1750 London was the second most important slaving port in the country. Alderman Newnham, one of the capital’s MPs, and a partner in a banking firm who had formerly worked as a sugar merchant, as well as the head of a grocery business, claimed Abolition ‘would render the city of London one scene of bankruptcy and ruin’.3 Between 1660 and 1690 fifteen Lord Mayors, twenty-five sheriffs and thirty-eight aldermen of the City of London were shareholders in the Royal African Company, the trading operation that held a monopoly on shipping Africans to the colonies. Many MPs were either West India planters or their descendants. Sir Richard Neave, a director of the Bank of England for forty-eight years, was also Chairman of the Society of West India Merchants.4
One consequence of this transatlantic trade was the rising number of black Africans who began to enter the capital. They were brought over as servants by planters, returning Government officials, and military and naval officers.5 They were used as reassuring companions to comfort their masters on their long voyages back to an island from which some had been absent for decades. Other blacks had been offered as perks for the commanders of slaving vessels:
The post of captain of such a craft was a lucrative one, and those who gained it were prone to make display of their good fortune by the use of gaudily-laced coats and cocked hats, and large silver or sometimes gold buttons on their coats. A special mark of distinction was the black slave attending them in the streets.6
These naval captains were allowed to sell their slaves in the capital. Auctions were by no means secret affairs: slaves ‘were sold on the Exchange and other places of public resort by parties themselves resident in London’.7 That this was possible, despite the longstanding belief that the air of England was too pure for slaves to breathe, and the assertion in 1728 by Lord Chief Justice Holt that, ‘As soon as a negro comes to England he becomes free’, was confirmed by two legal rulings. The first, in 1729, was issued by the attorney-general Sir Philip Yorke and the solicitor-general Charles Talbot; their counter-opinion was that the mere fact of a slave coming from the West Indies to Great Britain or Ireland did not render him free, and that he could be compelled to return again to the plantations. The second, in 1749, was a judgement by Lord Hardwicke, that runaway slaves could legally be recovered.8
Many Africans found themselves working as butlers and attendants in aristocratic households. Their duties were rarely onerous and their chief function seems to have been decorative and ornamental. They served as human equivalents of the porcelain, textiles, wallpapers, and lacquered pieces that the English nobility was increasingly buying from the East.9 These slaves were often dressed in fancy garb, their heads wrapped in bright turbans. Owners selected them on the basis of their looks and the lustre of their young skin much as dog fanciers today might coo and trill over a cute poodle.
Oil paintings of aristocratic families from this period make the point clearly: artists such as John Wootton, Peter Lely and Bartholomew Dandridge positioned negroes on the edges or the rear of their canvases from where they gaze wonderingly at their masters and mistresses. In order to reveal a ‘hierarchy of power relationships’, they were often placed next to dogs and other domestic animals with whom they shared, according to the art critic David Dabydeen, ‘more or less the same status’.10 Their humanity effaced, they exist in these pictures as solitary mutes, aesthetic foils to their owners’ economic fortunes.
Yet, on the whole, black people were well-treated by the nobility. Relationships flourished, not only in the kitchens and the pantries where blacks and working-class maids flirted and fondled, but between black servants and the aristocracy itself. Owners often took it upon themselves to educate their possessions and gave them lessons in prosody, drawing, musical composition. Dr Johnson famously left his Jamaica-born employee Francis Barber a seventy-pound annuity and, much to the disgust of his biographer Sir John Hawkins, made him his residuary legatee.11 Johnson was happy to pray together with Barber and refused to let him go and buy food for his cat as he felt that ‘it was not good to employ human beings in the service of animals’. His politics both shaped and were shaped by this friendship: ‘How is it’, he once roared about America, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’12 Over two hundred years on, Barber’s descendants still live in the Lichfield area where he moved after Johnson’s death. They are all white now, and the name will die out with this generation: the last male descendant’s children are all daughters.
Less well-known than Barber is Julius Soubise who was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts in 1754. Brought to England as a ten-year-old, he was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of Kitty, Duchess of Queensberry. She tried to bribe one Dominico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo, an Italian fencing master based in Windsor, to teach him to fence and ride. Reluctantly he agreed but refused to take her money. Soubise was an adept student and soon became an accomplished equestrian and fencer. He also learned to play the violin, compose musical pieces and, with the help of the elder Sheridan, improve his elocution.
Soubise’s self-regard burgeoned dramatically and he began to claim to all and sundry that he was an African Prince. Never shy of an audience, he sang comic songs and delighted in amateur dramatics. According to Henry Angelo, ‘his favourite exhibition was Romeo in the garden scene. When he came to that part, “O that I was a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek,” the black face, the contrast of his teeth, turning up the white of his eyes as he mouthed, a general laugh always ensued, which indeed was not discouraging to his vanity, and did not prevent him pursuing his rhetorical opinions of himself.’13 He goes on:
I remember seeing him, when presenting a chair to a lady, if from some distance, make three pauses, pushing it along some feet each time, skipping with an entre-chat en avant, then a pirouette when placed. One of his songs, truly ridiculous, his black face and powdered woolly head not suitable to the words, was a Vauxhall song then, ‘As now my bloom comes on a-pace, the girls begin to tease me’; when he came to tease, making a curtsey to the ground, and affecting to blush, placing his hands before his face, an encore was sure to follow.14
Soubise excelled as a fop and doused himself with such powerful perfumes that members of the audience attending the same theatrical performance as him had been known to exclaim, ‘I scent Soubise!’15 He was also a serial philanderer and was often spotted at the opera surrounded by aristocratic women. Even during the time he worked as an usher to Dominico Angelo at Eton he often drove up to Windsor ‘with his chère amie, in a post-chaise and four. There, Madame, waiting his return from the college, he would meet her, dine in style at the Castle-inn, take his champagne and claret, entertain half a dozen hangers on, and return to town by the same conveyance.’16
A member of fashionable London clubs, and accustomed to riding fine horses in Hyde Park, the increasingly cocky Soubise also fancied himself not only as a poet – composing chiefly romantic sonnets – but as an accomplished letter-writer. His notoriety flourished, no doubt to his satisfaction, and it was rumoured that the Duchess of Queensberry was besotted – and possibly sexually involved – with him. In 1773 William Austin produced an engraving that showed her and a dandified Soubise fencing.
His fall from grace, though it had been long forecast, was
