New edition of Mayo-born author's biography of Howe Peter Browne published

Sourced from some 15,000 original papers and letters, scattered in archives worldwide, as Castlebar-born author Anne Chambers notes: “Howe Peter Browne led me on an eight-year-long fascinating journey from Westport to the West Indies and many places in between.” A new edition of her biography – From Rake to Radical: An Irish Abolitionist – has just been published.

The only child of John Denis Browne, Marquess of Sligo, Westport House, and his wife Louisa, daughter of Admiral Howe, British naval hero, Howe Peter Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo, was reared in a climate of wealth and privilege. At 20 he inherited five titles, a 200,000-acre estate in the west of Ireland and sugar plantations in Jamaica.

Lord Sligo’s youth conformed to the popular image of a Regency Buck in the notorious world of the Prince Regent, the gambling houses, bawd houses and theatres of London to the salons of Paris, in the company of such profligates as Lord Byron.

A patron of pugilists, dancers, courtesans and artists, founder member and steward of the Irish Turf Club, spy, sailor and jailbird, guest of the family of Emperor Napoleon, as well as the father of 15 children, the diversity of Sligo’s life in this racy 18th century world of excess is truly breathtaking.

From a hedonistic youth, as Anne’s biography’s reveals, Sligo transformed into a reforming, even an enlightened landlord in Mayo. A passionate advocate of Catholic emancipation, multi-denominational education and legal reform, Sligo tried to alleviate the desperate circumstances of his numerous tenants, aggravated by a rapidly rising population, the ‘curse’ of subdivision and the absence of employment outlets.

His efforts elicited the praise even of Daniel O’Connell in the House of Commons as well as from Castlebar’s Telegraph and Connaught Ranger which, at the height of the 1831 famine that ravaged Mayo, recorded: “The unbounded charity of the Marquess of Sligo…his money is now the main source by which the destitute…are kept alive…without enquiring whence they come.”

On his appointment as Governor General of Jamaica in 1834, Sligo’s liberal endeavours were transferred across the Atlantic to take on the brutal system of slavery. As owner of two plantations on the island, inherited from his grandmother Elizabeth Kelly, the planters expected Sligo to be on their side. His objective, however, as he informed them on his arrival, to establish a social system ‘absolved forever from the reproach of slavery’ set them on a bitter collision course.

Sligo found the savagery of slavery personally abhorrent. “The cruelties are past all idea,” Sligo told the Jamaican Assembly. “I call on you to put an end to conduct so repugnant to humanity.”

He advocated the building of schools for the black population, two of which he built on his property. He was the first plantation owner to initiate a wage system for black worker and later, after emancipation, to divide his lands into numerous farms to be leased to the former slaves.

As he had done in Ireland, Sligo also set out to reform the Jamaican legal system. His efforts on behalf of the black population were bitterly opposed by the planters, who accused him of ‘interpreting the laws in favour of the negro’ and who, as Sligo noted ‘set out to make Jamaica too hot to hold me.’ They withdrew his salary and commenced a campaign of vilification against him in the Jamaican and British press which resulted in his removal from office.

DETERMINED CAMPAIGNER

On his return, however, Sligo became a determined campaigner for full emancipation. One of his published anti-slavery pamphlets, Jamaica Under the Apprenticeship System, influenced the ‘Great Debate’ on emancipation in the British Parliament in February 1838.

On 22 March 1838, being, as he noted, ‘well aware that it would put an end to the (slavery) system', he publicly announced in the House of Lords that, regardless of the outcome of the British government’s deliberations, he would free all apprentices on his own estates in Jamaica on 1 August 1838. His public pronouncement left the British government with no alternative but to implement full emancipation on the same date.

Sligo earned an honoured place in the history of Jamaica, where he is acknowledged as ‘Champion of the Slaves’ and where the town of Sligoville, the first free slave village in the world and visited by the author in the course of her research, still bears his name.

As Anne Chambers notes: "While statues of those involved in the slavery system are being removed, perhaps one should be erected to the memory of this emancipator from the west of Ireland.”

One of the multitude of quite extraordinary incidents revealed in this absorbing biography was the first recorded case of libel taken by Lord Sligo in 1833 against Englishman Frederick Cavendish, editor of the Telegraph and Connaught Ranger (later re-named The Connaught Telegraph) in the Court of Common Pleas in Dublin. Their divergence over the issue of Repeal of the Union descended into a personal vendetta against Sligo in a series of articles written by Cavendish under the pen name Philodemus.

“For the injury and stain which the defendant (Cavendish) has cast…on his (Sligo's) character…’ the editor was subsequently found guilty, fined £250 damages (which Sligo donated to charity) and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment. The case was widely covered in Irish and British newspapers of the time.

This biography not only introduces one of the 19th century’s most fascinating characters but also sheds new light on significant historical events and on the people who shaped them here in Mayo, as well as in England, Europe and the West Indies.

From Rake to Radical: An Irish Abolitionist (New Island Books) is written by Anne Chambers and features an intriguing cover designed by Westport artist Sheelyn Browne, Lord Sligo’s great-great-great grand-daughter. It is available in bookshops now.