For once, “Pecksniff” was telling something like the truth. By now, Letitia was truly a woman on the edge: harassed by debt, her star status in decline, her social position in free fall, her allies melting away. William Jerdan, for one, privately had no doubt as to why she married George Maclean. When he first received the news of her death in early 1839, he confessed to Lady Blessington, in an unpublished letter marked “Private,” that Letitia had only gone through with the marriage because she was “annoyed and depressed by the inconveniences and humiliations of her own position.” He showed no sign of holding himself in any way responsible.
Katherine Thomson and Emma Roberts had good reason to bathe the marriage in a retrospective glow. Their eyewitness accounts of the courtship indicate how closely they were involved in what looks like a concerted effort on their part to find an honorable exit route for their beleaguered friend. Letitia had by now become an “inconvenience” in herself, a social contaminant and an emotional drain. Faced with her increasingly chaotic mood swings, Miss Roberts and Mrs. Thomson reassured her to her face that no one believed the rumors. But they were also placed in the embarrassing position of having to answer ever more awkward questions about her in her absence.
The only way in which Letitia could realistically recoup her honor was through marriage. But any new potential husband would have to be an outsider, ignorant of the slanders: a man who could take her away. George Maclean must have seemed the perfect candidate when he turned up in London in the late summer of 1836. His arrival on August 31 was noted in the Morning Advertiser on September 5, along with the interesting fact that he had brought with him two young Ashanti “princes” in the care of a tutor to be educated in Britain.
Maclean was just a year older than Letitia. Born in the Scottish Highlands in 1801, the son of a clergyman, he had joined the Royal African Corps in his early youth. As a result, he had spent all his adult life far away from the spiders of society: first at Sierra Leone, and since 1830 as governor of Cape Coast Castle, the most important British trading fort in West Africa.
The first meeting between the couple took place at a dinner party in Hampstead, once Keats’s Cockney stamping ground but increasingly colonized by the new rich. The party was given by a wealthy merchant named Matthew Forster, no apparent relation to Letitia’s former fiancé John Forster, though both came originally from the northeast of England where the surname is common. Matthew had a long association with George Maclean, as his firm, Forster and Smith, was the leading British player in the West Africa trade at the time. One of the precursor companies of the modern Unilever, in the 1830s it had a fleet of at least fourteen—possibly as many as seventeen—ships. The commodities Forster and Smith imported from West Africa included gold, mahogany, coffee, peanuts, and, in particular, palm oil, used in the preparation of soap. Matthew and his brother William were sophisticated operators whose business combined commodity trading with complex finance and numerous other interests. Matthew was, for example, on the board of the Liverpool and London Insurance Co., the York and London Assurance Co., and the South Eastern Railway Co., while his bulging portfolio also included investments in Berwick Salmon Fisheries, South Hetton Colliery, and Hartlepool Docks.
There is no sign that Letitia had ever met her wealthy host before she agreed to spend a few days at his house, Belsize (or Belle Size) Villa, later known as Belsize Court. Set in bucolic grounds, it has since been demolished but is revealed in a late Victorian photograph to have been a substantial mansion in the late Georgian neoclassical style. In Matthew’s day, it boasted two gatehouses and, at the time of the 1851 census, eight live-in servants.
How anyone in Letitia’s literary circle came to know Britain’s premier palm oil importer is a conundrum, one of the many niggling mysteries in her story, but there is just a hint that the indefatigable fixer Jerdan may have played a role. Comically, given his grubby reputation, in 1834 he acquired a stake in the largest soap factory in London, Hawes Soap Works, the family firm of Benjamin Hawes, M.P., a man of wide cultural interests and acquaintance. Hawes’s company is likely to have had dealings with Forster and Smith, as it supplied the soap trade with raw materials (though in 1835 Forster and Smith decided to go it alone by financing a new mill in London to extract oil from peanuts for making soap).
Perhaps Jerdan continued to proffer Letitia generally around as a celebrity guest, as he had done in the past, although without anticipating her marriage. In the wake of her shocking death, he assured Lady Blessington that he had so “deprecated” her engagement to Maclean that he had tried to persuade her to break it off.
More likely, the connection may have come through a couple named Mr. and Mrs. John Liddiard, who are revealed in their daughter Maria’s unpublished diaries to have already known Letitia well by 1831. The Liddiards’ other friends included Emma Roberts, while Dr. and Mrs. Thomson are also on record as recurrent visitors to their home. John Liddiard (born c. 1779) is recorded in the 1851 census as a retired warehouseman, which meant a wholesale trader. Wealthy enough to have a substantial villa in leafy Streatham and a house in town in Hyde Park Gate, he may have had business connections with West Africa, and thus an entrée to Matthew Forster. The shadowy substratum of Letitia’s nonfamous acquaintance is hard to penetrate, the interstices of her social web too often erased. The scattered and fragmented sources conjure only a faint sense of the anonymous lives of the era, lived in humdrum bourgeois respectability: the turning of a blind eye to Letitia’s “fallen state” and the quiet machinating to correct it by promoting her marriage.
Letitia’s stock was falling fast in literary and high society, but in mercantile circles she retained a sprinkling of stardust, just as the “poet of fashion” in the Sunday Times squib of 1826 finds a niche in the business community after losing cachet among upper-class patrons. Her value as a trophy guest might alone explain why Matthew Forster wanted the celebrated L.E.L. to grace his dinner party in honor of the governor of Cape Coast Castle’s London visit. But it cannot explain why the merchant proved as eager as Emma Roberts and Katherine Thomson to matchmake Letitia with George Maclean. As we shall see, he had good reason to suppose that it might suit his business interests.
Matthew was so keen to make the match that on the morning of the dinner party he came up to Letitia as she was sitting in the library at Belsize Villa and thrust a sheaf of papers into her hand, telling her that they would form an introduction to the man she was about to meet. The texts contained Maclean’s own account of an expedition he had led against a rebel tribe.
Letitia was being invited in advance to perceive the governor in a heroic light: to play the same role as her audience had once played in the idealized construction of L.E.L. “If Miss Landon still retained her prejudice in favour of heroes, the perusal of Mr Maclean’s dispatches was well calculated to awaken the first strong feeling,” Emma Roberts later put it.
Roberts herself was probably being naively romantic in helping to encourage the marriage. But there were other issues at stake behind the scenes. They can only be assessed by probing the backstory of Cape Coast Castle, George Maclean, and Matthew Forster, even before we bring L.E.L. and her future husband together for the first time over Matthew’s dining table, with its impressive array of fine silver.
Letitia’s story was about to intersect with the history of British interests in West Africa during its most complex and ambiguous phase: the transition period between the height of the British slave trade in the eighteenth century and the establishment under the Victorians of direct imperial rule. The port of Cape Coast had been an important trading post for centuries and had become the hub of the British slave trade by the 1700s. But the surrounding region did not formally become a British colony, the Gold Coast, until the 1860s.
Prior to the Abolition Act of 1807, the castle’s precincts had provided a marketplace in which slave dealers did business above the heads of the human cargoes held in its underground s
ilos. The model was that of a government-sponsored “public-private partnership,” as the historian William St Clair puts it. Trade was conducted at the castle under the protection of British armed forces, under the aegis of the African Company of Merchants, analogous to the East India Company.
After the Abolition Act of 1807, the castle and its satellite forts lost their historical raison d’être, however. It became unclear as to what the British should do with them or with the influence they had built up in the surrounding region. The African Company of Merchants was dissolved in 1821 owing to its slaving associations. Yet the British government continued to underwrite the garrison at Cape Coast, perhaps more out of inertia and uncertainty than as a result of any positive policy.
In the 1820s, it considered withdrawing entirely, but was unwillingly drawn into a local war after the Ashanti, much of whose wealth was bound up with the slave trade, attacked, probably in resentment at the Abolition Act. Once hostilities calmed down, the British government again considered withdrawal but was pressured into continuing to fund the garrison by two separate interest groups. Abolitionists wanted a British military force in place to fight the slave trade, which continued to operate openly out of non-British ports in West Africa long into the nineteenth century, as nations such as Portugal and Brazil had not signed on to the ban: at Whydah, for example, in what is now Benin, the notorious Portuguese-Brazilian slave trader Francisco de Sousa—subject of Bruce Chatwin’s classic book The Viceroy of Ouidah—held sway. On the other hand, West Africa merchants such as Matthew Forster, who were involved in growing what was then called “legitimate trade”—that is, in commodities rather than slaves—needed military support to keep the trade routes into the West African interior open, as the region was plagued by tribal wars.
In response to such pressure, the British government agreed to keep funding the garrison, shortly before Maclean was appointed as governor of Cape Coast Castle in 1830. As such, he was expected to support official British policy by policing the slave trade; to stamp out the local custom, inimical to British values, of “human sacrifice,” the execution of prisoners as part of elite funeral rites; and to exercise soft power through supporting missionary work and education.
Yet despite the new abolitionist policy, the old public-private model, dating back to the days of the African Company of Merchants, continued. Central government outsourced Maclean’s appointment to the new merchant committee, the “Council of Merchants,” that had been formed following the demise of the old company. Its chief spokesman was Matthew Forster, the man who introduced Maclean to his future wife.
Although he was in reality the merchants’ placeman, Maclean interpreted his own role as political and judicial. Often acting on his own initiative, he succeeded in extending the sphere of British influence in West Africa. As a lawbroker, he settled local disputes and punished criminals in the courthouse at Cape Coast Castle. More widely, he nurtured a détente between the Fante and Ashanti so successfully that he is still remembered in Ghana today with admiration as a peace broker.
It was useful to the local nations to have a skillful independent mediator, but Maclean’s role was informal, not underpinned by international law (which did not yet exist), nor even with any clarity by the British legal system of the day. One reason for his success in creating a Pax Britannica was that he embedded himself in the local culture, unlike later British colonial officials who barricaded themselves in their compounds and made “going native” taboo.
Yet Maclean was not a colonial ruler in the Victorian imperial sense, with political powers direct from London. The West African region for which he was responsible did not yet have fixed borders or a clear system of law and governance, though it formed the original template for what later became the colonial Gold Coast and, after independence, modern Ghana. He was governor of the castle, the commanding officer in charge of its garrison, not governor of a country, his other official title being “President of the Council of Merchants.” Indeed, his mercantile connections were almost certainly what recommended him to the job in the first place. His previous posting had been to Sierra Leone, where Matthew’s brother William ran the local Forster and Smith operation. The very ship on which Maclean sailed for London for his rare home leave in 1836 suggests the closeness of his client relationship with the firm. Owned by Forster and Smith, she had been flatteringly christened the Governor Maclean.
Although the Colonial Office had rubber-stamped Maclean’s appointment in 1830, its commitment to the region remained uncertain. Matthew Forster felt he had to keep pressuring the Colonial Office to support British business, afraid that the grant for the garrison might be withdrawn at any moment. In 1832, he pressed the point that only by supporting the “legitimate” economy on the ground could Europe pay the “heavy debt” it owed Africa “for the crimes that have been committed under the slave trade.”
At the time he introduced George Maclean and Letitia Landon in 1836, Matthew was still a mere outsider lobbyist. Although his trading activities had made him rich, he was a gritty northern businessman with no entrée into London’s political elite. The Whig cabinet of the time was dominated by aristocrats with liberal sympathies with whom he had no social connection and little in common. The only conceivable reason why Matthew should have been so keen to promote the governor’s union with L.E.L. was because he surmised that she might provide useful contacts.
Despite her falling stock, Letitia still moved in circles close to the seat of power. Government ministers frequented the Whig salon of her patroness Lady Blessington. The countess had a particular fondness for the then colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, in whose “highly polished manners” she delighted. Matthew must have figured that an alliance between her protégée L.E.L. and his own George Maclean might just give him the political access he craved. Letitia’s personal connections among the Whig elite clustered around Lady Blessington also included Lord Normanby, who went on to take over from Glenelg in February 1839. Had Letitia lived just three months longer, Matthew would thus have achieved not just an indirect connection but a direct personal channel to the colonial secretary via Letitia as governor’s wife.
Back in the autumn of 1836, Matthew’s need to cultivate the Colonial Office was particularly intense. In the summer of 1836, it had received untoward correspondence from someone at Cape Coast, alleging that the British West Africa merchants were flouting the antislaving laws with the governor’s collusion. In particular, the merchants were accused of contravening the 1824 Slave Trade Consolidation Act, which had been brought in to bolster the original 1807 legislation. Its purpose was to close a loophole by making it illegal not only for British subjects to trade directly in slaves, but also to do so indirectly: by trading with slave traders, whether by supplying them with goods, or doing business with them even in the most abstract of ways, such as by insuring their ships.
The Cape Coast correspondent alleged that the governor was helping British merchants to break the 1824 law by letting them use the storage facilities at the castle to hold goods destined for use in the slave trade. As he concluded, “Thus is Cape Coast Castle, supported as it is by British funds, and bearing the flag of a country that has paid twenty millions of money for the abolition of slavery, made a warehouse for the supply to these dealers in human flesh and blood, of the very articles they require for the prosecution of their detestable traffic.”
The whistleblower was a man named John Burgoyne. His personal history does little to support his claim that he was acting idealistically on behalf of the oppressed African. However, it does offer some insight into the sort of person likely to seek refuge at Cape Coast Castle in the 1830s, providing a context for Letitia’s subsequent decision to go there.
Burgoyne was an opium addict and bigamist, who had previously been court-martialed in Jamaica for striking a brother officer, before briefly managing to secure the post of captain of the guard at Cape Coast Castle. Having hoped to be promo
ted to governor himself, he channeled his resentment into a long-running smear campaign against Maclean, conducted both in private letters to the Colonial Office and pseudonymously in the press. He was a disaffected renegade, out of control and determined to stir up trouble. Maclean constantly had to defend himself against similar charges, mostly issuing from Burgoyne, right up until he was finally relieved of his post in 1844.
Not only was Maclean accused of turning a blind eye to business corruption, but he was also accused of ordering inhumane floggings. One named African prisoner, Kobina, a runaway slave, property of a merchant called Hansen, was given five hundred lashes in 1835, a punishment regarded as lethal in the British navy at the time. The miscreant, who had committed burglary after absconding, was found dead the next day in his cell. A “somewhat perfunctory inquest” recorded that Kobina had died not of his injuries but because he had taken poison in prison “in rage at his public humiliation.” Letitia’s death a few years later would likewise generate controversy and conflicting accusations.
Although neither knew it at the time they met, then, the one thing Letitia and Maclean had in common was that they were both on the receiving end of “slander.” Burgoyne’s motives were no purer than those of the “enemies” who sexually smeared Letitia. But recent research suggests that, like theirs, his allegations had some basis in reality.
The history of the slave trade and its aftermath is still in the process of being uncovered. Marika Sherwood’s seminal 2007 study After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807 makes no reference to Letitia Landon and barely mentions George Maclean. But it includes Forster and Smith among its case studies of businesses that continued to make their wealth from the slave economy after it was made illegal. In particular, she exposes Matthew’s firm as an egregious but secretive flouter of the 1824 Slave Trade Consolidation Act.
L.E.L. Page 26
