Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [65]
In contrast to this commonplace example, we should also remember that in the eighteenth century – indeed, from the late seventeenth century – many others were unable to draw on such parental protection. Young boys were brought from the West Indies, Africa or India as slaves, to become pageboys in aristocratic households. Although some were treated well and given some education, their lives must have seemed so alien as to have been utterly bewildering.
Whilst many like them were slaves by origin, sometimes they were paid wages just as if they were free. In fact, there was some confusion over their legal status right up to the point when slavery was finally abolished in Great Britain in 1833. As early as 1706, Chief Justice Holt wrote that ‘by common law no man can have a property in another’. This suggested that as soon as a slave came to England he became free, although this notion was soon squashed by Philip Yorke as Attorney-General.7
Slavery was outlawed in Scotland as early as 1778, as a result of the case of Knight versus Wedderburn. Joseph Knight had been purchased in Jamaica and brought to Scotland at the age of twelve or thirteen to be a personal servant. Eventually, Knight married and left the service of John Wedderburn, who later had him arrested. When local justices declared that Knight must continue to be a slave, the sheriff of Perthshire ruled that the state of slavery was ‘not recognized’ by the laws of Scotland, a judgment upheld by the court of session in that year.
Granville Sharp, one of the active abolitionists of the time, intervened in the case of a young slave, James Somerset, who had been shipped over to England from Virginia. He had escaped, been recaptured and put in irons. Sharp had him brought before Lord Mansfield, who ruled (eventually) for Somerset’s release, but ruling too that a slave could not be forcibly repatriated against his will.8
Curiously, Dido Belle, the child of a black slave woman and Sir John Lindsay, Lord Mansfield’s nephew, and lived in his household at Kenwood. She managed the dairy there and became a companion-servant to her cousin. Mansfield not only left her money and an annuity in his will but confirmed her status as a free person.9
Numerous young black servants, forgotten to history, can be glimpsed in portraits of the period. One such is thought to be James Cambridge, who appears in the portrait of the Earl and Countess of Burlington, which now hangs at Lismore Castle in Ireland. The fashion for the possession of a black servant may have been begun by Venetian merchants. Certainly they appear in portraits in great country houses almost as a visual foil to the whiteness and delicate complexions of the young women of the family.10
The bitter truth is that black servants were sometimes treated as little better than playthings for the aristocracy, their youth used up far away from their families. The Duchess of Kingston had a page called Sambo, whom she brought up from the age of five or six, dressing him in fine style and taking him to the theatre, where he sat in her box. Once he reached the age of eighteen or nineteen, however, she tired of him and sent him back to the West Indies.11
We must be grateful for the fact that there were always critics of this practice. As early as 1710, Richard Steele wrote a letter of complaint to The Tatler as if he himself were one such child: ‘As I am patron of persons who have no other friend to apply to, I cannot suppress the following complaint: Sir – I am a six-year old negro boy, and have, by my lady’s order, been christened by the chaplain. The good man has gone further with me, and told me a great deal of news: as I am as good as my lady herself, as I am a Christian, and many other things.’ At one point, it was erroneously believed that slaves who converted to Christianity while in England were automatically granted their freedom. The letter continued: ‘but for all this, the parrot, who came over with me from our country is as much esteemed by her as I am. Beside this, the shock dog has a collar