Dr Thomas Townes, a physician and the son of a Barbadian enslaver, is not a household name. Nevertheless, the Christ’s alumnus was an early proponent of innatism: the notion that the differences between white and Black persons were derived from interior biological phenomenon – an idea contrary to the more popular theory of environmentalism. Born and schooled in Barbados, Townes rose through the academic ranks after matriculating at Christ’s in 1664, took his BA around 1668, M.B. a year later in 1669, and MD in 1674. There he may have met Martin Lister, a St John’s fellow, and one of the foremost English naturalists. A fellow of the Royal Society and Royal College of Physicians, Lister was familiar with the plantation system, as the former organisation had invested in the East India and Royal African companies. In fact, Lister was a member of the Royal Society’s influential governing council from 1683 to 1685, when it received dividends on its £200 investment in the African Company.¹

After graduating, Townes returned to Barbados – and Lister was involved in that decision as well. In a letter, Townes reported that he would ‘goe shortly to the Barbados, where of I can serve your curiosity of inquiring after any thing, that is rare to these Northern parts, you may command me’. The letter advised Lister that, if he wanted to ‘send your commands to me’, they should be addressed to Edward Lascelles, a tobacco merchant in Threadneedle Street. Arriving in Barbados, Townes got to work and sent a letter in March detailing some of the experiments which he had conducted on the enslaved population. ‘It wil[l] not be unwelcome perhaps’, he informed Lister, ‘if I tel[l] you that the blood of Negroes is almost as black as their skin. I have seen the blood of at least twenty both sick and in health drawn forth, and the superficies of it al[l] is as dark as the bottome of any European blood after standing a while in a dish’. The humoral balance – the Roman and Greek physician Galen’s notion that blood, if it did not properly circulate, stagnated, and thereby caused sickness – was still an article of scientific faith at this time.²

Townes used that idea to different ends than most physicians, though. Rather than seeing blood as shaped by climatic conditions, Townes reported to Lister that ‘the blackness of Negroes is likely to be inherent in them, and not caused (as some imagine) by the scorching of the Sunne’. Consequently, the blood of Black people, he argued, was different to ‘creatures here that live in the same Clime and heat with them, have as florid blood as those that are in a cold Latitude viz: England’. Townes’s project of human experimentation may have cost the lives of his victims, who were weakened through sickness, malnutrition, and overwork on the colonial plantations.³

Townes’s experiments were taken seriously in the Royal Society. Lister, a prominent Cambridge fellow (who had been elected to that position by mandate from the king), informed Henry Oldenburg, the Society’s secretary, that ‘A correspondent of mine at Barbados, the learned Thomas Townes has lately furnished me with an observation or two, which I shall transcribe for you’. Lister soon informed John Ray of Townes’s findings. In a short note in July 1675, he wrote: ‘Blood of negroes black’. These observations were debated in the Royal Society’s global correspondence networks, with Lister hearing that an ‘Ingenious’ physician named Thomas Glover had ‘lately come from our American Plantations’ in Virginia and Barbados. There he had also ‘let many Negros blood, and always observ’d it as florid and red as any Europeans blood, and that he never saw any of a black or dark color, as is represented by the latter, you received from that island’. Glover was receptive to Townes’s findings, however, arguing that he would inquire into ‘other places, where Blacks inhabit’ concerning the ‘truth of this observation’. In turn, Lister was defensive of his Barbadian protégé and correspondent, complaining that Glover had not conducted the same ‘Experiment’ as Townes and thus the Royal Society would have to embark on more research to confirm his findings in Barbados.⁴

Natural philosophers and, as we shall see, lawyers were intimately connected, both personally and intellectually, to the propagation of the British Empire. Whether considering the theoretical and philosophical foundations of race, accepting collections from slave-trade investors, travelling to slave societies to conduct research, or assisting in the governance of Britain’s slave empire, Cambridge men were dedicated agents in imperial processes, and their experiences further illustrate the spectrum of interconnections between Britons and their empire. Though seemingly unconnected stories, the growing professionalisation of the natural science and legal fields was inextricably intertwined, as historians have shown, with Britain’s slave empire. In turn, Cambridge fellows ensured that the spoils of imperial conquest, whether plants or book collections, would return to the University and Britain writ-large, and be laundered in scientific collections and college buildings. The chapter will explore these processes, looking first at natural scientists and then at lawyers and jurists who, following on from the Virginian and New England missionaries, enforced rules, laws, and legal philosophies that codified the heavily contested racial fiction that white Europeans could enslave African children from birth. The legacies of these ideas would be felt far beyond the county borders of Cambridgeshire.⁵

With the rise of England’s Protestant empire, natural scientists – like Townes – were some of the first men who benefitted. For natural philosophers, their acceptance of slavery was born, in part, out of a self-interested desire to access and profit from the colonial spaces where they could make new discoveries and then bring these specimens home to Britain. As Kathleen Murphy writes, recent works on the global history of science have ‘expanded the practitioners of Atlantic science to include enslaved and free Africans (as well as Native Americans and white women) alongside more familiar figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles-Marie de La Condamine’. That story was true at Cambridge too. For the enslaved were pivotal to many of the discoveries that have been attributed to important men of science in Cambridge’s history.⁶

University fellows and former students, in turn, donated to collections. John Covel, the Master of Christ’s (1688–1722), provided Sir Hans Sloane, a plantation owner in Jamaica through his marriage to the heiress Elizabeth Langley Rose (Fulke Rose’s widow), with ‘A manati strap for whipping the Negro slaves in the Hott W. India plantations’. Covel, who had previously served as the Chaplain to the Levant Company, which exported trade goods such as silver, pepper, nutmeg, wool, and cotton from the Ottoman Empire, gave £100 for altering the college chapel and organised a subscription to raise money for construction efforts (which Sir Isaac Newton provided nineteen guineas towards). The Christ’s College Commemoration Books record that Covel generously ‘built the Tower of the Chapel and furnished it with a Clock and Bell’. Sloane also commissioned George Lewis, a Queens’ alumnus, Chaplain to the EIC in Madras, and skilled Persian linguist, to collect shells, butterflies, and nuts – with Lewis’s extensive collection of literature from the Levant and Asia donated to Cambridge University Library.⁷

Colleges cultivated extensive collections of natural and human specimens too. The Benin Bronzes have justifiably received much attention, yet it bears remembering that the institutional acquisition of treasured possessions has a centuries-long history. After Captain James Cook’s three-year voyage (1768–1771) on the HMS Endeavour to observe the transit of Venus, he brought back numerous ‘Weapons, Utensils and Manufactures’ from the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich (and namesake of the Sandwich Islands, which was the European name for Hawai’i), donated these items to his alma mater, Trinity College. The inventory included paddles, clubs, a battle axe, edge tools, necklaces, dresses, fishhooks, and a bottle of an ‘elastic Gum’ from South America. The Cook treasures joined Trinity’s other oddities: the piece of a mummified Egyptian, a ‘magick cup’ from Egypt, a Rhinoceros horn, a ‘Quiver containing seventeen Poison Darts used by Indians’, Samuel Morland’s speaking trumpet (an early megaphone), and the heart of Daniel Malden, a sailor who had broken out of Newgate several times and had then been executed in 1736 for stealing linen. Trinity’s collecting also extended to flora. Under the supervision of Richard Walker, the Vice-Master of Trinity, John Harrison, the college gardener, expanded upon John Ray’s botanic garden that had been kept since the 1660s, with ‘Banana, Coffee-shrub’, ‘Torch-thistle’ (so named because some Native Americans used the stems of that species of cacti as torches), and ‘the Red Jessamine of the West Indies’. The age of discovery was an era of imperial collecting, and colleges (and college men) were at the forefront of this endeavour – receiving rarities from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.⁸

Despite the efforts of these hobby collectors, a working definition of “science” and “scientists” was somewhat elusive. Samuel Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary, defined the sciences in five ways: as ‘Knowledge’; ‘Certainty grounded on demonstration’; ‘Art attained by precepts, or built on principles’; ‘Any art or species of knowledge’; and ‘One of the seven liberal arts, grammar, rhetoric, logick, arithmetick, musick, geometry, astronomy’. Science, then, was defined through its methods – the scientific method of reasoning, experimentation, and deduction that led to an empirical conclusion. There were no science departments and scientists were treated as theoreticians alongside philosophers, rhetoricians, and men of the cloth as thinkers struggling to pursue knowledge about the world, both material and spiritual. Theology and religion were not at all separate; the questions that natural scientists explored often revolved around divine phenomena or Biblical stories, such as proving the creation in Genesis or Noah’s Flood. The Royal Society was not the sole preserve of scientific researchers either, with the Fullers and other members of the landed gentry holding positions of authority. Scientists, especially in medicine, were considered trained professionals but it was not until the early nineteenth century that gentleman amateurs, such as Stephen Fuller, were replaced with university-educated specialists.⁹

Born 1 May 1665, John Woodward never attained an undergraduate degree; still, he was one of the most significant of these natural scientists in Cambridge’s history. Despite his limitations in education, Woodward rose from an apprenticed linen draper to an apprentice in medicine to Dr Peter Barwick, Charles II’s physician. Benefitting from Barwick’s patronage, he became the Gresham Professor of Physic in 1692 and then, a year later, a Royal Society fellow. Woodward’s connections to Cambridge began that year too, as Thomas Tenison made Woodward a Doctor of Medicine – though it was the latter’s death and benefaction that had a real effect on university life. When he died on 25 April 1728, Woodward’s executors disposed of his ‘ready money, my money in the South Sea Company, all Debts owing to me, all money due to me on mortgages, on Bonds, Bills, notes, or other securities and my said Household Goods, Books, Antiquities jewels, plate, and all my other personal Estate herein’ to purchase lands that would then be donated to Cambridge and used to support a lectureship in his name, the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology.¹⁰

Woodward’s South Sea assets were a noteworthy component of his generous benefaction. In the aftermath of the Bubble, Woodward’s executors owned £820 of stock, which was divided into £410 of stock and the same amount in annuities, with the sum in the latter security increasing to around £700 on his death. These investments complimented his personal ownership of £500 in Royal African stock in 1720. Given Woodward’s wealth, the Woodwardian Professor enjoyed some luxuries: they were paid £100 a year and were only required to read four lectures on a topic mentioned in his 1695 work, Natural History of the Earth, where the donor had, in the later enlarged version of the text, posited that Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans differed in ‘Stature, Shape, Features, Hair, and Complexion’ due to climate, soil, and diet. Those environmental determinants, Woodward argued (and students and fellows would have heard in the lectures), explained why Indigenous ‘Americans’ were more akin to the ‘early Inhabitants’ of Europe in that they ‘knew Nothing of Letters, of Coyn’d-Money, of Iron, of the Plough, or of Horses’.¹¹

As an aside, Woodward’s calculations of the profits that he might have gained from these South Sea and Royal African securities owed a significant debt to mathematicians. Finance and the financial calculations of annuities and compound interest had started to pique the interest of Cambridge fellows and their interlocuters, most prominently Isaac Newton at Trinity College. Their studies were essential for the national interest as the rise of the South Sea and East India companies and the government’s efforts to finance the public debt with securities in these trading firms necessitated investigations into the viability of these assets for private and public investors and the fiscal-military state. Newton’s South Sea holdings increased exponentially from £1,000 in 1712 to at least £10,000 in 1717 to £16,275 in June 1721 and, a year later, to £21,696. He made profits on this investment before the Bubble but suffered greatly in the crash. Newton’s interest in finance began fifty years earlier in 1670, when he wrote to John Collins, an accountant and mathematics instructor. Their letters concerned annuities and Newton’s efforts to determine, through logarithms, the expected interest rate from assets. William Jones (c.1675–1749), a friend of Newton’s who purchased Collins’s papers, deposited several notebooks with the University containing his calculations of simple interest, compound interest, pension annuities, and accounts of a tabulation of imports and exports, which reveal the interest of contemporary Cambridge mathematicians in financial matters.¹²

Woodward and his Natural History owed a significant debt as well to enslaved Africans. The collection of fossils that he bequeathed to Cambridge – contained in two large oak cabinets – included material from slave societies, including Virginia, Maryland, Barbados, and Jamaica. Together, these specimens contributed to Woodward’s grand theory that the Biblical Deluge had produced fossils, as these were the creatures contained in the ‘promiscuous Mass of Sand, Earth, Shells and the rest, falling down [due to gravity] and subsiding from the water’. The Bible, for him, provided the answers to scientific questions – and, to answer those hypotheses, he encouraged natural scientists to use enslaved collectors. In his Brief Instructions for Making Observations, he wrote that the ‘gathering and preserving of Insects, Shells, Plants, Minerals, &c. may be done by the Hands of Servants; and that too at their spare and leisure times: or in Journies, in the Plantations, in Fishing, Fowling, &c. without Hindrance of any other Business, the things herein desired being common, and such as (one or other of them) occur in almost all Places’.¹³

Enslavers and natural scientists obliged. They followed Woodward’s detailed instructions, sending numerous specimens for his research. Much of this material was undoubtedly attained with the explicit help or assistance of enslaved persons. Since at least the sixteenth century, the enslaved were used as fishermen and pearl haulers in the Caribbean and mainland Americas, trawling the Atlantic’s oyster beds, so their labour was essential if various specimens had to be drawn from the ocean floor. On the teeth of marine life, Woodward noted that one specimen ‘is found on the Coasts of Jamaica, Barbadoes, and other Parts of the West-Indies’. On a particular species of sea urchin, Woodward wrote that such a specimen could be ‘found on the Shores of Barbadoes’. In his records of Virginian specimens, Woodward noted the existence of numerous species – the ‘Bottom Shell of an Oyster’ or the ‘upper Valve of a small Oyster’ – that were, more likely than not, discovered and collected by enslaved Africans.¹⁴

Woodward relied on the Royal African Company for his scientific work too. He was not alone in pleading for the slave-trading company to support his passion for collecting: the Virginian naturalist John Banister requested that they ‘bestow on me 4 or 5 guinny negros’ to assist him on scientific expeditions. In his published Collection, Woodward had gold from Guinea, which he ‘had of the Royal African Company, and was inform’d they once had a Lump that weigh’d somewhat above 3 Ounces’. Charles Hayes, a mathematician, geographer, slave-trader, and sub-governor of the Company, had sent that valuable specimen. Woodward recalled that Hayes ‘in his Letter from Cape-Coast in Guinea, 7 Feb. 1704, mentions one he saw there that weigh’d 4 Ounces… and that he had accounts of much larger found in those Parts’. From this information, Woodward speculated whether torrential rains had managed to disperse gold from the mountains. Aside from Hayes and Woodward, numerous scientific luminaries and fellows were involved in the RAC. Dr John Arbuthnot, the Scottish physician, director of the Royal Academy of Music, and inventor of the famous “John Bull” satirical image, held £2,000 in stock; Dr John Freind, whose estate helped to fund a College Readership in Chemistry at Christ Church, Oxford, and an Anatomy School, held the same amount of stock; Dr Thomas Pellett, the President of the Royal College of Physicians and alumnus of Queens’, Cambridge, had £1,000 invested; and Dr William King, the principal of St Mary’s Hall, Oxford (now Oriel), had £1,000. Men of science and education were intimately and financially connected, then, to the most prolific global slave-trading enterprise.¹⁵

Woodward also depended for his specimens on the intrepid work of other Cambridge fellows in the American colonies, who required the acquiescence of enslavers and their enslaved labourers. Woodward’s Natural History refers multiple times to a ‘Mr. Vernon’ – William Vernon, a fellow of Peterhouse. Much of Vernon’s intrepid life remains shrouded in mystery, but he was born in Hertford and entered Peterhouse in 1685, graduating with a BA in 1689. At Cambridge, he befriended John Ray who invited the young naturalist into the Royal Society’s prestigious circle. Elected a college fellow in 1692, Vernon was granted leave and funding to ‘improve his Botanick studies in the West Indies’, lest he marry or pass away there – the former unlikely given Vernon’s overt fondness for mosses and Lepidoptera, and the latter much more likely given the Caribbean’s high mortality rates. Several years later, Vernon was sent to Virginia because William Byrd II and Sloane sought his expertise for a natural history of the colony. Travelling throughout the Chesapeake, Vernon sent numerous specimens to Woodward, including pieces of bone, shells, and teeth. Though the Peterhouse fellow died in 1711 in obscurity, Woodward and Vernon had cemented the university’s reputation for natural history.¹⁶

Cambridge’s slaving connections did not end with Woodward. The first Woodwardian Professor, Conyers Middleton, had financial investments in the slave trade in the form of South Sea stock. The sale document for these investments was signed, sealed, and delivered in the presence of Thomas Crosse, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, and John Mickleburgh, the Minister of St Andrews Church and Professor of Chemistry in Cambridge, on 29 September 1721. Born in Richmond, North Yorkshire, on 27 December 1683, Middleton entered Trinity College in March 1699, graduating with a BA degree in 1703, and was elected to a fellowship in 1705. He received his Doctorate in Divinity from no less than George I. After his first wife, Sarah Morris, passed away in 1731, Middleton reinvented himself from a controversialist (often locked in petty collegiate squabbles with Richard Bentley) into a natural philosopher. In his inaugural lecture, he observed that the study of fossils may help prove the historicity of Noah’s Flood. Though Middleton made few statements on enslavement, his 1745 Letter from Rome mentioned that the face of a saint he saw there was ‘as black as a Negro’s; so that one would take it rather for the representation of a Proserpine, or infernal Deity, than, what they impiously stile it, of the Queen of Heaven’. Middleton was no innovator in these prejudicial remarks – Black people and Black skin, amongst many early modern white Britons, were associated with sinfulness, savagery, and bondage. Isaac Barrow, the Master of Trinity College and Newton’s mentor and predecessor as Lucasian Professor, preached that ‘Nature coveteth good success to its designs and undertakings… therefore was he put to water dry sticks and to wash Negros; that is, to instruct a most dull and stupid, to reform a most perverse and stubborn generation’.¹⁷

Continuing the studies of these Cambridge luminaries, the Reverend Charles Mason, the Woodwardian Professor of Geology for twenty-eight years and, like Middleton, a fellow of Trinity, was looked upon – like the Cambridgeshire landscapes which he traversed and mapped with precision – as ‘rather unhewn, rough, and unsociable’. Despite his obtuseness, Mason developed networks of correspondence and knowledge production that stretched to the Caribbean. One such correspondent was the Reverend William Smith, the Rector of St John’s Parish in Nevis, whose Natural History of Nevis, and the Rest of the English Leeward Charibee Islands in America was dedicated in 1745 to Mason and the island’s ‘Worthy Gentlemen’, who he hoped would benefit from the ‘spiritual Blessings of Heaven[.]’ Having maintained a record of the region’s climate and wildlife, Smith presented his work to Mason, who encouraged him to write the treatise. In any case, many of Smith’s observations involved enslaved African assistants. He noted how the enslaved collected cockles on the shore, gathered the bark of dogwood trees and used its juice for fishing, and the dangers of collecting poisonous sea creatures. Searching for shells, Smith and his companions ‘ordered my Negro Man Oxford to strip, dive, and unloose it [an object at the bottom of a pond]’, and “Oxford” managed to pull ‘Roots and Branches’ from the water which convinced the Reverend that the ‘vast Atlantick Ocean… might abound at [the] bottom with large growing Trees, and smaller bushes, as well as with Weeds, or Grass’. After arriving in Cambridge, Smith presented his collection of roots and shells to Mason, another enduring example of how the hidden labour of enslaved Black people shaped scientific thought at Cambridge.¹⁸

Alongside the Woodwardian Professors, Cambridge botanists supported colonial enterprises. Richard Bradley, who had a similar non-university background to Woodward, rose from a journeyman interest in gardens and botany to a professorship after the publication of his 1710 work A Treatise of Succulent Plants earned him notice from Sir Hans Sloane and the naturalist and apothecary James Petiver, who worked with traders in enslaved Africans to collect specimens. After a visit to the Netherlands, which stimulated his imagination for horticulture (and for the medicinal effects of coffee to cure the plague), Bradley became the first Cambridge Professor of Botany in 1724.¹⁹

Holding the chair until his death in 1732, Bradley intervened in subjects ranging from infectious diseases to tulips – and, in these studies, he regularly conversed with men such as Sloane. Compiling his lectures, which he claimed would ‘bring me in a good sum of money’, Bradley wrote to Sloane around 1727 hoping to ‘have the opportunity of seeing your History of Jamaica. It would do me great service in what I am about’. Like Woodward, Bradley’s research interests utilised Caribbean collections, particularly Sloane’s displays. His 1721 treatise A Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature mentioned in exhausting detail how in ‘the West Indies there is another sort of Flying Lizard, different in the Colour, and Make of its Wings’ (with the coloured plates for this discussion taken ‘from my own Collection: the same is in Sir Hans Sloan’s Cabinet’, and that in ‘Suriman, and some other Parts of the West Indies, there is a large Fly, which they commonly call the Lanthorn Fly’ – a specimen found ‘likewise in Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection of Rarerities’. His History of Succulent Plants, which appeared in five editions from 1716 to 1727, contained a wealth of detail on White Torch Thistles ‘in the West-Indies, growing among the Rocks, and shooting forth its Pillar-like stems upright to a great Heighth’. Bradley’s research into Caribbean flora and fauna, from flying lizards to bats that ‘were as large as a Rat’, owed a significant debt to the colonists who discovered these specimens.²⁰

Bradley was a much-publicised botanist, but he was not content to collect oddities – he considered his chosen profession as an avenue to improve the empire. Bradley had considered erecting a ‘Physick Garden at Cambridge’. Four decades later, the generosity of Richard Walker brought this plan to fruition, yet Bradley had greater ambitions for the garden than the ‘Wisdom and Goodness of God’. He compared it to Amsterdam’s Garden which had received ‘Plants, from several Parts of the World; which, as the Governors see Occasion, are transmitted to some of their own Plantations, the least distant from them, and thereby advantage their Trade’. The coffee tree was the perfect example, to him, of the positive externalities generated due to a public garden (see Figure 3.1). At first, the Dutch cultivated the tree in Batavia ‘till’ they imported many Tun Weight from thence of their own Growth and brought Trees of it to Amsterdam; where, after a little Time, they raised several Hundreds and sent them to Surinam and Curasau in the West Indies, from whence I am told, they receive a good Freight of Coffee every year’. The project was such a success for the Dutch, he claimed, that ‘they may gather Coffee enough in those Plantations to supply the greatest Part of Europe’. Reflecting upon the ‘State of our American Plantations, and our extensive Trade’, he thought that it was imperative that they send ‘many Plants of Use, which will grow freely there, and may be collected and prepared for them, in such a Garden as I speak of’. Given that, between 1767 and 1789, coffee exports from Saint-Domingue had quadrupled, Bradley’s enthusiasm for that produce was well-founded.²¹

Figure 3.1

The Coffe[e] Tree, print from Richard Bradley, A Short Historical Account of Coffee (London: EM. Matthews, 1715). Royal Society.

Understandably, Bradley’s obsession with coffee, particularly its medicinal qualities, continued unabated. A regular of the Grecian coffeehouse in Devereux Court (a place for refreshment frequented by Sloane, Petiver, and Newton), the Professor again discussed coffee trees in the 12 September 1727 edition of his successful The Weekly Miscellany For the Improvement of Husbandry, Trade, Arts, and Sciences. Running for over two decades, the Botanist published a letter that he had received from a “J. Wickliffe” in Bristol applauding his Short Historical Account of Coffee that had ‘pleased me and the Company where I was’. (Presented to the Royal Society on 28 April 1715, the Account celebrated coffee’s medicinal and mercantile qualities.) The reader, perhaps a merchant, supported growing coffee in the North American plantations and remembered that he had been in Barbados where ‘I saw a good Number of Coffee-Trees growing very well… It is a new thing in that Island; but as it is new, it will ask some Time before the Barbadians will come into it; for they were not, when I was there, fond enough of it to set heartily about improving it’. Nevertheless, the Bristol correspondent acknowledged that it ‘grows well’ in Barbados and given that they had seen ‘great Plantations’ in Surinam and Curaçao exporting the product, Barbadian enslavers should be ‘encouraged’ to produce coffee that was ‘much fresher and cheaper’ than elsewhere, owing to the shorter voyages between England and the Caribbean plantations. Bradley agreed – and he replied that a ‘parcel’ of coffee trees had been delivered from Barbados to the Royal Gardens at Hampton Court to encourage production. Relating information from his distinguished contacts, including Dr Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, the Professor of Botany in Amsterdam’s Botanical Gardens, Bradley noted that the trees must be ‘raised by laying the tender Shoots in Earth, which may be an Instruction to those in Foreign Countries’ – providing a more detailed method of growing and raising coffee trees in his Gardiner’s Calendar.²²

Natural science was, as with so many other aspects of Cambridge life, a family affair. Both John Martyn and his son Thomas succeeded Bradley as the Professors of Botany – and their appreciation of the world beyond Britain’s shores perhaps came naturally: John’s father (and Thomas’s grandfather) was a Hamburg merchant and John had married a daughter of Claude Fonnereau, a Huguenot ‘merchant prince’ who had a significant fortune in the linen trade, including to East India (a sizeable fortune that was reinvested in land and, in part, in EIC and SSC stocks). Following his election to the Royal Society in 1727 after lecturing on botany in London, John, alongside his influential mentor Sir Hans Sloane, worked with travellers to attain specimens from the Caribbean, including from William Houstoun, a Scotsman who had been employed on board the Assiento as a slave ship’s surgeon with the South Sea Company. Martyn mused in a 1731 letter to Houstoun, who depended upon Indigenous and enslaved African collectors for his specimens, that he had ‘done enough already to stir up the jealousy of any man who has not been before you in the West Indies; and, if I am not grievously mistaken, you will soon make it difficult for any one to have success who comes after you’. Their connection continued after Martyn’s appointment to the Professorship at Cambridge, and in October 1732 Martyn and his fellow Society members supported Houstoun’s application to be admitted as he had set out for Georgia, with the support of the Bray Associates, ‘in Search of the Plants & Drugs of that Country’. Martyn and Sloane also proposed that Rose Fuller, a ‘Gentleman well Skill’d in all parts of the Mathematicks, Natural and Experimental Philosophy, & most branches of Curious & Usefull Learning; being desirous of becoming a Member of this [Royal] Society’. The findings of these men, including fourteen seeds from Spanish America and specimens from Barbados, Dominica, and Jamaica, were documented in Martyn’s Historia Plantarum Rariorum.²³

The later Professor’s linkages to enslavers also extended to his other hobbies, among them his editorship, alongside the clergyman Richard Russel, of the satirical Grub-Street Journal from 1730 to 1733. On 25 May 1732, the same year that Martyn was appointed as Professor, the Journal published a notice of ‘a Negro-BOY, Named SCIPIO’ who had ‘Went away from his Master’ and had not ‘been heard of since’. The “master” in the advertisement was Andrew Smith, an attorney in King Street, Cheapside, and the document was one example of a wider genre of such advertisements in Britain and the North American colonies that aimed, Simon Newman argues, to ‘commodify those who dared elope’. The text read that Scipio ‘had on a blue Livery, a small Sleeve to his Coat, turn’d up with yellow Plush, trim’d with white Metal Buttons; his Coat double-breasted to the Waste; the Buttons of his Breeches plain and flat, made of white Metal’. The dressing of the Black enslaved in somewhat garish outfits was part and parcel of middling and elite white efforts to display their manservants to a gawking public as symbols of the master class’s wealth and social status. In a city with ports and other methods of escape, the master in this case, Smith, hoped that Scipio, a ‘Strong made Boy’, would not travel far as he ‘talks bad English’ (perhaps indicating that he was recently enslaved from West Africa). Scipio’s fate does not appear in the record, however John Martyn’s publication of that advertisement in the Journal was another example of the complex range of interconnections between academic knowledge-seekers and the individuals and families, from the more prominent Fullers to the attorney Andrew Smith, that benefitted from Britain’s slave societies.²⁴

Thomas, who held the Professorship for more than sixty years (1762–1825), was a far more prolific author than his father, though. Elected to a Sidney Sussex fellowship after graduating from Cambridge, Thomas contributed numerous works from a translation of Jean Jacques Rosseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany in 1785 to an Italian travel guide to illustrations of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linneaus’s botanical system. Martyn’s impressive publishing record coincided with a period of turbulence in the Cambridge botanical world. Charles Miller, the first Curator of the botanical garden, left the University in 1770 for Sumatra to cultivate nutmegs, spices, and other vegetables which ‘might prove advantageous objects of commerce’. Observing the garden’s dwindling finances, Martyn stepped into the breach and assisted as Curator alongside his other duties. The Cantabrigian had an interest in the gardens, but he did not show a similar proclivity for teaching – and he returned to London after 1796 (though he still held the Professorship for the rest of his long life). The time away from the classroom, however, enabled Martyn to improve and expand upon Philip Miller’s already monumental The Gardener’s Dictionary.²⁵

Thomas’s two volume Dictionary, which was published in 1807, had an obvious debt to the Black population in the Caribbean and the significant knowledge that they had gained in medicine and construction methods through their inventive efforts to survive slavery. The Dictionary mentioned how the people that he labelled “negroes” used certain plants and glutinous barks as diuretics, to stimulate menstrual flow, or to treat roundworms; he claimed that the enslaved used Jamaican cabbage trees for mats in slave huts and the seeds as feed for wild hogs; he recognised their attachment to papaw trees because they ‘render the air healthy, and therefore plant them near their houses’; and he informed readers that the enslaved and poor whites utilised the shells of the Cucurbita (a relation of the pumpkin) as ‘water-cups’ and the pulp was ‘employed in resolutive poultices’. Martyn was clear throughout about the significance of local Black knowledge in the publication, and he recognised in one passage on Jamaican hibiscus that ‘Its common name there is Congo Mahoe; the negroes affirming that it came originally from Africa’.²⁶

The Dictionary was intended for application to plantation economies. That emphasis is clear in a section on indigo production, where the Cantabrigian introduced new passages that were not in Miller’s original published version. For context, Elizabeth Pinckney, who was born in Antigua and moved to South Carolina with her family in 1738, started running her father’s plantations at the age of sixteen and sought to perfect the cultivation of indigo as a dye for the transatlantic textile market. Her entrepreneurial efforts paid dividends as that product became the colony’s second most profitable cash crop after rice (leading, in turn, to the growing popularity of that good beyond the Carolinas). The production and sale of indigo crossed imperial lines, with prominent French Louisiana enslavers such as Julien de Lallande Poydras trading that commodity to London and holding insurance contracts there on the produce that they shipped across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean.²⁷

Martyn had some words of advice for these colonists. Like Samuel Martin’s plantation manual, the Cambridge scholar established in detail how to grow, develop, and reap this crop. ‘The culture of Indigo’, he wrote, ‘has been greatly neglected among the English colonists, though no part of the world affords a better soil, or more commodious situations for that purpose than Jamaica’. Thankfully, ‘they have begun however to plant there of late years’. He continued: ‘Seventeen negroes are sufficient to manage twenty acres of Indigo: and one acre of rich land, well planted, will, with good seasons and proper management, yield five hundred pounds of Indigo in twelve months: for the plant ratoons and gives four or five crops a year: but must be replanted afterwards’. The Cambridge Professor advised that the planters not leave the crop too long before it was to be cut, and that ‘some experiments in the culture and management of indigo’ would allow them to reap that produce ‘whilst young and full of juice’. Martyn recognised that ‘labour being dear in the West Indies’, so he advised the use of drill ploughs to sow the seeds and a hoe plough to keep the crop free of weeds and ensure also that the stalks would be stronger and therefore resistant to insect outbreaks. From the size of the enslaved labour force and plantation grounds to the technologies required for cultivation, Martyn’s expertise was dedicated, in no small part, to assisting landed enslavers in their efforts to expand imperial commerce.²⁸

If some Cambridge men were content to stare at the ground, others found knowledge and wisdom in the heavens. Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth Astronomer Royal and Trinity fellow, had connections to imperial and slaveholding enterprises. Though Maskelyne was a keen physicist and mathematician, his early life was more grounded – the unfortunate passing of his father at the age of twelve left his family in dire straits, though his education at Westminster School coincided with the eclipse of 14 July 1748 (a seminal event in his life). Entering St Catharine’s College in 1749, Maskelyne – despite being the seventh wrangler – initially considered a career in the church and was ordained as a minister in 1755 and was elected to a Trinity fellowship a year later.²⁹

The East and West Indies shaped Maskelyne’s life and fortunes. His elder brother, Edmund, was an administrator and soldier in the East India Company, and his younger sister, Margaret, married Robert Clive on 18 February 1753 (and Clive later employed Edmund as his aide-de-camp). Clive (or the 1st Baron Clive) was twice Governor of Bengal and had earned a vast colonial fortune. The baroness longed for his return home, however, writing to Edmund from Berkeley Square in May 1766 that he had been ‘an instrument of so much good to Bengal & the India Company, that it quite disordered me, & my rejoicing was beyond all description’, hoping that ‘there will be no occasion for my Lord to stay in India longer than December, although the Directors of course ask him to stay another year’. Nevil benefitted from his East Indian familial associations, and, that same month, he sent a letter to Edmund being ‘greatly obliged to you for your kind intention expressed in your letter of making me a present of 500£ India stock; tho’ I must own I am not so surprised at so great a testimony of regard from a brother of so generous and affectionate a disposition’. Less than twenty years later, Nevil gained significant financial benefits from the Caribbean. In 1784, he married Sophia Pate Rose, whose father, John Pate Rose, owned an estate in Northamptonshire and another in Jamaica, named “Mount Hindmost,” which produced rum and sugar.³⁰

Nevil’s courtship with Sophia was neither his first nor last association with the Atlantic world. His involvement there began in July 1760, when the Royal Society sent him to St Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean to observe the transit of Venus. (‘Some Members of the University of Cambridge’ had, that very same year, also lobbied for and succeeded in making the EIC open ‘any of their Settlements’ and ‘divers Factories’ in Sumatra, Batavia, and Madras to scientific minds interested in observing the Transit, though the firm admitted that it possessed only one set of tools for that endeavour.) The trip was a failure owing to poor weather, which obscured his vision of the celestial event, yet Maskelyne took advantage of his time there to use the moon to determine longitude. Having published his lunar-distance method in the British Mariner’s Guide (utilising the work of the German astronomer Tobias Mayer), and thereby establishing his reputation in the calculation and tabulation of nautical travel, the Board of Longitude next sent Maskelyne to Barbados in 1763 to determine the capital Bridgetown’s coordinates via the observation of Jupiter’s moons. (The Board had hoped to send their educated observer to Jamaica, but a deadly fever there had scuppered these plans.) Springing into action, Maskelyne had to get his affairs in order with little time to spare, writing to his brother that he had ‘taken 100£ on Portugal specie with me which I am inform’d is the best method of supplying myself’, and asked whether he could collect his college rents from Trinity, which along with his other funds would be sufficient ‘for 8 months at Barbadoes’.³¹

Sailing from Portsmouth, Maskelyne’s arrival in Barbados six weeks later was ‘saluted with 15 Guns’ from Needham’s Fort. The friendly welcome continued whilst he was on the island: ‘Since my arrival here’, he noted to his brother in December 1763, ‘I have passed my time much more agre[e]ably, to which the great civilities I have received from the gentlemen of this place have not a little contributed’. He established his observation point on Constitution Hill; still, he had plenty of time – whilst enduring a heat that was ‘somewhat too great for an European Constitution’ – to traverse the island, commenting that the colony was ‘very pleasant in general, & as green if not greener than in England, but not with Grass, but with India Corn, Guinea Corn, & Sugar Cane plants; the first of which is chiefly used for sustaining the poultry & sometimes also the cattle, & the second is the chief food of the negroes’. He made few remarks on enslaved labourers in the letters (though he pondered in his journal whether ‘workmen’ in the observatory had moved his instruments). Lodging with a Bridgetown attorney, Maskelyne reassessed his prejudices against the colonists, observing that this important ‘Island is reckon’d the Garden of all the West Indies, & is indeed very pleasant, very different from the Idea we commonly form of this part of the world in England’. That visit – the research from which he published as a ‘Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge’ – and his wife’s Jamaican connections may have made a lasting impression. As the slave trade was debated four decades later, Maskelyne purchased Jesse Foot’s 1804 Observations principally upon the Speech of Mr Wilberforce, which challenged the ‘black accusations’ that had been cast at enslavers.³²

Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, the Master of Trinity Hall from 1710 to 1735, was a significant agent in the British Empire, providing legal advice on slavery-related cases and assisting benefactions connected to the plantations. Born on 29 November 1669, Nathaniel followed in his father, Sir Richard’s, footsteps from cradle to grave. He was educated at Oxford, and, like Lloyd senior, he was elected a fellow of All Souls. Nathaniel trod another well-worn familial path – becoming an advocate in the Doctors’ Commons, a society of Doctors of Law with educations at Oxford and Cambridge practising civil (particularly probate and maritime issues) and canon (or ecclesiastical) law in London, which his father had done as the Dean of Arches. Though classified as an honourable and ‘masculine office’, Britons were rather torn in their opinions concerning barristers, who specialised in common law, or the advocates. For some, the law was an ‘Laudable and Honourable’ profession – one ‘worthy of a Scholar and a Gentleman’; and, to other observers, lawyers were ‘fusty, musty, dusty, rusty, filthy, [and] stinking’. Legal careers, the historian David Lemmings notes, were ‘attractive’ to families who had enough financial standing to support their son’s careers but did not have the provincial landed estates or ‘national standing’ to attain high political offices for their children.³³

Lloyd’s familial wealth and status certainly had its limits. Although a Member of Parliament for the City of Durham, his father was a younger son, and he did not inherit the family seat, Aston Hall, in Oswestry on the Welsh border. Consequently, Nathaniel’s inheritance included a dozen silver plates, the lease of his father’s legal chambers, and books and funds to support his legal career. Lloyd was intelligent and hardworking, however – and he needed those traits because English law before the publication of William Blackstone’s Commentaries in 1765 was dry and complicated. Still, the rewards of that ‘worthy’ office were compelling, as the Commons’ advocates, many of whom had specialist knowledge in international law, found ready employment in the Church, the admiralty and vice-admiralty courts, and in diplomatic service.³⁴

Lloyd’s lifelong involvement in the Doctors’ Commons brought him into contact with Britain’s slave empire. Founded in 1511, the Commons maintained close institutional ties to Trinity Hall, which at times earned an average yearly rent of £63 from their ownership of its rooms. This monetary linkage between Trinity and the Commons members, many of whom were involved in Atlantic trading companies, meant that the college earned an economic benefit from individuals involved in the empire. Humphrey Henchman, the grandson of the more famous Bishop of London, possessed £3,500 in stock after the Royal African Company launched another issue of securities in 1722. Imperial companies also hired the Commons as council to manage issues of maritime law. After taking a Doctorate at Trinity Hall, Sir Thomas Penfold was hired as council to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operated the North American fur trade, for one guinea. The size of the Commons was never large – indeed, between 1512 and 1856 ‘only 462 advocates were admitted (or a little over one a year)’ – but the civilians had an outsized influence because ‘the study of civil law’ was thought to ‘cultivate the art of statesmanship’. Together, Lloyd and his colleagues shaped the nature and extent of Britain’s sovereignty over the oceans.³⁵

Few of these advocates, who provided their rents to Trinity Hall, matched Charles Davenant in stature. Davenant, a parliamentarian since 1685 and a former student at Balliol College, Oxford, defended joint-stock organisations against individual traders seeking to challenge their monopolies. An advocate for the EIC, Davenant, who had a stable living as the Commissioner for Excise, earned around £1,000 a year for three years, writing a “Memorial on the East-India Trade” in February 1696 and an Essay on the East India Trade, which argued that ‘the Wealth England had once, did arise chiefly from Two Articles: First, Our Plantation Trade. Secondly, Our East India Traffick’. No better statement could be made for the importance of imperial rule to England’s finances, and Davenant sought to prove his point further in subsequent publications hoping to resume the RAC’s monopoly, which had effectively ended in 1689. Davenant argued that a free trade in enslaved Africans had led to the ‘Planters complaining extremely of the great scarcity of, and extravagant Advance upon the Price of Negroes[.]’ Company rule would, he claimed, address this chaos. Far from impartial lawyers adjudicating on cases, therefore, the civilian lawyers were active participants in imperial companies, and Trinity Hall stood to gain financially from their imperial and slaving activities in chamber rents.³⁶

Whilst at the Doctors’ Commons, Lloyd ascended the legal ladder. On 15 November 1701, he was appointed a deputy admiralty Advocate, a position that his father had held, replacing Dr Henry Newton for a time as the ‘advocate Generall for all matters Ecclesiastical, Maritime, & Foreign, relating to the Crown’, earning £20 an annum for this position. Five years after being knighted in May 1710, Lloyd became George I’s legal advocate, advising government officials negotiating a treaty with France to lower trade duties (negotiations which the French swiftly nullified). As an expert on admiralty law, many of his cases around this time involved Atlantic slavery. Lloyd contributed to the law of contraband – an important issue given that the Atlantic had a budding illegal trade in an assortment of smuggled goods, including human beings, to avoid imperial taxes. A manuscript survives detailing his approach to the adjudication of prizes from the United Provinces of the Netherlands, which were involved in the slave trade in both the East and West Indies, prohibiting the delivery of victuals and manufactured goods to ‘any port of the state of the United Provinces, or into any of their territorys, lands, plantations, or countries’. In crippling European enemies who relied on their transatlantic trade, Lloyd perhaps hoped to undermine Dutch slave societies, such as Curaçao and St Eustatius, which were largely dependent – like the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica – on foodstuffs and mercantile goods to survive.³⁷

Lloyd adjudicated on plantation estate cases as well. Cornelius O’Kelly was one of several Irishmen and Irish families, including the Walshes, Skerrets, Stapletons, and Rourkes, who moved to Saint-Domingue to exploit France’s fastest growing colony. (John Stapleton and his wife Helen Skerret were one of the most prominent emigrants and used their newfound wealth as plantation owners and slave merchants to purchase an estate in Nantes.) On 20 March 1712, Lloyd dealt with a case concerning Hughes O’Kelly, whose ‘late Brother Cornelius O Kelly Dyed in 1704 at St Domingo, under the French Government, Leaving an Estate of about 30000 Livres Tournois, which he Had, by Deed of Guilt in his Life-time, settled on the Petitioner, Pursuant to the Laws of France[.]’ The French government had not honoured the will, though. ‘That notwithstanding’, the petition continued, ‘the French have possessed themselves of the said Estate, and by a judgment obtained by surprize, Doe still detain the same[.]’ Known as Queen Anne’s War, the death of the childless Charles II of Spain had precipitated a transatlantic struggle for the Spanish American colonial possessions between Britain and the French and Spanish – and the colonial government perhaps confiscated O’Kelly’s estate due to the war. Taking that context into account, Lloyd suggested that O’Kelly had a just case against the French government and that he should receive assistance from British ministers to find a conclusion to the case – ‘according as the Laws and Practice of France shall permit’ – that suited his interests. Lloyd had a role, too, in the aftermath of the English capitulation of Nevis to the French in 1706, when he advised the government a decade later to round up ‘all the negroes’ who had at that time ‘fled’ the plantations to the woods and mountains, and he provided advice on the legality of the French forces under Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville holding hostages after Britain’s defeat.³⁸

Lloyd’s jurisdiction as the Advocate General and legal counsel went to other prominent issues related to enslavement. Alongside the contraband trade, Lloyd adjudicated on piracy cases and had a role in defining the laws concerning the treatment of pirates. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 had ended the War of the Spanish Succession, yet peace had put large numbers of privateers out of work. Forced to explore new opportunities for profit, these privateers attacked ships transporting silver, foodstuffs, gold, and slaves. In 1720, Lloyd gave an opinion along with Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, on whether legal officers could try and execute pirates at sea. This issue remained a significant point of contention because judges sought to provide colonial authorities with the ability ‘within your Majesty’s colonies or plantations for trying of pyrates there’. They recognised the importance of that issue for imperial and regional security, ‘considering how much the seas have been infested with pyrates’, but they could find no such precedent for a trial in this manner.³⁹

Such a trial would soon emerge, however. In January 1723, Lloyd adjudicated on a case involving a Royal African Company slave ship, the Gambia Castle, and John Massey, who along with a group of soldiers had been sent to protect the vessel and regarrison a Company fort. The crew were mutinous from dysentery, malaria, and scurvy due to severe malnutrition – and they had subsequently turned to piracy alongside the first-mate George Lowther. Massey returned to England, but the Company had other plans, arguing that he should be ‘fairly hanged’ (a sentence duly carried out). That was not the end of Lloyd’s dealings with West Africa. Two years later, he empowered ‘the commander of his Majesty’s ship the Kinsale, in conjunction with the principal agents belonging to the African Company at their settlements abroad, to try and execute such pirates as may happen to be taken on the coast of Africa[.]’ As the Crown’s legal counsel, Lloyd perhaps understood his role of defeating piracy and bolstering a slave-trading enterprise as intertwined objectives.⁴⁰

The Master of Trinity Hall soon confronted the pirates of the Caribbean in the courtroom. On 8 March 1718, Lloyd committed a pirate to Newgate who had travelled to that infamous prison to visit ‘some of his Acquaintance[s]… with whom he had committed several Piracies in the West Indies’. More than four years later, in October 1722, Lloyd also sat in judgment on a Council of the Admiralty, which was deciding on a case involving Robert Lowther, the Governor of Barbados. The report in the newspaper read that on 12 February 1719 a vessel sailing into ‘Carlisle-Bay in Barbadoes, was known to be a Pirate Ship whereupon Application was made to Capt. Whorwood, and Capt. Smart, Commanders of two of His Majesty’s Men of War, viz. the Rye-Galley and Squirrel’. Whorwood had fought pirate vessels in the Chesapeake Bay after the War of the Spanish Succession and had petitioned for more powerful ships and military support, but his activities opposing piracy were soon impeded. After capturing the vessel in Carlisle Bay, Lowther had demanded to have the ‘Pirate Ship deliver’d to him, alledging an Act of Parliament’, yet Whorwood insisted on his ‘Right to dispose of the Prize, pursuant to His Majesty’s Gracious Intentions, and produc’d his Orders from the Board of Admiralty to take, burn, sink, or otherwise destroy any Pirate Ships, or Vessels, &c’. The debate escalated quickly – Lowther detained Whorwood and deemed his seizure of the pirate vessel ‘a Criminal Article’. In the commotion, the accused pirate appealed to the governor, arguing that he was, in fact, travelling to Barbados to ‘sell his Slaves’. The accused pirate escaped custody – providing merely another reason for the Council to terminate Lowther’s controversial governorship.⁴¹

Lloyd provided legal counsel for the South Sea Company too. Aside from slave-trading, the landmark Asiento contract, which Britain had acquired from Spain in 1713, had granted one vessel of 500 tons a year of duty-free merchandise to the great trade fairs at Portobello and Veracruz. Britain had formed a bridgehead in the Spanish Americas. The first ship, the Royal Prince, was scheduled to leave in 1714, but had only left port in 1716 – in consideration, the Spanish raised the tonnage of the next ten ships to 650. In 1722, the Company contacted Lloyd to advise them as they disputed the Spanish calculations of the relative tonnage of their vessels. They implored the advocate to consider whether the Company could ‘Legally send out their annual ship this year, by virtue of the aforesaid Treatys’ without ‘measurement or otherwise’ and sell their goods in Veracruz. Lloyd eased their concerns – he mentioned that the treaties ensured that the vessels could leave for the Spanish colonies – and he advised that the Company must stay within the policies stipulated in the Treaty. ‘Indeed’, he observed, ‘there are a clause or two, as The Compa[ny] are Desirous to avoid Henceforwards: and, Frauds will be avoided which might redound to Prejudice, by the Entry of these ships. Which seems to Carry, a Like Rule for other annual ships’. ‘This’, he continued, ‘I Conceive that the Secure way will bee, for the Company to Keep up to the Treaty and Convention, and not trust to the accounting for any Excesse’. To remain profitable, the SSC’s trade in manufactured goods could not be curtailed – and Lloyd’s legal advice helped to preserve its commercial activities.⁴²

Alongside advising the South Sea and other companies, not to mention acting as the Master for Trinity Hall, Lloyd was a major investor in imperial enterprises. In 1707, he came into possession of his parents’ stock in the East India Company, amounting to £230, which they appear to have held since at least 1684. (Dame Elizabeth had £112 in 1691 and Sir Richard retained £100, and they increased their collective holdings to £230 eight years later.) Lloyd seized the opportunity to acquire more securities, and, in 1720, he appeared twice on a list of SSC stockholders, with his assets amounting to around £4,000 some of this stock being held with Jacob Sawbridge, a London banker and a director of the Company. Holding that same amount in stock in 1720, Lloyd increased his share to at least £6,000 in the whirlwind of speculation around the Bubble, indicating that he was one individual amongst many who had unwisely bought into a bull market. As noted in the Chapter 2, in 1723 the company’s assets were divided into stocks and annuities to stabilise the firm, and Lloyd was not cautious following the Bubble. He increased his stake – owning £12,080 in annuities before lowering that amount to £9,158 in annuities by 1733 – but Lloyd maintained an active interest in the Company’s trading stock, with over £600 in securities held on his death.⁴³

Besides his South Sea holdings, Lloyd – like his father, Richard – owned a stake in the Royal African Company. In 1720, he appeared on a List of Names of the Adventurers with £3,000 stock – a substantial sum that qualified him to be chosen governor, sub-governor, or deputy-governor. He was not the only university grandee or benefactor on that list: the Reverend Joseph Smith, the provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, who facilitated a £1,000 donation from Queen Caroline to that institution, had £500 invested in the RAC; and James Brydges, the 1st Duke of Chandos, Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, possessed £30,000 of stock and used £1,000 of his fortune to endow the Chandos Chair of Medicine and Anatomy there. He was also listed as benefactor of £500 to the construction of the Cambridge Senate House, which was completed in 1730. Chandos had spearheaded a new infusion of capital at the time of Lloyd’s investment to remove the Company’s debt burden and ‘reinvigorate’ (in one economic historian’s words) its slave-trading activities. The RAC’s quadrupling of the number of shares issued and outstanding propelled the Company into a relatively successful era: a new fort was constructed in Angola (and others were repaired), ships were outfitted, and money and goods flowed into its depleted warehouses. Still, with the Company perhaps not matching the expected return on investment, Lloyd decided to dump his stock, with the final £2,000 sold in 1722.⁴⁴

Ever shrewd with finances and administration, Lloyd turned his hand to managing Christopher Codrington’s benefaction. Colleagues since their appointment as fellows at All Souls, Lloyd was awarded 100 guineas in Codrington’s generous will, which the lawyer had in his possession, after the colonial administrator died on 7 April 1710, his health irretrievably damaged after leading a failed invasion of French Guadeloupe. Lloyd mourned his friend, who had given £10,000 to build and stock a new College library. He begged the College Warden for the ‘acceptance of Mr Codringtons Picture, for yr. Hall: The Image of One Dead, to live again, among my Surviving Friends[.]’ However, with Codrington’s chief beneficiary, his cousin Lieutenant Colonel William Codrington, refusing to pay out the legacies to All Souls, Lloyd’s first act on Codrington’s behalf was to provide the SPG’s committee members with Christopher’s will, which ‘bequeathed some of his [Barbadian] plantations’ to them – and the Barbados Committee retained Lloyd as legal counsel. Lloyd, for his part, was a subscriber to both the SPG and SPCK for much of his life.⁴⁵

Codrington’s cousin started to transfer the legacies three years after the benefactor’s death, and Lloyd was one of the overseers of the planned Codrington Library’s construction and managed the benefaction fund for the College. As the money trickled in in 1713, he facilitated the transfer of funds to the College, and signed off on the accounts. One of those balance sheets on 2 June 1714 mentions Dr Peirce Dod’s purchase of £2,300 of South Sea stock on the College’s behalf. Dod was an interesting figure in his own right: a later investor in the Royal African Company, the Oxford man had a controversial medical career, writing pamphlets dismissing the science of smallpox inoculation. For All Souls’, however, Dod was an exceptional servant to the college – and, although Dr Edward Kynaston, another fellow, travelled by coach to South Sea House on Threadneedle Street in London, the College ordered the ‘Stock to Continue in Dr. Dods name’.⁴⁶

Retrieving the investment before the Bubble burst, Dod continued the South Sea investing that Lloyd had first supervised. After Lloyd’s fellowship ended, Dod held £6,220 in South Sea securities in June 1723, which was then split into £3,110 in annuities and the same in stock. By 21 November 1728, Dod managed to acquire £5,100 in annuities under “The Wardens Colledge of All Souls in Oxford.” (An institution-level investment in such government debt securities was not unusual: Wadham College, Oxford, owned SSC annuities as well.) Dod assured the Warden that ‘The Interest arrising from the Annuities is now in my hands & ready to be paid whenever I shall be drawn upon[.]’ Between 1725 and 1743, the most that the College made each year from the interest in these annuities was £664.⁴⁷

Although he managed Codrington’s money, Lloyd mobilised his own funds to support the project. That investment was essential because, as John Smail argues, credit markets were in their infancy. Bonds and loans were emotive in the eighteenth century – they were bonds of trust and not just commercial instruments. In November 1718, Lloyd wrote to the Bursars to assure them that ‘all the Clear Profitts, which shall accrue to mee from my Fellowship, after All Souls Day 1718, and for soe long time, as I shall Continue Fellow… for the use aforesaid, to the Bursars yearly, shall bee their sufficient Discharge, against mee my Executors, or Administrators’. Lloyd acted as a personal lender of last resort to the College – a position to which he could dedicate his energies seeing as he had resigned his position as the King’s Advocate and from the Doctors’ Commons in October 1726. He provided two bonds to the College, one for £1,000 which All Souls paid £25 half yearly for, and another for £1,200 at £30 half yearly. Writing to the Warden in July 1729, he noted that ‘I will as a Common Creditour, Lend the College £1000 at 5 p cent upon their Common Seal payable by them To mee, my Executors, or Administrators’. He did not want this money, he informed All Souls, ‘taken as any Benefaction by them, nor is it so intended by mee’. The money that he donated through his fellowship, two bonds, and later bequest for £1,000 were integral to the construction of the library, Hall, cloister, buttery, and quadrangle. For these efforts, he was immortalised with a bust that peers down at readers in the Codrington Library and a portrait by Thomas Gibson.⁴⁸

Lloyd’s legal expertise was used to the benefit of another substantial benefaction in Oxford aside from Codrington – one which also had ties to British imperial interests in South Asia and the Americas. Lloyd was well placed to assist John Radcliffe’s executors. A doctor by trade, Radcliffe amassed significant wealth from property; yet, like Lloyd and so many other elites, he had also invested in imperial ventures. In 1688, he joined with nine others to fund the recovery of shipwrecked treasure in St Helena – an interest in the South Seas that continued until the end of his life when he invested in the SSC in 1711 (holding £12,500 in trading stock before selling his securities two years later). Contributing £5,000 to the Helena enterprise, Radcliffe also funded three East India ships, the Antelope, Adventure, and Wolfaire between 1696 and 1705, and was an investor in that Company’s stock. He provided ‘£50 a year for ever’, too, to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Upon his death on 1 November 1714, Radcliffe was worth around £140,000, with £40,000 provided to Oxford for an additional library (named the Radcliffe Camera, which was partly funded with South Sea money), £5,000 to his alma mater University College (money that was used for building two sides of a new quadrangle), four scholarships, travelling fellowships, and a prize fund for a medical science thesis. In June 1725, Lloyd provided legal guidance on choosing the Library Keeper for the Camera. He noted that the ‘Founder’ had not ‘presented any method or form of choosing’ that position, except for a stipulation that they be a ‘Master of Arts’ in Physick. Nor, Lloyd continued, did Radcliffe ‘Direct any Examination, As to their Proficiency and Learning to be made[.]’ The importance of his advice was highlighted by its recipient: Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, who assisted his brother-in-law, the Prime Minister Robert Walpole with Britain’s foreign policy.⁴⁹

As for Lloyd, he departed the mortal coil on 30 March 1745 leaving generous bequests to multiple colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge. The recipients included the University of Cambridge (providing £500 to the library and the same sum for University repairs along Regent’s Walk), All Soul’s (as mentioned above), Lincoln College, Oxford (who he gave £500 to remodel the library’s bookshelves, and was featured in the Oxford Almanack as one of its principal ‘Founders & Benefactors’), Trinity College, Oxford (his alma mater), and he saved his most generous bequest for Trinity Hall. He provided an initial £1,000 in return for an annuity of £50 to redevelop the Front Court, donated £3,000 to remodel the Hall and extend its grounds to the River Cam, and helped with extensive repairs to the chapel, ‘so as to be almost rebuilt’. The monumental building work in the chapel included new marble flooring, wainscoting, iron work and glass for the windows, lead piping, a communion table, and doors and dressings. Trinity Hall did not receive Lloyd’s South Sea securities – these went to establish a charity fund for the poor of Oswestry and Whittington, a market town and village on the English side of the Welsh border – but the college purchased £2,660 in South Sea annuities four years before Lloyd’s death, which earned more than £63 in dividends the first year (though the Company was no longer involved in slave-trading). Buried in the college chapel, Trinity Hall recognised Lloyd as their most generous benefactor – establishing a memorial to the man who had shaped the college’s ‘fabric’.⁵⁰

Trinity Hall’s connection to the Atlantic world did not end with Lloyd. Sir William Wynne, a specialist in probate law and later Dean of the Court of Arches (1788–1809), contributed to several slavery-related cases, even as the University debated the efficacy of slaveholding. Wynne’s life revolved around the collegiate system, with his father, John Wynne, serving as the Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. The Welshman instead chose to attend Cambridge – arriving at Trinity Hall in 1746, taking his Doctorate in 1757, and holding a Fellowship from 1755 until his death.⁵¹

Wynne was involved in imperial matters after American independence. As Dean, he adjudicated on cases related to US merchants, since that nation’s newfound independence from Britain meant that they were aliens – citizens of a foreign country – and therefore unable to trade within the Empire under the Navigation Acts, which restricted trade to British ships – a damaging development for Caribbean colonists who relied on the American carrying trade for goods (often around forty per cent of goods leaving some New England ports were destined for the Caribbean). One query considered whether a register could be granted to ships constructed before independence. Wynne answered that vessels constructed before the Revolution could trade because ‘such vessels could not be said to belong to any Colony or Plantation [belonging] to his Majesty’, and if British subjects had purchased ships from the beginning of the war until the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, these purchases were rendered ‘illegal’ because the trade had happened with ‘revolted colonies’. He also advised that customs officers could seize vessels from American citizens built and purchased by Britons after 1776 ‘trading to from or in any British Island or Plantation, or to any Part of this Kingdom or other [of] his Majesty’s Dominions’.⁵²

Three decades later, Wynne ruled on another American vessel, the Washington. Intended to be ‘employed in a slave-trade adventure on the coast of Africa’ before the abolition of the slave trade in the United States (and then turning to gun running and trading near the Congo River), Wynne and two other judges, Sir William Scott and Sir John Nicholl, refused to release the ship which had been impounded in Barbados. An adjudicator on imperial cases, Wynne followed Lloyd in making benefactions to his college too. After claiming the Mastership in 1803 (at the second attempt), Wynne donated 252 volumes to the library over nine years.⁵³

Though Lloyd and Wynne were involved in day-to-day legal matters, natural law and the natural rights of enslaved Africans caused significant philosophical debate within Cambridge. Thomas Rutherforth (also spelled “Rutherford”) was the most prominent (and undiscussed) Cambridge interlocutor in that debate. The son of a Cambridgeshire rector, Rutherforth was admitted as a sizar at St John’s College in April 1726, and he rose to become a Royal Society fellow in 1743 and the Regius Professor of Divinity in 1745 (and was thereby elected a Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge). Like Lloyd and Gooch, Rutherforth had powerful friends and became a chaplain to Frederick, the Prince of Wales (and George II’s heir apparent before the former’s untimely death in 1751), and he later ministered to Frederick’s wife, the dowager Princess Augusta, after his passing.⁵⁴

Rutherforth’s personal connections extended to the mercantile classes. In a letter to Peter Burrell, included in his Two Sermons Preached Before the University of Cambridge in 1747, the professor commended the former sub-governor of the South Sea Company and investor in the Royal African Company for ‘placing your son under my care’ and hoped to provide that student with ‘that virtue and regularity’ which ‘had been laid before by your instructions, and by the example, which he saw at the head of his own family’. Rutherforth would reveal his commitment to prominent merchants and enslavers, such as Burrell, through publications as well as his teaching.⁵⁵

Rutherforth’s two volume magnum opus, Institutes of Natural Law, published at Cambridge in 1754, was a popular treatise amongst prominent American statesmen, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. The text was a commentary on the Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius’s 1625 On the Law of War and Peace, which was a plea for law and order after the Thirty Years’ War devastated much of Europe. The text extended Grotius’s discussion of the ethics of enslavement. Rutherforth was a committed paternalist, arguing that enslaved people were children whom enslavers had a duty to civilise. ‘The good of the child is the end, to which the authority of the parent over the child is directed’, Rutherforth declared in the treatise, ‘and the good of the master is the end, to which the authority of the master over the slave is directed’. He went on to concede, however, that the ‘parent has no right to command the child’, still he maintained that ‘the master has a right to command the slave to do such actions, as are for the masters’ benefit’.⁵⁶

Rutherforth’s Institutes defended the natural inequality of human beings. Though people were not natural slaves, they remained a ‘slave from his birth’ because ‘Nature has indeed made a difference between the parts and capacities of mankind’. Some were able to ‘judge for themselves, and to pursue their own good’ yet others had to be ‘directed’. Consequently, in rejecting natural slavery, Rutherforth established enslavement on the grounds of humanitarian action and the common good – that enslavement was an ‘obligation’ for individuals to be directed in their actions by enslavers ‘in view to their benefit, who direct him’. Next, the Regius Professor turned to the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem (“that which follows the womb”). Originally passed in Virginia in 1662 after a mixed-ethnicity woman Elizabeth Kay Grinstead had successfully sued for freedom because she had a white English father, the law mandated that children followed their mother’s legal status. In resolving the question of whether the children of sexual violence between enslavers and the enslaved were free, the law allowed slaveholders to profit from their children, as Thomas Jefferson did with his six children to Sarah “Sally” Hemings. Rutherforth reconciled himself to this doctrine even though he opposed natural slavery. ‘Since liberty is the natural state of mankind’, he queried, ‘it may be asked whether the children of slaves are free?’⁵⁷

To answer this fraught question, he constructed four justifications for enslaving children: an act of the parents (who placed their children into slavery), a person’s consent, criminal guilt for committing an offense, and debt peonage. The Professor turned to debt as a reason why the children of enslaved mothers should be enslaved. ‘The original debt’, he wrote, ‘is indeed encreased by its maintenance during its infancy’. He continued: ‘For the loss of her work and the extraordinary expence, which the child occasions, during the time of gestation and birth, fall upon the master of the mother and not upon the master of the father’. The extent to which enslavers relied on debt as a justification to enslave their offspring is difficult to answer, but Rutherforth’s text certainly provided legal and ethical cover for enslavers in the courtroom and remained a central tenet of gradual abolition schemes that determined that enslaved people had to work to a certain age to relieve themselves of their “debt” to enslavers.⁵⁸

Rutherforth’s argument about the efficacy of childhood enslavement, which echoed the German jurist Samuel von Pufendorf, was controversial though. The Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Francis Hutcheson, rubbished this claim in his A System of Moral Philosophy, which his son published one year after Rutherforth’s Institutes. Hutcheson accepted that when ‘one maintains the child of a stranger, whatever prudent expences are made may justly be charged as a debt, where the contrary is not declared’, but he was wary of how nations committed ‘to the natural rights and liberties of mankind’ had used this principle to enslave ‘equally innocent children of captives in war, or of men of a different complexion… for ever, with all their posterity, upon no other pretence of right than this claim upon them for their maintenance’. If the debt was paid, Hutcheson rebutted, then the enslaver had no right to hold that child in bondage, and the enslaved minor had ‘plainly a right to choose that labour by which he can soonest discharge the debt’. The Scotsman had attacked the notion that one set of natural rights existed for whites and another for Black British subjects.⁵⁹

Rutherforth’s support for childhood enslavement was contested in Cambridge as well. Fellows were aware of (and commented upon) the horrors of enslavement – in fact, comparing people’s actions to an enslaver was fast becoming a punchline. Thomas Gilbert, a Peterhouse fellow, wrote a poem in 1738 questioning why someone acted ‘Like Christian tyrants to the Negro slaves?’ Edward Christian – the Downing Professor of the Laws of England (1788–1823), Professor at East India Company College (1806–1818), and elder brother of Fletcher Christian, a leader of the mutiny on the Bounty – wrote a popular response to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England from 1793 to 1795. Innocent people, he wrote, including children, retained the ‘power of action’ even under threat from ‘barbarous laws’ and, in another passage, Christian attacked the idea that ‘the master’s right to the service [of the enslaved] can possibly continue’ under the writ of habeas corpus because ‘the negro in a state of slavery is incapable of entering into [a contract] with his master’. Christian rejected the possibility of children being indebted for their birth.⁶⁰

Slavery was again central to the second volume of Rutherforth’s Institutes. Unlike servitude, Rutherforth maintained that slavery had ramifications for a person’s citizenship and rights within the community. Freedom was necessary to be the member of a civil society, and, consequently, Rutherforth claimed that ‘a slave is incapable of being a member’ of such a community because they were beholden to enslavers and must therefore ‘act for his master’s benefit in all things, according to the judgement and will of his master’. Incapable of acting for the ‘general security’ through wartime service or public employment, enslaved Black persons were denied a pathway to citizenship through patriotism, as many Black soldiers claimed in the British Empire. That theory anticipated, in some respects, the South Carolinian congressman David Ramsay’s 1789 Dissertation on the Manner of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen of the United States, where he argued that ‘Negroes are inhabitants, but not citizens. Citizenship confers a right of voting at elections, and many other privileges not enjoyed by those who are no more than inhabitants’. Rutherforth also prescribed how much power the state had over enslaved people’s treatment on the plantation. According to him, as the enslavers’ property and persons considered outside of civil society, the enslaved could be treated however slaveholders wished since the broader community had no ‘authority over the master for the benefit or security of his slaves’. There is evidence of this doctrine in practical use and for Rutherforth’s influence on slave laws in the antebellum United States. For instance, in the North Carolina case State v. Mann in 1829, the judge Thomas Ruffin used Rutherforth’s Institutes to argue that enslavers were not liable for a grievous harm upon enslaved persons because such an act was for the ‘good of the child’.⁶¹

Rutherforth was certainly not the only St John’s academic to write on slavery and natural law. A contemporary of Rutherforth, John Taylor, received his BA in 1725, and, after practicing with the Doctors’ Commons he was appointed as a college fellow and as a tutor to the children of John Carteret, the 2nd Earl of Granville, a Secretary of State under George II. Published in 1769, Taylor’s Elements of Civil Law echoed many of Rutherforth’s claims in the Institutes. Regarding the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, Taylor argued that children were enslaved at birth because the ‘offspring of a slave, through its own impotency, can provide nothing for the state of its infancy; and… the future service of its life is due to the owner, as a debt of education’. Taylor viewed the enslaved as inhuman, comparing them to horses and other property; still, he also expanded on Rutherforth’s original arguments, particularly on whether enslaved persons should be soldiers in service to the empire. ‘The Romans never made soldiers of their Slaves’, Taylor wrote, for two reasons: ‘the honour of the profession’, and ‘the secret was, they durst not trust them with arms, their number so considerable; which is now the steady politics of our West India colonies, and for the same reason’. Together with Rutherforth, Taylor’s writings show a strain of Cambridge intellectual thought existed that defended enslavement at birth.⁶²

As with the Institutes, Taylor’s Elements spread beyond Cambridge, finding its way into the libraries of Thomas Jefferson and other elite enslavers and abolitionists. In fact, the text’s afterlife overshadowed its author: proslavery activists utilised its commentaries on the consistency between Christianity and enslavement and the natural basis of coerced labour within the ‘little Empire of a private family’, where ‘children’ were subordinate to their parents, to defend the plantation system. Abolitionists, too, seized upon Taylor discussion of the treatment of the enslaved as ‘no persons’ and ‘beasts’ under Roman law to illustrate the ‘cruelties’ and ‘diabolical injustice[s]’ that enslaved African Americans lived under. In 1852, the eight members of two enslaved families were met by a free man on board a ship whilst travelling with their Virginian enslavers, Jonathan and Juliet Lemmon, to New York and subsequently freed – with the help of local abolitionists – under a writ of habeas corpus. The lawyers who supported the enslaved in the so-called Lemmon Slave Case (named after the enslavers), which established the right of personhood for the enslaved, drew upon Taylor’s work, amongst other authorities, to claim that enslavement ‘originates in mere predominance of physical force, and is continued by mere predominance of social force or municipal law’, and was therefore an ‘active violation of the law of nature’. The findings in the case illuminate the long-reach and malleability of Cambridge legal texts.⁶³

Having discussed the Cambridge professional classes – the clergymen, natural scientists, and lawyers – in the preceding chapters, one can see the active involvement of fellows, lecturers, and benefactors in imperial processes. Though wealth and academic thought are often separated, the two were inextricable – especially so if Cambridge figures wanted to use their hard-earned funds to support imperial endeavours, as they did with most schemes and enterprises that historians have drawn attention to in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the Guinea Company to American courtrooms, the thoughts and cashbooks of Cambridge intellectuals had a lasting influence, shaping the origins and nature of the English and British empires. Their experiences disprove Prime Minister William Gladstone’s assertion concerning the ‘antagonism which is offered to wealth by mental cultivation [at universities]’. Soon, the antagonisms within Cambridge grew between fellows, students, and alumni who attacked the slave system and those who sought to consolidate and defend the plantation machine.⁶⁴