By R. W. Morrell
In June, 1797 an impoverished bookseller by the name of Thomas Williams was charged with blasphemy for having sold a single copy of Paine’s Age of Reason, the prosecution having been initiated by an organisation with the grand title of the Society for Enforcing the King’s Proclamation against Immorality and Profaneness, better known by its critics as the Vice Society. Its president was one Beilby Porteus, the son of a retired Virginian plantation owner, and bishop of London, while its committee included two other Anglican bishops, several members of the nobility, a general and several members of Parliament who included William Wilberforce, later celebrated for opposition to slavery, except for workers in English factories.
According to Robert Hodgson’s Life of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, D.D. (1811). ft was under his “active and discreet direction (that) the licentiousness of the Metropolis had to a certain degree been checked”, but then “a publication of such an infamous description, and calculated to produce such infinite mischief… made its appearance, and was disseminated with inconceivable industry through every town and village in the kingdom”. The offending publication was Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (p.125).
The Vice Society was outraged, in their opinion the book was “in point of argument …. perfectly contemptible, but what was worse, in the view of Porteus was that “it was addressed to the multitude, and most dexterously brought down to the level of their understanding. It compressed the whole poison of infidelity into the narrow compass of an essence or extract, and rendered irreligion easy to the meanest capacity.” In other words, it was easy to read, as indeed it was and is.
The indignant bishop thus wanted progress of the work “checked instantly”, and while it was thought that bishop Richard Watson’s “antidote” (Apology for the Bible) was “admirable”, it is clear from what Hodgson writes that it was thought ineffectual.
It was thus decided that the man who had dared, in violation of all decency” to publish Paine’s book should have inflicted on him some signal punishment”, a statement that infers the outcome of the case had been decided in advance. So it was that Thomas Williams was prosecuted at the court of the King’s Bench, Porteus and a colleague, the bishop of Durham, having prevailed on Thomas Erskine (who had defended Paine when he was tried for seditious libel) to prosecute on behalf of the Vice Society. Williams could not afford a defence so the outcome was inevitable, the outcome being inevitable and, as Hodgson states, “the Jury without a moment’s hesitation” found him guilty. Throughout the case the judge, Lord Kenyon, made no secret of his support for the prosecution and openly showed his bias along with his support for the society.
However, prior to the sentencing of Williams, Erskine was enticed into visiting Williams’s shop and what he saw there horrified him, Williams’s wife and their three children, two of whom had smallpox, were destitute and starving. As a consequence of this at a full committee meeting of the society presided over by Porteus with two other bishops present and Wilberforce, which was held before Williams was due to be sentenced, Erskine described the situation the family was in and appealed to the committee to be lenient and allow him to plead for a nominal sentence, pointing out that mercy was “a grand characteristic of the Christian religion” and suggesting the society should be well satisfied with the punishment already inflicted on Williams, who had been in prison some time awaiting sentence. But the saintly Porteus (as Hodgson represents him) and the others present, were inflexible, not for them compassion or mercy. Disgusted at their stance Erskine refused to accept his fee and refused to anything further to do with the case, a fact Hodgson omits to mention in his book, where instead he praises Erskine’s presentation of the prosecution’s case. Williams was sentenced to a year in prison plus his own recognisance for £1,000.
It thus comes as no surprise to discover that Porteus supported negro slavery, making this all too clear in a lecture he gave before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1784 and later published as An Essay Towards a Plan for the more effectual Civilization and Conversion of the Negro Slaves on the Trust Estate in Barbadoes (London, 1807). The estate, or plantation, was “stocked” (Porteus’s own expression) with 300 slaves plus their innumerable slave children, and in his address the bishop was primarily concerned with how to coerce the slaves into becoming Christians, thereby “rendering them industrious, honest, sober, faithful, and obedient to their masters, as they are expressly enjoined to be in Scripture, under pain of eternal punishment in the world to come”, which would “in a great degree remove the necessity of the whip”, and secondly increasing the plantation’s profitability by reducing costs. Something that has a rather modern ring to it.
He advanced several proposals that included compelling the slaves to undertake additional Christian propaganda on. Sundays, a day they looked upon as their own, designed to make them more submissive, but allowing them an extra hour off on another day. He appreciates that this might appear to have a detrimental effect on profitability, but this would be minimal, indeed it might even have the opposite effect. However, it seems that the slaves were resistant to the attempts at conversion, so Porteus called for attention to be concentrated on their children, who should be, he maintained, placed under the charge of a catechist “as soon as they are capable of articulating their words, and their instruction must be pursued with unremitting vigour”, but only until they were too young to work, for as they grow fit to labour”, their attendance, “must gradually lessen, till at length they take their full share of work with the grown Negroes”. Here he was saying that profits’ came before Christianity, a familiar stance amongst Christian prelates throughout history and still conspicuous today.
To assist in the task of conversion, Porteus wanted the plantation’s slaves to have as little contact with those from other plantations where owners had little interest in conversion. In addition, contamination with heathen ideas brought in by newly imported slaves from Africa was to be avoided, for it was “always extremely difficult to make any religious impressions” on their minds. Instead, Instead, he suggests, giving “every possible encouragement” should be given to “the increase of the native Negroes”, which could be done by granting “certain privileges and indulgences to those Negresses, who have large families; and if there are any who have brought up decently and creditably an unusual number of robust and healthy children” they could be given their freedom, presumably, though this is not stated, after they had reached an age when having children would have been difficult. There would thus be “a constant succession of home-born Negroes” and, throwing altruism to the wind, not that it was ever there, this would ensure the slaves owners would “reap many substantial. advantages”, not the least of which would be to “save the heavy expense of frequent purchases” involved in re-stocking. Moreover, Creole slaves were “far superior in fidelity, obedience, docility, and industry to the African Negroes”, and “young Negroes will be much more easily trained up in the Christian faith than. those who come full grown from the coast of Guinea… Porteus could as well have been writing of cattle.
The bishop makes not the slightest reference to freeing the youngsters from slavery, but simply held the carrot of possible freedom to their mothers providing they produced children like rabbits. How the mothers would have felt on seeing their husbands and children remain in servitude was a matter the bishop did not address, but he did suggest that some Negroes who “distinguish themselves by a superior knowledge or more uniform practice of Christianity”, for which they “might be rewarded with the privilege of gradually working out their freedom” (his emphasis), but aware of the “apprehensions” this might create, for it could be looked upon as having a detrimental effect on “the produce of the plantations, by lessening the number of slaves”, he suggests “the privilege might be restricted to a very few in a certain number of years”, while their places would be taken by the “natural increase” of the Negroes, by which one assumes he had in mind the breeding programme he had earlier argued for. Moreover, the “enfranchised should be obliged to continue for a stated time, as day labourers on the plantation, at a certain stipulated price”, and by thus creating by degrees “a new race of free hardy labourers, who had been brought up in habits of industry, and accustomed to the heat of the climate (who) would do more work in less time, and at a much less expence (sic) to the society than any equal number of slaves”. In short, slavery under another name, and when eventually the English government abolished slavery in territories under its control, and massively compensated the slave owners, but the lot of the former slaves who were theoretically free remained the same, the masters became employers with poverty replacing the whip as the means of making the former slaves work even harder but at far less expense to the plantation owners.