Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [66]
A memorial stone in Henbury, near Bristol, commemorates the death of a black running footman: ‘Here Lieth the body of Scipio Africanus, Negro Servant to ye Rt Hon Charles Williams, Earl of Suffolk and Bristol. Who died ye 21 Dec 1720 aged 18 years.’13 These high-sounding classical names suggest that black slaves were a high-status possession in a civilised society, a strange reflection on the culture that informed so much of the best literature and architecture of the day. The inscribed verse illustrates the paradoxical and confused attitude to young slaves in Britain. It begins:
I who was born a Pagan and a slave
Now Sweetly Sleep a Christian in my Grave
What tho’ my hue was dark my Savior’s sight
Shall change this darkness into radiant light.
Black pages were thought of as little more than chattels. Early in the century, a duchess wrote to her mother that her husband was unwilling that she should accept the gift of such a child from a friend and offering to pass him on in her turn: ‘Dear mama, George Hanger has sent me a Black Boy, eleven years old and very honest, the duke don’t like me having a black, and yet I cannot bear the poor wretch being ill-used; if you liked him instead of Michel I will send him; he will be a cheap servant and you will make a Christian of him and a good boy; if you don’t like him they say Lady Rockingham wants one.’14
One of the more inspiring stories was that of Ignatius Sancho, which begins in the bleak misery of British-sponsored slavery. He was born in 1729 on board a slave ship; his mother died and his father committed suicide. Ignatius was presented as a gift to three sisters in Greenwich who refused to educate him. He himself wrote years later that he had the misfortune to have been placed ‘in a family who judged ignorance the best and only security for obedience.’15 He taught himself how to read and write and attracted the attention of some of the nobility. The Duke of Montagu met him and took him ‘frequently home to the Duchess, indulged his turn for reading with presents of books, and strongly recommended to his mistresses the duty of cultivating a genius of such apparent fertility.’16
Aged around twenty, Ignatius ran away and threw himself on the mercy of the widowed Duchess of Montagu, who took him in and employed him as a butler, leaving him a legacy when she died in 1751. Ignatius later went into service, probably as a valet to the Earl of Cardigan, and turned out to be a gifted musician. He left service to become a successful grocer and corresponded with the novelist Laurence Sterne. He also married a West Indian woman who bore him six children. In The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1802), he wrote: ‘the latter part of my life has been . . . truly fortunate, having spent it in the service of one of the best families in the kingdom.’17 He was admired for his wit and erudition.
By 1770, 14,000–20,000 blacks were believed to be living in London, principally as a side effect of the lucrative trade between Britain and its sugar-planting and slave-holding islands in the West Indies.18 Horace Walpole recalled that the sisters of Lord Middleton had a black servant ‘who has lived with them a great many years and is remarkably sensible’. On hearing that the British were sending a ship to the Pellew Islands in the Pacific, this servant exclaimed: ‘Then there is an end of their happiness.’ Walpole remarked rightly: ‘What a satire on Europe!’19
Young children from India and China were also taken into service. The Indians were often attached to the households of men who were officers of the East India Company; they appear also to have had the status of slaves.20 In the Crimson Drawing Room at Knole hangs the remarkable portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of Wang-y-Tong, a Chinese page employed by the 3rd Duke of Dorset and brought to England by John Bardby Blake, a schoolfellow of