Belle (14 page)

When Lord Mansfield entered Westminster Hall at eleven o’clock on the morning of Monday, 22 June 1772 the chamber was crowded, and not just with the great and the good of London: there was a group of dignified black faces waiting tensely to hear the judgement. Mansfield knew exactly what was at stake. Despite his concerns about the consequences of his ruling, Mansfield was aware that a clear statement of the law was essential. Neither emotion nor economics could influence him: ‘Compassion will not, on the one hand, nor inconvenience on the other, be to decide; but the law …
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum
’ (Let justice be done, though the heavens fall).

And then? Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly what he said. There are several versions of Mansfield’s final judgement, some of which have their own spin, such as Granville Sharp’s triumphant account.
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The
Morning Chronicle
reported the next morning that his speech was as ‘guarded, cautious, and concise, as it could possibly be drawn up’.
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But there is no evidence that there ever was a written or prepared speech. No text has ever come to light. There are, indeed, at least seven versions of this historic ruling, all based on memory of what Mansfield said in court.

Several accounts record that he used the word ‘odious’ to describe the state of slavery: ‘it’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law’, or ‘[Slavery] is so odious that it must be construed strictly.’
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Perhaps the most reliable version is that of court reporter Capel Lofft:

The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only positive [written] law … it is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England, and therefore the black must be discharged.
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Later critics have argued that the ruling was partial and limited, but there is no doubt that in the courtroom at that moment the victor was James Somerset. Mansfield had done the unthinkable. Somerset was a free man.

Whatever the precise wording, there is no question that this was one of the most significant rulings in English legal history. Granville Sharp and his followers were ecstatic, and certainly viewed it as a victory. But Benjamin Franklin, who was in court that day, was scathing about ‘the hypocrisy of this country, which encourages such a detestable commerce by laws for promoting the Guinea trade; while it piqued itself on its virtue, love of liberty, and the equity of its courts, in setting free a single negro’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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A local guide called it the ‘first town in the kingdom in point of size and commercial importance, the metropolis excepted’.
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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.
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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.