Betsy Newton was enslaved by Lady Sarah Holte (the first heiress I write about in the book) and her sister Elizabeth Newton from 1784 to 1794. By the time she reached London, they were both dead, so she went to see the man who had inherited her and her family, to demand the paperwork confirming freedom for herself and the four young children she had left behind. Thomas Lane admitted she was free by arriving in England,* but refused to help with her children. Betsy remained in London, marrying twice, corresponding with her family in Barbados, and continuing her campaign for her children’s freedom, but to no avail.

Betsy’s chutzpah and determination is quite breathtaking, and just one example of the amazing resilience shown by people fighting to assert their humanity in the most impossible of circumstances that I encountered throughout my research. The callous disregard of the women who inherited her led to her losing five children: the one who died as a newborn, and the four that she was forced to leave behind in Barbados. This is the human cost of enslavement; the damage that still needs repairing today.

If you’d like to hear more about Betsy, her grandmother Mary Hylas, and the rest of their family, please do pre-order my book, Heiresses, Marriage, Inheritance, and Caribbean Slavery,  out 4 September.

​*For more about the legal status of Africans in England, see this article. 

 In the Spring of 1796, Lady Elizabeth Webster was pregnant by her lover, Henry, Lord Holland. Her husband Sir Godfrey had returned to England a year ago, leaving her abroad in Italy. With this obvious evidence of adultery, divorce was inevitable. 

While it would be a relief to be parted from her despised, and much older, husband, ‘the certainty of losing all my children was agonising’. Until 1839, the law dictated that fathers gained sole custody of children after a divorce. 

In desperation, Elizabeth developed a ‘visionary scheme’ to keep her favourite child. In the village of Paullo on the way to Modena from Bologna, she daubed red spots on her daughter Harriet’s arms with her watercolours to convince everyone she had measles. Then she dismissed the servants, sent Harriet to England via Hamburg, dressed as a boy, and put together a ‘rude coffin’, filling her oblong guitar case with stones, a pillow dressed in children’s clothes and a wax mask. She sent this strange item to the British Consul in Livorno for burial, then travelled on to Modena to break the news of her daughter’s death.

Sir Godfrey, who also ‘doted’ on Harriet, was ‘wretched’ on hearing the news and ‘wept his lost child for some time’. 

Three years later, Elizabeth, now Lady Holland, had to come clean. Her new husband’s political career was taking off, and no politician can afford to have embarrassing skeletons in their closet.  In June 1799, she revealed the truth, sending Harriet back to Sir Godfrey, who ‘immediately recollected and acknowledged her’. 

​Elizabeth lamented:

    I have renounced a darling child, and my heart aches afresh when I
    think of the separation. She is so captivating… with my others I feel
    gratified to see them healthy and intelligent, but her winning manners
    convert the duty of maternal attention into a positive enjoyment. I delight
    in being with her… Would to God I were allowed to bring her up!