Georgian London: Into the Streets (14 page)
Read Georgian London: Into the Streets Online
Authors: Lucy Inglis
That rape cases even came to court was a reflection of the legal system – for defendants, prosecutors and their representatives.
Throughout the eighteenth century
, the conviction rate in rape cases stood at about 17 per cent on average, reflecting the belief that access to the courts and legal redress for ordinary people was a basic function of eighteenth-century law.
In Westminster Hall, lawyers sat in booths and gave succinct advice to anyone who could pay them for a few minutes. These men were often depicted as grasping, but it allowed ordinary people to consult a lawyer at a fixed price. The courts sat in open view in another part of the hall, making decisions on matters both petty and great. Although England had a great legal tradition by the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century saw law and philosophy combine to create laws which recognized modern sensibilities. Dedication to a cause, stamina and debate could – and did – change society.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, there was concern about the status of slaves arriving in England from the Colonies. In 1690, John
Locke stated in his
Second Treatise of Government
that it was a basic right ‘
not to be subject to
the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man’, reflected in the courts’ approach to rape cases. Yet Locke owned shares in the Royal African Company, which traded in slaves and wrote the 110th Statute of South Carolina: ‘Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.’ In 1729, the Yorke–Talbot legal ruling decreed that slaves did not become free on English soil. In 1772, the Somersett ruling changed everything.
In 1765, surgeon William Sharp treated Jonathan Strong, a slave beaten to the point of losing an eye and then abandoned in the street by his master, David Lisle. When Strong had recovered, Lisle reclaimed him as property. Granville Sharp, William’s brother, engaged in a legal battle to free Strong, and lost. Sharp became an advocate for the rights of slaves and, in 1772, masterminded the test case of James Somersett. Somersett had arrived in England as the property of Charles Stewart, a Boston customs official, and was baptized in St Andrew’s Holborn early in 1771, with three godparents standing for him. When he wished to leave Stewart’s employment, he was abducted and put on a ship for Jamaica. Sharp arranged for the case to come to court and published pamphlets which garnered public interest. The presiding figure was Lord Mansfield, a moderate and educated man. At his home, Kenwood House in Hampstead, lived his illegitimate mixed-race grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle.
Mansfield was heavily criticized by the pro-slavery community for being influenced by ‘
a Black [Dido] in his house which governs him and the whole family’. Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, went to dinner with the family and noted in his diary that:
Mansfield tried to persuade Stewart to settle by selling Somersett to his godparents, but neither side was having it. Both parties were determined to see the law decided once and for all. Mansfield ruled that habeas corpus applied to anyone in England, even if they originated elsewhere. He was aware of the significance of his ruling, stating, ‘
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
,’ or, ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall
.’ It was the beginning of the end of slavery, though it would take many more years for the abolitionist movement to triumph. Londoners everywhere discussed and debated the position of slavery within a ‘free society’. The Westminster Forum, one of the premier debating societies, posed the same question over many years and, increasingly, invited ‘
ingenious Africans’ to speak at debates, inquiring:
Mansfield had made slavery on English soil difficult, but not impossible.
When he died
, in 1793, he made sure to ‘confirm’ Dido’s freedom in his will. The trade in unpleasant racist pamphlets continued, using the Somersett case as an excuse to pontificate upon ‘
the negroe cause
’, but for the ordinary people in Westminster, and throughout London, integration was the new reality.
Living happily in Westminster, above his grocery, was Ignatius Sancho. He was born either on a slave ship or in Greenwich. The Duke of Montagu saw Sancho on Blackheath and brought him home to amuse his wife, Lady Mary. She died in 1751 and left him with a year’s salary and a £30 annuity. Sancho promptly fell to women and cards. However, after an ‘
unsuccessful contest at cribbage
with a Jew, who won his cloaths’, he appears to have given up gambling. He returned as a valet to his old employer’s son-in-law, George Brudenell, who had assumed his wife’s name for himself and their children, in 1749, to prevent it dying out. When his father-in-law died, George was created the 1st Duke of Montagu, reviving the title in ‘the second creation’. George
Brudenell inherited the mantle of John Montagu in more ways than one, and he continued the latter’s charity towards the somewhat hapless Sancho. Whilst in George Montagu’s employ, Sancho married Ann Osborne, a young woman of ‘West-Indian origin’. By 1773, he was crippled by gout and could no longer work for the Duke, who set him up with a freehold in Westminster and a small grocery.
He was a prolific letter writer
and one written to Laurence Sterne, in 1766, gives a neat picture of his life: ‘I am one of those people who the vulgar and illiberal call “Negurs”.’ Also in 1776, he wrote of the slave trade ‘it is a subject that sours my blood’. Sancho loved music and published three collections in his lifetime, making him Britain’s first native black composer. After his death, a collection of his letters was published, full of the trivia of eighteenth-century life and also one of its landmarks: in the summer of 1779, he hoped that the family dog, Nutts, would not catch fleas in the heat; and in September of 1780, he wrote to his friend Mrs Cocksedge that he had cast his ‘free vote’ in the election of that year in favour of Charles James Fox. Ignatius Sancho was the first recorded black voter in Britain.
When he died, in December of that year,
The Gentleman’s Magazine
featured the first known British obituary of a black individual, recording simply: ‘In Charles-str. Westminster, Mister Ignatius Sancho, grocer and oilman; a character immortalized by the epistolary correspondence of Sterne.’ There was no mention of his race. It was Joseph Jekyll who, in 1782, published a biography of Sancho along with an edition of his letters, and coined the phrase which would immortalize the Westminster butler and grocer as ‘
the Extraordinary Negro
’.
A MAN CAN NEVER BE GREAT
THAT IS NOT POPULAR, ESPECIALLY IN ENGLAND’
The British government operated from the old palace of Westminster in a series of cramped and dilapidated rooms, as outdated as the system which filled them with MPs. Busy debating societies advertised in the papers, calling politically minded citizens to taverns and coffee houses to pick apart foreign policies and domestic matters.
‘Sedition’ became an ever greater preoccupation as the government, if not King George III, began to realize their powers over the ordinary people had limits. The right to vote, so long the preserve of a few freeholders, was, as a result of the property boom, becoming the right of many independent Londoners. Parliament would evolve rapidly during the eighteenth century to cope with changes in society and the wider world as Britain established an Empire. Within Westminster, three events would act as catalysts for change in the old system: the John Wilkes affair, the Gordon Riots and the election of 1784.
Political corruption was endemic for most of the eighteenth century. Even those who entered Parliament with the most altruistic of motives often utilized the ancient system of rotten or pocket boroughs to secure their seat. These boroughs were constituencies in which the vote could be influenced. In many rural areas this was tolerated, where social ties or allegiances to local landowners held sway, but London was a city of independent traders. Men voted as they saw fit, and were proud of it; few had a landlord looking over their shoulder as they cast their vote. By the middle of the eighteenth century, many realized that the political system as it stood was unsatisfactory and did not reflect the way the city and the nation was growing and changing. One man, John Wilkes, would highlight many of the deficiencies of the British government.
Born in Clerkenwell in 1725, Wilkes was the son of a distiller. Physically he was unappealing, cross-eyed and with a severe underbite. This did not dissuade him from making the pursuit of women one of his foremost concerns. After a short-lived and unsuccessful marriage, he settled in London with his daughter, Polly, and a year later had bribed himself into a seat in the House of Commons, as Member of Parliament for Aylesbury.
While Wilkes’ disadvantages in the looks department did not hamper his success with women, they did hamper his success as a speaker in the House. In 1762, he turned to the written word to express his political opinions. On 5 June, he began to publish the anti-Scottish magazine
The North Briton
anonymously. The following year, he used issue 45 to attack the King’s speech for the opening of Parliament. It had been written by Lord Bute, a Scottish minister popularly
associated with Jacobitism. Even the number 45 was symbolic, evoking the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. The attack on the King was too thinly veiled. On 26 April, the government put out a warrant to find and arrest the anonymous author of
The North Briton
. Four days later, John Wilkes was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. His house was searched and his papers confiscated.
The government had made a huge mistake. Wilkes, despite his sly appearance and financial incontinence, was popular. He was also canny. He argued that his arrest was unlawful and that as an MP he could not be arrested for libel. When he was taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall to plead his case, he was accompanied by cheering crowds yelling the rallying cry which was to become a London legend: ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’
It was clear that a gulf was opening up between the courts of Westminster and the government. Wilkes was released on 6 May, and won £1,000 in damages against the government for trespass. This could not, however, plug the holes in his finances.
John Wilkes was not only in financial trouble but also incapable of keeping himself out of mischief. As soon as he was free, he began to print
The North Briton
as a collected volume, seeing it as a useful way to bring in some money. He also printed a small number of copies of a poem he had written, for limited circulation amongst his friends. This poem was a spoof of Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Man
, entitled
Essay on Woman
, and began with the line, ‘Awake, my Fanny!’ It goes downhill from there.
The poem was read out in the Lords. In the Commons, Samuel Martin called Wilkes a coward, and the two fought a duel in Hyde Park the next morning. Wilkes took a shot to the groin and for some time was dangerously ill. Realizing the game was up, he escaped to Paris on Christmas Eve 1763.
He was expelled from the House of Commons, tried by Lord Mansfield in his absence, and found guilty. But Paris was not for a man like Wilkes. For one thing, he didn’t have deep enough pockets and was soon at risk of being arrested for debt. In February of 1768, he returned to London and was voted into the seat of Middlesex, prompting more cries of ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ from his electorate.
Wilkes, however, was still facing sentencing for the guilty verdict Mansfield had passed on him after he fled to Paris and, despite the crowds’ efforts, he was sent to prison in Southwark.
On 10 May 1768, Parliament was opened by the King. A huge crowd gathered outside the King’s Bench Prison with the expectation of ‘returning’ Wilkes to the Commons. He was, after all, still an MP. The army was waiting. Shots were fired and seven were killed, including the son of a farmer working nearby. It was instantly dubbed the ‘St George’s Massacre’.
In February 1769, the House of Commons expelled Wilkes again. What followed, when his seat fell vacant, would see the start of the movement for parliamentary reform begin in earnest. At the election to replace him, Wilkes’ name was on the papers. The votes came in, and the people returned him. The House of Commons then decided that he was ineligible to be returned as an MP, and held another election. He was returned again. And again, in April 1769. Two days later, the House of Commons declared the election void and installed Colonel Henry Lawes Luttrell as MP. The people shouted for reform.
The City, ever defiant of Westminster, chose Wilkes as Alderman for the ward of Farringdon Without, close to his Clerkenwell roots. The City petitioned the King, calling his ministers corrupt. The petition was ignored. When a second, bolder petition was also disregarded, the people knew that the government was not acting in the interest of the nation.
In the meantime, John Wilkes became one of the twenty-six City magistrates and, as such, was more involved in the application of day-to-day law than ever. He went on to become Sheriff, and then Lord Mayor. During the 1770s, he also supported the reporting of business from the Houses of Parliament, which had previously been banned. Politics were increasingly in the public domain, and this was seen clearly during discussion of what became popularly known as ‘The American Question’.