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ZACHARY MACAULAY
By Iain Whyte
Talk given to a group at Rothley Court the day after the 200th
Anniversary 26/3/07
In the 1950s we in Britain
were carelessly uninterested in keeping our historical documents here so it is
not surprising to find that the bulk of Zachary Macaulay’s letters and papers are not here, not in his native Scotland, not in Clapham his London
home alongside Wilberforce and many of the abolitionists, but in the giant
Huntington Library in California, USA.
It is a rich Treasury, but fortunately some documents have escaped and remain
here.
Mr. Humphrey Errington is a maker of goats’ cheese in deepest rural
Lanarkshire. He is also the great great great grandson of our man Zachary
Macaulay. Last month he took from an old leather suitcase and lent me a
fascinating letter dated 30th July 1794 addressed to Thomas
Babington Esquire, Rothley Temple
written from the freed slave colony of Sierra Leone where for several months
Zachary Macaulay had been Governor. Here
it is. And there are some very interesting things in this letter.
But firstly just a few facts about the man and his life. Zachary was
born in 1768, son of the Church of Scotland minister in Inverary, Argyll.
Educated locally he was a clerk in a Glasgow merchants house at the age of 14
and at 16 his father sent him to Jamaica where he worked as a ‘book keeper’ (a
polite term for overseer of slaves) 5 years later he returned to Britain and
came here to live with his sister Jean and brother-in-law Thomas
Babington. The Babington connection took
him on a trial visit to the free slave colony in Sierra Leone where he became later
Assistant Governor and then Governor in a very difficult time for the colony.
He finally returned home, married Selina Mills, daughter of a Bristol Quaker.
By this time he was well into the circle of abolitionists and became in 1804 a
member of the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Employment
wise he administered the African Institution which ran Sierra Leone and edited the evangelical Christian Observer
which had a strong anti-slavery emphasis. In 1815 he represented the
Abolitionists in Paris at the Peace negotiations
with France
trying to ensure the abolition of the French Slave Trade.
We celebrate today the abolition of the Slave Trade. But perhaps
Zachary’s greatest work was as Editor of the magazine of the new movement to
abolish plantation slavery itself – the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter which had
an incredible circulation between 10 and 20,000. This
was the engine room or if you like the ammunition for the Parliamentary
campaign. Wilberforce used to say ‘let us look it up in Macaulay.’ Zachary
edited the Reporter in the crucial years between 1825-1831. He literally spent
days and nights in exposing slavery and wore out his health. His business
suffered and in his last years, though he had with others achieved abolition,
he spent in illness and financial ruin.
Zachary died in 1838 and a bust of him with an inscription lies in
Westminster Abbey.
In 1833 Wilberforce’s parliamentary successor, Thomas Fowell Buxton led
delegates on the final push to Downing Street
to lobby the Prime Minister. That evening at dinner Buxton ended his speech by ‘gladly seizing a long
wished-for opportunity of bearing testimony to the merits of the real leader of
this cause – the anti-slavery tutor of us all – Mr. Macaulay.’
Back now to our letter. There are things in it which help us to get a
picture of this man, not least of the influence of Rothley and those who came
around it on his life. And they also indicate some of the curious contrasts and
paradoxes of this great but fallible and faulty human being. One of the
problems of biographical writing is that it either lionises the subject or it’s
a put down. We’ve seen this in the treatment of men like David Livingstone,
Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King and of course William Wilberforce. Zachary
Macaulay’s two biographers have been close relatives and so he has tended to
come out as a bit of a plaster saint. History is rarely that simple. And it
wasn’t with Zachary.
“Each time I take up my pen to write to you I am forced to send you
apologies in place of the long letters I owe you and you will already have
judged from the complexion of what precedes this that the same must now happen.
If I write at more length to others than to you it is not that I love you less,
but that I have more hope of indulgence from you.”
That kind of comment is what we might expect from a young man to his
father or favourite uncle. But all the evidence is that Zachary’s father was a
stern harsh figure whose scholarship the young man respected but between whom
there was no affection and no uncle fulfilled this role. We have here a trust
and an affection which was to be a unique experience for this young man
unequalled until he met Selina, his wife to be.
There must have been a uniqueness about Thomas Babington. All we know of
the slave societies of the West Indies
indicates that men were brutalised and often women too. The horrendous
conditions endured by slaves and the almost imaginable sadistic cruelty not
only degraded those who suffered from it but those who perpetrated it. My
generation was brought up on the chilling stories of the Holocaust and the Nazi
camps and the slave societies paralleled these. Zachary’s only account of the society
in which he spent five years shows that there was no middle way – you accepted
the ruthlessness and brutal life and you participated in it or you got out. A
letter to a friend at home describes him in a cane field with the noise of the
whip and the cries of the victims and add “you might think of your friend in
hell” But chillingly he got used to
this hell and even delighted in it at times so that he didn’t immediately jump
at the chance to get out. When he
thought he was dying there was none to care for him – it was a totally selfish
and indulgent society but in health that held some attractions for him.
So its hardly surprising that when he arrived at Rothley one of the
daughters of the house described him as ‘a disagreeable conceited youth, with
self-sufficient dogmatic manners.’
When I was a local minister I had to tell off the grandson of one of my
members who was just back from apartheid South Africa and at the age of 10
started ordering around people in the church
hall as if they were servants!! But behind the bombast and the arrogance lay a
wounded and directionless young man, starved of love. It would have been all
too easy for the Babingtons to censure him or to indulge him. They did neither.
The subtle blend of tough love and gentle devotion to principle were
undoubtedly crucial in his development. No wonder that he later described
Babington as one ‘on which the lineaments of the divine character’ were ‘fairly
and deeply drawn.’ From Thomas Babington (and also from his sister Jean) he learnt
of a Christianity that was neither the formal cold observance in which he had
been raised nor the obsessive individual
piety which had no bearing on ethics and practice which often sought to replace
it. As we’ll see he struggled with religion and theology all his life but at
Rothley he found a new direction to his faith that rested on the confidence and
security which his relationship with his brother-in-law (and his sister) gave
to him. They valued him and they challenged him to become involved in the cause
that united them all. This was to start by his passage to Sierra Leone.
But Thomas and Jean Babington did more than that. They were crucial in
assisting the development of the love of Zachary’s life, the one without whom,
as he later confessed in a letter to her, he could not have done his crucial
anti-slavery work. Lets take up the story in that 1794 letter. “Assure my
sister” he wrote “that she need be under no apprehensions of my contracting
myself in England.
I wont say without her approbation, for that might be a promise too much, but
without her knowledge. You may assure her likewise that there is no one woman
in Great Britain
for whom I have a predilection as once to have formed the notion of a union
with.” That was to change dramatically within the next twenty months. A teacher
in the Bristol school run by the poet and friend
of the abolitionist, Hannah More, fell in love with the awkward serious young
man about to embark again for Africa, and he
with her. The More sisters were appalled, not just at the prospect of young
Selina Mills going to Africa but one of them
was so close to Selina that she put every obstacle in the way of this romance.
The ‘understanding’ was reached between them literally as Zachary was about to embark
on the ship for Sierra Leone.
In a letter from Jean Babington to he brother in February 1796 there is a
commitment to do everything possible both to reverse the opposition of the More
sisters but to support Selina in her lonely absence from her fiancée.
Thomas and Jean Babington were not the only ones to notice the change in
the austere young man who had at last found someone special. But they alone by
inviting Selina to Rothley were able to take the risk of letting her know
something of Zachary’s background. In January 1797 he, Zachary, wrote to Selina
that Babington ‘knows me in some respects better than I knows myself’ and has
helped him to this self knowledge. ‘His three hours narrative respecting me
must necessarily have brought you more acquainted with my tempers and dispositions.’ Risky indeed, but far from Zachary feeling
that this honest appraisal of his faults would result in turning Selina against
him, it was the key to giving him confidence to reveal what we would otherwise
never know – the bleakness of his years in Jamaica, his turning his back on God
and any humanity, and his falling in with all the worst aspects of that planter
society. We have to be a wee bit careful. Zachary once wrote from Sierra Leone “I
am not a Paedobaptist, a Predestinarian or a Presbyterian” but he retained so
much of his Calvinist upbringing with the emphasis on total depravity that all
his life, though embracing the salvation offered in Christ he also remained
tortured by the enormity of his sinfulness. The incomparable Albert Finney playing
the elderly blind John Newton in the
film “Amazing Grace” is quoted as saying: “I know two things for certain…I am a
great sinner and Christ is a great saviour.”
It was not just the Babingtons who influenced Zachary’s religious
development. From these long exchanges between Sierra
Leone and Bristol,
informed by passionate love, came theological dialogue. For a young man from
Calvinist Scotland, instructed in evangelical Anglicanism, to listen to and
allow his own religious thinking to be shaped by a woman from a Quaker family
was remarkable. But they did have theological discussions by post and Selina’s
views on contemporary theology were taken on board by Zachary. He and his
colleague in the abolition movement James Stephen were incidentally very much
keener on the participation of women in the campaign than Willliam Wilberforce
and Thomas Clarkson, who definitely did not approve. What I think we have in
religion is a series of tensions in Zachary’s life which were never entirely
resolved. He says he rejects infant baptism (I am no Paedobaptist) but he could
not abide what he sees as the lawless kind of free worship he finds amongst the
followers of Baptist missionaries in Sierra Leone when he was Governor.
He says he is no Presbyterian yet some of the most unfortunate aspects of
Presbyterianism where guilt rather than grace dominate he retains. And the all
too Presbyterian work ethic which made him such an efficient Governor of Sierra
Leone and such an effective anti-slavery campaigner also made him afraid to
enjoy the pleasures of life in a way that Wilberforce and I suspect Babington
never suffered from. In 1807, 4 months after the abolition bill he confessed in
a letter to Selina from London
“You cannot imagine what a dissipated afternoon Babington and I had,” a
described a tour of entertainment instead of being in the office!
Zachary wrote to Selina from Sierra Leone that her letters had
helped ‘to soften down a few of the asperities of my rugged nature.’ Yet it was
that same ‘rugged nature’ that enabled him to stay at his post as Governor after
the invasion and sacking of the colony by the French in 1794, to withstand the
constant storms between this colony of freed slaves and the surrounding ships
and stations of the most active slaving industry in West Africa, and to
adjudicate between rival religious groups and the duties and rights of the settlers. Imagine being the Governor of Honk Kong or the Mayor of West
Berlin during the cold war or Lord Mountbatten the last Viceroy of India on the
eve of independence and you have some idea of the magnitude of the task facing
the young Macaulay. Almost every historian condemns Macaulay’s governorship as
severe and unbending, even cruel or racist. Ironically when he was campaigning
against slavery it was the West Indian Party in Parliament which accused him of
allowing a black jury to try and condemn a white man. Inexperience and
insensitivity led him to make some bad judgements and to act undiplomatically
at times towards the settlers who were frustrated by being denied much that had been promised. But given the situation in which he found
himself I believe such judgements to be wide of the mark.
Back to our letter for a moment.
In contrast to the stiff upper lip austerity that his detractors
portrayed and far from the despising of the place over which he ruled Zachery
wrote to Babington “I become more and more attached to Africa, and should
similar events to what have haped in France be likely to hap in great Britain I
should resolve …on burying myself in its quiet and peaceful bosom.” This
despite the slave trade which he never ceased to condemn. But in his journeys
to meet local chiefs and in his walks around the colony, despite the dangers,
the climate and the incessant fevers that struck him and others threatening
their lives, this love of the place is very apparent. He shared much of the paternalism of his time
towards other races – it would have been strange if this were not so – but
never do we find anything of the philosophy of some other ‘progressive’ Scots
such as David Hume in claiming the inferiority of those with black skins.
Historians such as Adam Hochschild
and Simon Shama for all their
research have fallen into the trap of concluding that his missionary zeal,
patriotic fervour, and assumption of moral leadership, tedious though this is
to a 21st century observer amounted to a doctrine of racial
superiority.
His journals sent home to Henry Thornton the Secretary of the Sierra
Leone Company whose servant he was, give us an insight into daily life and
those to Selina a more personal picture of his constant tensions. As Acting
Governor he was to do something which he justified at the time but was forever
haunted by. In July 1793 the settlers,many of whom had been American slaves who
fought with the British in the American War of Independence brought 5 slaves
who had run away from Richard Horrocks a local English trader to Zachary
expecting him to shelter them in the colony. To their horror he returned them
to Horrocks claiming that he had no authority to otherwise – the slave trade
was legal under British law however much they loathed it and longed to see it
abolished. They were not the only ones who were horrified. The Directors of the
Company could hardly believe that this had happened. Zachary argued that any other action would
lay the colony open to attack or denial of the supplies on which they depended
and no protection would be given to them. Technically he was right. But even
though abolition was a long way off all the time he was in Africa
in similar circumstances which often arose he found some legal pretext or
another to avoid this kind of return to captivity whilst continually pressing
on the merchants whom he came to know to abandon the evil trade.
In 1794 Zachary became passionately concerned about the French
Revolution and this is reflected in the letter. As with many of the
abolitionists he had a fear of civil unrest and an innate conservatism –
another irony since it was revolutionary stirrings that they were all accused of
by their enemies. He describes here the energy of Revolutionary France
withstanding all defeats in battle “in spite of the wickedness and impiety of
her mad, ferocious and diabolical rulers” – he really sees the full measure of
the threat to all morality, peace and security posed by the France of this time. Yet it is his
love of France
that makes him grieve for the terrible state of government terror that it has
become. Zachary learnt French at an
early age, some of his closest friends were to be French citizens, he was held
in huge respect by the French abolitionists and by their society Les Amis de Noirs (Friends of black people)
and he was as I mentioned the chosen representative to go to Paris in 1815. As present day Treasurer of the Britain
Zimbabwe Society I can feel the same desolation over a country and people with
so much to give being caught in the icy grip of a vicious tyranny again.
Once more in this letter we find a clue to the complexity of the man. A
lover of order and correctness he nevertheless is able to see the dangers of a
clamp down on freedom that there certainly was in the Britain of the
1790s. “I fear,” he wrote “that the vigorous measures which are taken to secure
obedience and the immense levies of militia making, will in the end prove a
lever to overthrow it. A war with opinions will perhaps never prove successful
for opinions cannot be killed by cannonballs.” Such democratic sentiments might
bring a wry smile to the face of a Sierra Leone settler who railed
against what he saw as an authoritarian governor. For my part I wonder what
Zachary would make of the number of freedoms lost by us today in the cause of
‘anti-terrorism’ or of the value of spending untold billions in renewing the
Trident nuclear weapons. Do we learn from history – or not?
Before we leave Sierra
Leone and this particular letter I want to
take up the image of Zachary Macaulay as
what Hochschild described in ‘Bury the Chains’ as “this humourless and
unlikeable man.” Such a judgement I believe is superficial. Certainly in the
journals there are passages that seem to be very censorious and his
descriptions of his relationships with the Settlers and some of the
missionaries show him with the insecurity of youth as dogmatic and determined
to have his way, worse still to assume that it was always God’s way. The other
side of that coin as we have seen was a humility in his confessions to his boss
Thornton and his fiancé Selina. I’ll come back to that element of humility at
the end. In fact his capacity for friendship grew and the correspondence not
just with the Babingtons but with William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, his
French friends Baron De Stael and Louis
Dumont, but above all with his old friend and co-worker in the cause James
Stephen show a very different side to him. In writing to his son Tom at
University he says “Your mother went to hear Mrs. Williams preaching yesterday”
and we think “a woman in the pulpit in the early 1800s” but in fact it’s poking fun at a guest preacher in Clapham
that the Macaulay family find not to be robust enough in his leading of
worship. As a pre-Victorian father he had the traditional Scottish reluctance
to be seen giving praise to his son – when Tom makes his first speech at an
anti-slavery meeting and Wilberforce is ecstatic Zachary, although bursting
with pride simply tells Tom that a young man shouldn’t keep his arms folded in
the presence of a royal duke! Yet as a father there are many stories of his
games with his children. If there is any doubt about his humour lets look at this
last quote from the letter of July 1794. Although he assures Jean Babington through
Thomas that he has no present intention of marriage to an English woman there
is an addition to that. “But” says Zachary “she will remember that these appearances
don’t extend to Africa. If therefore I should
have the honour of presenting to her some sable princess in the Character of a
Sister she must not accuse me of a Breach of Promise.” It is of course possible
that he considered marrying an African though this is most unlikely not on
racial grounds but on religious ones – only a Christian woman would suit and
daughters of chiefs were not normally of the faith. No, it is surely a gentle,
somewhat dry, but mischievous sending up of his sister and brother-in-law who would
after the initial shock have no doubt chuckled over it.
Time and space is not sufficient to do justice to what was the most
important part of Zachary’s life as far as the anti-slavery movement is
concerned. The characteristics of thoroughness, endurance, and attention to
detail, found in him at an early age,
part of his heritage, immensely useful in Sierra Leone, were to come to full
fruition in the 1820s, the key period of his life. When on leave from Africa in
1795 he sailed to England
via Barbados
on a slave ship. There are all kinds of stories about this and some mixed
messages about dates in the history books. It may be that Wilberforce asked him
to gather evidence on the voyage and in Barbados. The records show that the
ship had 225 slaves bound for Jamaica
and his diary shows notes not on the voyage but of conditions in Jamaica.
Detailed statistics and accounts were to prove immensely valuable in the later
campaign to get rid of slavery itself but when he returned home finally in 1799
he was immediately involved in the lobbying of government by the abolitionists.
He had one supreme advantage. Wilberforce, Clarkson, Sharp, Babington,
Gisborne, and Thornton
were the giants of the abolition movement. But none of them had first hand
experience of the West Indies or of the West
African slave trade. James Ramsay had, and in the 1780s had instructed both
Clarkson and Wilberforce. But he was long since dead. Zachary was the only one
who could fulfil that role. In a guilt ridden letter (another one!) to Selina
he shows his frustration at being kept in London
instead of coming to Rothley to see her (she had almost taken up residence
here!) but the demands of the cause meant that he needed to be in London and on
hand to provide the evidence.
It may be worth saying a brief word about dates. The slave trade was
abolished in 1807. The idea was that if the supply of slaves was cut off,
conditions on the plantations would improve and eventually slavery would wither
and be replaced by free labour. The reverse happened. The ban was flouted
despite the British Navy’s efforts and foreign imports were obtained. Many
planters fearing the end of slavery worked their charges even harder and
certainly resisted any changes or ‘improvements. In this atmosphere the disbanded
committees formed to campaign against the trade restarted with the modest aim
of “The mitigation and eventual abolition of negro slavery” I have here a
letter which is unsigned and was therefore didn’t cost me much, but which is
highly significant. It reads “18th January 1823 Mansion House Place. Mr. Macaulay
presents his compliments to the author of an excellent paper on West Indian
Slavery signed “Observer” which appeared in the Imperial Magazine for January
1823. He would feel himself particularly indebted to the author if he would
afford him an opportunity of personal communication, as the subject is one
which deeply interests him.”
Two things about this simple but important note. The London Committee
for the abolition of slavery was formed just a few months later with Zachary as
a leading member. He was therefore ahead of the field. And he was combing for
information, reading widely in any sources
he could find. I have seen that issue of the Imperial Magazine. The article on
slavery was a one-off and anonymous – it was not central to the magazine’s
concerns. Yet Zachary ferreted it out. As he was to do throughout the 1820s
keeping providing ammunition for the campaign.
The Anti-Slavery Reporter was a monthly magazine which was launched in
June 1825. Zachary was the first editor and continued in that position even
through ill health in the early 1830s at one time running it from France where he
was helping out the French abolition movement to publish their own journal. The
Reporter served two main purposes. It provided facts and figures, accounts and
evidence for the campaign in Parliament. And it provided a source of news and encouragement for the many local
committees up and down the country. For those of my generation it was perhaps
the equivalent of the Anti-Apartheid News though sadly unlike the demise of
apartheid, slavery is still so much a part of this world that the Anti-Slavery Reporter
continues to this day. Although so long away from his native land with few
visits back to it there is a particular note of pride on page 39. of the January 1831 edition when he writes “before leaving
Scotland for the present we have to add, with great satisfaction, that this
cause has been advocated by the ministers of religion, in that country, both of
the established church and other
denominations, with particular zeal and ability.”
Through correspondence we learn that Zachary laboured day and often into
the night digesting reports, articles, and reviews of slavery from voluminous
Government tomes that most would have baulked at tackling, to small items in Caribbean newspapers or speeches at anti-slavery
meetings. It was a Herculean task undertaken almost entirely on his own. But it was no blunderbuss task but skilfully
worked out. If you look at the Reporter you will see that there is very little
in the way of comments or anecdotes which could be used by the enemies of
abolition as prejudiced and inaccurate. Macaulay used the sources that could not be challenged by the
pro-slavery party because they came from their own sources
on the islands. In 1826 and 1830 he reproduced a series of advertisements in
the Royal Jamaica Gazette which detailed sales of slaves to pay their master’s
debts with the marks of whipping on their bodies or loss of ears or other body
parts. When he detailed a particularly
notorious case of Henry and Helen Moss in the Bahamas who were found guilty of
torturing to death several female slaves, Zachary used as his source the dispatches of successive Governors of the
island to the Colonial Secretary. His sole comment made was “We will not cease
to all the attention of our countrymen to these abominations, as long as they
are suffered to exist.”
And that he did. But not without cost. Infuriated by their inability to
contradict him by facts, his enemies descended first of all to mocking him and
then to digging up stories of his Sierra Leone enterprises. John Bull, the London newspaper and unashamed
organ of slavery interests bracketed him with Wilberforce, Buxton, and Stephen
in what the paper called “Bible dinner snuggeries and Godly tea drinkings”
claiming to care for black slaves but not British labourers (that was a
favourite attack on the abolitionists) His name was a gift for lampoons as he
was termed “Saint Zachariah” and his support for the highly successful sugar
boycott campaign led to a taunt of “Zaccarine.”
More seriously it accused him of feathering his own nest in Sierra Leone,
monopolising trade, profiting by a bounty on captured slaves and ruining the
colony which they had always seen as a foolish scheme. The evidence that they
produced was the testimony of a judge in the colony with whom Zachary had
clashed and been indiscrete in his comments to one of his successors.
In 1824 Zachary instituted libel proceedings against John Bull but after
the magazine applied to the Court of Chancery for two commissions to take
evidence in the West Indies and Africa
Zachary’s friends, including Wilberforce and Babington persuaded him to drop
the case. If lost it would spell financial ruin but more importantly the
dragged out proceedings over the years would have sucked in his time and energy
and the anti-slavery cause would have become diluted. Zachary was reluctant to
drop the case. The very tenacity or in Scotland we use a word “thrawnness” that
kept him terrier like at his task of exposing slavery made him reluctant to let
go, but in the end as in most things, he saw what was truly important. And that
was getting rid of the evil of slavery.
The
merchant company which Zachary set up to trade with Sierra Leone had prospered at the
start. He took the oldest Babington son, Thomas Gisborne into partnership and
as anti-slavery matters took over his life he left the business affairs to this
nephew and another Kenneth who was situated in Sierra Leone. It was a disaster. It
is difficult to see whether Thomas and Kenneth helped themselves to money or
simply mismanaged the business – few books, accounts or records were kept.
Kenneth pulled out early with apologies – Thomas remained evasive and refused
any investigation until Zachary in the end sacked him. It is a measure of the
strength of the ties that this break with Thomas and Jean Babington’s eldest
son did not strain the relationship between the Babingtons and the Macaulays. A
letter from Rothley 17 Feb 1829 to Zachary declines to judge Thomas Gisborne
but admits “it is altogether a grievous affair and falls heavily on an old man
like me” but the affection towards Zachary is kept in tact. Meanwhile Zachary had
to move to more modest accommodation, his own debts piled up and he became
bankcrupt. His remaining years saw increasing dependence, after Selina died, on
his family for accommodation and often on his own son Tom for money. Henry, his next son went out to Sierra Leone in
1830 but could do little to rescue things. Characteristically Zachary’s loss of
worldly wealth brought no emotional or passionate response – these were
reserved for the great religious and educational causes that he embraced and
above all for abolition. “The Lord gives.. the Lord takes away “ was his
attitude of resignation.
The last impression I want to leave of this remarkable man is that of
acceptance and humility. Hard one virtues and not always consistently
practised otherwise he would have been a saint. But while Clarkson’s family
bickered with the Wilberforces over the attention given to Thomas’ part in the
movement and while Clarkson’s History denies some of his colleagues an
honourable place Zachary is content with a back seat role to the extent that he
has received less recognition than his due. Lord Brougham, Edinburgh lawyer,
abolitionist, and Lord Chancellor of England (funny how they always have Scots
for this – Lord Mansfield and now a different kind of Chancellor in our
neighbour Gordon Brown) Brougham promised to get Zachary a small post as
commissioner of charity which would have given him a little income . Tom
Macaulay MP was annoyed that he was delaying and prevaricating over it. “Oh
no,” said his father, “don’t trouble him – it will all come in the end. He has
much to do.” In his Westminster Abbey
memorial bust the opening words read “In grateful remembrance of Zachary
Macaulay who during a protracted life, with an intense but quiet perseverance
which no success could relax, no reverse could subdue, no toil, privation, or
reproach could daunt, devoted his time, talents, fortune and all the energies
of his mind and body to the service of the most injured and helpless of
mankind.” All eulogies, all epitaphs over simplify and of course this complex
character is no exception. But who of us would not be immensely proud to have
even a small part of that as a remembrance of our lives.
A last story to lighten things. Zachary’s love for Selina when he was in
Sierra Leone
bordered on the obsessive. When she sent
him a painted miniature he complained that the artist had dared to improve on
the unimproveable – her looks. He loved her passionately and sought a way of
showing it. He bought a parrot from a trader but unfortunately the bird only
spoke Fulani. He then, in the solemnity and privacy of the Governor’s office
taught it to say “I love you” in English. It was to be sent to England o the
next available ship as a living token of his devotion. Alas, like John Cleese’s
parrot, the bird expired before the ship sailed. But Zachary’s love for Selina
lasted for over four decades and was not broken by death.
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