In May 1832 Anna Eliza Grenville wrote to her husband, Richard, first duke of Buckingham and Chandos, imploring him to share information regarding the state of the family finances: ‘If I had not brought you one penny being your Wife I should have had a right to your confidence but … surely I have an additional & powerful right to be consulted, so large a portion of the property being mine.’Footnote 1 This letter illustrates the complex relationship between gender, property, and power in the nineteenth-century aristocratic family. Grenville brought extensive property to her 1796 marriage, providing her with an important, although precarious, sense of entitlement: what Joanne Bailey has described as an ‘instinctive sense of property-ownership’.Footnote 2 Conditioned by her legal rights and her class, this precarious grip on wealth shaped the way in which Grenville negotiated her position as a woman, wife, and property-owner. ‘An attached & honest wife may … be of as much use as a West Indian Attorney’, she insisted.Footnote 3 This was not simply a rhetorical flourish. In addition to metropolitan property, Grenville owned Hope estate, a Jamaican plantation upon which worked 379 enslaved men, women, and children. Exploring Grenville's relationship with ‘her’ property demonstrates how important it is to provide room for married women in understanding how aristocratic ownership was conceived and experienced. But it is also clear that, despite the existence of a growing abolition movement, the ownership of other human beings was treated scarcely differently from the ownership of land. This raises the question: does the way we view female property-owners change when the property they owned included people?
That Grenville took an active interest in estate business is not surprising. Over the last few decades, a rapidly expanding scholarship has demonstrated the contribution made by propertied women to the transformation of British society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Single, married, and widowed women played significant roles as businesswomen, investors, and entrepreneurs.Footnote 4 These women were, of course, operating within a patriarchal system that fundamentally restricted the terms of their engagement. Legal curtailments, political restraints, and social and cultural expectations served to shape and sometimes limit the experiences of female businesswomen and the opportunities available to them. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women were intimately involved in the worlds of finance and commerce. But it is important not to place too much emphasis on women's economic agency, risking giving ‘the impression that gender did not really matter’.Footnote 5
David Cannadine may have suggested that ‘wealth, status [and] power’ were ‘preponderantly masculine assets and attributes’, but women played an important role as landowners in early nineteenth-century Britain, possessing somewhere between 10% and 15% of land.Footnote 6 Women also made significant contributions to the broader socio-economic affairs of landed estates.Footnote 7 While their experiences of land-ownership varied widely, large numbers of elite women were actively involved in the possession, management, and ‘improvement’ of rural estates: supervising enclosures, undertaking building works, and implementing agricultural developments.Footnote 8 Indeed, Amy Erickson, whose ground-breaking work on early modern women's property-ownership did so much to stimulate interest in the field, recently exhorted historians to stop emphasizing the exceptionalism of female property-owners and managers, suggesting that doing so risks reinforcing a whiggish perspective of women's history and perpetuating the very narratives that many are trying to destabilize.Footnote 9 While the size and extent of Grenville's landholding was unusual, it is important to situate her within a much wider world of female land-ownership. But we also have to remember that Grenville did not only own land; she also owned people. She was a significant player in a violent, brutal, and degrading system that involved exploiting and expropriating the labour of other human beings for her own economic benefit.
That Grenville was a female slave-owner was by no means unusual. Contemporaries (like subsequent historians) often assumed that slave-ownership was a male undertaking; the pro-slavery campaigner Mrs Carmichael argued in 1833 that ‘there is no class of men on earth more calumniated than the West Indian planter’.Footnote 10 But this stereotype masked widespread female involvement in the business of slave-ownership. Women were ever-present within the urban and plantation economies of the British Caribbean.Footnote 11 In the 1830s, when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies, Mauritius, and the Cape, the British government awarded £20 million to slave-owners to compensate them for the loss of their property.Footnote 12 Women constituted 41% of the total compensation claimants and 24% of absentees – those who lived at least part of their lives in metropolitan Britain. Even abolitionists were willing to admit that there were ‘many widows and orphans who are the unconscious stipendiaries of this wicked system’.Footnote 13 As this anonymous pamphleteer intimated, these women were not all ‘owners’ of enslaved property in the strictest sense. Like their male counterparts, they received compensation not just as owners but as trustees, executrixes, trust beneficiaries, and legatees, and were particularly likely to claim compensation as annuitants.Footnote 14 Rarely ‘unconscious stipendiaries’, however, these women played a vital role in helping to transmit wealth rooted in enslavement into British society.
Born into the highest echelons of the British aristocracy, Grenville had a sizeable inheritance that made her one of the country's wealthiest heiresses. Before the Married Women's Property Acts of the late nineteenth century, it was difficult for married women to own property. Under the common law principle of coverture, a wife's legal identity was subsumed within that of her husband. Upon marriage, a woman's real estate immediately came under the control of her spouse; although it could not be disposed of without her agreement, her husband enjoyed the profits, while also possessing exclusive rights of ownership over her personal property and moveable goods.Footnote 15 Yet, although ideologically powerful, the principle of coverture was never all-encompassing and in practice its implementation was fragmentary. The system of equity, which first emerged in the fifteenth century, was designed to alleviate the severity of the common law and provided a means through which elite families, by settling their property, could evade the constraints of coverture.Footnote 16
Aristocratic families like the Grenvilles transmitted their property across generations through a device known as the strict settlement. Usually executed on the marriage of the heir, the strict settlement had two primary functions. Most importantly, it aimed to preserve and enhance the wealth and status of the family, protecting it from the potential profligacy of current or future generations.Footnote 17 It did this by creating a form of succession known as an entail, establishing life estates for persons yet unborn, usually, but not exclusively, along the male line of descent. Thus, while the ostensible owner of the family estates could enjoy their profits, they only possessed circumscribed powers over them. They could not sell, bequeath, lease, or mortgage the estates unless the settlement so stipulated.Footnote 18 The eldest son, according to the interestingly chosen words of Randolph Trumbach, ‘could regard himself as the slave of his family's interests’.Footnote 19 The other significant function of the strict settlement was to provide for other family members. The settlements laid out jointures (provisions made to support wives in their widowhood) and portions (sums to be bestowed on younger sons and daughters).
Much of the debate concerning the gendered implications of the strict settlement has focused on the extent to which it favoured eldest sons. Lloyd Bonfield argued that the ‘potentially generous’ provisions for daughters and younger sons means that it cannot be considered fundamentally primogenital.Footnote 20 Eileen Spring, conversely, contended that, little concerned with providing portions for younger children or protecting a widow's jointure, these settlements were ‘primogenitive in thrust’.Footnote 21 Yet these technical debates, rather generously characterized by Amy Erickson as ‘esoteric but entertaining’, do not always add to our understanding of gendered property relations among the aristocracy in particularly meaningful ways.Footnote 22 Women are represented in this historiography as either a means of increasing assets or simply dependants whose very existence drains resources from the estate. A clear distinction is made between the social and economic interests of the family as a whole and those of women, with little recognition that the two cannot be clearly separated.Footnote 23 Exploring the ways in which women negotiated their position within the aristocratic family, and examining their complex relationships with their own and their family's property, provides a more fruitful and interesting area of debate. Both material and symbolic, property-ownership was contested and negotiated not only in the nation's courts but in the everyday lives of men and women across Britain and the empire.Footnote 24
This article will use Anna Eliza Grenville as a lens through which to explore the gendering of aristocratic property- and slave-ownership. Examining how she negotiated her significant but precarious position within the aristocratic family, it will consider what it meant for a married woman to ‘own’ property in the nineteenth-century aristocratic world. Following a close examination of the Grenvilles’ strict settlement, it will investigate Grenville's property-‘ownership’ in practice, exploring her interactions both with the family's metropolitan property and with their Caribbean plantation, as well as the people enslaved upon the estate. It will show how seamlessly slave-ownership was integrated into metropolitan forms of property-ownership and transmission; this property was not conceived of any differently because it included people. But we cannot elide what this particular form of property-ownership involved: the brutal and violent exploitation of other human beings. In raising the question as to how we should view women like Grenville when the property they owned included enslaved people, the article will highlight the importance of always exploring gendered power in intersectional ways.
I
As was typical of a woman of her position, Anna Eliza Brydges, the only child of the third duke and duchess of Chandos, brought extensive property to her 1796 marriage to Richard Nugent Temple Grenville, eldest son of the marquis and marchioness of Buckingham. Protracted negotiations preceded the marriage, and in April 1796 the families resettled both the Chandos and the Buckingham properties in a new strict settlement. From her father, who died in 1789, Anna Eliza had inherited a legacy of £1,000, as well as estates in Middlesex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and several Irish counties.Footnote 25 Settled to the same uses as these properties were ‘all such Manors Messes. Lands Tenemts. & Heredits (whether in England, Ireland, Jamaica or elsewhere) as the sd. Lady Anna Eliza … should become intitled’ after her mother's death.Footnote 26 This included metropolitan leaseholds, small copyhold estates, and a position as head lessee of an Irish estate in perpetuity. But it was the duchess of Chandos's Jamaican estate, Hope plantation, that was particularly valuable, with estimated profits of around £6,000 a year.Footnote 27 The value of Hope did not come just from the land itself: ‘All Negroes Slaves Stock Utensils and Appurts’ belonging to Hope estate were settled to the same uses as the rest of Grenville's properties.Footnote 28 A list compiled the previous decade showed that on 1 January 1788 there had been 351 men, women, and children enslaved upon the estate, including thirty-three children aged between one month and six years old.Footnote 29
The settlement of this property secured Grenville's pin money, an annual sum paid to a wife throughout her marriage and one of the only categories of property that married women owned unequivocally.Footnote 30 While in practice women were not always able to save or spend their pin money as they wished, Grenville appears to have had control over the £1,200 provided for her; in 1834 she wrote to Coutts, informing them that she had deposited a sum of £1,224 ‘for her separate use subject to her future direction’.Footnote 31 The settlement also provided portions for younger children and made provisions for their education, maintenance, and ‘advancement’.Footnote 32 The resettlement of the Buckingham estates supplied additional portions, alongside a jointure of £2,000 that was to be paid to Grenville during her widowhood, though only until her mother's death.Footnote 33
The Grenvilles’ strict settlement was typical of that of the nineteenth-century aristocratic family. While it was not completely primogenital, it had a distinctly patrilineal flavour. Although charged with the aforementioned burdens, the settlement ultimately conveyed Grenville's properties ‘to the use of the sd. Richard Earl Temple for his life’, with remainders firstly to Grenville for her life and then ‘to the first and other Sons of the said intended Marriage Successively in Tail Male’.Footnote 34 This was a system that unquestionably placed sons in an advantageous position. However, only 60% of marriages produced male children. While the impetus of the strict settlement was towards a primogenital pattern of inheritance, the vagaries of demography meant that estates frequently came into the possession of women.Footnote 35 Grenville was herself an only child and a considerable landed heiress. The ‘strict’ settlement was therefore not completely strict. If the Grenvilles failed to produce a male heir, the settlement enabled Grenville, ‘notwithstanding her coverture’, to decide her beneficiaries, with potential daughters also provided a – peripheral – position in the line of inheritance.Footnote 36 Female family members were not completely omitted from the processes and practices of aristocratic property transmission.
Nor did the strict settlement only disadvantage women. Patrimonial inheritance strategies were ‘highly inegalitarian’, with every family member subordinate to the main heir.Footnote 37 Younger brothers and sons regularly found themselves in a dependent and potentially precarious position, as Thomas Grenville, Richard Grenville's uncle, articulated.Footnote 38 ‘The kindness of my Cousin has given me a good income’, he admitted to Grenville, ‘but the limitations of it have left me no control or disposal over any part of it, the funded property as well as the landed estate being all placed in strict settlement, & therefore being entirely out of my reach of power.’Footnote 39 Certainly, the claims of women were generally subsidiary to those of male family members, but uncles, brothers, and younger sons could also find themselves subordinate to an older sibling.Footnote 40 The strict settlement contained a multiplicity of different hierarchies. It is important to think about how settlements worked to reproduce various kinds of inclusionary and exclusionary practices, as well as the ways in which they were variously complied with, manipulated, and disregarded when legal directions were put into practice.
II
Despite the provisions made for Grenville in the strict settlement, it is ultimately difficult to conceive of her settled property as legally owned by her during her marriage. Although he could not mortgage or sell the properties, it was her husband who was to ‘receive and take’ all surplus ‘rents Issues and profits of the said Hereds. and Premes.’ during ‘the joint lives of himself and the said Lady Anna Eliza Brydges to and for his and their own use and benefit’.Footnote 41 While the strict settlement was a mechanism used to evade the common law principle of coverture, the notion of the wife being covered by her husband remained powerful.Footnote 42 Nevertheless, there could be considerable differences between the formal codes that stipulated how married women were required to live and the experiences of their everyday lives. How married women identified with their property was not necessarily co-terminous with their legal rights.Footnote 43 ‘Ownership’ was a peculiar and complicated thing.
Many women's relationship with ‘their’ property shifted over their life course.Footnote 44 During the first thirty years of her marriage, there is little evidence to suggest that Grenville was actively involved in the management of the family properties, either metropolitan or colonial. This, however, changed in August 1827. With the family's financial problems mounting, not least as a consequence of Richard Grenville's profligacy, the by then first duke of Buckingham and Chandos embarked on a sojourn around the Mediterranean.Footnote 45 This was supposedly a money-saving endeavour; having failed in his ambition to acquire a position in India, sailing around Europe enabled the duke to drastically reduce expenditure on his costly English estates – and to escape his creditors.Footnote 46 Shortly after his departure, his wife made a discovery that triggered a much closer involvement in financial and economic matters, something she maintained for the rest of her life.
This discovery concerned the marriage settlement of her son. In the Grenvilles’ own 1796 strict settlement, the duchess was given the power to dispose of the estates she brought to her marriage if, at any point, the couple had no surviving male heirs. If Grenville died without appointing an alternative successor, these properties could be inherited by female descendants.Footnote 47 In 1819 the Grenvilles’ only child, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville (hereafter referred to as Chandos, the moniker he adopted after his father attained the dukedom), married Lady Mary Campbell, and the Buckingham and Chandos properties were resettled in a new strict settlement.Footnote 48 However, in 1827 the duchess discovered that, although this settlement had, as expected, resettled her Irish and Jamaican estates on Chandos for his life, in this ‘obnoxious deed’ the estates would, upon his death, revert firstly ‘to his Son in Tail male’ and then to the duke, absolutely.Footnote 49 To make matters worse, the rest of the property that Grenville had brought to her marriage, consisting predominantly of estates in Hampshire and Middlesex, had not been included in the resettlement at all.Footnote 50 Thus, as her adviser put it: ‘As matters … stand the Reversion of all your property is transferred to the Duke, & remains in his power.’Footnote 51 This was presumably done to provide a way for the duke to mortgage, sell, or bequeath these estates, possibly as a way of helping to clear his debts. This ‘misappropriation of settlement powers’, however, directly contravened the terms of the duke and duchess's own marriage settlement.Footnote 52
The jurist, MP, and fellow Jamaican slave-owner Edward Hyde East was a lifelong family friend of the duchess, serving as one of the trustees of her marriage settlement, and it was he who acted as Grenville's legal and financial adviser. In a time of great confusion and uncertainty, East was, in her view, an ‘independent honourable Man’, embodying a kind of respectable masculinity not evident in her extravagant aristocratic husband.Footnote 53 East informed Grenville that he had told the duke's agent that ‘you had not supposed it possible, without your consent & cooperation, for any part of your own property to be directed from the channel it had been placed by your marriage settlement’ and otherwise would ‘certainly have objected to it’.Footnote 54 The use of the second-person pronoun here is particularly interesting. In any legal sense, this cannot really be considered to be Grenville's ‘own’ property, yet Hyde clearly conceived it as such. Neither was such language unusual; it was employed throughout their correspondence. Grenville was indeed ‘much grieved’ to make this discovery, concerned that the duke might sell this property in order to pay his debts or disencumber his own family estates.Footnote 55 While he would have needed his son's consent to do this, and the birth of a grandson in 1823 meant that there was no immediate danger, Grenville fully understood that this left her family property in a precarious position. She was vehement that these estates be resettled.
The duchess would have been in a difficult position had her husband objected to her proposal. The only remaining option would have been to take him to court. The duke did, however, agree to resettle the properties, weakly insisting that he had always believed that the Chandos estates would eventually revert to his wife and that his lawyers must have disobeyed his instructions.Footnote 56 Thus, the metropolitan Chandos estates were settled ‘on Chandos his heirs male & female’ and in case of their failure were to be given ‘to the Duchess, to be disposed of according to her last Will and Testament’. This protected these properties, ensuring that what the duke admitted were ‘her estates … for whom my concern & interest must be, & is, so very limited’ would not be mortgaged, sold, or end up in the hands of his collateral relations.Footnote 57 Grenville herself played a key role in the reformulation of this resettlement. Perhaps thinking of her recently born granddaughter, she insisted that female descendants be well provided for and included in the line of inheritance.Footnote 58
Protecting these estates was important because of the difficult financial situation that the Grenvilles found themselves in. The duke was an extravagant and reckless man and had amassed debts of at least £223,000.Footnote 59 To compound matters, Chandos had picked up his father's bad habits, admitting in March 1828 that he had debts of at least £58,000.Footnote 60 East wrote to Grenville, emphasizing the importance of learning more about her son's situation, as ‘this would enable you to see more distinctly how far your available funds could assist him’. Although it is not completely clear to whom this ‘you’ refers – just the duchess or both her and the duke – East's admission that little could be taken from ‘the Duke's current income’ suggests that Grenville had amassed her own separate resources.Footnote 61 Certainly, she did not underestimate the severity of the situation, refusing, several years later, to allow Chandos to sell her diamonds, kept ‘in my name at Coutts’.Footnote 62 Noticeable throughout this whole discussion was a slippage between pronouns. Different kinds of property were variously referred to as ‘his’, ‘mine’, ‘ours’, and ‘yours’. In day-to-day discourse, there was no strict delineation between different kinds of familial property but rather a flexibility to the ways in which ‘ownership’ were understood.
Grenville regularly used a language of sacrifice to describe her response to this ‘distressing & harassing situation’.Footnote 63 Almost all understood that the duchess's collaboration was necessary if the family hoped to improve their financial situation. Grenville's relationship with her husband was a strained one, yet she remained dedicated to him. ‘There certainly is no one who would sacrifice so much or devote herself so entirely to secure your happiness as your Wife’, she insisted.Footnote 64 Grenville echoed these traditional assumptions about the position of woman and wife when she informed the duke that she had paid £800 to the steward at Avington, her father's ancestral home, out of her pin money, highlighting that she claimed no merit for performing what she considered a duty.Footnote 65 This sense of sacrifice was not solely restricted to a marital setting. ‘Be assured My Dear Lady Chandos I have never withheld any personal sacrifice’, the duchess wrote to her daughter-in-law, emphasizing the importance of placing long-term familial interests ahead of short-term gains that might have detrimental consequences for her grandchildren.Footnote 66 Grenville saw herself as a martyr, willingly sacrificing herself for the good of the family.
Nor were the duchess's proclamations empty platitudes. In the late 1820s she mortgaged and sold several Chandos properties not included in the resettlement, raising £44,000.Footnote 67 Grenville later informed her son that she had consented to this ‘to release your father from great pecuniary difficulties’.Footnote 68 Interestingly, she came to bitterly regret this decision: ‘I severely blame myself for ever having yielded to consent to any Sales or Mortgages, which have only encouraged a wanton waste of money for which you & your Father are so bitterly suffering’, she admonished Chandos in 1833.Footnote 69 Despite repeated badgering, she refused to ever again ‘lend myself to such destructive Measures’, remaining firm in her determination that no further properties of ‘hers’ would be mortgaged or sold.Footnote 70
Having discovered the perilous state of the Grenvilles’ finances, the duchess remained closely and actively engaged with the family business. East ensured that she was well informed about a range of financial and business matters, including specific information about the various sales, mortgages, and leases relating to the family properties.Footnote 71 Grenville used this knowledge to influence familial decisions pertaining to property, business, and finance, an influence generally both assumed and accepted. Like many of her contemporaries, the duchess regularly corresponded with the stewards and agents of the family properties, including with Avington's steward, A. O. Baker, and Thomas Crawfurd, the duke's principal agent.Footnote 72 These discussions covered a wide variety of topics, from tenancies, loan arrangements, and financial accounts, to harvests and the building of tenants’ cottages.Footnote 73 In common with many other aristocratic women, Grenville was actively involved in managing the family properties, an important node in the web of networks through which the Buckingham and Chandos estates were administered.Footnote 74
Grenville's most substantial involvement came when she adopted primary responsibility for the family affairs, including during the duke's sojourn around the Mediterranean. ‘In the absence of the duke of Buckingham I trust you will forgive my troubling you respecting a business which is of the utmost consequence to him’, she wrote to Lord Goodrich in 1828, insisting that his assistance would be greatly appreciated and ‘most valuable to us’.Footnote 75 She assumed a similar role in 1835, when the duke was suffering from gout, engaging with Coutts on the family's behalf.Footnote 76 Grenville acted as she believed her husband wished and kept him up to date with her endeavours. Yet a sense of confidence in her own abilities underpinned this work; she implored him to cease his ‘constant fretting’.Footnote 77 Like many married women, Grenville possessed the knowledge and expertise to continue the family's business undertakings when her husband was indisposed.Footnote 78 She played a significant role as an ‘incorporated wife’, acting in the worlds of business and finance as a promoter of her marital, and familial, interests.Footnote 79
Nor was the duchess afraid to challenge her husband when she saw fit. Upon discovering that the duke was contemplating sending the books of his metropolitan properties to the prominent West Indian MP William Burge, Grenville vehemently stated her opposition, protesting that he ‘can know nothing of English Farming’.Footnote 80 Her opposition to the idea of making a Mr Ledbrooke one of the duke's trustees was even more forceful. ‘There are I believe insurmountable objections from his low birth & very limited understanding’, she proclaimed, believing he was of insufficient ‘rank of life’ to adopt the management of ‘our large property’ (my emphasis).Footnote 81 The extent to which her husband listened to Grenville is difficult to know. The forcefulness with which she expressed such opinions might indicate that she possessed some degree of influence, but it is equally possible that this assertiveness was a response to feeling completely ignored.
The duke was rarely transparent with his wife, something that greatly displeased her. ‘I shall ever assert my right to your confidence because I do feel that I deserve it’, she angrily admonished, arguing elsewhere that she was ‘worthy of being trusted and consulted’.Footnote 82 Her daughter-in-law echoed this frustration, although she framed it quite differently. In 1834, Mary Grenville wrote to the duchess hoping to learn ‘the real state of the case’, but her insistence that she had never before ‘attempted to interfere, even by inquiry, respecting matters of business’ hints at her concerns about the acceptability of her behaviour.Footnote 83 Grenville's response was telling. While promising to help Mary as best she could, she admitted that she was ‘perfectly ignorant of her son's affairs’; of even more concern was that she was ‘nearly as much so of the Duke's’, who she complained ‘never consults me or informs me of his difficulties except when he thinks I can be useful’.Footnote 84 This demonstrates how difficult it could be for women to negotiate their position within the aristocratic family. While it is clear that the duchess was an important cog in the Grenville machine – and she certainly viewed herself that way – the behaviours of both husband and son limited the extent of her endeavours, much to her frustration. Like many women across Europe, she relied on a wide network of friends, associates, and kin to establish her authority within her family.Footnote 85
III
But the Grenvilles did not just own landed property; they owned people. When the duchess of Chandos died in 1813, the Grenvilles inherited not only a Jamaican plantation but also the 391 men, women, and children enslaved upon it. The eldest of those was Old Dick, an ‘invalid’ and watchman supposedly 120 years old; the youngest were the twenty babies described as ‘Children at the Breast’, including Myra's Jasper, Abigail's Betty, and Deborah's Joe.Footnote 86 The power, position, and authority of slave-owning women like Grenville cannot only be assessed in relation to their husbands and sons. In the shadow of the duchess's frustrations about the limits of her property-ownership lay the lives of the hundreds of men and women whom the Grenvilles enslaved, exploited, and denied any basic rights of freedom for their own economic benefit.
Although Grenville's mother had been an active and engaged transatlantic correspondent, it was the duke rather than the duchess who adopted primary control of Hope.Footnote 87 He was not, however, a conscientious correspondent, perhaps reflecting the diminishing economic significance of the Jamaican sugar plantation. In 1819, Hope's sugar and rum production began to decline rapidly.Footnote 88 By the early 1820s, the plantation was struggling to generate half of the £6,000 annual profits expected in the 1790s, with subsequent accounts suggesting that even this was an overestimation. By 1825, the estate was losing money.Footnote 89 Yet throughout this period the duke continued to receive updates from the managers of Hope, known as attorneys, including details about shipments of sugar, the ‘very promising’ prospects for the ensuing crop, and the behaviour of those enslaved upon the plantation.Footnote 90
In 1824 Hope's attorney, Edward Tichbourne, wrote to the duke, emphasizing that he hoped ‘your Grace will be satisfied that I have been situated in this business solely for your Interest’.Footnote 91 While in many respects this innocuous statement simply shows Tichbourne pandering to his employer, it also implies that Grenville's interest in the property was subsumed within that of her husband. Richard Barrett, Hope's subsequent attorney, utilized similar language when he wrote to Richard Grenville informing him of the rebellion that had broken out on 27 December 1831. While Hope's distance from the rebellion gave ‘reason to rejoice’, it nevertheless ‘delayed the completion of your Grace's plans’.Footnote 92 The subject of these letters highlights the fact that the restrictions faced by married women need to be placed within a broader context that acknowledges a wide range of structures of freedom and unfreedom. Barrett's description of the rebellion was characteristic of the racism used by plantation and slave-owners to defend their position: ‘The negroes have established the fact that their ideas of freedom do not extend beyond the license of a savage life.’Footnote 93 Grenville may have been positioned within an inherently patriarchal system but, as a white, aristocratic woman, she was still in a hugely privileged position, particularly in comparison to the people whom she enslaved.
Although here both Tichbourne and Barrett seem to have conceived of Hope as belonging solely to the duke, neither man expressed this assumption consistently. In March 1833, Barrett wrote to Robson, Richard Grenville's solicitor, on the topic of ‘his family Estates in Jamaica’, framing this ownership not as individual or exclusive but rather as familial.Footnote 94 The duke himself understood the necessity of informing his wife of developments on the estate, recognizing that his plans could not be executed without her consent. When discussing the prospect of mortgaging Hope, he ordered Robson to explain the proposal to the duchess, ‘without which I cannot ask her to sign the deeds’.Footnote 95 Yet it seems that Richard Grenville was not as forthcoming in securing his wife's permission as this would suggest. The following year, the duchess wrote to her son, furious at the discovery that the duke had taken out a mortgage ‘upon my West India property’, declaring that she had previously determined ‘not to add to the Ruin of his property by consenting to any Sale or Mortgage on any of my Estates’. The duke's superintendents responded by insisting that they only discovered Grenville's opposition long after the arrangements had been made. The duchess did not contain her wrath, deploring the ‘contemptible conduct’ of those who had failed to inform her ‘until my sanction was required of arrangements concerning my own Property made unknown to me!!’Footnote 96 She sent several strongly worded letters to the parliamentary agent for Jamaica, William Burge, who was involved in the re-mortgaging process. ‘The Duchess cannot condescend to take more notice of such extraordinary neglect of all consideration of her feelings & the respect due to her’ she admonished, reinforcing her objections to ‘incumber[ing] her WI Estate’.Footnote 97 That Grenville's opinions were either strategically evaded or explicitly ignored highlights the difficulties that female property-owners faced, even when the law was supposedly on their side. Yet the vociferousness and vigour of her refusal to acquiesce also demonstrates that, when it came to property that they saw as their own, such women were prepared to stand up for themselves.
There were several occasions when, as with the couple's metropolitan properties, the duchess assumed the transatlantic management of Hope. During the duke's Mediterranean trip, Grenville received detailed accounts from Hope, notifying her of the amounts of sugar produced, the produce received in England, and the sums for which this was sold.Footnote 98 Indeed, she appears to have paid greater attention to Hope's accounts than her husband ever had, perhaps because she felt a greater personal investment in the success of the plantation. She presented her involvement as being undertaken on behalf of her husband. During the duke's illness, Barrett wrote to the duchess, begging her ‘to assure the Duke that no waste has taken place’ and to inform him that the crop across the island was suffering.Footnote 99 Grenville herself promised her husband that she would ‘do all you wish respecting the Jamaica concern’.Footnote 100 Yet Barrett's letters were detailed and precise, assuming a great deal of knowledge, both about the practice of plantership and the process of shipping and selling sugar. He also promised to send some arrowroot, coffee, and oil, ‘as your Grace demands’.Footnote 101 When necessary, Grenville was perfectly happy to involve herself in the business of slave-ownership.
Of particular concern was how the family should spend the compensation money they received following abolition. Through trustees, the Grenvilles received £6,630 in compensation for 379 men, women, and children enslaved at Hope.Footnote 102 Grenville was unequivocal about how this money should be spent. ‘You will I see by the Papers soon receive the W. India Compensation Money which will amply enable you to get out of all debt [to] Humphries & leave you a good surplus to pay off whatever presses most’, she wrote to her husband in September 1835.Footnote 103 When she became aware that this plan was not being followed, her vexation was more than apparent:
I am greatly disappointed at what you say respecting the appropriation of the Compensation Money for the Hope Estate. I was fully aware that the Estate being in Settlement both Chandos's Trustees & myself had a right to give in our Claims but I would not do that or even allude to it, feeling that the best thing for all Parties under existing Circumstances was to devote that Money to clear off Mr Humphries entirely & regain the property, for you will not have another opportunity of doing so. The money must not be otherwise appropriated.Footnote 104
Whether Grenville did have any legal right to claim compensation is difficult to discern. She never submitted a counter-claim – although her son unsuccessfully did – so it is impossible to know whether any such claim would have met with success. Regardless, the fact that she believed that she had a right to claim compensation and did not do so is in itself significant. It again suggests that notions of individual and familial ownership were intertwined. Any personal interest that Grenville may have had in the enslaved property was subsumed within a familial one; she acted as she believed was best, not just for herself but for the family as a whole. While her chastisement of her husband indicates that this did not necessarily mean acquiescing to the wishes of the male head of household, the recourse to family was undoubtedly part of the way in which she negotiated her precarious legal position as a married woman.
Grenville never visited Jamaica. Her relationship with Hope, and the people enslaved upon it, was entirely an epistolary one. The island was, in essence, an imagined place, what Catherine Hall has termed a ‘Jamaica of the mind’.Footnote 105 It is striking that at no point in the duchess's discussion of Hope, or of the compensation money the family received, is there any acknowledgement of the men, women, and children enslaved upon the plantation. This silence echoes her apparent lack of interest in discussing abolition with any of her family or friends. Whereas she was passionately engaged in debates about Catholic emancipation and reform, she was noticeably quiet on the subject of slavery. It is possible that these absences were part of the process of distantiation, a way of disassociating herself from the violent horrors of the system with which she was embroiled.Footnote 106 Slavery was, as Simon Gikandi has argued, ‘in absentia, on the margins, but still part of a presence … both inside and outside the system, a residue of what exists but cannot be acknowledged’.Footnote 107
There is no doubt, however, that Grenville was concerned about the impact of emancipation on the plantation. After the abolition of slavery in 1834, the British implemented a system of apprenticeship, whereby plantation-owners maintained control over the labour of their ‘formerly’ enslaved workers, while the latter were supposedly being prepared for freedom.Footnote 108 Initially intended to last six years, apprenticeship was a ‘half-way covenant’; the law compelled apprentices to work unpaid for up to forty-five hours a week.Footnote 109 But Grenville remained concerned about the productivity and profitability of the estate. Between 1832 and 1836, she sent around fifty labourers from her English estate to labour on Hope, alongside the ‘formerly’ enslaved apprentices still working on the plantation. In exchange for their agreeing to work on the estate for seven years, Grenville provided these labourers with transatlantic travel, a house and garden ground to raise provisions, and some limited maintenance. Veront Satchell briefly discussed this scheme in his excellent book Hope transformed, declaring that ‘the duke sent out white labourers’ to Hope. But, while Grenville certainly informed the duke of her endeavours, her correspondence makes it clear that it was she who led the project.Footnote 110 The organization and management of these ‘fine young men’ was a substantial undertaking, constituting her closest involvement with the plantation.Footnote 111
Grenville's concerns about labour shortages were far from unique. Almost 500,000 indentured labourers arrived in the Caribbean from India in the decades following abolition.Footnote 112 Some plantation-owners promoted European immigration, including Lord Seaford, who established a community of German immigrants in the newly christened Seaford Town.Footnote 113 It was very unusual, however, for British slave-owners to send labourers to the Caribbean from their metropolitan estates. Grenville was one of the few absentees to do so, and she may even have encouraged other local landowners to embark on similar ventures. In September 1835, several years after the departure of the first small group of labourers from Avington, she reported that her Hampshire neighbour George Ricketts and his nephew Lord Vincent were ‘both sending out English labourers to their [Jamaican] Estates’.Footnote 114 But this project was not simply about replacing labour. It also needs to be located within the wider context of the organized emigration of the rural poor. In 1831, the government began to encourage emigration to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act supported this colonial emigration, seeking to minimize discontent at home and offer new possibilities for paupers abroad.Footnote 115 A poor harvest and lack of employment meant that many of Avington's labourers were living in poverty, and the duchess viewed Jamaican emigration as a means of reducing the labour surplus on her estates. ‘I hope I have got a vent for the fine fellows who we must reject for the Hope Estate not belonging to our Parishes’, she admitted, aware of the ‘distress’ among the local population because of the shortage of work.Footnote 116
Ensuring the respectability of prospective emigrants was of the utmost importance. Grenville prioritized her Hampshire labourers over her husband's Buckinghamshire tenants, believing that just ‘one Preaching Person would do incalculable mischief & the neighbourhood of Stowe is sadly tainted’.Footnote 117 She was also keen to attract young women, including three sisters whom she hoped would make ‘good wives’, suggesting that she believed that a permanent and self-sustaining settlement of English labourers could be established on the plantation.Footnote 118 While we may question how ‘voluntary’ such recruitment was, the reports that the duchess received from Jamaica highlighted the comparatively advantageous position of the English emigrants. Informing Grenville that her ‘Avingtonions’ had arrived safely, Barrett described the village he intended to build for them, in ‘an open space uninterrupted by any high land between it & the sea’. He detailed his plans for gardens and fruit trees, explaining that their village was a mile from a chapel and promising that every care would be taken to ensure their religious instruction.Footnote 119 In contrast, he used well-worn racist stereotypes to describe the behaviour of the formerly enslaved apprentices, demonstrating the extent to which post-emancipation plantations continued to be characterized by racial hierarchies: ‘The laziness of the negroes increases, & I don't know what would have been the consequence had we not the English labourers to assist us.’ None of the labourers were as ‘trustworthy & hardworking as the Avington people’, he fawned.Footnote 120
While Hope was generally treated no differently from her English landed property, it is clear that Grenville did not conceive those who laboured on Hope in the same manner as their metropolitan counterparts, even when ostensibly ‘free’. She plainly felt a responsibility towards her English agricultural labourers, rooted in traditional ideas about the duties and obligations owed by landowners to their tenants. She engaged in behaviour considered by David Roberts, entirely insufficiently in the case of female landowners, as ‘paternalistic’: donating money for the poor, hosting Christmas dinner for parishioners, and, as she became more actively involved in estate management, building cottages for tenants.Footnote 121 This was a crucial part of the maintenance of the hierarchical structures that underpinned rural society, sustaining and reinforcing the duchess's own authority within the locale.Footnote 122 In return for such provisions, landowners expected parishioners to behave respectably, with orderliness and deference. Absentee slave-owners often conceived of their relationship with the people they enslaved in a similar way, although this rhetoric was always underpinned by an assumption of absolute authority and control.Footnote 123 This stands in stark contrast to Grenville's silence regarding her Caribbean labourers, whether enslaved or apprenticed. Whatever lay behind this silence – distantiation, disdain, indifference – she did not display any concern for the ‘distress’ of the large majority of people who laboured upon Hope. Perhaps a very different, and clearly racialized, set of power relations made such a performance unnecessary.
Despite Grenville's enthusiasm, and Barratt's hyperbolic platitudes, the emigrant project was an abject failure. West Indian plantation-owners failed to adapt to the new relations of production and the demands of wage labour, the conditions on sugar plantations remaining destructive for all who worked upon them.Footnote 124 Several emigrants died shortly after their arrival in Jamaica, although this did not diminish Grenville's enthusiasm for the venture. As one of these men had drowned and ‘Climate had nothing to do with it’, she still sent three of his younger brothers to Hope.Footnote 125 It was only after Grenville's death that Barrett admitted the project had been a catastrophe. ‘My error has been … to comply with the desire … that the property shd. be cultivated by European labourers’, he wrote. Complaining of the bad habits and intoxication of the labourers, he protested that the duchess's demands ‘for the indulgent treatment of these people have proved incompatible with due subordination & industry’.Footnote 126 Whether Barrett's attempted defence contained any grain of truth is impossible to tell; a subsequent investigation demonstrated that the estate had been entirely neglected and was ‘in a ruined state’.Footnote 127 Grenville's attempts to establish a white settler population on the plantation, and to sustain Hope's profitability beyond the period of slavery, were completely unsuccessful.
IV
A close examination of Anna Eliza Grenville's interaction with both her metropolitan and her colonial property supports Briony McDonagh's argument that we cannot properly understand the ownership, management, and control of landed estates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries without recognizing the role of elite women.Footnote 128 Her example demonstrates that married women were integral to the aristocratic family and its experience of property-ownership, playing a crucial role as acquirers, transmitters, and managers of familial property, identity, and wealth. These women's experiences, however, were not the same as their male counterparts. That neither coverture nor primogeniture was ever all-encompassing should not obscure the fact that these women were situated within a patriarchal system that restricted the terms of their engagement. Legal restrictions, political restraints, and social and cultural expectations − including those of recalcitrant family members − served to shape how women interacted with ‘their’ property.
Day-to-day conceptualizations of the ownership of the properties that Grenville brought to her marriage varied over time and space. Certainly, both she and others often envisaged them as familial. The ‘family’, however, was not a fixed or stable entity but a set of relationships bound together by mutable ideas about blood, contract, and intimacy.Footnote 129 Who or what constituted the family could mean different things to different people. It is too simplistic to assume that when properties were conceived as familial they were simply seen as belonging to the male head of the family. It is also clear that individual conceptions of ownership, including ownership by married women, remained important. Grenville repeatedly referred to ‘my West India Property’ and ‘my Hampshire Estates’, particularly when trying to exert influence. Very little of her property could be legally considered exclusively hers, but ‘owning’ property was important to her sense of self, a way of asserting an identity that was not merely ‘Grenville’ or wife. Grenville's aristocratic position was, of course, crucial to how she conceived herself, her property, and her authority, but property-owning women from across the social strata experienced disjunctures between the perception of their property-ownership and their legal entitlements.Footnote 130 To consider married women's property-ownership only within a legal framework is to look at just one aspect of a much broader, and messier, picture.
Cudjoe (seventy), Libby (thirty-three), and Prince (eleven) were just 3 of the 391 men, women, and children who in 1813 were enslaved upon Hope estate.Footnote 131 Anna Eliza Grenville was one of many British women whose property interests included those in people, who exercised their own property rights by stripping others of such rights. Female absentees played a crucial role in helping to bring slave-ownership ‘home’ to nineteenth-century Britain and facilitate the transmission of slave-based wealth into metropolitan society. Owning enslaved people was a distinct form of property-ownership, the legal possession of other human beings. But, although Hope plantation and the people enslaved upon it were an important part of Grenville's property portfolio – indeed, Hope was one of the few properties that she brought to her marriage that was included in the 1819 resettlement – this enslaved property was treated no differently from her other forms of landed property.Footnote 132 Through mechanisms such as the strict settlement, ‘West India property’ – a nebulous phrase that conceals far more than it reveals – could be seamlessly integrated into aristocratic forms of property-ownership and transmission. While it is important that the historian always remembers that owning Caribbean plantations involved possessing a specific form of human property, many absentees did not disentangle these different forms of property-ownership. Such an understanding reinforces the sense that the histories of Britain and those of the Caribbean cannot be conceived separately or in isolation. Rather, they were inextricably intertwined.
