James Brydges (1673-1744) and the Chandos Chair, by Aileen Fyfe

Aileen Fyfe

Friday 12 January 2024

In 1720, James Brydges, first duke of Chandos, gave £1,000 to the University of St Andrews to endow a new chair. During the early 1720s, Chandos was a director of (and investor in) the slave-trading Royal African Company. Nearly 12,000 enslaved Africans involuntarily crossed the Atlantic on the company’s ships during the period of his directorship (1720-1725).

Brydges’s father was a major Herefordshire landowner who married the daughter of a successful ‘Turkey merchant’ (i.e. someone who traded with the near East). Through those family links to the Levant Company, Brydges senior served as ambassador in Constantinople in the early 1680s. Brydges junior became an MP in 1698, and networked extensively with politicians, merchants and artists. He became a member of the East India Company in 1700 (and of the Levant Company some years later), but made his fortune through his role as paymaster of the army from 1705 to 1713. This enabled him to become an investor in many of the speculative money-making schemes of early eighteenth-century England, to buy the estate of Cannons in Middlesex, and to establish himself as a patron of the arts and music. He was ennobled by George I, initially as earl of Carnarvon in 1714 and then duke of Chandos in 1719. His lavish spending on the redevelopment of Cannons, as well as his extensive patronage and philanthropy, earned him the contemporary label ‘princely Chandos’.

In the 1710s and 1720s, Chandos invested his wealth in a wide range of enterprises, some of which proved lucrative (the East India Company, the Bank of England, and the Sun Life Assurance Company) and some of which did not. He suffered significant financial reversals at the time of the South Sea Bubble (1720), but this did not dent his enthusiasm for investing and spending. In the early 1720s, when he became involved with St Andrews, he was also enthusiastically promoting the York Buildings Company’s efforts to exploit the land it had acquired in Scotland by purchasing estates forfeited after the failed 1715 Jacobite rising; and trying to revitalise the activities of the Royal African Company.

The Royal African Company had been chartered in 1673 to transport enslaved Africans to the British plantation colonies (whereas the South Seas Company transported enslaved Africans to ports in Spanish America). The RAC’s original monopoly on slave trading with the British colonies had ended in 1698, and by the time Chandos became involved, the RAC was struggling against new competition. In 1720, Chandos and his wife Cassandra were part of a wave of investors who brought new capital to the company, and Chandos’s large personal stake gave him a seat on the board of directors. For the next five years, he sought to find new ways to exploit the company’s access to Africa. He revived the slave-trading activities, and also sought other profitable commodities among the natural resources of west Africa (e.g. ivory, gold, botanicals).

The RAC showed its appreciation of Chandos by naming a new ship after him. Its activities can be traced in the RAC entry in the Slave Voyages Database. On its first voyage, in early 1722, the captain and 42 crew of the Chandos sailed to Ouidah, in modern-day Benin, in search of their first human cargo. Between February and October, they acquired 417 enslaved people from Ouidah and from Jacquin (further east along the coast). In late October, they embarked for Jamaica, for what would prove to be an unusually long 94-day voyage. Only 349 of the enslaved people survived the voyage. By May 1723, the Chandos was back in London. The ship made another voyage between August 1723 and September 1724, and a third from January 1725 to February 1726, on each occasion, making the crossing from west Africa to Jamaica in around 60 days. Together, those three voyages transported 1,473 people (mostly men and boys) from Benin and the Gold Coast to Jamaica; 10% died on the voyage.

Chandos ended his involvement with the RAC in 1725, when it seemed that the business could not be made sufficiently profitable. During his five years in office, the company had transported over 12,000 enslaved Africans from west Africa to the British colonies of Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua (and sometimes to Virginia and North Carolina).

During this same period, Chandos made a number of gifts to institutions of learning: £1,000 to St Andrews for a new chair; £500 to the University of Glasgow for its library; and £800 to the University of Cambridge for its library. One of his biographers attributed these gifts to his desire to create a public memorial for himself that would be more lasting than his business schemes. It is not clear why Chandos decided that St Andrews needed a new professorship rather than help with its library, but he was most likely advised by Charles Stuart, tutor to Chandos’s adolescent son. John Brydges and his tutor had made a tour of Scotland in 1719, and spent some time in St Andrews. Contemporary correspondence insinuates that the duke of Atholl (then-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews) had helped to secure a place at Balliol College, Oxford for young John, which suggests another connection.

Chandos had initially suggested that the new chair be in ‘eloquence’, but St Andrews had been hoping for a chair of Medicine, to keep up with recent developments at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and managed to persuade Chandos that this would be a better idea. The Chandos Chair of Medicine was created in 1722. Its existence was intellectually and financially important to the University, because it enabled the University to award M.D. degrees, even though it did not offer formal medical training.

Chandos’s desire to fund a new professorship had been a grand gesture: the other professorships established at St Andrews in the previous half-century (in Mathematics and in Ecclesiastical History) had been endowed by monarchs. The duke of Atholl tried to persuade the University that it should show its appreciation for Chandos’s ‘Munificence & Generosity to the University’ by organizing an annual oration on his birthday, but when Atholl himself died shortly afterwards, the University took advantage of the situation by appointing Chandos as its new Chancellor (in 1724), a role in which he served (not particularly actively) until his death.

The Chandos Chair remained the University’s only chair of medicine until the late nineteenth century (though it had been treated as a chemistry chair in the early nineteenth century). In 1898, the Conjoint Medical School (with University College, Dundee) was created, and the Chandos Chair was designated as a chair of physiology, to distinguish it from the newer chairs (including the Bute Chair of Anatomy). Its status as the University’s oldest medical chair was recognised in the incorporation of the Chandos coat of arms into the new mace created for the Faculty of Medicine in 1949.

The Chandos chair has been in abeyance since January 2020, following the retirement of the last holder.

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Aileen Fyfe is professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews.

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References:

Slave Voyages Database https://www.slavevoyages.org/past/enslavers#, data on the voyages of the ship Chandos can be found as voyages 75256 (1722-23), 75258 (1723-24) and 76969 (1725-6).

Matthew David Mitchell, ““Legitimate Commerce” in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England under the Duke of Chandos, 1720 – 1726.” Enterprise & Society 14, no. 3 (2013): 544-78. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/es/kht038 .

Susan Jenkins, Portrait of a Patron: The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674–1744) (2007)

On the foundation of the Chandos chair, see Ronald G. Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (St Andrews, 1992), pp.104-5; Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities (Edinburgh, 2008), 416-18; J. Maitland Anderson, ‘The “Princely Chandos” and the University of St Andrews’, The Scottish Review, 25 (1895), pp. 45, 46; and University Calendar: History and Constitution (University of St Andrews, 1987)

On some of Chandos’s other activities, including asset-stripping Jacobite estates, see Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Union, Empire and Global Adventuring with a Jacobite Twist, 1707–53’ in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680-1820, edited by Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (London, 2014).

On Oxford’s Chandos connections, see see Sebastian Raj Pender, ‘Balliol and the Proceeds of Slavery’