Rough Crossings Page 5

  And yet, as the Sharps would also have known, there was another Mansfield, father-protector to Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, a black girl who lived as a member of his family in his elegant Robert Adam villa, Kenwood House, up on Hampstead Heath. Dido was the daughter of Mansfield’s nephew, Captain John Lindsay. Her mother—whereabouts now unknown—had been taken by the captain, as was often the custom, as part of a Spanish prize. And while the captain was off somewhere building an empire for the Lords of the Admiralty, the Lord Chief Justice and his wife, without children of their own, cared for Dido as their own and made her companion to another of their nieces, Lady Elizabeth Murray, whose father was ambassador to the emperor in Vienna. The two girls, dark as coffee and blonde as wheat, grew up together at Kenwood amidst the Gainsboroughs and Dutch cabinet pictures (for Silver Tongue had a shrewd and happy eye) as fast friends: tending the dairy; gathering harebells in the meadow; picnicking by the lake that Humphry Repton, famous for his Red Books, had built the Chief Justice; and, sweetly bonneted and aproned, scattering grain for his prize laying hens. The fashionable Johan Zoffany—who else?—was commissioned to paint Dido and Elizabeth as a double portrait: the dewy rosebud in pink watered silk, the dusky princess turbaned and gowned in white satin with a rope of creamy pearls at her throat. A muslin scarf gently winds them together, Elizabeth touching the thigh and elbow of her black cousin who smiles and points a teasing little finger at her own chin. Visitors, including the austere colonial governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, were shocked to see the girls arm in arm.

  Was it possible, then, that such a benefactor should rule that a black subject of the king was no person at all, but mere property, and so be shut out for ever from his protection? That was what Granville Sharp wondered to the point of consuming obsession, and was impatient to test.

  II

  HARK! Ahoy there! Granville sings of the Thames and, by God, upon it!

  Delightful Stream—that Life might pass

  Reflected from the Summer Glass

  Scenes of Innocence and Love.

  While sooth’d alike by many a Song

  Thy kindred Streams should glide along.

  The musical Sharps were afloat on their barge, the suitably named Apollo, capacious enough for a commodious cabin. On spring and summer nights, when the barge was moored at Fulham, James might spend the night there bobbing on the innocuous and scummy tide. Much exercised by the state of the water, Granville expended more of His Majesty’s time in his office in the Tower penning some “Remarks on the Encroachments on the River Thames near Durham Yard.”1

  Zoffany painted the Sharp family concert and was criticized for being too fanciful with the number of people and instruments on the boat.2 But the artist had been commissioned to paint an allegory of high-spirited family harmony, so he could be liberal about including members like an elder brother, Dr John Sharp, whose pastoral cares kept him in Northumbria. In most other respects, Zoffany got the crowded jubilation of the Sharps just right. One of Granville’s preparatory memoranda includes the following to be taken on board: violins, kettle drums, horns, serpents for James, oboes for Granville, clarinets and a harpsichord, plus ample provisions of tea, bread, butter and honey, greatcoats for the inevitable showers, gear for the two big horses (all fringed hooves and heavy cruppers) who towed the Apollo, and, one supposes, a bone for Roma the dog, who seldom barked before Handel was done. The boat might even have accommodated William’s small organ, known in the family from the time that their brother acquired her as “Miss Morgan.”

  Waterborne, the Sharps became still more celebrated—and more fashionable—than they had been for the concerts in Mincing Lane. After her husband died in 1767 Eliza, the harpsichordist, returned to London, and her diary records the Prince of Wales, along with his three brothers and their courtiers, standing for half an hour at the river’s edge, listening to the concert, requesting particular songs (and getting them played), and bowing graciously to the musicians at the concert’s end. An appreciation for the Sharp chorale and ensemble may have been the only taste that the prince had in common with his father, since a few weeks later the family played for the king while he sat beneath an ancient oak in the garden at Kew. The programme was based on the usual favourites, including Handel, a Concerto in G (of course) played by Granville on his double-flute with James oomping away on the serpent beside him. This was the kind of merriment to which George III easily warmed. In the midst of a song performed by “Signor Giordanio,” the dark skies (for this was an English summer) opened, threatening to drench the monarch. In a trice the brothers and the bargeman pulled down the movable canvas awning that protected them from the elements, jumped ashore and set it over the king’s leafy but now inadequate shelter. Decently, at the end of the music, before the Sharps could bow, their sovereign waved his own hat in salutation.

  But there could be trouble in paradise. A few weeks later, in July 1770—while her son, the naturalist Joseph Banks, was in Queensland with Captain Cook, supping off giant clams and loin of kangaroo—Mrs William Banks of Turret House, Paradise Row, Chelsea, was woken by a frightful scream. Then there was cursing, slapping, the sounds of a brawl from the sloping, grassy embankment that led to the river’s edge. She heard her own name called in heavily accented, frantic despair: “Mrs Banks, come help me for God’s sake, they are going to trepan me and take me on board ship.”3 Concerned (but prudent), she sent her servants out to investigate: it was, as she had thought, the negro Thomas Lewis, whom three men were dragging on his back to the water’s edge, two of them hauling the fellow by his legs.

  Confronted, one of the three men waved a scrap of newspaper that they said advertised for the capture of the runaway, and swore they had the Lord Mayor’s warrant for his detention. The servants had best clear off, they shouted, lest they fall foul of the law themselves. Intimidated, the servants shrank back but continued to watch as Lewis, struggling, was pushed down into the water and his hands and legs bound. Exhausted and half drowned, Lewis was finally thrown into the skiff, moaning piteously. So the men took some sticks and thrust them into the black’s mouth and down his throat to gag him. They pushed off and rowed downstream into the darkness of the river, and when the boat passed Chelsea College and the Physic Garden nothing more was heard except the light dip and splash of the oars.

  Given the details of the kidnapping, Mrs Banks lost no time in going to see Granville Sharp. By 1770 Sharp’s reputation had gone far beyond the virtuosity of his double-fluting. In the three years since the Jonathan Strong case he had been transformed from an obscure clerk in the Ordnance Office to an eccentric but famously resolute warrior on behalf of slaves in England. In 1768, alerted by Strong to another case, he had helped bring a suit against the owners of a female slave who had shipped her back to the West Indies notwithstanding that she had married a free black. Invoking the unlawfulness of coercive transportation, Sharp and his lawyer managed to secure a judgment demanding the return, costs paid, of the woman.

  The following year Sharp published the fruit of his exhaustive research into the status of slaves in England, A Representation of the Injustice and dangerous Tendency of tolerating Slavery or even Admitting the Least Claim of private Property in the Persons of Men in England. Even before the tract was printed, Sharp sent twenty manuscript copies to the great and mighty, including Blackstone and the Archbishop of Canterbury for their consideration, since he hoped to incorporate any criticisms they might have into the printed version. Whatever its effect on his correspondents, the circulation of the tract and the noise it made in London society caused the lawyers for Kerr and Lisle (still suing the Sharps for theft of their property) serious second thoughts about the wisdom of pressing their case. They procrastinated and then let the suit go. It added to the satisfaction of Strong’s liberators that, by failing to bring the suit to trial, Lisle and Kerr incurred a penalty of triple costs.

  By 1769 Sharp was driven by a burning sense of the vileness of the commerce in humans, calling it,
as if it were too loathsome to be frankly uttered, the “Accursed Thing.” In his letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sharp urged him to campaign for the repeal of the brutal Plantation Laws, since they stained Britain and the British government with “the blackest guilt.” (As the author of a study on divine retribution in the scriptures Sharp was convinced that, left untouched, something so abhorrent as the slave trade would some day bring down the full weight of God’s wrath on the heads of the sinful British.) But his “little tract,” as he called it with unconvincing modesty, was designed to avoid sweeping moral hyperbole and to appeal instead to the legal and historical fastidiousness of its intended readers, and to the unarguable record of case law. Yorke-Talbot, he insisted, had been superseded by Holt, and Justice Holt’s determination that only a non-person could be deprived of the protection of the king’s laws in England was itself rooted in immemorial custom. Repugnance for true slavery in England had swept away the draconian law of Edward VI; hence the Elizabethan dictum of air too pure for slaves had persisted. The notion that slaves could be held to have entered into a contract comparable to that applied to apprentices Sharp discounted as absurd. His message spoke, above all, of a kind of juridical patriotism, which Sharp did not have to affect an order to voice: he believed it with all his heart. English Common Law was the most precious of the nation’s gifts. It was the rock of British freedom on which the “Accursed Thing” would surely be smashed.

  Granville Sharp had become a tireless public nuisance. Nothing escaped his virtuous opportunism. When an advertisement offering a reward for news or recapture of a runaway “Poor wretched Negro boy” was posted in the Daily Advertiser by one “Mr Beckford in Pall Mall” he alerted William Beckford, the richest and most powerful of the City’s aldermen and a power among the West Indian lobby, but also a figure much given to mouthing off radical views on the sanctity of liberty. “On a supposition that Mr Beckford in Pall Mall may be a relation of yours,” Sharp informed William Beckford of this shameful notice, since “I believe you to be a sincere well-wisher to the true interests, constitution and liberties of this kingdom.” He made so bold as to include his “little tract” in the hope that Beckford might now be prompted to “consider the subject” of slavery and the trade “more seriously than you have hitherto done.”4 He seemed to believe he could embarrass the powerful into goodness—a truly English strategy. To the Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden, he sent another advertisement, posted in the Public Advertiser: “To be sold, a Black Girl, the property of J.B—eleven years of age who is extremely handy, works at her needle, tolerably and speaks English perfectly well, is of an excellent temper and willing disposition—Inquire of Mr Owen at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement’s Church, in the Strand.”5 Since the “frequency of such publications must tend very much to extinguish those benevolent and humane principles which ought to adorn a Christian nation…I am thoroughly persuaded that your Lordship will take such notice of this notorious breach of the laws of nature, humanity and equity, and also of the established law, custom and constitution of England as will be most consistent with that strict and unshaken regard for all these which has always been a distinguished part of your Lordship’s character.” Letters from a “Gentleman in Maryland” who saw plantation masters “flea” the backs of slaves “with Cow Hides or other Instruments of Barbarity” were copied and circulated to those on Sharp’s growing list. His Maryland correspondent asserted that “they pour on Hot Rum superinduced with Brine or Pickle, rub’d in with a Corn Husk in the scorching heat of the sun,” adding with the patriotic flourish that would become a commonplace in the British attack on American hypocrisy, “If I had a child I would rather see him the humblest scavenger in the Streets of London than the loftiest Tyrant in America with a thousand slaves at his Back.” America and Americans were now classed as the tyrants.

  So Mrs Banks evidently knew just what she was doing when, on the morning after the kidnapping of Thomas Lewis, she called on Granville Sharp at his lodgings in the City. As soon as he had heard her out, the two went together to Justice Welsh to obtain a warrant for Lewis’s release. At Gravesend, where the mayor endorsed the warrant, Mrs Banks’s servant attempted to serve it on the master of the ship carrying Lewis to Jamaica, the Snow, but he brusquely shook it off and got under way. Refusing to admit defeat, Sharp then did the rounds of magistrates and pestered the Lord Mayor until he got what could not be denied: a writ of Habeas Corpus. Since the Snow had been delayed at The Downs by contrary winds, the writ was taken to Spithead by Mrs Banks’s servant Peter, riding hell for leather to the south coast. Rowed to the Snow from Spithead, Peter found Thomas Lewis “chained to the mainmast, bathed in tears and casting a last mournful look on the land of freedom which was fast receding from sight.”6 The writ was duly served on the captain, who “on receiving it became outrageous” and let fly some ripe nautical curses, “but knowing the serious consequences of resisting the law of the land, gave up the prisoner whom the officer carried, safe, but now crying for joy, to the shore.”7

  Back in London, Lewis related his history to Sharp. He had been born a free man on the Gold Coast in West Africa; had lived with his uncle after his father’s death, before being approached by an English officer, who asked him if he would like to travel to learn the English language. Thomas had gone with the officer—only to discover that he was being shipped off to Santa Cruz, where English was definitely not the lingua franca. He then worked for a succession of masters, including Robert Stapylton, who took him to Boston and New York. But throughout his journeyings, whether working as body servant, waiter or hairdresser’s assistant, Lewis received wages, and that fact alone argued for his never having been a chattel slave. Shipwrecked, Lewis was captured by a Spanish captain, who took him to Havana where by chance he saw Robert Stapylton again and appealed to him for rescue. Claiming Lewis as his property, Stapylton took him to Philadelphia and New York and eventually to England. But it was now clear that the price of that rescue in Havana was permanent bondage to Stapylton. Although Stapylton offered as evidence of his benevolence to Lewis the fact that he had got him admitted to St George’s Hospital, a surgeon testified that he had been asked about Lewis’s prospects so that, once recovered, he could be “taken away.” Understanding the precariousness of his situation, and fearful of being sold and shipped to the Caribbean, Lewis escaped twice and was twice hunted down.

  That second kidnapping had taken place on the night of the 2nd of July. Stapylton, who evidently knew just where to look for Lewis, had approached him, protesting he truly meant no harm. Since his master was by now old and blind, Lewis may have believed him. But it was precisely Stapylton’s increasing infirmity that may have made the need for the money to be got from Lewis’s sale all the more urgent. At any rate, the strategy for taking Lewis was elaborately planned. Claiming to be anxious about chests of tea and gin that he had stored at Chelsea College wharf so as not to attract the attention of customs officers, Stapylton asked Lewis to fetch them back—presumably with a consideration for himself. For the sake of discretion, he told Lewis, Richard Coleman, his waterman, would be taking him to the wharf by a circuitous route. (Coleman later testified that he had been approached by Stapylton to “carry the Black down.”) Somewhere in a side alley between the Physic Garden and Paradise Row two other watermen, Aaron Armstrong and John Malony, had jumped Lewis, and the tell-tale scream carried to Turret House, Paradise Row.

  Five days later, Lewis, Granville Sharp and Mrs Banks told their story to a Grand Jury in a private prosecution for assault against Stapylton, Armstrong and Malony. Sharp was worried that a Grand Jury would never return an indictment on behalf of an assault made on a black. But Thomas Lewis’s chance for liberty had been the work of many white men and women: Mrs Banks; the servants who made sure that she knew exactly what had happened; Peter who rode first for Gravesend and then on to Spithead, following the Snow; and, not least of course, the self-appointed band for the negro cause, the Sharp family. Indeed, Mrs Banks and Granville
Sharp continued to take a vigilant interest in the welfare of Thomas Lewis during the seven months between the indictment and the trial, an interest motivated as much by the necessity of hanging on to their prime witness as by concern for the safety of his person. When John Thomas, the black servant at whose house Mrs Banks had thought to lodge Lewis in safety, himself departed with his master to the colonies, she expressed to Sharp her fears that this might leave Lewis unprotected as well as unemployed. Evidently, they also fretted about how well Lewis and his case would stand up at trial, especially since he was apparently playing truant from the schoolmaster who had been assigned to his instruction and had become agitated at the prospect of appearing before the court. Their concerns became so serious that Mrs Banks and Sharp approached Stapylton, offering to drop the prosecution if he would make a public apology for the kidnapping and sign a solemn, notarized pledge for Lewis’s safety and liberty. But sensing his adversaries’ pessimism about the outcome of the case, Stapylton not only declined the compromise, but insisted through his lawyers on going to trial before the King’s Bench, where he must have calculated his best chance of acquittal lay.