John Ellis is back with a fascinating piece about Amelia Francis, a black woman living in Georgian London. If you have never heard of her, fear not, no one else has either!
All that is known about her comes from a series of newspaper reports, the first from 22nd March 1819 and the last from 1st June 1829. Two further reports from 1833 may very well also refer to her but we cannot be absolutely certain that they do.
Several of the reports mention her ‘curious’ history but they all detail her increasingly fractious brushes with the criminal justice system. The reports variously refer to her as ‘deranged’, ‘vicious’ and ‘violent’. Her ‘victim’, the Earl of Powis was the son of Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’). As the first born son, he had inherited, what most would now regard as, his father’s ill-gotten gains and lived in splendour at one of London’s smartest addresses, Berkeley Square. Amelia had been employed there as a servant.
Let’s start by examining the slightly different versions of how she came to be in the household of the Earl. The accounts agree that Amelia was a native of distant St Helena (best known as the remote island where Napoleon Bonaparte was incarcerated and died). The story starts when the Earl’s ship stopped at St Helena as he was returning to England from India. In one account he had ‘found her on the island, then an infant, deserted by her parents’ and ‘desired her to be taken on board his ship.’ In another version he plays a more passive role, ‘some person’ took her onto the ship and, once on board, ‘his Lordship was pleased with the child’. A third version says more bluntly that ‘he purchased this female’. She would have been about five years’ old when this transpired, whatever ‘this’ was.
Whatever the circumstances, the newspaper reports all paint the Earl as an honourable man entirely undeserving of the campaign that Amelia waged against him after she emerged from her teens. He had ‘sent her to a boarding school, where she received a genteel education’ with a view to her being employed as ‘a servant in a respectable family’ and subsequently ‘had several situations provided for her.’ One report mentions that she ‘served in his household as an attendant on his children.’ When she started to cause trouble for him (quite a lot of trouble!) his Lordship ‘provided a passage for her to St Helena having ‘given her a considerable sum of money, with ample equipment of wearing apparel of every description and everything else she might want’. She didn’t stay on St Helena long it seems and, when she managed to get back to London by stowing away, ‘his Lordship … very humanely offered to pay the parish officers for her support.’ He also offered to return her to St Helena ‘at his own expense’ but she refused to go.
We will turn now to how Amelia repaid this paragon of virtue for his kindness.
The first report (from 22nd March 1819, by which time she would have been about twenty) tells us that ‘her behaviour was such as to prevent his Lordship’s keeping her in his establishment.’ In July 1827 she was ‘charged with collecting a mob and creating a riot’ outside his house (‘a crowd of 100 persons at least’) and ‘indulging herself in the most gross and obscene language’ and that she had ‘frequently before been committed to prison for similar conduct.’ She was still at it in July 1828 when she was once again in front of the Magistrate ‘charged with a riot and breaking the windows at the house of Earl Powis.’ Having ‘collected a heap of stones in the street, she very deliberately set about smashing all his Lordship’s windows.’ On more than one occasion she resisted arrest (and that’s putting it mildly if the accounts are to be believed).
Clearly there had been a major rupture in the relationship between the Lord and servant / purchase. What caused the schism? We cannot know although Amelia obviously felt grievously wronged and wanted the world to know about it. Nor was it a fleeting thing, she carried on her campaign against him for a full decade during which she repeatedly kicked over the traces.
Was the timing significant? Reports of Amelia’s campaign span the period March 1819 to June 1829 and this was a decade that featured much social unrest. The Peterloo massacre, when the local militia in Manchester savagely set about unarmed and peaceful protesters, eighteen of whom died, took place in August 1819; the Cato Street conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the entire Cabinet, was planned for February 1820 (the plot failed and six conspirators were executed); and the Spa Fields riots of 1816 were still a recent memory, a black woman had been one of those hanged for her part in the disturbances. It is intriguing, therefore, that Amelia was not altogether alone in her campaign against the Earl, one report refers to her ‘collecting a mob and creating a riot’ outside his house in Berkeley Square. The ‘mob’ was perhaps easily roused but the fact that a black woman was able to enlist the support of a hundred or more perhaps suggests that, whatever Amelia’s grievance was, others shared her sentiments.
Amelia was poor, black and a woman; her opponent was an immensely wealthy white man with the weight of the establishment behind him. There was only ever going to be one winner and it is no surprise that by 1833, Amelia, if the last two reports do refer to her, was ‘destitute’ and ‘half-starved’. Was she, as one report said ‘deranged’, or had she been sorely wronged by the Earl? Clearly, understandably, he was keen to be shot of her and paid once to send her back to St Helena and offered to do so a second time. Was this because he had genuinely liberal feelings and felt it was the least he should do or was he assuaging a guilty conscience and trying to keep her quiet?
We can never know the answers because what is missing in all of this is Amelia’s own voice, she is just another black women whose story is only told through the, unforgiving, eyes of others.
John’s article is here: