Guest post by Leslie Wilson: ELIZABETH HEYRICK - THE MAKING OF AN ANTI-SLAVERY CAMPAIGNER by Jocelyn Robson

 

"She wrote in language which is still relevant, if not to the abolition of slavery, certainly to our attitude to the climate crisis."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and three for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. The first two deal with Nazi Germany: The War’s Not Over Yet is published as a Kindle e-book and is set at the time of the Russian blockade of Berlin in 1948. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany.

1809: A forty year-old woman hears of a bull-baiting that is to take place in Bonsall, in Derbyshire. Appalled, she gets herself to Matlock, two and a half miles distant, tries to get local dignitaries to stop the event. They refuse. By the time she gets back to Bonsall the bull is already tied, and the dogs about to be released. The crowd has been drinking for hours; bets have already been placed. The woman speaks to the crowd, appealing to them to give up their entertainment. She has no success. So she tries something else. She manages to find out who is the bull’s owner and buys the animal from him. The bull is saved. 

In carrying out this action, Elizabeth Heyrick transgressed against the approved behaviour of women at this period; she shouldn’t have been at such an event at all, let alone interfering with the pleasures of men. The story demonstrates her courage and determination, which was to be further manifested through the rest of her life.

She was born in 1769, into a middle-class, dissenting family with radical tendencies. Attractive and elegant, she fell in love with John Heyrick, a descendent of the poet Robert Herrick, and married him at the age of nineteen. The marriage turned out badly. Heyrick, though idealistic, was also a gambler and had a violent, unstable temperament, for which Elizabeth blamed herself, though her family blamed her husband (her brother even challenged Heyrick to a duel because of his treatment of his wife, but nothing came of it).  They spent several periods apart and there were no children. In 1797, she came back from church to find him dead on the floor from a fatal heart attack.

This dreadful shock precipitated her into a period of depression and self-starvation, but she had a supportive family, no financial troubles (though she donated her Army widow’s pension to charity), and a circle of engaged, intelligent female friends, some of whom were Quakers. Though she continued to suffer depression, she found a role in life: campaigning for the oppressed.

Heyrick herself became a Quaker in 1807 (two years before she prevented the bull-baiting) and also probably taught for a while in a Quaker school for girls in York. Quakers were then in what is known as the ‘quietist’ period, and it was rare at this stage for outsiders to become convinced, so Elizabeth was exceptional in this respect also. However, quietism must not be understood as inactivity. Though Quakers had owned slaves in the past, and many of them through their business activities had been connected with the profits of slavery, uneasiness about slavery grew throughout the eighteenth century and in 1772, the American anti-slavery campaigner John Woolman had convinced the London Yearly Meeting of Quakers to include an abolitionist statement in the Epistle which was sent out to British Quakers after that national meeting. Subsequently many British Quakers became dedicated anti-slavery activists, and briefed campaigners such as William Wilberforce.

Women were also permitted to minister during the silent Meeting for Worship, and many of them (including two of Heyrick’s friends) were ‘recorded’ as ministers, which doesn’t mean that they became paid ministers or led the Quaker meeting; simply that they were recognised to have a calling to stand up and speak in the largely silent Meeting. Though women did play a subsidiary role within the Society of Friends, they nevertheless had far more opportunity to speak and be heard than in many other denominations; certainly more than the Church of England, which did not allow women to speak at all. For a woman like Heyrick, the Society of Friends could be seen as a natural home.

She became the author of eleven hard-hitting pamphlets; against animal cruelty, against social injustice in Britain, and against slavery (these all written in the 1820s).

The slave trade was abolished in the same year that Elizabeth became a Quaker, but chattel slavery was not. It was argued that if the trade was abolished, slave owners would be kinder to their enslaved workers, and even that abolition would come about gradually (Heyrick regarded this idea as propaganda on the part of the planters, who were certainly good at protecting their interests). She wrote in language which is still relevant, if not to the abolition of slavery, certainly to our attitude to the climate crisis.

‘The slave-holder knew very well, that his prey would be secure, as long as the abolitionists could be cajoled into a demand for gradual instead of immediate abolition. He knew very well, that the contemplation of a gradual emancipation, would beget a gradual indifference to emancipation itself. He knew very well, that even the wise and the good may, by habit and familiarity, be brought to endure and tolerate almost any thing.’

She was never a woman to pull punches. She wrote: ‘We that hear, and read, and approve, and applaud the powerful appeals, the irrefragible arguments against the Slave Trade, and against slavery, - are we ourselves sincere, or hypocritical? Are we the true friends of justice, or do we only cant about it? – To which party do we really belong,’ – to the friends of emancipation, or of perpetual slavery? Every individual belongs to one party or the other; not speculatively, or professionally merely, but practically. The perpetuation of slavery in our West Indian colonies ... is a question in which we are all implicated.’

During the 1820s, women became increasingly active in the campaign to abolish slavery, and formed their own societies, in which Elizabeth was active. Her pamphlets were, of course, read by the members of these societies. One of the issues which particularly concerned them was the sexual abuse of enslaved women; ‘moral degradation’  was the word used; it was of its time, but everyone knew what it meant. ‘I have known them gratify their brutal passions,’ the freed man Olaudah Equiano writes about the white captors, ‘with females not ten years old.’  

Meanwhile, the national Anti-Slavery Society, with its male membership, was still sticking to the aim of gradual abolition. Eventually, the women had enough.  Prior to the Gentlemen’s Anti-Slavery Society’s annual meeting, they said they would donate £50 (equivalent to around £3,300 today) to that society if they were willing to give up their use of the word ‘gradual’ in their aims. The women’s contribution to the outcome was never (are we surprised?) mentioned, but the society did indeed give up the word ‘gradual’, in spite of objections from William Wilberforce.

 Elizabeth died in 1831, before the 1833 Act was passed which abolished slavery in all British dominions. She would have been outraged at the payment of compensation to the plantation and slave owners, a sum which has only recently been paid off by British taxpayers, but which has enriched many a British family. ‘The slave has a right to his liberty,’ she wrote, ‘a right which it is a crime to withhold – let the consequences to the planters be what they may.’

 Exceptionally among white anti-slavery campaigners, Elizabeth Heyrick regarded the enslaved people as equals, regardless of skin colour.  She defended the uprisings against the planters, regarding them as justified; she denounced floggings and cruel punishments, both in the West Indies and in Britain. She spoke out for a decent living wage for the working classes. Through careful research and an exciting access to a preserved archive, Jocelyn Robson has opened up for us the life of an extraordinary and precious woman. She is to be congratulated.

Elizabeth Heyrick: the making of an anti-slavery campaigner is published by Pen and Sword History.

Photograph by Corinne Lambert

Recently, sculptor Corinne Lambert was commissioned to make this piece, Abolition (Remembering Elizabeth Heyrick) which is now in the permanent collection at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. The presentation was covered by BBC Leicester - read the piece here.