 Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister at the time, commented that if Stokes was in league with Arab slave-trading, then ‘he deserved hanging’.Sir John Kirk, for years the British Consul in Zanzibar, remarked that “he was no loss to us, although he was an honest man.” The news of Stokes’ execution was received with indifference by the British Foreign Office.When the German ambassador asked Sir Thomas H. Sanderson, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, whether the British government planned to take any steps regarding the execution of this “well-known character”, Sanderson wrote