For Faith and Freedom

by Walter Besant

Down in the waist the gentlemen gazed and gasped, in astonishment. It was no new thing for the planters to buy political prisoners. Oliver Cromwell sent over a shipload of Irishmen first, and another shipload of those engaged in the rising of Penruddock and Grove (among them were gentlemen, divines, and officers, of whom a few yet survived on the island). But as yet no gentlewoman at all had been sent out for political reasons. Wherefore, I suppose, they looked so amazed, and gazed first at me and then at one another and then gasped for breath.

'Alice Eykin, gentlemen,' said the salesman, who had a tongue which, as they say, ran upon wheels, 'is a young gentlewoman, the daughter, I am informed, of the Rev. Comfort Eykin, Doctor of Divinity, deceased, formerly Rector of Bradford Orcas, in the county of Somerset, and sometime Fellow of his college at Oxford, a very learned Divine. She hath had the misfortune to have taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion, and was one of those Maids of Taunton who gave the Duke his flags, as you have heard by the latest advices. Therefore, she is sent abroad for a term of ten years. Gentlemen, there can be no doubt that her relations will not endure that this young lady—as beautiful as she is unfortunate, and as tender as she is beautiful—should be exposed to the same hard treatment as the rogues and thieves whom you have just had put up for sale. They will, I am privately assured'—I heard this statement with amazement—'gladly purchase her freedom, after which, unless she is permitted to return, the society of our Colony will rejoice in the residence among them of one so lovely and so accomplished. Meantime, she must be sold like the rest.'

'Did Monmouth make war with women for his followers?' asked a gentleman of graver aspect than most. 'I, for one, will have no part or share in such traffic. Are English gentlewomen, because their friends are rebels, to be sent into the fields with the negroes?'

'Your wife would be jealous,' said another, and then they all laughed.

I understood not until afterwards that the buying and selling of such a person as I appeared to be is a kind of gambling. That is to say, the buyer hopes to get his profit, not by any work that his servant should do, but by the ransom that his friends at home should offer. And so they began to bid, with jokes rude and unseemly, and much laughter, while I stood before them still bareheaded.

'Ten pounds,' one began; 'Twelve,' cried another; 'Fifteen,' said a third; and so on, the price continually rising, and the salesman with honeyed tongue continually declaring that my friends (as he very well knew) would consent to give any ransom—any—so only that I was set free from servitude: until, for sixty pounds, no one offering a higher price, I was sold to one whose appearance I liked the least of any. He was a gross, fat man, with puffed cheeks and short neck, who had bought already about twenty of the servants.

'Be easy,' he said, to one who asked him how he looked to get his money back. 'It is not for twice sixty pounds that I will consent to let her go. What is twice sixty pounds for a lovely piece like this?'

Then the Captain, who had stood beside me, saying nothing, interfered.

'Madam,' he said, 'you can put up your hood again. And harkee, Sir,' he spoke to the planter, 'remember that this is a pious and virtuous gentlewoman, and'—here he swore a round oath—'if I hear when I make this port again that you have offered her the least freedom—you shall answer to me for it. Gentlemen all,' he went on, 'I verily believe that you will shortly have the greatest windfall that hath ever happened to you, compared with which the Salisbury Rising was but a flea-bite. For the trials of the Monmouth rebels were already begun when I left the port of Bristol, and, though the Judges are sentencing all alike to death, they cannot hang them all—therefore his Majesty's Plantations, and Barbadoes in particular, will not only have whole cargoes of stout and able-bodied servants, compared with whom these poor rogues are like so many worthless weeds; but there will also be many gentlemen, and perhaps gentlewomen—like Madam here—whose freedom will be bought of you. So that I earnestly advise and entreat you not to treat them cruelly, but with gentleness and forbearance, whereby you will be the gainers in the end, and will make their friends the readier to find the price of ransom. Moreover, you must remember that though gentlemen may be flogged at whipping-posts, and beat over the head with canes, as is your habit with servants both black and white, when the time of their deliverance arrives they will be no longer slaves but gentlemen again, and able once more to stand upon the point of honour and to run you through the body, as you will richly deserve, for your barbarity. And in the same way any gentlewomen who may be sent here have brothers and cousins who will be ready to perform the same act of kindness on their behalf. Remember that very carefully, gentlemen, if you please.'

The Captain spoke to all the gentlemen present, but in the last words he addressed himself particularly unto my new master. It was a warning likely to be very serviceable, the planters being one and all notoriously addicted to beating and whipping their servants. And I have no doubt that these words did a great deal towards assuring for the unfortunate gentlemen who presently arrived such consideration and good treatment as they would not otherwise have received.