The Boy in the Painting: Marcus Thomas, b.1768-d.1816

By Alice Millard, Research Assistant

Please note that some of the language used in the original records includes offensive and insensitive terminology. The inclusion of these terms is not an endorsement of such language, but are there to authentically represent the original document.

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In August 2021, I began trawling through the transcripts of baptisms, marriages and burials for each parish in West Sussex. I was looking for individuals whose ethnicity may have been described as one other than white, or members of a diasporic community. As part of ongoing intersectionality work in the archive, I then started to compile a database of such individuals, in the hope that research could be conducted into their lives.

One such entry appears in the New Shoreham baptism register. On 2 April 1794, a boy called John Henry was baptised by his parents, Marcus and Elizabeth Thomas. Marcus is described in this entry as “a Negro man” – an archaic word thought to have come from the Spanish for black. Marriages between white British people and Black African or West Indian people at this time were rare but not unheard of, and there was certainly a small population of people with Black ancestry in Britain. Author Gretchen Gerzina estimates between 1% and 3% of London’s population was Black.[1] However, the rarity of such a marriage makes this baptism entry particularly notable.

I was intrigued about how Marcus had come to be in the small port town of New Shoreham in 1794, along with his wife and son. Marcus was not a very common name, and it would be reasonably unlikely to have two young Black men called Marcus Thomas in Britain at the same time. I also knew that, in order to marry, both bride and groom would have needed to be baptised, so I decided to track him down in further records.

Searching Ancestry, I found a baptism entry in St Martin in the Fields (Westminster) parish register for a 19-year-old Jamaican man called Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas on 22 April 1787. Despite the additional middle names, the age of this Marcus would fit with that of the Marcus in New Shoreham. At this point, I was quite excited to have just found a potential baptism record. However, a mere few seconds later, I spotted something which would change the course of this research.

The baptism entry above Marcus’s was for the third Earl of Harrington’s son, Fitzroy Henry Richard Stanhope. Both Marcus and Fitzroy were baptised in the same church on the very same day. The similarity between both names struck me as more than just a coincidence. I found myself wondering if it were possible Marcus was, in some form or another, attached to the Stanhope family. I decided to look into the life of the third Earl, Charles Stanhope.

It was fashionable for wealthy families during the 17^th and 18^th centuries to have young Black children employed as ‘decorative’ pages. It was thought that the presence of an elaborately dressed Black child in their household would symbolise their wealth and status to visitors. It was also common for wealthy families to commission portraits of themselves alongside Black children. Many wealthy families in Britain and across Europe had built their businesses by exploiting the labour of enslaved Africans, and were therefore dependent on slave colonies for continued income. Black children were often taken from such colonies as household trophies.

This was as much proof as we needed; the boy in the painting was indeed called Marcus and had probably been taken from Jamaica to England by the Earl in 1781-2.

The timing of Marcus’s baptism is interesting. As I now knew he was around 13 years old at the time of the painting, it took another six years before he was baptised. Baptising servants who had not been received into the Church of England was common practice, and I had already found several instances of Black servants being baptised elsewhere in the county. So, why was Marcus baptised aged 19, and not earlier? Perhaps the Earl of Harrington had agreed that Marcus was approaching adulthood and would release him from service in his household. However, this is just speculation.

But what happened to Marcus after his baptism in 1787? Sadly, little is known about his life afterwards. There is a marriage between a Richard Fitz Roy Augustus Thomas and Elizabeth Plaxton in St Martin in the Fields (Westminster) on 24 January 1793 which, given the uniqueness of his baptised name, seems likely to have been Marcus.

This is where we come back to the baptism entry in New Shoreham. I have not been able to confirm if this baptism of John Henry Thomas is related to the Marcus Thomas of the painting. However, it feels more than a coincidence and, until I can prove otherwise, I think it may well be the same Marcus.

Marcus died 16 July 1816, aged 48, and was buried in St Martin in the Fields burial ground in Camden under the full name of ‘Marquois Richard Henry Fitzroy Frederick Augustus Thomas’. The burial register notes he came from the workhouse. The lot of the Black community was limited in Georgian Britain; many had come to the county alone and were financially poor, some living in poverty. Whilst owning slaves within Britain was against the law, many Black employees were taken advantage of due to racial prejudice and opportunities for exploitation. However, the workhouse day book for St Martin in the Fields shows that Marcus entered the workhouse on 3rd July, and that it was his first admission. This suggests he was financially stable, only requiring the services of the workhouse when he became very ill; workhouses offered rudimentary care for the sick.

Being able to identify Marcus has been an exciting and fascinating journey of research. That this previously unknown boy, stood gazing up at the third Earl of Harrington, now has a name and a story is testament to the potential for wonderful stories waiting to be uncovered in archives.

May 2022 update

The first of these updates concerns John Henry Thomas, the son of Marcus and his wife Elizabeth, who was baptised in 1794 in New Shoreham – the record which started this whole research project. As pure research serendipity, I stumbled across (via Ancestry.co.uk) a burial for John Henry Thomas in Sunderland in 1797. His burial entry records that his parents were Marquis Richard Fitzroy Augustus and Elizabeth Thomas. So, between John Henry’s baptism in Shoreham in 1794 and his burial in Sunderland 1797, the Thomas family had moved more than halfway up the country. For what reason remains unknown.

The next update came from searching the Westminster Rate Book index on FindMyPast.co.uk.

There are two Westminster Poor Rate Book entries for a Marquis Thomas: one in 1803 where he is listed as living in the ‘Leicester Fields’ area of St Anne’s, Soho; the other, also for 1803, a Marquis Thomas is listed as living in ‘Whitcomb Street’ in St Anne’s, Soho.

Given the unusual spelling of the forename, I believe this is the same Marcus.

Following this, I began looking for further potential children born to Marcus and Elizabeth. Presuming Elizabeth did not die early and given that Marcus is recorded as living until 1813, I thought it likely that they had at least one further child.

I found a possible daughter, Anna Maria Jane Thomas, who was baptised to a Marcus and Elizabeth Thomas in Bexhill-On-Sea, East Sussex, on 6 July 1801. The very same Anna Maria Jane Thomas was buried, aged four, in St Anne’s, Soho, on 19 March 1805. I believe this is likely to be the same Thomas family, as the Earl of Harrington had a daughter named Anna Maria (and we know Marcus was ‘fond’ of using the Earl’s familial names as his own), as well as the fact we have evidence that Marcus lived in St Anne’s, Soho.

What was particularly interesting about Anna Maria’s burial entry is that her address is given as ‘Swan Alley’. I decided to use Horwood’s 1790s plan of London (available here), which includes the names of streets, courts, and alleys in detail, and cross-reference it with Google Maps. After a bit of searching, I believe Swan Alley is now known as Flaxman Court.

Lastly, I found a possible son called Augustus Thomas, who was buried aged 13 months in St Anne’s, Soho, on 28 April 1805. As with Anna Maria, Augustus was also recorded as being from Swan Alley.

After the initial joy of finding these additional details on Marcus’s life, I realised that they only add to the mystery. Why did he move from Westminster to Shoreham, Shoreham to Sunderland, Sunderland to Bexhill-On-Sea, and then back to Westminster? My initial thoughts go to whether he was in a militia – groups who moved around frequently and often with young families in tow – or perhaps he was even involved with trade. Sadly, surviving records which would reveal this information are very unlikely to exist.

September 2023 Update

Over the past year, I have delved a bit deeper into the history of Marcus and his life in England. In my previous blog update, I noted the absences as well as his appearances in the records. One of these absences was what he had done for a living once he married Elizabeth Plaxton and fathered three children.

One of the inexplicable oddities about Marcus’s life in England was that the baptisms and burials of his children appeared up and down the country. In an age without motorised vehicles, travelling beyond your home county was rare. To recap:

• John Henry Thomas baptised in New Shoreham and buried in Sunderland.
• Anne Maria Jane Thomas baptised in Bexhill in East Sussex and buried in Soho.
• Augustus Thomas [birthplace unknown] buried in Soho.

I wondered how Marcus and Elizabeth were able to afford this prolonged travel and exactly why they were travelling the country, especially whilst Elizabeth was pregnant and with small children in tow. I thought that Marcus may have worked in service and the family moved frequently, but this seemed unlikely given his family commitments. Instead, perhaps he was working as a merchant. His appearance near coastal towns with shipping activity would support this. However, I felt this was less likely given his apparent inability to read and write.

I thought hard about other reasons a young man would traipse across the country. From previous research, I knew that families sometimes accompanied soldiers and their regiments from military camp to military camp. Accounts exist of wives or widows in particular providing regiments with auxiliary support such as doing laundry and cooking meals. Was it possible Marcus was some sort of soldier?

I roughly mapped Marcus’s movements around England on a map for a clearer picture. Using this, I began searching for these places in relation to military activity in the newspapers digitised on the British Newspaper Archive website. After several hours of searching, there seemed to be a clear correlation between the places in which the Thomas family were baptising or burying a child and the places in which the Westminster Militia had set up camp.

The Westminster Militia was a supplementary regiment originally raised in 1662, but by 1796 had been led by James Clitherow of Boston Manor in Brentford. Clitherow had taken over after its former colonel, John Fenton-Cawthorne, was court-martialled for various misdemeanours. Clitherow also oversaw recruitment of the militia’s band; I had an understanding from reading various articles and books that it was common practice to recruit young Black men (sometimes recruited directly from the West coast of Africa) as drummers and fifers in regimental bands in the 1600s to the mid-1800s.

There was only one way to confirm this, and that involved visiting the London Metropolitan Archives, where the papers of Colonel James Clitherow are held. I identified a number of records pertaining to the band amongst his papers and booked an afternoon session. On arrival I completed my registration, packed my coat and bag away, and headed into the reading room. Collecting my first set of records, I sat down at a table and opened the box. On top of a small pile was a simple handwritten list of members of the band. And there he was, Marquis Thomas, a member of the Westminster Militia band in 1802.

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[1] Gerzina, Gretchen (1995). Black London: Life before Emancipation. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-8135-2259-3.