IN 2020, JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE announced its intention to remove the seventeenth-century marble memorial monument to its benefactor Tobias Rustat (right) from the college chapel where he is buried. Rustat, declared the college, a Stuart courtier described by John Evelyn as a “very simple, ignorant, but honest and loyal creature” acquired his enormous fortune through the slave trade, some of which he then redistributed to Jesus College. He had to go.
I am not on the side of the statue-smashers, but I initially unquestioningly accepted Jesus College’s description of Rustat as having made his money through slavery. So I was therefore surprised to discover that Rustat’s involvement in the slave trade consisted of buying a few shares in the Royal African Company after
