On a bright summer’s day recently I visited Paxton House, a Palladian mansion near the English border. It lies beside the River Tweed within acres of gardens, woodlands and meadows, and part of the pleasure of the trip was roaming by the riverbank in the shade of sprawling beeches and oaks.

The house is a Georgian masterpiece, as is its interior, with one vast room hung with paintings from the National Galleries of Scotland. The rooms are furnished with chairs, tables, desks and armoires by Chippendale – it is one of Britain’s finest collections – and throughout there is an air of astonishing grandeur and luxury.

Obviously this did not come cheap, but its second owner, Ninian Home, had no trouble finding the means to turn this into a show-stopping stately home. As a sugar plantation owner in the West Indies he was filthy rich and wanted everybody to know it.

Paxton House Trust, which holds the property for the nation, does not shy away from this shameful legacy. Instead, it has an exhibition highlighting the family’s lucrative links to slavery and their plantations in Grenada.

Part of the house’s collection of sumptuous Georgian costumes includes a model of a black servant dressed in elegant shirt, silk waistcoat and breeches. What he and other black servants made of the Scottish Borders is not recorded; perhaps the best that can be said is that they were likely to have lived longer and more healthily here than if they had been working on a plantation.

For what it’s worth (very little you might say), it seems that Ninian Home was not a brutal owner. But an owner he was, one of countless great planters who made their fortunes, and passed them on, from the labour of the enslaved. Such were conditions in the West Indies – and in other colonies on the eastern seaboard of America – that so many died of disease, overwork or........

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