How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach…
IN KELLOE church five or so miles north of Sedgefield, there is a plaque which commemorates the birth nearby of Elizabeth Barrett Browning who, it says, was “a great poetess, a noble woman, a devoted wife”.
Elizabeth was one of the greatest romantic poets of the Victorian era, famed for her Sonnet 43 which begins as above, and for her great romance with her husband, Robert Browning.
Poet - Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
But the plaque doesn’t say that Elizabeth’s family suffered from what she regarded as a 'curse', a curse passed down through the generations and one which Britain is still struggling to come to terms with today – the Barretts made a vast fortune out of slavery in the West Indies.
The plaque to Elizabeth Barrett Browning at Kelloe Church.
Elizabeth’s grandfather, John Graham Clarke, from Newcastle, probably had the largest interest in the slave plantations of anyone in the North-East. When he died in 1818 he was involved with 13 plantations and owned The Rebecca, one of very few ships which brought sugar and rum from the West Indies directly into the Tyne.
The Rebecca’s imports fed his sugar refineries in Newcastle, Gateshead and Stockton.
His contacts in the Caribbean included the Barrett family, who had emigrated to Jamaica in 1665 to start the first slave plantations, and who had come to own 84,000 acres and 2,000 slaves.
One of the Barretts, Richard, treated his slaves so sympathetically his house was the only one not to be torched in a slave rebellion. Another Barrett, Edward, was known to ruthlessly whip his slaves to get them to work.
In 1792, when another of the Barretts, George, died, his six illegitimate children were sent to Newcastle to be brought up by John Graham Clarke, who had never married.
The children’s mother was Elissa Peters, a 'mulatto', a mixed race slave.
George said in his will that his children should be freed from slavery and be brought up in a country where there was no "distinction respecting colour". Newcastle must have fitted the bill, and for John Graham Clarke, although he had the inconvenience of the children, he was now tied to the most fabulously wealthy family in the West Indies.
His plan worked. In 1805 his daughter Mary married Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. He was grandson of the notoriously ruthless slave owner and had added the second 'Barrett' to his surname in order to inherit his grandmother’s Jamaican estates.
This left him with 10,000 acres of sugar plantations, which earned him about £50,000 a year – more than £4m a year in today’s values.
But he didn’t have a home in England, and the Barretts could now see that the wind was blowing against slavery. They needed to reshore their wealth, bring it home to Britain before the Caribbean exploded.
With John Graham Clarke’s help, the Barretts leased Coxhoe Hall, between Sedgefield and Durham.
It was regarded as the finest country home in County Durham, built amid a 1,000 acre estate in 1725 by John Burdon on top of a Tudor manor house. It was designed by architect James Paine (Raby Castle, Gibside and Alnwick Castle, to name just a few of his local works) and had 20 bedrooms, with castellated towers on the outside and magnificent internal plasterwork by Giuseppe Cortese.
However, after about 20 years, Burdon had tired of Coxhoe as he had bought an even more sumptuous estate at Hardwick, near Sedgefield, on which he lavished his fortune.
Durham memories - Coxhoe Hall, entrance room.
So, in 1805, the newly-married Mary Graham Clarke of Newcastle and Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett of Jamaica moved into Coxhoe Hall.
The following year, on March 6, their first child was born there. They named her Elizabeth, and she was the first of their 12 children.
In January 1808 Thomas Peters, the eldest of Elizabeth’s mixed race cousins, visited Coxhoe Hall from Newcastle.
On February 10, 1808, Elizabeth and her newborn brother, Edward, were baptised at St Helen’s Church, Kelloe, in 1809 – one of the great treasures of the church was the '18th Century font' in which this great literary figure was christened, but investigation in 2019 revealed the font was probably from the early 20th Century and so had missed her by a century or so.
The church at Kelloe where Elizabeth Barrett Browning was baptised
A few months after the baptism the family left County Durham for a 500-acre estate in the Malvern Hills in Herefordshire which her father had bought and which was far more glamorous than coal-streaked Coxhoe.
Although Elizabeth seems not to have returned to her northern birthplace, her family connections with the area continued via another of her uncles, Samuel Moulton Barrett, whom in 1814, as part of the reshoring process, bought Carlton Hall near Aldborough St John on the outskirts of Darlington. He became a big figure in local political circles, representing Richmond as its Whig MP from 1820 and speaking at meetings in Darlington until 1828 when he was forced to relocate to Jamaica to take on the day-to-day – and fairly benevolent – running of his slave estates.
Samuel stayed in touch throughout their lives with his niece, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was a sickly child, enduring a nasty illness when she was 15 that left her physically disabled, but she had a brilliant mind.
She published her first volume of poems in 1838 and became internationally famous with her third volume, published in 1844 – in the days before rock ‘n’ roll, poets were the pop stars of their generation.
Her lines came to the attention of fellow poet Robert Browning, who was six years younger than her, and they began corresponding – 574 of their letters survive.
Browning, too, had a West Indian connection, although his father had been so sickened by slavery that he returned to London to become a bank clerk.
On January 10, 1845, even though they had never met, Robert began his letter to Elizabeth: “I love your verses with all my heart… and I love you, too.”
Elizabeth refused to allow him to meet her, fearing her older, invalid form would put him off, but eventually she relented, and on May 20, 1845, she accepted his visit at her family home in Wimpole Street, London. It was the first of 91 visits he paid. She recorded their blossoming relationship in a fourth volume of poetry which includes Sonnet 43 – perhaps the finest love poem in the English language.
But as any poet knows, the path of true love never doth run smooth.
Elizabeth’s tyrannical father did not want any of his 12 children to marry. In the past, biographers have said this was because he had inherited mixed race genes and did not want to pass them on.
This belief was strengthened as Elizabeth described herself as having 'dark skin and full lips' and even said that, at 5ft exactly, she was 'little and black'. She also spoke of 'a curse' being passed down through her family’s generations.
However, modern genealogists can find no evidence that she was descended from a slave, and modern biographers believe the 'curse' she referred to being handed down the generations was the lucrative ownership of slaves.
In fact, one of her biggest hits was a poem called The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, published in 1846 in a fundraising magazine for the abolitionist cause. She wrote it after gathering information from her Jamaican relatives, and it deals shockingly with gender and race from the point of view of a female slave is who is whipped and raped by her owner, runs away when she finds herself pregnant by him, and then kills her 'too white' baby.
While Elizabeth rejoiced at the emancipation of slaves in 1833, her father considered that it had ruined the family, driving a wedge between them. He probably also didn’t approve of Browning, who was a struggling poet still relying on his father – a mere bank clerk – for money.
To escape what Elizabeth called the “veriest slavery” of her dictatorial father, she married Robert in secret on September 12, 1846, and, a week later, they eloped, at first to Paris and then to Italy, where they came to reside in Florence.
Elizabeth was so happy that her mobility improved and she gave birth to a son. In her writings, she campaigned against slavery and child labour and for women’s rights, which further enhanced her reputation.
The grand marble monument over Elizabeth Barrett Browning's grave in Florence. Picture: Public domain from wikipedia
But, just as she never returned to her Durham birthplace, she never returned to England and she never saw her father again.
As it says on the plaque in Kelloe church, she died in Florence on July 29, 1861, aged 55.