15. ‘Peter’: London’s connected community of slave-ownership

AN East-Indian Tawney-black boy, long haired and slender, a mark burnt in his forehead and brest, his name Peter, in a Purpel Suit and coat, ran away the 17 of this instant September; Whoever can bring him to Mr. Beasley at my Lady St. John’s house neer the Globe Tavern in Long Acre, or to Mr. Thomas Joyce at his house in Bow-lane London, shall be well rewarded for his pains.

Mercurius Publicus, Comprising the Sum of all Affairs
now in agitation in England, Scotland, and Ireland,
Together with Forrain Intelligence; For Information of the
People, and to prevent false News, 25 September 1662

These few dozen words are all that we know of a young South Asian boy who eloped from a London house in 1662. Named Peter, he was described as ‘AN East-Indian Tawney-black boy, long haired and slender’, and was a well-dressed personal attendant ‘in a Purpel Suit and Coat’. The ‘mark burnt in his forehead and brest’ were probably the result of brandings intended to mark him as property while identifying the person who owned him, although the one on his forehead may have been punishment for a prior escape attempt.¹ Thus what is probably the only surviving archival record of this person reproduces his bondage, his subjection and the erasure of his identity. The historical archive privileges enslavers over enslaved, and the limited and implicitly violent record is rendered all the more troubling by the fact that we can piece together various archival records to learn a great deal more about those who owned or sought out Peter, those who were, directly or indirectly, a party to the violence enacted upon his body. Perhaps the most striking feature of London’s seventeenth-century runaway slave advertisements is that they reveal distinct networks of professionals and of elite English men and women, some of them well-known members of a community of men and women who were invested in the creation of colonies, empire and the racial subjection and slavery upon which they were built.

The advertisement for Peter promised a reward to anyone who would return him to ‘Mr. Beasley at my Lady St. John’s house neer the Globe Tavern in Long Acre, or to Mr. Thomas Joyce at his house in Bow-lane London’. Long Acre was a handsome street just north of Covent Garden in the parish of St Martin in the Fields. Oliver Cromwell had resided there during the early years of the Civil War, and in the 1660s it was home to such residents as the earl of Peterborough, John Dryden and Lady Elizabeth St John, wife of Sir Oliver St John. A leading lawyer and Parliamentarian, St John appears to have had few if any direct colonial and mercantile interests.² However, his third wife Elizabeth was the widow of the London merchant Caleb Cockroft, who had been engaged in the East India Company’s trade in saltpetre and gunpowder.³ Thomas Joyce, who may have been the father of the man in Bow Lane to whom Peter might be returned, had spent years in South Asia as an East India Company agent and commanding officer.⁴ We do not know exactly how Peter came to belong to Lady Elizabeth St John, but it may have been through her first husband Caleb Cockroft or through his mercantile connections with the Joyce family, and Oliver St John’s wealth and reputation in mid-seventeenth-century London made the family’s ownership of a liveried and branded personal attendant possible. The London townhouse from which Peter ran away was probably a large and well-staffed household, but at about the time that the young South Asian made his bid for freedom, Sir Oliver St John – a Parliamentarian known as Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Dark Lantern’ who had much to fear following the Restoration – went into exile on the Continent.⁵ Perhaps Peter seized his opportunity during a time of familial chaos to escape not just from his mistress but also from a network of lawyers, merchants, politicians and others in London who embodied the metropolitan core of a fast-growing network of colonies built around bound labour.

Figure 33. Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘Piazza in Covent Garden’ (c.1647). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

In the wake of the Cromwellian era the restored royal family were at the head of England’s rapidly expanding slave-trading operations. In December 1660 Charles II had granted a charter to the Royal Adventurers into Africa, which three years later was rechartered as the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Relating to Trade in Africa. The king and his brother, the duke of York, were major investors in both. Indeed, the king loaned ships to the company, including one named the Blackamore which in 1663 took a cargo of 373 enslaved Africans from the kingdom of Allada (or Ardra) on the Bight of Benin to Barbados. In this early voyage the mortality rate was a shocking 60 per cent, and only 150 enslaved people disembarked. Between 1663 and 1672 the Royal Adventurers organized ninety-six slave-trading voyages, carrying some 26,666 enslaved people from Africa and disembarking 20,088 survivors in the English colonies. Charles II dissolved the Royal Adventurers in 1662 and issued a new charter to the Royal African Company, and the duke of York became the new company’s governor. Over the eighty years up to the company’s dissolution in 1752 it ‘shipped more enslaved African women, men, and children to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade’. Thus, from the moment Charles II was restored to the throne, the royal family were deeply invested in racial slavery, and many of the bodies of enslaved people were branded with the initials ‘DoY’ or ‘DY’ for the duke of York or ‘RAC’ for the Royal African Company. With the monarch’s family chartering, investing in and profiting from slavery and imperial trade, it is hardly surprising that so many wealthier Londoners followed their lead, or that some of these people ended up owning enslaved people in the capital itself.⁶

Figure 34. Unknown artist, Elihu Yale; Dudley North; Lord James Cavendish; David Yale; and an Enslaved Servant (c.1708), oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Andrew Cavendish, 11th duke of Devonshire. The enslaved child stands in contrast to the White children playing in the background: he is looking towards the four men he is serving, and his clothing and turban mark him as an exoticized attendant. His collar marks him as the property of one of the men, quite possibly the duke of Devonshire.

In early March 1662 a ‘Moor going by the name of Anthony’ eloped from Henry Rowe in Shacklewell, Hackney.⁷ Apart from noting that he was about sixteen or seventeen years old, the advertisement did not describe Anthony, focusing instead on his clothing. Wearing ‘an olive coloured suite and coate lined through with yellow lace, in yellow stockins lac’t with yellow’, Anthony was well dressed, as befitted his position as servant to a well-respected and leading London mercantile family. Rowe’s great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had each served as lord mayor of London, and had built their home at Shacklewell into one of the significant landed estates within easy access of the City of London.⁸ Susan Rowe, Henry’s aunt, had married Sir Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick. Rich was deeply engaged in colonial endeavours as a founding member of both the Company of Adventurers and the Bermudas Company, and before the Civil War he had controlled the patent for Trinidad and Tobago.⁹ Perhaps Anthony had come to the Rowe family’s manor house at Shacklewell from one of Rich’s colonial ventures, but whatever his route there he appears to have been determined to free himself. Three months later a second advertisement announced that the young man had ‘RUnne away again’.¹⁰ By the time this advertisement appeared, he had been free more than two weeks: perhaps he had learned from his first escape attempt and this second bid for freedom was successful.

The identities of those who sought to recapture freedom seekers in Restoration London, and the people they relied upon as contacts, illustrate how quickly racial slavery permeated and became embedded in respectable society. Slavery was not simply a new plantation labour system thousands of miles from England but instead was an institution that was both real and present in London. Merchants, printers, goldsmiths, ship owners and captains, and members of the aristocracy were not only investing in and profiting from colonial ventures and the fast-growing slave trade, but some of them were also the owners of enslaved people in the capital itself. In January 1682 an unnamed ‘tall Blackamore’ escaped from Crambourn Lodge near Windsor, wearing ‘a Green Doublet and Breeches, with a large Chairmans Coat of the same colour, Laced with Sir Robert Holmes, his Livery’.¹¹ Holmes, an admiral in the Restoration navy, had led naval squadrons defending Royal African Company ships and trading posts along the West African coast, and had captured several Dutch slave-trading vessels.¹² Perhaps this freedom seeker was an African who, rather than being liberated from a captured Dutch slave ship, had instead become a prize of war, human property displayed by Holmes to show his standing and even his martial success. Another unnamed enslaved man, described as ‘a black Negro Man about 30 years of age’ and also dressed in a smart livery, eloped from Spitalfields, just east of the City, four years later.¹³ The only person named in this advertisement was the contact to whom information about the freedom seeker might be submitted, the merchant Paul Allestree. His premises were on St Martin’s Lane, a street that was ‘well built and inhabited by Merchants’ in Langborne ward.¹⁴ Allestree had become one of London’s leading merchants in the Barbados trade and was all too aware of the increasing use of enslaved African servants in London.¹⁵

The royal family was deeply entrenched in the companies supervising and profiting from the transatlantic slave trade, and equally involved in the holding of enslaved people in London. On 16 February 1689 Charles Hector, ‘a Negroe belonging to ye Duchess of Monmouth’, was baptized at St Martin in the Fields.¹⁶ A wealthy Scot in her own right (as the duchess of Buccleuch), Anne Scott was the widow of James Scott, the duke of Monmouth. As Charles II’s illegitimate son, he had led the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion against James II, for which he was executed in July 1685.¹⁷ The duke of Monmouth justified his rebellion as vital for the liberties of Englishmen ‘unless we could be willing to be Slaves as well as Papists, and forget the Example of our Noble and Generous Ancestors, who conveyed our Privileges to us at the Expence of their Blood and Treasure’.¹⁸ We can only imagine how Charles Hector may have felt about the slavery that so concerned the late duke.

The contacts specified in runaway advertisements to whom freedom seekers or information on their whereabouts might be transmitted were as important as enslavers themselves in showing the spread of racial slavery through a network of London merchants, investors and their associates. When Stephen, a twenty-year-old ‘Negro Man’ who ‘speaks good English, being a Native of the Leeward Islands’, escaped in October 1701, an advertisement indicated that he might be returned to the merchant Joseph Martyn at his premises in Love Lane, just east of Tower Hill.¹⁹ Martyn had spent time in Nevis and, on his return to London, had specialized in the Caribbean sugar trade, representing the Leeward Islands as their London agent. By the end of the seventeenth century he was one of only two private merchants who came close to competing with the Royal African Company in the volume of sugar he imported.²⁰ William Mead, who claimed ownership of Stephen, was a leading Quaker merchant best known for standing trial alongside William Penn in 1670.²¹ Later, in the eighteenth century, Quakers would play a prominent role in early abolitionism, but during these early years Quaker merchants did not shy away from the transatlantic slave trade or even slave-ownership, and William Mead’s brother Thomas was co-owner of at least three slave-trading voyages between 1699 and 1705.²² Perhaps Stephen’s bid for freedom was successful, for a second advertisement published on 24 November, almost fifty days after his escape, indicated that he remained free.²³

Merchants engaged in the North Atlantic trade regularly featured in advertisements as the contacts who would take custody of recaptured freedom seekers. Thus, for example, Rowland Tryon (a merchant and the brother of Thomas Tryon, London’s sixth-largest importer of Caribbean and North American goods in 1686) was the contact named by Edward Archer in his advertisement for Quoshey; Paul Allestree, the eighth-largest importer in 1686, was the contact in an advertisement for the freedom seeker Tom Bay; Bartholomew Gracedieu, the twelfth-largest importer, was the contact named in an advertisement for Tony; Stephen Skinner, the fourteenth-largest importer, was the contact named by Edwin Stede in his advertisement for Quomino; and Richard Cary, the eighteenth-largest importer, was the contact nominated by James Yeames in an advertisement for an unnamed freedom seeker.²⁴ London’s merchants did not simply participate in the trade in enslaved Africans and the crops they grew: from their homes and counting houses in London, they willingly participated in the attempts to recapture bound and enslaved servants who dared to escape.

The runaway advertisements published in London between the 1650s and the early 1700s reveal a network of investors, patrons and aristocrats, merchants, ship captains and military officials who either owned enslaved people or facilitated the capture of such people. Together they helped make racial slavery real in London, transforming a colonial abstraction into a local social reality. They were the people who crafted and populated the first runaway slave advertisements, helping to construct what would become a primary mechanism for the prevention and punishment of escape, the single most significant individual form of resistance to enslavement.