Protestant Exiles from France/Book First - Chapter 13 - Section XVII
XVII. Christopher Edward Lefroy, M.A., Retired Colonial Judge.
The two younger sons of the reverend head of the English Lefroys were Christopher Edward (born 1785) and Benjamin (born 1791). We first meet with the former in 1803, on the alarm of an invasion from France, as a volunteer officer. In 1804 he was preparing to be a solicitor — a profession which he adopted for a time, but soon relinquished. Under the influence of his pious mother, he fearlessly professed Bible religion in a very irreligious age, and published a very creditable book, entitled, “Are these things so? or, Some Quotations and Remarks in defence of what the world calls Methodism. By Christopher Edward Lefroy, of Chapel Street, Bedford Row.” London, 1809. This was his first appearance as an author; he had edited a volume of verses by his lamented sister-in-law, Mrs. George Lefroy, of whom her brother, Sir Egerton Brydges, said: “She was a great reader, and her rapidity of apprehension was like lightning; she wrote elegant and flowing verses on occasional subjects with great ease.” About the year 1811 he was called to the bar, and then decided to go to Oxford. His college was Magdalen Hall; he became B.A. on 15th January 1814, and M.A. on 6th July 1816. It is probable that, like the majority of barristers, he was not favoured with business; but his gown made him eligible for salaried appointments. He became known as an ardent philanthropist, and both an admirer and an associate of William Wilberforce. When the Governments of the Netherlands and Great Britain entered into a treaty for the suppression of the slave trade in Dutch Guiana, and a bench of five judges was instituted, Mr. Lefroy was selected to be the British Judge or Commissioner. This was in the spring of 1819. The appointment was to be for ten years, and a retiring salary was promised. The only obstacle in Mr. Lefroy’s mind was the fearfully pestilential climate; and he put the question whether, in the event of the failure of his health, he might retire after eight years’ service. The following letter answered his question; it also exhibits the preliminaries of his departure for Surinam, the capital of the Dutch colony:—
Viscount Castlereagh to Christopher Edward Lefroy, Esq.
“Foreign Office, May 11, 1819. — Sir, — I have the honour to acquaint you that you will be allowed the sum of £400 sterling towards the expenses of your equipment for the situation of His Majesty’s Commissary Judge at Surinam. You will be allowed a salary of £1500 sterling a-year whilst officiating in that character, such salary to commence from the 5th of April last; and should you be desirous of relinquishing the duties of your situation at the expiration of eight years after your arrival at Surinam, you will be allowed a pension of £750 a-year upon your retirement. I have to add for your information that the amount of your outfit will be paid to you by Mr. Bandinel, the agent in this office for the Commission; and you will draw upon him at the expiration of each quarter for the amount of the salary due to you for that quarter; and he will be instructed to answer such bills drawn upon him at sixty days’ sight. — I am, Sir, your most obedient humble servant,
He arrived safely at Surinam, but soon discovered that it was not in Dutch Guiana that men of authority had any desire or intention to suppress the slave trade. Successive Governors were not unfriendly, neither were his brother-commissioners unfaithful; but all the lower officials conspired with the planters to prevent the laying of complaints before the Commissary Court. And there was a criminal court, called the “Court of Policy,” presided over by the planters and their partners in a clandestine slave-trade, which practically reversed the Commissioners’ judgments. Often for many consecutive months there was no Dutch cruiser to patrol the coast; and even if there were, a slave ship could be captured only when flying a British or a Dutch flag; the French flag was therefore usually adopted. The indignant British Judge himself writes:— “Could I help quarrelling with a set of infidels who treated the treaty itself and the whole subject with derision? — I will mention one case, just as a sample of the spirit I had to contend with. I had with great labour and pains procured an order from the King of the Netherlands, that the cargo of a particular slave-ship seized in the act of smuggling in slaves (consisting of five young Africans in the prime of health and youth) should be free, according to the treaty, and delivered over to the Government — instead of which, they sold to the planters all these fine young Africans, and took an equal number of old superannuated and crippled negroes, and giving them a nominal liberty, sent word that the order of the King had been complied with.”
The shape in which this quarrel came to light was this. Before the ten years were expired (perhaps before half of the period — I have no list to refer to) all the Commissary Judges had died from the effects of the climate, except Mr. Lefroy. He himself thought that his own death was at hand, and wished to leave behind him a strong and sounding protest against the evasion of the treaty, and against the specially polluted and cruel slavery of the Dutch colony, and also against (to use his own epithets) “the revolting, frightful, all-crime-comprising, all-depravity-inducing, all-humanity-deriding, heaven-outraging, and demoniacal practice, the West Indian Slave Trade.” He accordingly wrote a Novel, with notes and an epilogue, and sent it to England to be printed without the author’s name. Copies arrived at Surinamin the year 1826. What must have been the surprise of the Governor and the highest officials on receiving as a present a volume of 324 pages, with the title-page and dedicatory epistle:—
| OUTALISSI; a tale of |
to WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, Esq., |
The volume is a romance in which fiction as to names and as to exact occurrences is a framework for true statements and anecdotes. Outalissi is a slave, the chief of an African village, who with all his people was conveyed to Dutch Guiana in a French ship commanded by Captain Legere. Bob Jackson, an English sailor, was one of the crew, and afterwards made a deposition in the presence of Captain Bentinck, of which the following is the substance:—
“Captain Ledger, as they calls him, seeing me unemployed, said I was a good likely sea-looking lad, and asked if I had a mind to take a run with him to Africa for a cargo of mules. Being quite out of prog, and rather sulky, I said I didn’t care, and he took me aboard with him immediately. When we came into the Bight of Benin, I soon found what a cargo of mules meant, and one of the men, an Englishman like myself, said he know’d of a king as lived somewhere in those parts, about twenty miles up the country, that had taken him home and cured him of a fever once when he was wrecked upon that coast, and that if the captain Mould send a dozen hands with him, and give a trifle head-money, he’d bring away the whole village, king and all. So I was ordered of the party, &c.” The attack began by setting the village on fire; then the people were captured, but Outalissi hid himself in his woods. He lost his liberty, however, by leaving his hiding-place; the king “came stealing out of the woods to reach an oyster, I thinks ’twas as Bill said, or some such lubberly lingo as he larned when he was a soldier, for this Bill isn’t above a half-bred sort of a land swab of a sailor after all.” (The author explains that Bob was trying to say reconnoitre.) On being asked why he did not make an affidavit before the Commissioners, Bob replied that as an Englishman he would be liable to be sent to England to be tried and hanged for slave-trading, and “they wouldn’t believe that I didn’t know what mules meant when this here Frenchman engaged me.”
I give some specimens of dialogues introduced in this tale:—
Page 45. “There are different modes of conducting all employments,” said Mr. Cotton. “Captain Legère, for example, never stows above three mules to a ton, or loses more than a third of his cargo on a voyage, and his decks are as clean nearly as those of a man-of-war. I will not, however, deny that it would be desirable to avoid even such a waste of valuable life and muscle as that; but the risk and penalties are now so heavy as to compel the traders, like smugglers, to make the profits of one successful voyage cover the loss and expenses of three; and if that precious little humbug, Mr. Wilberforce, had been content to regulate instead of abolishing the trade, there might have been something to be said for him.”
“But,” said Edward, “don’t you see that it would have been impossible by any regulations to bring such a trade within the pale of humanity, because any restrictions, proportioning the numbers of the slaves to the tonnage of the ships, would have so raised the price of legally imported slaves, as to make the profits upon smuggling a sufficient temptation to practise it with as much if not more disregard to the waste of life.”
“I can’t see,” said Mr. Hogshead, “what right Mr. Wilberforce had to trouble his head about the matter, with Ireland and the press-gang under his nose.”
“It’s rather hard upon Mr. Wilberforce, too,” said Edward, “or indeed upon any man, to condemn him for doing anything because he could not do everything. What he has achieved has cost him the labour of his whole life; and looked at seriously and in all its remote and probable consequences, a most glorious achievement it is.”
Page 117. “I really thought,” said Edward, “that it was the sincere wish of his Netherland Majesty to suppress this frightful traffic, from the laws that he has passed for that apparent purpose and the public expressions of his ministers.”
“Pshaw,” said Colonel Vansonmer, “all that, you know, is merely to humbug the British Government; his Netherland Majesty’s ministers are obliged ostensibly to comply with whatever directions my Lord Londonderry is pleased to send them.”
Page 118. "So, Mr. Bentinck,” said Monsieur Derague, “you are in correspondence with the British Commissioners here, I find, to help us in the discharge of our duty.”
“I could not be aware,” said Bentinck, “that my furnishing those gentlemen with information of a case, which I understood to be their special duty to attend to, would be disagreeable to your Excellency.”
“Their duty,” said his Excellency, “only extends to the adjudication, in conjunction with his Netherland Majesty’s commissioners, of slave-vessels found trading under Dutch or British colours, and brought before them by a British cruiser; but it is not easy to confine them to their duty. They have, of course, to affect a confidence in the earnestness of the wishes of our Government to extinguish this traffic corresponding with that of their own, or rather of the English fanatics whom their Government is reluctantly compelled to humour. They are unceasingly tormenting me with complaints of the continuance of slave importations (to which I reply, Produce me conclusive evidence, gentlemen). One of them, the other day, wished to advertise a reward for information, but I told him that it did not belong to his functions, and refused him permission to do so. He then wished me to advertise one myself, as the governors of the English colonies are in the habit of doing — which also I assured him our Dutch laws would not allow.”
The tale, with its epilogue and notes, was a tremendous exposure of life and society in these plantations; and the author’s ingenuity, warmth, and humour made the book a success. The appendix was more serious and statistical, and raised a flame in the colony. Formal complaints were made to the two European Governments, the book (though anonymous) being unmistakably by Mr. Lefroy. The Government of the Netherlands complained to the British Cabinet; and the author was censured as one who had written a libel, or who at least had come into imprudent collision with the colonial officials. It was even solicited that he should be recalled. The Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister. Mr. Lefroy repeatedly requested His Grace’s permission to retire at the end of the eighth year of his term, as Lord Castlereagh had arranged. It is not known what the Duke wrote; but the practical decision, as events proved, was that Mr. Lefroy was to consider himself recalled, but was to continue to reside and to act at Surinam until the whole term of ten years was completed. About this time he wrote a letter to Charles Edward Lefroy, the young head of the family, dated Paramaribo, Surinam, Easter Sunday, April 15, 1827, in which he says:—
“You have now a name of unblemished reputation for four generations to support. . . . In a Protestant kingdom no ancestry can or ought to be more honourable than a Huguenot ancestry. Your grandfather was a model of social excellence, uniting the scrupulous uncompromising integrity and truth of your great-grandfather. I have met with no one in my intercourse with the world who would bear any comparison with the impression I retain of his uniform dignity and consistency of deportment in every relation of life. He used to ascribe all his impressions of Christianity to your grandmother; but he was always a man of honour, and in his carriage and manners a perfect gentleman, almost a courtier. He exemplified, I think, what Dr Johnson calls the highest perfect of humanity, the character of a truly Christian gentleman. Your father (I had almost said) was born a saint, and passed from his cradle to his grave without one single vicious action, if not without a single vicious propensity.”
His vein of humour appears at the close of the above letter. He writes, “As for myself, I never had any real goodness much less sanctity in me; but I would still serve, if it were possible, to the rest of my family, as the Culloden at the Nile.” (The allusion is to a ship-of-war which ran on a reef, and was of no use in the fight except as a warning to its friends.)
Mr. Lefroy’s remaining years of office were more agreeable than he had ventured to hope. In fact, his project in publishing “Outalissi” was publicly justified. By appointment of the Netherland Government, Major-General Van den Bosch came to Surinam in 1828 to investigate into the state of the colony, and (says Mr Lefroy) “the very first thing he did on his arrival was to send all my official antagonists to the right about, and completely remodel the Colonial Government. He introduced many salutary regulations, as well for the protection of the slaves as the general prosperity of the colony — regulations which reflected more severely upon the prior local administration and the general moral character of the colony than any charges either expressed or implied in the narrative of Outalissi, and would themselves have been a gratuitous libel, if these charges had not been substantially true.”
The last sight we get of Mr. Lefroy in Dutch Guiana is himself and the Dutch Commissioner and the Governor unitedly encouraging the building of a church for the Moravian missionaries. I insert the following letter:—
“to the Editor of the ‘Guiana Chronicle’?
“Surinam, 1st January 1829. — Sir, — For the honor of this colony, you would much oblige me by inserting this letter, with the enclosed circular and a list of subscribers which, besides the names of the Governor, Fiscal, and Bookholder-general, comprises those of almost all the respectable inhabitants, excepting some few who subscribed liberally but requested the omission of their names. And lest the amount of my own subscription, in comparison with that of my superiors, should be charged with ostentation or a breach of proper etiquette, I think it right to say that at the time His Excellency General De Veer, who has a large family, gave me permission to collect, he kindly and repeatedly expressed his wish to me that neither myself nor others should consider the amount of his own as an impassable maximum. The chapel has since been completed upon a scale of 95 feet in length by 60 in breadth, and above 50 in height (Rhynland measure), with two galleries, one above another the whole course of the parallelogram, but at a very great additional expense to the Moravians themselves, beyond the amount of subscriptions, of nearly as much again. It is a plain but capacious building, and will contain commodiously a congregation of between two and three thousand persons. No Colonial Government has any excuse for holding its slaves in ignorance of Christianity that has so safe a vehicle for communicating a knowledge of it as that which is afforded by the Moravian establishment in this colony. Indeed, to do justice to this colony, of which I have now been a constant resident and a very close observer for nearly nine years, I must say that almost every individual in this colony respects them, that has the least pretension to respectability himself. And I don’t know that I shall over-colour the estimation in which they are held if I say that they are generally spoken of not only in terms of respect but affection, so much so, that I told their very amiable Warden the other day, the Rev. Mr. Ghent, that they were under the curse of Scripture, for everybody spoke well of them.
“The chapel was opened on the 21st day of July last, under the auspices of the Lord High Commissioner-General Vandenbosch and his lady, our present Governor, Admiral Sir Paulus Roeloff Cantzlaaz, his lady and family, several naval and military officers, and almost all the beauty and fashion of Paramaribo. I beg your acceptance of a lithographic sketch of it, which perhaps you will do us the justice to affix up in your kantoor; and I think it would be no more than a neighbourly action if you would insert in your respectable paper the enclosed advertisement which I have cut out of the Surinamsche Courant for the 23d of July, as our funds are still inadequate to the object proposed, and there may be possibly amongst you some wealthy and serious Dutchmen who would contribute to them. — I am, Sir, your most obedient humble servant,
Chris. Edward Lefroy,
“Judge of the Mixed Court for the suppression of the Slave Trade on the
“part of His Britannic Majesty.”
The editor of the Guiana Chronicle complied with Mr. Lefroy’s request, and also on 11th February 1829 published a leading article in praise of the Moravian missionaries, adding, “We are glad that so humble, unostentatious, and withal so useful, a class has met the support of the best and highest individuals in Surinam.”
Having left Surinam at peace with the colonists, what must have been the surprise of Mr. Lefroy, on his arrival in London, to find the Duke of Wellington still in an enraged state of mind? On the ground (I suppose) that the honourable Commissary Judge had not retired but had been recalled, he refused to act upon Lord Castlereagh’s letter, and reduced his pension to £600, thus inflicting for life upon a faithful public servant a heavy annual fine of £150, which (says Mr. Lefroy) was “imposed on me without judge or jury.” In this connection, it is nothing but justice to Christopher Edward Lefroy to quote the testimony of his nephew, Sir Henry Lefroy, that this action of the Duke “never abated his enthusiastic admiration of that great man.” The same nephew, after giving a quotation from Outalissi, says of his uncle: “This honest indignation at fraud and cruelty — this fearless and simple assertion of the truth of revelation and of the judgment to come — characterized him to the close of life. His conversation was always forcible and original, with a character of humour which was often exceedingly quaint. Many stories might be told of his harmless eccentricities; one of them, which he told himself with much gusto, was his putting to flight the conqueror of Waterloo! Residing not far from Strathfieldsaye, he occasionally met the Duke of Wellington in the hunting-field; he observed one day that the Duke was taking a course that would oblige him to pass by a certain gate, and the idea struck him that he would ride forward and open it, to show the hero that he bore no malice against him. But the Duke, who saw the movement and mistook the intention, clapped spurs to his horse (to escape a bore), followed by his admirer. My uncle reached the gate first, and dismounting, opened it, hat in hand. The Duke, who knew his man, then saw his meaning, and, riding through with a nod and smile, left him perfectly happy with his success.”
Mr. Lefroy’s well-earned repose began when he was aged forty-four. He bought the property of West Ham, near Basingstoke, extending to 203 acres, with an excellent house. Although he was a bachelor, his house had many occupants. In the very year in which he settled there his younger brother died, leaving a young widow and seven children. Benjamin was six years younger than the retired judge, having been born in 1781; his school education was at Winchester; he was of Merton College, Oxford, and took the degree of B.A. on 19th November 1813. He was successively rector of Compton and of Ashe. In November 1814 he married Anne Austen, and his death took place at the early age of thirty-eight, on 27th August 1829. While Mr. C. E. Lefroy’s private life was that of a father to his fatherless nephew and six nieces, his public life displayed constant activity and energy in the advancement of beneficent enterprises. He had some thoughts of publishing with his name a second edition of Outalissi, and had written a preface dated “West Ham, May 1830;” but this intention was fallen from. After twenty-three years of usefulness as a country gentleman, he was, in December 1852, seized with partial paralysis, and was nursed for the remainder of his life by his affectionate and grateful household. He died on 2d July 1856, aged seventy, lamented by his neighbours universally. He was buried in Basingstoke Churchyard, and the following inscription is upon his tomb:—
| Christoper Edward Lefroy, Esq., for 10 years British Commissary Judge at Surinam for the Suppression of the Slave Trade, and late of West Ham, of this parish, died July 2d, 1856. Aged 70 years.
With all the humility of prostrate helplessness I throw myself on God’s mercy thro’ Christ for the pardon of my sins, trusting in the Infinite Sufficiency of the full and perfect Atonement by Himself once made upon the Cross for the sins of the whole World.
The concluding words of his Will.
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