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When a Tahitian sailor was denied his well-earned wages, the rumour got about that Granville Sharp was on the case.
Although William Wilberforce is rightly remembered as the architect of slavery’s downfall in the British Empire, much credit also goes to Granville Sharp (1735-1813). Sharp’s tireless campaigning put such fear into traffickers that the mere rumour of his involvement could set a man at liberty.
When farmhand and lay preacher George Loveless was convicted of conspiracy, both charge and sentence made the country gasp.
In October 1833, after his wages had been slashed almost by half, George Loveless of Tolpuddle in Dorset, a farm labourer and father of five, formed a Friendly Society to support struggling families and to remind employers of their moral obligations. The following March, George and five others found themselves up before the Bench in Dorchester under the obscure Unlawful Oaths Act (1797).
In 1844, Daniel O’Connell was hauled before a Dublin court to answer charges of seditious conspiracy, and he didn’t stand a chance.
In February 1844, Robert Peel’s Tory Party succeeded in getting Daniel O’Connell MP, the outspoken but peaceful Irish rights activist, convicted by a Dublin jury on eleven charges of ‘seditious conspiracy’. That May, O’Connell was sentenced to a year in gaol; but four months later the sentence was quashed by the House of Lords, in a landmark decision for jury trials throughout the United Kingdom.
It should never be labelled ‘dangerous’ to subject Government policy to calm and honest criticism.
IN 1792, the Libel Act gave the jury, not the judge, the right to decide who was guilty of libel. It was soon put to the test, when the Government charged The Morning Chronicle with libel for reproducing the Society for Political Information’s scathing critique of William Pitt’s policies. The jury acquitted the defendants, vindicating the Society’s feisty defence of free speech, reproduced below.
A witness appeared before a Calcutta court, only to find that judge and learned counsel were determined to discredit her.
While visiting London in the early 1800s, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan was brazenly but quite legally defrauded of ten shillings by a litigious tailor, and he had heard hair-curling tales of similar judicial malpractice in Calcutta. He had also heard, however, of one occasion when the attorneys were given a taste of their own medicine.
When he left Calcutta in February 1799 for a tour of Europe, Abu Taleb Khan scarcely expected to spend so much of his time in England trying to keep out of the courts.
On January 21st, 1800, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan arrived in London, full of eager anticipation. What he never foresaw was the trouble he would get from litigious shopkeepers and tradesmen, who repeatedly defrauded him with the help of a corrupt judicial system. If the Indian ever felt he was being targeted he was quickly disabused: the natives of Jane Austen’s London were being skinned daily too.
After word came that Harry Demane had been lured aboard a slave-ship, Granville Sharp had only a few hours in which to make sure he did not sail.
Thanks to campaigner Granville Sharp, ‘Somersett’s Case’ in 1772 proved that slave owners could expect no help from our courts. But they could still sell their African servants into slavery in far-off British colonies, and when Mr Jeffries of Bedford Street did just that, the race was on to find Harry Demane before his ship left port — even as London was settling down for the weekend.