The Great Cat Massacre Read Free Page B

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 threeAnglicans, 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 ofpolitical 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