Secret Histories

The image that the BBC used to accompany its account of the National Trust's report on slavery and colonialism connections at its properties seemed counter-intuitive: Glastonbury Tor. What possible connection could an empty hill with nothing on it but a ruined medieval tower, and no significant activity since Abbot Richard Whiting was burned to death there in 1540, have to the international slave trade, I wondered?

It's fairly tenuous, as it turns out. In 1836, the heir of the Duke of Buckingham, Richard Grenville (he had many other names but we will confine ourselves to 'Grenville'), received a payout of £6,630 5s 6d under the slaveowners' compensation scheme on account of the Hope Estate on Jamaica and its 379 slaves, who had been part of his mother Anne's property before she married Richard's father - also Richard, the first Duke of Buckingham. The Duke had already made a claim for the huge sum of £20,000, but this had been rejected: the 1836 one was made in respect of his son's marriage settlement, arranged in 1819. The Glastonbury connection comes through one of the trustees of the settlement, Revd the Hon. George Neville-Grenville, a cousin of the Buckinghams who owned Butleigh Court a few miles from the town, and one parcel of land which was part of the Butleigh estate was that empty hill with the tower on top, now held for the nation by the NT. The reverend gentleman probably did not himself receive anything at all, and the story shows the ambiguities of the history of slavery and slave-owning in that legally the trustees of the Buckingham marriage settlement were virtually obliged by fiduciary duty to seek compensation if it was available, regardless of what they might have thought about the matter (some Grenvilles, including the first Duke, were enthusiastic supporters of slavery, while others were abolitionists). And, as it transpired, Richard would need all the money he could get.

But the reverend gentleman was also very much a gentleman reverend. George Neville-Grenville was the son of Baron Braybrooke and married the daughter of the Earl of Dartmouth, and inherited Butleigh from another branch of the Grenville family. He was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, a post he held in tandem with the Rectory of Hawarden in Wales, and on leaving Cambridge became Chaplain to Queen Victoria and Dean of Windsor. You could hardly get closer into the establishment of the Church of England, and histories like this show how woven the story of slavery is into that of the British ruling class. 

(Dartmouth? I thought that rang a fairly local bell, and so it does).