Representatives of Jesus College, Cambridge, have declared themselves “shocked” at the verdict that, despite the strident demands of campaigners, Grinling Gibbons’s monument to Tobias Rustat should remain in the college chapel.
What is truly shocking is the sheer certainty of these campaigners that the judgment of the Consistory Court of the Diocese of Ely, tasked with deciding the monument’s future, would go their way. It is of a part with the arrogant attitude of activists across the country, who have closed their ears to intelligent debate about how we commemorate notable people from the past whose social and political assumptions were very different from our own.
It turns too on a distorted view of the past: one that is rooted in the assumption that modern British society is deeply and ineradicably impregnated with the legacy of the slave trade. What the judge in the Rustat case, Deputy Chancellor David Hodge, rightly called the “evil, utterly abhorrent, and repugnant” slave trade did have a role in the making of Britain. But to afford it such exclusive predominance is to ignore all the other ways in which Britain enriched itself over the centuries. No better example of this distortion can be found than the row over Rustat, who, it has now been shown, made his many benefactions with money obtained elsewhere than the slave trade.
Some quiet victories have been obtained in recent months by those who oppose the new iconoclasm championed in universities and museums. Imperial College, for instance, has agreed not to remove the name of Thomas Huxley, one of the college’s founders. But it is the Rustat judgment which provides the firmest indication yet that the tide has finally turned. It is a landmark decision in the resolution of our current disputes. We must now hope that rational thinking is returning to British institutions just as the public grows exasperated by increasingly absurd claims about historical figures.
Deputy Chancellor Hodge had harsh words for those who jumped to conclusions about Rustat, enlarging his role in slavery out of all proportion, making it out to be the main source of his wealth, though it was not. Sloppy research about links between colleges and slavery is unacceptable in one of the world’s leading universities. In Jesus, as in other great educational establishments, the absurd generalisations of “Critical Race Theory” have been allowed to guide debate about events and behaviour several centuries ago. In one email a student even complained of “a concerted effort by external white supremacist organisations” to retain the Rustat monument.
The judgment also makes powerful positive points about the religious setting for the monument: a church or chapel belongs not to humans but to God, and “the Rustat memorial may be employed as an appropriate vehicle to consider the imperfection of human beings … Forgiveness encompasses the whole of humankind, past and present, for we are all sinners; and it extends even to slave traders.”
Nor should we forget the words of the Rustat monument itself: “The greatest part of the Estate he gathered … he disposed in his life time in works of charity.” Such a man, whose bones lie under the floor of his beloved chapel, deserves more than to be reduced to a cardboard caricature.
David Abulafia is a professor of history at the University of Cambridge
