The Royalls are known to have enslaved 64 people in Medford. Like his father, Royall became a merchant mariner and, at 23, bought people and property to establish his own Antiguan sugar plantation. Slave labor made Royall one of New England's wealthiest men. He actively invested in real estate, purchased silver from Paul Revere, traveled in a coach-and-four with liveried servants, bought fine china and furniture from abroad, and hosted lavish parties. Royall held a number of civic offices, serving as justice of the peace, chairman of the Medford board of selectmen, and representative of Medford to the colonial legislature; he returned his salary to the town treasury. Royall was elected to the Governor's Council in 1752 (serving until 1774), held the honorary military rank of Brigadier General of the Province, and served as an overseer of Harvard College. Royall also held pews at King's Chapel and Christ Church. Royall was 19 in 1738 when he married Elizabeth McIntosh, 15, the daughter of a friend of Royall's father. The marriage was advantageous and confirmed Royall's place in the colonial elite. The couple had three daughters, Elizabeth (b. 1740), who died as a child, Mary (b. 1744), and Elizabeth (b. 1747). Royall commissioned several paintings of family members. In 1741, Robert Feke completed a group portrait that depicts Royall with his wife, sister Penelope, sister-in-law Mary McIntosh Palmer, and daughter Elizabeth. John Singleton Copley painted daughters Mary and Elizabeth in about 1758, wife Elizabeth in 1767-68, and Royall himself in about 1769. Elizabeth McIntosh Royall died in 1770. In 1775, as war neared, the Royall daughters left Massachusetts for England. Royall fled Medford just three days before the Battle of Lexington, the first military engagement in the American Revolution. Failing to secure passage to Antigua, he sailed to Nova Scotia, instructing a friend to sell the people he had enslaved in Medford to finance his exile in London. After a year in Canada, Royall joined his daughters' families in England. He died of smallpox in 1781. In his 1779 will, Royall emancipated Belinda Royall (later Belinda Sutton) and directed she be paid a pension from his seized estate. Sutton "had to petition the Massachusetts legislature six times to receive her due." Her successful 1783 suit became one of the first instances of reparations for slavery after American independence. Harvard Law School In his will of 1779, Royall left land to Harvard