The Great Cat Massacre - A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes. Gareth RubinЧитать онлайн книгу.
had begun in 1765 when a young black slave had been brought to the home of his brother, William, a doctor who would later become surgeon to the King.*
The slave boy, Jonathan Strong, had been badly beaten and then abandoned by his owner. Once he was fit and well, Granville found him a job as footman to a pharmacist, but when Strong’s former master spotted him two years later he tried to kidnap his former possession. Granville went to court to stop him and had Strong legally declared a free man. Since then, Sharp had become something of a nuisance for slave owners, taking them to court over anything he could think of. He willingly agreed to help Equiano.
Based on Collingwood’s insurance claim, which included an admission of having thrown many men to their death, Sharp attempted to have Collingwood and the ship owners prosecuted for murder. The attempt failed but the resulting publicity gained him more supporters among the growing political classes and from the Quakers, without doubt the most radically political of the Christian denominations of the time. On 22 May 1787, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was born, consisting of nine Quakers and three Anglicans, including Sharp. Together they set about documenting the treatment of slaves and even brought examples of shackles and punishment devices to London, so the citizens could see how innocent men were being treated as – at best – criminals. It became the first public civil rights campaign. The Society regularly wrote to newspapers and organised public meetings and petitions to end the slave trade – one was signed by a fifth of the population of Manchester, which illustrates how deep and wide the campaign permeated.
As the spirit of the day turned to the Abolitionist cause, they recruited William Wilberforce MP, who offered to introduce a bill to Parliament to abolish the slave trade. It wasn’t until 1807 that Wilberforce managed to get a bill through but it did happen. And 15 years later a bill was passed to abolish slavery itself in most parts of the British Empire. Soon the Royal Navy was actively destroying the slave trade wherever it could find it.
Collingwood’s attempt at insurance fraud had had global effects.
BUT DID HE DO IT? – THE DEATH OF LORD CASTLEREAGH, 1822
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was a controversial fellow. For decades he was one of the most influential men in Europe – and therefore the world. His reputation rested on his position as Britain’s Foreign Secretary, which allowed him to build the European system of diplomacy that delivered peaceful but conservative government across the continent. He was also hated by poets.
For example, after the 1819 Peterloo Massacre of political radicals, blamed on the reactionary Cabinet of which Castlereagh was a leading member, Shelley wrote:
I met murder on the way
He had a masque like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
Shelley died in July 1822. Had he lived another month he might have perked up a little to hear that Castlereagh had been acting distinctly oddly. In an interview with George IV, the minister told the King that he was being watched by a mysterious servant. His ominous words were: ‘I am accused of the same crime as the Bishop of Clogher.’
The Bishop, Percy Jocelyn, had, the previous month, been defrocked and prosecuted after he was found in the back room of the White Lion in Haymarket with his trousers and a Grenadier Guardsman around his ankles. Sensibly, Jocelyn ran away to Scotland, to become a butler. A popular ditty of the time described the tale:
The Devil to prove the Church was a farce
Went out to fish for a Bugger.
He baited his hook with a Soldier’s arse
And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.
It is uncertain, however, whether Castlereagh (a) really had been foolish enough to do it with a Grenadier Guardsman and was being blackmailed, (b) had not been foolish enough to do it with a Grenadier Guardsman but was being blackmailed anyway or (c) was completely mad.
The King, very concerned, told him to speak to a doctor. Perhaps he was worried that Castlereagh had picked up a dose of something he wanted to get rid of, or maybe he thought the minister was one seat short of an overall majority. Certainly, the Duke of Wellington, a chum of the Foreign Secretary, believed it was the latter and wrote to Castlereagh’s physician, asking him to see his patient as soon as possible.
Castlereagh, in a state of agitation, retired to his home in Kent, where his wife, Amelia, took away all the razors to stop him killing himself. Ever resourceful, however, on 12 August 1822 he managed to find a letter opener and cut his own throat. His doctor found him bleeding and recorded his dying words: ‘Bankhead, let me fall upon your arm. Tis all over.’ It put an unambiguous end to an exceptional career.*
Yet, even after dying, Castlereagh managed to influence legislation. An inquiry into his death was held a few days later and ruled that he was mentally ill at the time. This was a charitable judgment because had the ruling been ‘suicide’, he would have had a stake driven through his heart and been buried in unconsecrated ground – possibly at a crossroads in order to prevent his ghost from haunting anyone who lived nearby (crossroads were known to confuse ghosts, who wouldn’t know which way to go).
At the time, many people compared the fact that Lord Castlereagh was buried with full rites in Westminster Abbey with the fact that one Abel Griffiths, a 22-year-old law student who killed himself soon after Castlereagh, was buried in ‘drawers, socks and a winding sheet’ at the intersection of Eaton Street, the King’s Road and Grosvenor Place in London. (At least, according to The Annual Register, a record of the year’s political and social events, which has been published continually since 1758, ‘the disgusting part of the ceremony of throwing lime over the body and driving a stake through it was dispensed with’.) The result of the public outrage was an 1823 law banning crossroad burials altogether, so much good came from his death.
On the other hand, Shelley’s friend Byron wrote:
Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh
Stop, traveller, and piss.
CLASS WAR BREAKS OUT IN THE COURTS – THE TICHBORNE CLAIMANT, 1862
Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne was due to become Sir Roger Doughty-Tichborne, baronet, upon the demise of his father in 1862. The only barrier to his assumption of the title was that he was dead too. Still, that didn’t prevent him from claiming it. Or, to be more precise, it didn’t prevent an obese butcher from the Australian outback claiming it, and demanding the inheritance.
Roger had rather shot himself in the foot a decade beforehand when he decided his cousin, Katherine, was the girl for him. But, as in a tale by Shakespeare, the two families were less than overjoyed with the prospect. There was nothing wrong with cousins marrying – a little bit of ‘keeping it in the family’ was quite normal with the aristocracy and most of the royals were so inbred it was a surprise when one turned out to look almost normal – it was the fact that he was usually so drunk he could hardly see.
In 1852 Roger therefore sold his army commission and went travelling in the Americas until he had dried out enough to stand up unaided, at which point his uncle and aunt might relent and hand over their offspring. On his travels, he saw all the normal sights – the Andes, Rio – and was on his way to Jamaica in 1854 when his ship sank to the bottom of the sea.
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