The man responsible had been delivering trunks for a lady when, his attention diverted, a boy he had asked to guard the other trunks in his cart had run off with them.
As in most English households at the time, infant mortality and sudden bereavement frequently afflicted Sancho’s family. Personal and political anguish often meshed:
The republicans teem with abuse, and with King’s friends are observed to have long faces – every body looks wiser than common – the cheating shop-counter is deserted, for the gossiping door-threshold – and every half hour has its fresh swarm of lies. – What’s to become of us? We are ruined and sold, is the exclamation of every mouth – the moneyed man trembles for the funds – the land-holder for his acres – the married men for their families, old maids – alas! and old fusty bachelors, for themselves.132
Sancho was an ardent royalist who mourned that ‘it is too much the fashion to treat the Royal family with disrespect’.133 He felt further beleaguered by the economic and territorial wars that were breaking out throughout the Empire during the second half of the 1770s. At such fluxy times, Sancho often took refuge in his blackness. Invoking his African birthright seemed to give him a kind of spiritual and intellectual space into which he could retreat from the awfulness of his surroundings:
Ireland almost in as true a state of rebellion as America. – Admirals quarrelling in the West-Indies – and at home Admirals that do not choose to fight. – The British empire mouldering away in the West – annihilated in the North – Gibraltar going – and England fast asleep [ … ] For my part, it’s nothing to me – as I am only a lodger – and hardly that.134
Sancho may claim he’s only a lodger but the mass of political details he supplied in this letter reveals someone who kept scrupulously up-to-date with contemporary affairs. This isn’t the blasé or casually ignorant response of the genuinely detached lodger. More likely, it’s the exasperated outcry of one hungry for quietude. Sancho’s life had rarely been free from disruption, upheaval, and enforced reversals of fortune. Now, spent and almost decrepit at the end of his life, all he wanted was to be able to look after his family and balance his grocery’s books. If he could also indulge in gossiping, or browse through the Gazette whilst reclining in his easy chair, occasionally gazing fondly at his wife slicing vegetables at a table and his children playing near the fireplace, then that was as close to happiness as he could imagine.
There may be two Sanchos, but neither one is any less real than the other. An appreciation of either persona – urbanely self-assured, or nervous and indigent – sharpens our understanding of the other. The Sancho who was cultured, exulted in the company of other artists, and possessed sufficient personality to warrant a portrait by Gainsborough, becomes all the more admirable when we see how hard he had to struggle to pursue his artistic interests. He wasn’t to the manor born, he never possessed great wealth, writing and composing music had to be subordinated to the demands of retailing. Equally, the quotidian struggles of the tobacconist and tradesman become more fascinating when contrasted with the refined face he exposed to posh society.
Perhaps the defining image of his life in London is to be found in one of the last letters he wrote, three months before his death in December 1780. He’d just attended hustings for the election of two Westminster MPs to the House of Commons where he would have heard speeches given by some of the greatest public figures of the day: Sir George Brydges Rodney, the heroic Rear Admiral of the relief of Gibraltar in 1780; the Honourable Charles James Fox, leader of the Opposition. The venue was packed; emotions and rhetoric ran wild; ‘the glorious Fox’ was ‘the father and school of oratory himself’; proceedings stretched out for over four and a half hours.135 Here sits Sancho, taking in all the excitement and drama. He was born on a slave ship. Now he holds the franchise – the only black man in the eighteenth century known to have done so. Born in transit thousands of miles away, apparently destined for a short and brutally functional life, he finds himself in Westminster, at the very heart of Empire. He has arrived. He is at the centre. He belongs.
And yet, as the hustings come to a close, and Sancho has voted for Rodney and Fox, he tells his correspondent of how he ‘hobbled home full of pain and hunger’.136 To an onlooker, the sight of a well-dressed, rotund negro limping away from Westminster hustings, perhaps comparing notes with other members of the audience, perhaps on his own, cursing and wheezing, would have been incongruous and funny. It does have a comedic aspect. But there’s also pathos and poignancy. Sancho participates and is present at the great events of his day. Yet it’s a struggle – his family is poor; he is famished. His body is falling apart and, though his feet are swollen with gout, he can’t afford a carriage in which to go home. He has travelled so far in his life, he can barely hobble any farther. He has trafficked between the worlds of the grocery and of high culture, an enslaved past and a liberated present, the slave ship and the metropolis. He can’t stride much farther. Almost at the centre, but not quite, Sancho’s experiences foreshadow those of many of the writers who follow him down the centuries.
* ‘Orangoutangs do not seem at all inferior in the intellectual faculties to many of the Negroe race; with some of whom, it is credible that they have the most intimate connexion and consanguinity. The amorous intercourse between them may be frequent; the Negroes themselves bear testimony that such intercourses actually happen; and it is certain that both races agree perfectly well in lasciviousness of disposition.’ Edward Long, History of Jamaica (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), vol. 2, p.370.
WILLIAM SANCHO – ‘Billy’ in the Letters – was almost as successful as his father. During the 1790s he worked as the librarian of the distinguished botanist Joseph Banks, and in 1803 became the first black publisher in the Western world when he brought out the fifth edition of Ignatius’ correspondence. Four years later he also published Voltaire’s La Henriade.
Another black man to strike it rich was Cesar Picton. Inheriting a legacy of a hundred pounds from a former employer, he added this sum to his own not inconsiderable savings and in 1788 began operating as a coal merchant in Kingston upon Thames. By the time he died in 1836, he was sufficiently wealthy to bequeath a house with a wharf and shops attached, as well as another house with a garden, stables, coach house and two acres of land.1
Sancho and Picton are exceptional in two ways – their financial success, and the social distinction they achieved. Most of their fellow black Londoners enjoyed neither. After the spate of books by and about black people that spewed from the printing presses at the height of the Abolitionism debate in the 1780s, references and allusions to them become far less common. Fashions changed and the prosperous classes began to regard negro servants as passé. At Knole there had been a black page – invariably named ‘John Morocco’ – since the reign of James I; after a house steward had killed the latest John Morocco in a fight in Black Boy’s Passage, Chinese replacements were used. The most famous of these was Hwang-a-Tung, renamed Warnoton, who was educated at the grammar school in Sevenoaks and appears in a Reynolds portrait of Knole.2
By 1800 there were almost no famous blacks left in London. Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Julius Soubise – all had died, the last ignominiously in a riding accident in Calcutta. Sensationalist accounts of the slave revolts in Haiti from 1791 onwards led to a resurgence in the belief that blacks
