Why Robert Clayton and Thomas Guy Must Fall
In the wake of the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, Ann-Marie Akehurst explores this contrasting reputations of two of his contemporaries, both made wealthy by the slave trade, both major benefactors to London hospitals, where they are memorialised by statues that are now to be removed from public view.
As events related to the Black Lives Matter movement unfold, public sculptures have become lightning rods for heated debate. We have witnessed a variety of responses to the controversy, from the jettisoning of slaver Edward Colston’s statue into the River Avon at Bristol, to the menacing, masked ‘protectors’ of the Plymouth Naval Memorial, among others.
The joint response of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity, and King’s College London on 11 June was somewhat more discreet than these two alternatives, yet more decisive than that of many similar institutions:
Like many organisations in Britain, we know that we have a duty to address the legacy of colonialism, racism and slavery in our work. We absolutely recognise the public hurt and anger that is generated by the symbolism of public statues of historical figures associated with the slave trade in some way. We have therefore decided to remove statues of Robert Clayton and Thomas Guy from public view, and we look forward to engaging with and receiving guidance from the Mayor of London’s Commission on each. We see the pervasive and harmful effects of structural racism every day through our work. Black people have worse health outcomes, and this inequality is one of many ways racism permeates our society.
Grinling Gibbons, Robert Clayton, c. 1701. St Thomas’ Hospital, London
Damnatio memoriae, spoliation, iconoclasm, defacement and repurposing are all part of the violent history of public sculpture. While opinion is divided about the next resting place of such monuments, it is clear that, wherever they end up, they should be contextualised to inform audiences what they monumentalised when created; how they have been subsequently received; and about the extent and influence of past events – and in particular colonial history – on present situations.
Certainly, to excavate the histories of these two statues at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals reveals something of both the architectural history of the institutions, and of the social nexus of money, power, philanthropy and race from which they emerged, while throwing light on the origins of present-day unrest. Unlike John Cassidy’s statue of Colston in Bristol, both were contemporary to the lives of the men they commemorate. Grinling Gibbons’ statue of Robert Clayton (1629–1707), erected in 1701, and Peter Scheemakers’ of Thomas Guy (1644/5?–1724) of around 30 years later, relate to the early modern building of those hospitals. The history of neither statue is without complication, though the latter in particular demonstrates the importance of understanding a wider perspective, as Guy was a controversial figure when it was erected, but not for his connections to slavery.
Clayton, on the other hand, was held in high regard. He was a merchant banker who dominated the City of London’s money market by integrating the mortgage as a form of long-term security for banking loans. By 1670, he had amassed a great fortune and followed the customary path to greatness – he entertained Charles II in his London mansion, was knighted, established a country seat, became an alderman and lord mayor of the City of London, supported the Whig cause as an MP, and became a director of the Bank of England in 1702.
Clayton’s philanthropic commitments were expected of his social status, and included election as president of St Thomas’ Hospital, a role he held until his death, during which time he established a subscription fund. St Thomas’ was one of London’s medieval foundations and its buildings needed renovation. It was remodelled between 1680–1702 – perhaps in consultation with Christopher Wren, who was a hospital governor at the time – by the mason-architect-carver Thomas Cartwright, adopting an old-fashioned plan of courtyards and piazzas lined with promenading galleries. Clayton’s philanthropy was recognised in a statue commissioned from Grinling Gibbons.
Gibbons is mostly associated with producing virtuosic carved limewood enrichments for the interiors of country houses, public buildings, London churches, and St Paul’s Cathedral, where he produced swags surrounding the choir gallery. However, he supplemented his income by engaging in the more lucrative market for statues, tomb monuments and decorative stonework, for which he was less well equipped. HIs marble statue of Charles II – represented as a Roman emperor – created for the Royal Exchange in 1684 reveals the economic realities of his business. The engraver George Vertue later ascribed its design and execution to the Flemish-born sculptor Arnold Quellin, a claim reinforced by an anecdote in which Gibbons demonstrated that marble carving was not his forte. The partnership between Gibbons and Quellin ended acrimoniously, and Gibbons’ subsequent figurative works have been criticised for lacking a feel for posture and gesture. Late in Gibbons’ career, his statue of the Christ’s Hospital benefactor John Moore was controversial; that of Sir Cloudsley Shovell was also criticised, while on occasion other patrons even requested refunds.
The statue to Clayton was commissioned around this time – Gibbons received £200 for the work. The financier Clayton is represented in contemporary, rather than heroic, classical dress, and even the untrained eye can recognise that the stance is ungainly. His form is concealed behind his coat, and more attention has been devoted to the detailing of his periwig than to his face. The chains of office and the shield on the plinth below tie him closely to the City of London, of which he had been lord mayor. His rolled papers gesture to his business associations, which produced the money that he dedicated to the hospital. In this respect, Clayton was representative of his class and time: hospitals were increasingly seen as a way of performing Christian charity. On the other hand, his occupation as an assistant to the Royal African Company between 1672 and 1681 – and a fortune founded upon the slave trade – were not referenced on the statue and were little commented upon at the time. The Royal African Company was an English trading company established in 1660 by the newly restored House of Stuart together with City of London merchants to exploit the gold fields of the Gambia River and trade along the African west coast. It shipped more African slaves to the Americas than any other institution in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, transporting approximately 212,000 people between 1662 and 1731, of whom 44,000 souls died en route.
In the 1680s, the Company was transporting about 5,000 slaves a year to Caribbean markets, and its profits were underpinning the financial power of those running the City of London. Its investors were fully aware of its activities and intended to profit from this exploitation – they included among their number the philosopher John Locke, the diarist Samuel Pepys, and Matthew Wren, son of the bishop of Ely and cousin of the architect Sir Christopher Wren. Astonishing as it may seem today, Clayton’s involvement with the Royal African Company in no way impinged upon public esteem in which his philanthropic activities at St Thomas’ were held.
The reputation of Thomas Guy was perhaps more complex, even during his own lifetime. A bookseller and member of the Stationers’ Company, he established his fortune by illegally importing Dutch bibles, thereby being instrumental in breaking the Crown monopoly on printed bibles. Having amassed £15,000, he became a significant benefactor of his hometown of Tamworth, for which he became MP. By shrewd investment, Guy extended his fortune and the eminent physician Richard Mead persuaded him to endow a hospital for incurables – people suffering congenital disabilities and chronic diseases excluded from existing hospitals. In 1721, land was bought from St Thomas’ with the intention that the new hospital be part of the same foundation, though Guy later decided on a separate administration – the new Guy’s Hospital building cost £18,793.
Peter Scheemakers, Thomas Guy, 1734. Guy’s Hospital, London
Shortly after Guy’s death in 1724, a bill was enacted to set up a statue at the hospital. In his will, he had left a further £219,000 to the institution, the largest benefaction of the early 18th century. However, his reputation was already compromised, although not by the connections to slavery that are so offensive today. Only four years later, a rival bookseller, John Dunton, published An Essay on Death-Bed Charity attacking Guy, saying he had ‘liv’d undesir’d, and dyed unlamented’. Guy had been personally ascetic, but Dunton accused him of stinting the poor, paying starvation wages and denying his relations after death. His comments echoed a popular essay by Dutch physician Bernard de Mandeville that scrutinised religious motives and galvanised attitudes against misers. Among its strident attacks on philanthropic hypocrisy, The Fable of the Bees: or Public Virtues, Private Vices asserted that ‘Pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together’.
When Scheemakers’ brass-and-marble sculpture was finally unveiled in 1734, the choice of materials was controversial as they were reserved for high-status subjects. It resembles Gibbons’ statue of Clayton – then nearby in St Thomas’ courtyard – in posture, size and elevation. Both subjects wear contemporary dress and clasp documents in one hand and their cloak in the other. However, Guy’s lack of wig has been interpreted both as an attempt to dignify him as equivalent to a writer, or to suggest his personal asceticism. Amplified by its setting, it was enriched by four brass plaques around the plinth, including reliefs depicting The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan. David Solkin’s attentive analysis argues this was an attempt to associate Guy with ‘active philanthropy’, counteracting contemporary representations of Guy as a miser and usurer, while also stressing that his benefaction was given during his lifetime, fending off the growing public fear about and hostility to the clergy’s control of deathbed donations. Acts of excessive generosity thwarted the financial expectations of the propertied classes, and there was a perceived moral and ethical tension between the individual, their soul and posterity on the one hand, and the family and the duties of a landed nobility on the other.
Guy’s bequest even became a focus during the debate over what became the Mortmain Act (1736) in the House of Lords, which shifted the trend from such individual philanthropic bequests towards public subscriptions in which donations were made in the spirit of an investment – an economic model that persisted well into the 19th century. It was argued that public contempt should be directed at any man who ‘happens to fall into that delirious ambition of erecting a palace for beggars, and having his name engraved in gilded letters above a superb portico; or … [who] grows ambitious of having his statue set up in the area of any charitable palace … For we generally find that the men who are seized with such deliriums, are men of great fortunes and small expense’.
It was Guy’s bourgeois pretensions and perceived miserliness that were offensive to the class-sensitive aristocracy in the 18th century – in all this, the fact that his fortune had been generated largely by buying low and selling high in the speculative South Sea Bubble was barely acknowledged. Such investment was common: wealthy people such as Isaac Newton were among those who did so. The South Sea Company was an instrument facilitating the British Government’s 30-year monopoly on the Atlantic slave trade to supply the Spanish colonies with 4,800 slaves annually, and also dealt with the Royal African Company, which supplied African slaves to Jamaica. Up until 1718, it transported around 34,000 enslaved people, and so was regarded as a rational investment opportunity. When the scheme collapsed, widespread fraud among the company directors and corruption in the Cabinet was revealed, generating far more outrage than its human traffic. John Aislabie, then chancellor of the exchequer, was found guilty of the ‘most notorious, dangerous and infamous corruption’ and imprisoned.
These two cases raise the issue, still alive today, of the relationship between tainted money, its uses and the histories to be told, because – as de Mandeville argued – people’s motives are never fully known. History endeavours to excavate and interpret those varied and sometimes contradictory stories, but even monuments, which aim to arrest time, are part of its flow. Benefactors’ intentions differ in type from decisions to commemorate them: their agency ceases at death, whereas the institutions persist as legal entities, able to review their positions in the light of new information. Posthumous debates about Guy’s legacy and reputation persisted throughout the 18th century when charitable projects were increasingly funded, during the donor’s life, by public subscriptions rather than individual, posthumous benefactions, demonstrating how attitudes shift according to the times. As Solkin concluded in 1996, Guy’s conflicting reputations ‘provided an arena for attempts to grapple with certain pressing questions of social identity’. Solkin recovers two contemporary interpretations of Guy’s identity – the philanthropic, hard-working Christian businessman, and the miserly usurer, thief of his family’s inheritance and hypocrite. The original source of his wealth was not then a concern. But now, in the light of more information, the statues to Clayton and Guy are judged inappropriate by their inheritors and are to be removed – just the next chapter in the continuing history of public sculpture in Britain.
If you are interested to learn more about this evolving history of public sculpture, in BBC Radio 4’s ‘Race and Our Public Space’, Samira Ahmed chairs a discussion between the artist Hew Locke, the historian and former director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor, philosopher Susan Neiman and Danna Walker, an architect and founder of the social enterprise Built by Us, which aims to diversify construction and architecture to create a more inclusive built environment. It is available to listen to on BBC Sounds, and at this link.
Ann-Marie Akehurst is an independent urban and architectural historian who has published on early modern architecture and national identity, sacred space and the architecture of health. She is the programmes officer and a trustee of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.
Further reading
David H. Solkin, ‘Samaritan or Scrooge? The Contested Image of Thomas Guy in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 78, no. 3 (September 1996), pp. 467-84.
Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989).
William A Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Chapel 2008).
David Esterly, Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving (London: V&A Publications 1998).