Earl Mulgrave 

Earl Mulgrave was the Royal Governor of Jamaica at the time of the emancipation of the slaves in 1834. His support for the missionaries and their desire to abolish slavery earned him the hatred of the slaveholders on the island, many calling him “the baptist-loving earl, the heartless whig, the namby-pamby novel-writer,” among other epithets; yet, as Cox notes, he met these epithets with “a spirit of calm and dignified firmness, becoming his character and office.” He signed the bill, ending slavery throughout the British colonies (the bill had been passed by parliament on 28 August 1833) on 12 December 1833. He remarked that “slavery, that greatest curse that can afflict the social system, has now received its death-blow.”  He returned to England in March 1834, just prior to the implementation of the abolition bill on 1 August 1834, and was succeeded by the Marquis of Sligo. See F. A. Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society, from 1792 to 1842, 2 vols. (London: T. Ward, and G. and J. Dyer, 1842), 2:205-206; 195-198; John Clarke, Memorials of the Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, 1869), 110.