HERO? OR A MONUMENTAL MONSTER?
There are statues all over the world in memory of Henry Dundas... yet the Scots aristocrat is forever tainted by his links to the evils of the slave trade
Few Scots today have ever heard of Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville. Yet, for more than 40 years and into the 19th century, he had Scotland in his pocket. An edinburgh advocate, an ardent Tory and the ultimate machine politician, Dundas not only held the handful of Scottish offices that truly mattered – Lord Advocate, Keeper of the Scottish Signet, and Dean of the Faculty of Advocates – but sat in Parliament and held significant Cabinet posts.
Dundas was Home Secretary and war Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Treasurer of the Royal Navy.
He was also a ruthless networker, a venture capitalist, and a master of nepotism, securing place and privilege for the sons of dozens of Scots aristocrats he wanted firmly in his debt – mostly in west Indies plantation ventures and, in the process, greatly expanding the extent and commerce of what would eventually be the British empire.
Dundas was not an entire and unscrupulous horror. He stoutly refused to anglicise his speech or accent. Cultured, and with an eye for beauty, he was very much behind the expansion of edinburgh (critically, by bridging assorted canyons north and south of the Castle) and the construction of the New Town.
Yet a great many Scots cordially loathed him, cackling darkly of the ‘GovernorGeneral’ or ‘King Harry the Ninth’. He wed, subsequently divorced and beggared a 14-year old heiress – who, though she lived to be 97, was never again allowed to see any of her children.
James Boswell damned Dundas as a ‘coarse, unfettered, unfanciful dog’ and his whitehall career ended in disgrace: Dundas was the last man ever impeached in the House of Lords for misappropriation of public funds and, though he got away with it, never held public office again.
Yet he is memorialised all over the world – in Canada, in Australia, in Hong Kong, wherever sons of Scotland built their fortunes in diaspora.
THeRe is a monument, too, to Dundas overlooking the Perthshire village of Comrie, and two statues in edinburgh – one, atop a 140ft column in St Andrew Square, now the matter of some controversy. That is because Dundas was up to his neck in the slave trade and was central to the delay of abolition by decades.
Much as slithery Remain politicians have paid lip service to Brexit while toiling to frustrate it at every turn, Dundas piously deplored slavery while engineering ‘gradual’ abolition and (though he did not live to see it) the recompense of slave owners, in 1831, at public expense.
And he cleverly accomplished this not in arguments about property rights, but on the grounds of national security – that the west Indian slave trade, in particular, was vital to Britain’s interests in an era when we were in nearperpetual war with France.
with characteristic edinburgh politeness, no one – 200 years on – is calling for his vertiginous statute to be pulled down.
But a plaque is to be added by the base, explaining who he was and pulling no punches about his shameful part in prolonging a disgusting institution, though agreeing its precise wording is taking inordinately long.
After 12 years under an SNP administration, we have all supped rather more than we realise on the rhetoric of ‘Scottish exceptionalism’ – that ours is a land particularly ‘enlightened, progressive, welcoming and inclusive,’ as Nicola Sturgeon stormed unpleasantly, ‘and no Tory is ever going to be allowed to change that’.
Inclusion, it seems, has its limits. But no Nationalist should be allowed to rewrite history. In the last decades of the 18th century, hundreds of Scots not merely made a mint with the produce of slave labour, chiefly, sugar and tobacco, but in selling slaves. They could sail to Africa laden with Scottish goods and sell them; load up with hundreds of manacled, terrified Africans, make for the Caribbean, flog off such of their human cargo as had survived the voyage, and then return to Greenock, Port Glasgow or Leith with the latest west Indies harvest.
Streets all over our cities are named after the places where slaves were worked to death, or the men who presided over such dark enterprises.
Some suggest Glasgow’s City Chambers was funded by the descendants of slave-owning fortune. It has been bleakly established by one historian, Stephen Mullen, that Glasgow University chalked up the equivalent of £200million today in bequests and endowments from families deeply implicated in slavery.
The schools I attended are delicately tainted. Jordanhill was built in the leafy grounds of an estate bought in 1912 from Parker Smith, Unionist MP for Partick.
His great-grandfather had bought it around 1800 for happy retirement atop a fortune he had made in America and the west Indies.
And James Gillespie’s High School, in edinburgh, was endowed by the will of a tobacco merchant who died in 1797 – kindly, avuncular, folksy, who would have known Dundas and was no less implicated in slavery.
AND that is before we begin to contemplate the record of Scots colonials in the New world – such as Lachlan Macquarie, the Hebridean governor of New South wales who directed at least one massacre against Aborigines.
Dundas can be tenuously defended on three grounds. He personally loathed slavery and, as a young advocate, defended and won from the Court of Session the freedom of one black man, Joseph Knight, from his sometime owner, John wedderburn. Nor were blacks enslaved in the first instance by europeans; they were, in the main, captured and sold by other Africans.
Nor, perhaps, was it ever in Dundas’s power to secure abolition. As Michael Fry has argued, the Pitt administration and Dundas ‘wanted to end the slave trade as soon as possible, but found that a majority of MPs, many with links to west Indian plantations, would not wear this...
‘It was a political situation, much like the row over Brexit. Compromise is hard to find among strongly held opinions. A UK government has to win over Parliament because our system is not run by ministerial command. In the 18th century, it was not yet democratic, but it was already Parliamentary.’
That is not beyond contention. what is certain is that Scotland is only just beginning to have a conversation with herself about darker aspects of her past – and that england, at no time, has held the least monopoly in the cynical, the exploitative and the ruthless.