Your University
Sharp and strong is the sword of justice Harry Potter (LLB 1992)
Earlier this year I took part in the unveiling of a plaque at St Bartholomew’s Hospital to Granville Sharp, the inveterate antislavery campaigner whose dogged persistence and refusal to give up ultimately triumphed in what became known around the world as The Mansfield Judgment. Here is the story of how a moral crusade began; how a chance encounter in a London street between a man and a boy led to the sword of justice striking its first blow against the chains of slavery. In eighteenth-century England a premium was put on property rights. They were defended by the ‘bloody code’ that stipulated hanging for many forms of theft or fraud – and were held sacrosanct by the courts. Owners of property could do with it pretty much as they pleased, justifying all sorts of casual cruelty to animals, wives and slaves, all in their way ‘property’. Enter Granville Sharp. Born in 1735 and named after Queen Elizabeth’s vice-admiral Sir Richard Granville, he was the twelfth of fourteen children of the Archdeacon of Northumberland and the youngest of his five sons. There was no money left for his education, but he was prodigiously clever and became an autodidact. He read all of Shakespeare as a boy and taught himself Greek and Hebrew as an adult. He became an ordnance clerk, an odd job for a pacifist – which by that time he was. He was also a staunch Anglican, with an absolute moral certainty and clarity. It was just this unbending ethical rigidity that was needed when a sin the size of slavery entered his consciousness. 32
One morning in 1765 the twenty-nine year old Sharp was leaving his brother William’s surgery in Mincing Lane, when he encountered a teenage boy who was battered and bruised, ‘nearly blind and doubly lame’. He was called Jonathan Strong and was a slave whose owner was David Lisle, a lawyer. Lisle had bought Strong in Barbados for £70 and brought him back to England. For some infraction Lisle had pistol-whipped the boy so hard around the head that the butt had separated from the stock. The valuable weapon could be repaired, but why bother with a slave? Lisle had thrown this now worthless object, like so much rubbish, onto the street. Somehow Strong had strength enough to stagger to William Sharp’s surgery, which he must have known offered a free service to the poor. Granville saw the boy and took him to his brother who arranged for his admission into St Bartholomew’s. Strong remained there for four and a half months. On his discharge Granville got the lad a job as an errand-boy for a Mr Brown, an apothecary in Fenchurch Street. By ill chance, after two years, the then ‘good-looking, stout young man’ was spotted by Lisle in the street. Lisle seized and sold his property to a Mr Ker, a Jamaican planter, for £30. Kerr would not pay until that property was safely stowed aboard a Jamaicabound ship captained by James Laird. So Lisle put the boy in a lock-up called the Poultry Compter, pending transit to the West Indies. Strong wrote to Brown for help. Lisle threatened Brown
Feature – Sharp and strong is the sword of justice
with illegally detaining his goods for the past two years. Brown sought help from Sharp. Sharp hurried to the compter and told the turnkeys not to release their charge to anyone until he had taken the matter before the Lord Mayor’s court. That court duly ruled that, as Strong had committed no crime, he was free to go whenever he wanted. Laird then seized Strong’s arm and declared he was taking the property of Mr Kerr. Sharp quickly charged Laird with assault, and Laird let go of his prey. Lisle was furious, went to Sharp’s door, accused him of robbery and challenged him to a duel. Sharp retorted that he should be satisfied with legal remedies. The lawyer’s first recourse was to the rapier, the ordnance clerk’s was to the law. It was the legal route that Kerr to his cost confidently took. He sued Sharp for trespass against his property. Sharp sought legal advice and was told of an adverse authority: the weighty Joint Opinion of attorney-general Yorke and solicitor-general Talbot, which considered that a slave coming into England remained the property of his master. Sharp could not believe that the law could really be so unjust. What was wrong morally could not be lawful. He had faith in the Common Law of England. While the suit was pending he scoured statutes, judgments and legal tomes and ‘God be thanked’ could find nothing justifying slavery. Ultimately Kerr’s suit was dismissed, not on its merits, but for lack of prosecution. Kerr had to pay treble costs.
Harry Potter
Harry Potter was a history scholar at Emmanuel College Cambridge and later a Fellow of Selwyn College. He was ordained and has served as a parish priest in South London and been a chaplain in HMP Wormwood Scrubs and HMYOI Aylesbury, both then category A prisons, holding the most dangerous adults and youths. While at these latter two institutions, Harry took a part-time law degree at what was initially Ealing College of Higher Education, later becoming the Polytechnic of West London and then Thames Valley University. In 1993, Harry was called to the bar by Gray’s Inn, and has practised in criminal defence ever since.
Granville Sharpe
So Strong’s could not become the test case on whether slavery could exist in England. But Strong had inspired Sharp to find one, so that the law of England could be clarified, the Joint Opinion overruled, and ‘England’s air purified’. He did so in the case of another slave called James Somerset, whose plea for habeas corpus he brought before the Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, for judgment in 1772. The rest, as they say, is history. Quotations taken from 'An Account of the Occasion Which First Compelled G.S. to Study Law & Undertake the Defence of Negro Slaves' in the Granville Sharp Papers, Gloucestershire Record Office.
Harry has contributed to a number of documentaries on the history of law and philosophy on BBC TV and radio. He has written a number of books, the first, Hanging in Judgment: Religion and the Death Penalty from the Bloody Code to Abolition, being an expanded version of his final-year thesis for TVU. Subsequent books have been on Scottish History: Bloodfeud: the Stuarts and Gordons at War, about the unsolved murder of the second earl of Moray in 1592, and Edinburgh Under Siege, 15711573, about the defeat of the forces of Mary Queen of Scots. 2016 saw the publication of Law, Liberty and the Constitution: A Brief History of the Common Law. He also writes on prisons, the war poets, Thomas Browne, and has lectured on such subjects as Rudyard Kipling and the First World War, The Sin of Anatomy, and life as a barrister.
Learn more about the School of Law and Criminology at uwl.ac.uk/law 33