Will of the Month: A widow of Calcutta and her moveable property

Posted by e.m.vine@exeter.ac.uk

Content Note: This blog post discusses enslaved people

This month’s post takes us on a journey from London to Calcutta via the South Atlantic island of St Helena, navigating the complex administration of the wills of those who died thousands of miles from England, the movement of people and property, and the blurred boundary between the two.

Most of the wills in our sample – wills that were proved before the highest probate court, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) – were made by individuals who lived in southern England and Wales. Where we have testators from northern England, it is generally because they owned goods in both the northern and southern province, as the PCC had the right to grant probate in such cases. The PCC also contains the wills of individuals who died abroad, such as sailors, soldiers, or East India Company employees, or those who were resident overseas but owned property in Britain. Wills in our sample were accordingly made by testators who lived in locations as distant as Amsterdam, Barbados, South Carolina, Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Newfoundland, and the Ottoman Empire.

Elizabeth Thomlinson, described as a widow of Calcutta, was ‘sick and weake in body’ when she made her will on 13 June 1720.[1] She died in September of that year. In the days following her death, the witnesses to her will and its codicil testified to the document’s legitimacy in front of ‘the President and Counsel in Bengal for affairs of the Hon^r United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indias’. Yet her will would not be proved in London, before the PCC, for another five years.

A man of whom ‘little need[s] to be said’

When Elizabeth died, she had not been in Calcutta long. She had arrived in January 1720, with her East India Company chaplain husband Rev. Joshua Thomlinson, of whom one biographer notes ‘little need[s] to be said […] His career in India lasted a little over four months, and his widow barely survived him’.[2] That Joshua died so quickly after his arrival in Calcutta meant that he barely got to take up the Church position that he had been appointed to. In his own will he was described as ‘being sick and weak of Body’: he died within three days of making it, on 29 May.[3] The makeshift or hurried nature of the circumstances in which Joshua made his will were confirmed by the witnesses, who ‘declared [it] to be the Testators’ Last Will and Testament where no Stampt paper is to be had’.[4] Elizabeth, also sick at this point, made her own will within two weeks of her husband’s death.

Elizabeth clearly anticipated her own mortality, and quickly adapted to the administrative tasks of widowhood, using her will to distribute some of Joshua’s remaining effects. She disposed ‘of all my deceased husband the Reverend Joshua Thomlinson his Library of books’ including ‘two volumes new in folio of Doctor Tillotsons works the whole duty of man in folio’, and ‘unto Thomas Coales his choice of thirty bookes out of what books remaines’. She left Joshua’s remaining books, including commentaries on the bible, and books in ‘Latin Greeke Hebrew’ to ‘the Church of Calcutta’. She also gave ‘forty rupees towards a Charity school in Calcutta’ – a relatively small amount, considering that she left ten times that amount to Samuel Feake, the Governor of Bengal. Joshua had previously left ‘Eighty Rupees’ ‘towards setting up of a Charity School in this place’. Elizabeth lived for another three months, making a codicil to her will a week before she died, in which she asked her executor ‘to build a Tomb over my husbands and my Grave’.

The Thomlinsons as travellers

The Thomlinsons had not travelled directly from England to Calcutta that fateful year. Joshua had spent twelve years as an East India Company chaplain on the island of St Helena, an English colony on a remote volcanic outpost in the South Atlantic Ocean and ‘stopping-off point’ on the route to India. Elizabeth’s brothers, John and William Worrall, and their families, still lived on St Helena, and many of her goods went to them. She desired ‘that all my wearing apparell may be sent to my brother John Worrall at S^t. Helena which I give between his wife and daughters excepting one black sattin Gowne and petticoat and a black scarfe which I give to my sister in law Martha Worrall’. She also gave to her niece ‘all my plate that is to say Two Tankards Twelve Spoons one salver three Casters and one porringer also One Table Cloath and sixteen English Diaper Napkins’. Calcutta and St Helena were 7000 miles apart as the crow flies, a voyage round the south of Africa that would have taken months. It would have been a considerable undertaking to ensure that Elizabeth’s clothing, plate, and spoons reached their intended beneficiaries halfway across the world. Both Elizabeth and Joshua’s wills acknowledged that they did not know if all their beneficiaries on St Helena were still alive; the danger and separation inherent in East India Company life is apparent in both documents.

The Thomlinsons as slave owners

The Thomlinsons, like almost all English families on St Helena, were slave owners. The English had enslaved people on St Helena since they had colonised the island in 1659, forcing them to work on plantations of indigo, coffee, and sugar, or in domestic labour.[5] Elizabeth’s will contains this brief sentence: ‘I give my slave wench Nanny which I left along with M^rs Elizabeth Lacy on S^t Helena’s her freedome’. By the 1730s, ‘wench’ was a dehumanizing term increasingly used to refer to women of African descent.[6] It is striking that, as in other wills that mention enslaved people, Nanny is discussed in a similar manner to other moveable property.[7] Her existence on St Helena is recognised in the sentence which comes sometime after Elizabeth’s attempts to return her spoons and napkins to that same island. Her freedom had not been granted when the Thomlinsons had first travelled to Calcutta. Perhaps Nanny had been attached to a household that they had intended to return to, or perhaps she had been ‘gifted’ to Mrs Lacy in their absence. She was freed perhaps only when Elizabeth Thomlinson was faced with the incontrovertible truth that neither she nor her husband would live to leave India. Perhaps, reckoning with her approaching death, Elizabeth’s decision to free Nanny was made in a moment of conscience. This request was made in the same clause as Elizabeth’s gift to the charity school: like many Christian contemporaries, she had no objection to enslaving others, but paradoxically viewed granting an enslaved person their freedom as a charitable act, a positive good.

The Thomlinsons’ wills hint at many of the complexities and contradictions in the lives of the English men and women who travelled in the employ of the East India Company. Joshua described himself as a ‘Minister of Gods word’, he and his wife left bequests to charity schools and churches in Calcutta. As a man of religion and learning, Joshua’s library was carefully packed up and transported across the ocean. As a married couple, they faced the uncertainty of travelling thousands of miles and separation from family, and the realised fear of sickness and premature death. Their life in the colonies also enabled them to ‘own’ enslaved people in a manner that had no legal basis in Britain itself. As slaveowners, they granted freedom to the woman named Nanny almost as an afterthought, and only once they had secured their own tablecloths, plates, and spoons.

^[1] PROB 11/606/129, Will of Elizabeth or Eliza Thomlinson, Widow of Calcutta, East Indies, 18 November 1725

[2] Eyre Chatterton, A History of The Church Of England In India since the early days of the East India Company, (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1924) p.72.

[3] PROB 11/594/384, Will of Joshua Thomlinson, Minister of Calcutta in Bengal, East Indies, 20 December 1723

[4] PROB 11/594/384, Will of Joshua Thomlinson, Minister of Calcutta in Bengal, East Indies, 20 December 1723

[5] Kathleen Wilson, Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers, The American Historical Review 116 (2011), 1294–1322 at 1307.

[6] See Karen Cook Bell, “‘A Negro Wench Named Lucia’: Enslaved Women during the Eighteenth Century.” in Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp.20-43, at p.22.

[7] See Ellen Filor, ‘The intimate trade of Alexander Hall: Salmon and slaves in Scotland and Sumatra, c.1745–1765’, in Margot Finn and Kate Smith eds. The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857, (UCL Press, 2018) pp. 318-332