Next month, the transept of Ripon Cathedral will come to life with a 1723 plea for freedom, written by an anonymous enslaved Virginian and almost certainly addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. The story behind its rediscovery is, in its own way, as remarkable as the play it inspired.

Incidents in the Life of An Anglican Slave, Desirée Baptiste's dramatic play-poem, arrives at Ripon Theatre Festival on Tuesday 7 July, followed by a Q&A with the writer-performer. It is built around what is believed to be the earliest written plea for freedom by an enslaved person anywhere in the British Empire, unearthed in the Church of England's own archives at Lambeth Palace Library. Ahead of the performance, I spoke to Baptiste about the find that started it all, the act of giving an anonymous voice its due, and why — for all the weight of its subject — she is adamant the evening should be, above everything else, entertaining.

Baptiste had known of the letter's existence for some years before she finally held it, having come across a summary of its contents in a scholarly article. But nothing, she says, prepared her for standing in its presence. This is, after all, the earliest known written plea for freedom by an enslaved person in the British Empire – and nearly three hundred years on, that fact pressed in on her in a way reading about it never had.

The words fell on the page in verse. The form chose me, not the other way around.

It was while examining the letter closely that she noticed something the published scholarship had missed entirely. The document is conventionally catalogued as addressed to Edmond Gibson, the Bishop of London. He held that office at the time the letter was penned, and was not an insignificant bishop or a 'local' bishop Based in London he had jurisdiction over the colonies. But tucked in front of the words ‘Bishop of London', Baptiste spotted a single, easily overlooked syllable: 'arch'. It pointed to a different, far more senior recipient — William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, based at Lambeth Palace itself, where the letter still resides.

It is the kind of detail only close, physical scrutiny of a document can surface, and it transformed how Baptiste understood the letter's author. This was not someone appealing modestly to a local bishop but an enslaved person, with no resources and no standing whatsoever, aiming their plea at the most senior cleric in the entire Church of England – and, in the same breath, at the King. "The magnitude of it, the scale of the enslaved writer's ambition and courage, moved me greatly," she says. "It inspired me to pen the play." She raised the discrepancy with Lambeth Palace Library directly; they agreed with her reading, and the catalogue entry has since been amended.

Establishing that the letter itself was genuine took more than a hunch. Baptiste asked the library's then-librarian, Giles Mandelbrote, to have it formally authenticated, which he arranged through an expert at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Her grasp of the wider context—the world the letter's author was writing from—came through her research into the history of Colonial Virginia, and her own deep understanding of the topic of transatlantic slavery generally (her area of research expertise).

What the letter itself reveals about its author is fragmentary but telling. They were of mixed Black and white heritage, described in the period's own brutal shorthand as "mulatto"; enslaved, strikingly, by their brother; raised within the Church of England; and subject to a violent overseer. They had no time to write except on Sundays. What remains unknown — and likely always will — is the writer's gender, their age, precisely where in Virginia they were held, or how, against every obstacle the system threw up, they came to be able to write at all. Baptiste says she can't identify a single detail from the original letter that didn't find its way into the play, even if only in passing.

There is a bitter irony, too, in who the letter appeals to. It pleads not just with the Archbishop but with the King and "other rulers" for freedom – and it is unlikely, as Baptiste points out, that its author knew quite how compromised those figures were. In the very decade the letter was written, Archbishop Wake was complicit in the purchase of enslaved Africans for the Codrington estate in Barbados, a plantation owned outright by the Church of England. The monarchy, meanwhile, had been officially entangled (by royal charter) in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people since the 1660s. The letter's writer assumed a moral authority at the top of English church and state that, in reality, was itself bound up in the very trade they were begging to escape.

The decision to render all this as a play-poem, rather than as straight drama or historical lecture, wasn't really a decision at all, Baptiste says: "The words fell on the page in verse. The form chose me, not the other way around." That form has now travelled a long way from Lambeth – to Chester Cathedral, the Edinburgh Fringe, and venues in Barbados - Grenada, and SVG (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) – and Baptiste says the piece itself has never changed in the telling. What shifts, performance to performance and country to country, is simply how each audience responds to it.

This is, first and foremost, storytelling and entertainment — some might call it edu-tainment. And it is truly a great story.

Staging it inside working cathedrals, given the Church's own historical entanglement in the trade the letter exposes, might seem a provocation. For Baptiste it's the opposite: a cathedral feels like the play's natural home. She credits The Very Revd Dr Tim Stratford, Dean of Chester Cathedral, as the first to bring the piece into a UK cathedral, and The Rt Revd Calvert Leopold Friday CMG, Bishop of the Windward Islands, with doing the same in the Caribbean, staging it in his diocese's mother cathedral. Her ambition now reaches further still – a full cathedral tour of the UK, ending at Canterbury itself: a kind of pilgrimage, as she puts it, undertaken by an enslaved, Anglican-baptised ghost.

That ghost, as written, is no passive victim. Resilience and real, dry humour run alongside the horror of her circumstances, and Baptiste is clear that it wasn't so much a calculated dramatic choice as basic honesty: the humour is simply part of who the character is. It mattered to her that audiences met a rounded person, not a one-dimensional sufferer. She wants people to leave the cathedral with two key takeaways: empathy and healing.

There's a local thread here too, one Baptiste isn't quite ready to pull on. Yorkshire has its own deep entanglement with slavery wealth — Harewood House and the Lascelles family, a few miles from Ripon, are the most prominent examples. Asked whether that history feeds into the piece, she demurs with a smile: she'd be giving away some of the play's surprises if she said any more. The post-show Q&A, she adds, is where these threads tend to get pulled properly — conversations she describes as consistently intelligent and engaging, as illuminating for her as the writer as they are for the audience.

For anyone tempted to give it a miss on the assumption it sounds like heavy going, Baptiste has a simple answer: "Expect to be entertained. This is, first and foremost, storytelling and entertainment — some might call it edu-tainment. And it is truly a great story."


Incidents in the Life of An Anglican Slave will be performed at Ripon Cathedral on Tuesday, 7 July, as part of Ripon Theatre Festival, followed by a Q& A with the writer-performer. Click here for tickets and more information