Robert Wedderburn came a long way to find out that his father was a bastard. Born in Jamaica, as a young man Robert made his way to London. He was press-ganged by the Royal Navy, forced to fight for the British in the American Revolution, in 1782.
After the war ended a year later, he managed to escape from his ship in Barbados. He returned to London to his wife Elizabeth, who gave birth to twin babies in 1784. Times were hard. Robert set off to Scotland to ask his father James for help.
He knocked at the door of Inveresk Lodge near Edinburgh in the summer of 1785. But he got only a glass of weak beer from a footman, and a cracked sixpence and a flea in his from his dad – James called him a lazy fellow.
This is a moment that should feature in every Scottish history book. It’s a moment when BOOM – two worlds collide: prosperous Georgian Edinburgh and the hidden underworld where the wealth was stolen, on Jamaican slave plantations.
A place at the table
That is what Geoff Palmer, whose memorial service I attended last week, argued.
Geoff didn’t want figures like Robert to be ignored – absent from the books and the clan histories. Geoff wanted them to take their proper place in the story we tell about the past. He was deeply proud of their resistance and struggle. (1)
That day at Inveresk, heading away empty-handed from the estate built with wealth that his mother had helped create with her unpaid labour, Robert took a step on the road to radicalism.
Rosanna – a beauty betrayed
Robert’s story is told in depth in a new – and very readable – biography by historian Ryan Hanley.
Hanley’s biograhy also tells the story of Rosanna, Robert’s mother. (I don’t see it on the “Scottish History” tables of the bookshops I visit – but I think it should be there. )
Rosanna must have been very beautiful. She was a prized lady’s maid to Basilia Douglas, a relative of the Duke of Queensbury, who had moved out from Dumfriesshire to Jamaica.
Rosanna had some education. Her father may have been a slave owner. Rosanna helped her mistress with her clothes, hair and so on, and Lady Douglas was to some degree fond of her.
When James, who was well known for his rape and abuse of slave women, spotted and wanted to buy Rosanna, he was turned down. So he got someone to pose as a buyer from another family. It was only after the deal was done that Rosanna found out where she was headed.
Refusal and resistance
Rosanna was furious at this betrayal and resisted in whatever way she could. Because she refused to be a compliant mistress, James brought in another woman, (Esther. Esther’s children by James were later sent to be reared on the Inveresk estate, under the name of Graham.)
Rosanna had two sons by James. The older was also called James and his birth certificate has the name James Wedderburn on it three times.
It reads: “James Wedderburn, son of Rosanna, a mulatto woman, the property of James Wedderburn, by James Wedderburn”. (“By” in this context means fathered by. Mulatto historically meant someone with one Black and one White parent)
Robert was born around 1762. Some time later, Rosanna ran away to the house of James’s older brother John, (2)
Rosanna made it clear she would rather die than return to James’s place. The Wedderburns eventually agreed to sell her back to the Douglas family. As part of this deal, in 1764, her two sons were freed, and they were sent to live with Rosanna’s mother Talkee Amy.
A woman with no human rights
Chattel slaves, as Geoff Palmer makes clear in his book The Enlightenment Abolished, had no human rights. It was legal for their owners to beat, rape or even murder them – although in the latter case the owner would lose a valuable asset. That was the reality that Rosanna experienced.
Rosanna had a couple of years of relative respite, but then Lady Douglas died around 1766. Rosanna was sold again to another Scot, a Dr Campbell who also raped her. She became pregnant and, resisting the mistreatment of Campbell and his wife, she started to deliberately starve herself to death.
She was sold again to Charles Boswell – perhaps the distant cousin of the famous diarist who described him as “having left Scotland “very poor” and returned from Jamaica in 1768 “very rich”. (My suggestion – but it could have been another Charles Boswell as the dates are a bit tight),
Boswell also raped Rosanna and made her pregnant. She got permission from him to walk a long way to visit Amy and the boys, despite her advanced state of pregnancy. But Boswell’s wife grew angry that her lady’s maid was to be absent for the day and sent Boswell after Rosanna to punish her. He rode 15 miles and had her tied and laid on the ground – with a hole scooped out in the earth for her belly – and beat her savagely in front of Amy and her young sons. This was a sight Robert never forgot. It traumatised him for the rest of his life.
“My mother was a slave”
At a meeting in London, the reformer Robert Owen – of the model village at New Lanark – presented a plan to send the homeless poor to plantation-style work farms.
Robert leaped onto the table and interrupted the meeting to tell the crowd that his mother was a slave on a plantation and he knew at first hand what the loss of freedom and human rights entailed.
 |
“Repent ye Christians”
Robert also watched his grandmother being beaten – an event that gave him a lifelong suspicion, even hatred, of authority.
Amy was a resourceful woman who worked at the market in Kingston. At one point, she dragged the young Robert across the island to ask James for some help raising him – she got nothing and told James he was “a mean Scotch rascal”.
Thrown on her own resources, Amy became a handler of stolen goods smuggled by a secret ring of white plantation owners. They brought tariff-free goods in and they smuggled people out – escaped slaves who could pay for their passage off the island. It was not an underground railway, more a people-smuggling gang. Amy also had a sideline in Obeah spells and incantations.
When one of the smuggling conspirators was captured at sea, his nephew blamed Amy for bewitching the ship and had her beaten almost to death. This was another trauma that Robert never forgot.
Robert himself lived the rest of his life in London, hand to mouth on the margins of society, involved in petty crime, convicted of running a brothel, arrested for sedition.
But he campaigned and wrote about the evils of slavery and he told the stories of what his mother and grandmother had experienced. He spoke up for them – he refused to be shamed and silent.
Robert wrote in one account: “repent ye Christians for flogging my aged grandmother before my face when she was accused of witchcraft by a silly European.”
 |
The knock that echoes across the years
Two centuries later, Geoff Palmer visited Inveresk Lodge. He didn’t go alone. Geoff went with the late politician Bill Wedderburn, a descendant of Robert — the son who had been turned away from that same door. This time, they were admitted, a small moment of symbolic significance.
Geoff worked tirelessly to bring the hidden world of slavery – the subjugation and the struggle – into the light and to make people aware of the connections between the unpaid labour of slaves and three centuries of Scottish history. He wanted people to know about the huge wedge of privilege and prosperity it brought to Scottish society, and about the stories of the slaves, whose descendants are connected, like Robert, to the slave owners.
Geoff wrote a long poem about all this which is included in The Enlightenment Abolished. It includes these lines –
Our right to be black and live here is not under review
We paid a bitter price to live like you
That knock on the door in Inveresk echoes still, cutting through the complacency and denial. Can you hear it?
Footnotes
(1) I wrote this piece last year about Geoff Palmer’s long campaign to get a plaque mounted by the Melville Monument in Edinburgh’s St Andrews Square – I think someone should make a movie about it.
(2) John Wedderburn is famous for the legal case of Joseph Knight, a slave whom James took to Scotland. Joseph escaped, litigated for his freedom in a Scottish court and won. There were only 70 or so chattel slaves in Scotland though, so it did not have a wide impact.
What Scotland can learn from Jamaica here
I made this 90-second video of the memorial service. Contribute to the Sir Geoff Palmer memorial scholarship fundraiser here
Featured image: by Andrew Cawley via Wikimedia Commons CC BY SA 4.0 International
First published on the author’s A Letter from Scotland Substack
Leave a Reply