be swept along in the tide of congratulations, moved by the rejoicing he saw on many faces, though by no means all.

  That evening he dined out with friends, fellow abolitionists. Toasts were drunk to liberty, to the final end of this iniquitous traffic in human beings, an end just round the corner now—they would see it in their lifetime. There were even toasts to the Lord Chief Justice for this historic ruling, which, someone declared in the euphoria of the occasion, had abolished slavery in England. There was a speech of thanks to Ashton for his selfless efforts on behalf of Evans and his long campaign in the antislavery cause.

  He arrived home late and made his way to bed, lightheaded with the praises and the bumpers of wine. He slept deeply in the first part of the night, but woke at dawn with something of a headache and a strong feeling of thirst. When he had drunk a glass of water, he realized with remorse that he had lain down to sleep without saying his prayers, without any word of thanks to the Divine Author for the outcome of the trial. He knelt at his bedside and prayed aloud, asking forgiveness for his neglect, the failure to show gratitude, thanking God for guiding the judge’s mind to a right decision. True, it had been narrowly worded; true, it had been restricted in scope, doing no more than deny the master’s right to compel a slave aboard ship and transport him back to the plantations. But a step had been taken, a decisive step in the struggle he had given his life to.

  Then it came to him suddenly, as he still knelt there, that the narrowness of the wording did not matter after all, that it had no significance. He remembered the remarks of his fellow diner, that the judgment had abolished slavery in England at a stroke. An error he had thought it at the time, but he saw now that it might by general belief be converted to truth. This was the line to take, these were the words to promulgate and repeat. As many people as possible must be brought to think that the ruling had abolished slavery in England. If it were said often enough, and emphatically enough, it would come to be generally accepted as fact, and so it would become true. By these means the tide of opinion would swell, it would submerge the quibbles of the law. All slaves setting foot in England would be regarded from that very moment as free. Spurre
d on by this, they would follow the example of Jeremy Evans; they would repudiate their bondage, smash the yoke. England would truly become the home of freedom, admired and envied among the nations. Ashton felt his heart swell with this tide of liberty, and his eyes filled with tears.

  Soon after this dawn and these tears, Percy Bordon and Billy Scotland walked for the first time with the others across the fields to the mine. Both were possessed by a sense of great occasion, though Percy still labored with the fear of something monstrous dwelling below, some presence known only by rattlings and thuds and loud puffs of steam.

  In spite of this fear, walking with his two brothers and hastening his steps to keep up with them, he felt proud to be entering the world of men. The light was strong enough for them to see the pale radiance of the sun as it rose through faint clouds before them, to the east. There was a sense of waning summer in the air. In the fields beyond the mine, toward the Dene, the wheat stood straight and tall, and there was a luminous gilding on the stalks and ears. From the edges of the wheat fields they could hear the trailing song of the yellowhammers, whether joyous or sad no one could tell.

  At the pithead they waited for the banksman’s call that the shaft was clear. One by one the men found a space in the swinging rope, made a loop, thrust their limbs through and bound them tightly. This David Bordon did now for the first time—a step forward for him too, to be among the grown men. Michael Bordon took Percy astraddle across his knees, told him to hold tight, grasped the rope with one hand, keeping the other free to guard against collisions with the walls of the shaft during the descent.

  Four men, two youths and two children bound and clutched together, strung out along the rope, began the descent into the darkness of the pit. One of the children would spend his life toiling belowground, would never know anything else, would scarcely know anything else existed. The other in the course of time would come up into the light of the world, would move with his family away from the colliery village to a place where the air was more wholesome and the houses more spacious. He would learn to read and keep account books, and he would help his two older brothers in the management of the textile factory the family came to own, which gave increased opportunities of employment and brought prosperity to some, and where many small children toiled for long hours. And this difference in the destiny of the two boys was entirely due to a dead miner’s dream of freedom.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Barry Unsworth, who won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, was a Booker finalist for Pascali’s Island and Morality Play and was long-listed for the Booker Prize for The Ruby in Her Navel. His other works include The Songs of the Kings, After Hannibal, Losing Nelson, and Land of Marvels. He lives in Italy.