Alongside all that, though, is another eighteenth-century gentry story, the one focused on here, of families striving to avoid the humiliations of the fading Tories and turning instead to the opportunities that a new imperial world was offering them. In these Whig families, the essence of the gentry spirit remained adaptability and responsiveness to change. For the less than great, the possibilities of the Atlantic began to look attractive. Both the eighteenth-century families here responded to that challenge, looking to create or re-create their destinies on the slave-powered plantations of the Caribbean and the seaboard of continental America.
It is the moment when the gentry step out on to a new global stage. The change in scale meant that the questions in play also evolved. What happened to inherited gentry ideas of gentlemanliness, neighbourliness, honour and ‘worth’ when exposed to the competitive, often corrupt and brutal conditions of Atlantic business networks? What became of honesty, directness and ‘community’ when business often required rather different qualities? Or of family relationships when they became the structure for a family business? How malleable were these gentry principles? Could the gentleman transform himself into the global citizen?
If you wanted to dip your ladle deep into the North Atlantic slave and sugar system, Barbados was the place. It was the easternmost of the Caribbean islands and so in the Trade Winds the furthest to windward, the first to be reached from either Britain or Africa. The British had been there for most of the seventeenth century. They had tried tobacco, cotton, indigo, ginger, aloes and dyewoods, but every one of those commodities was subject to boom-bust fluctuations in the English markets. Only the demand for sugar consistently outstripped supply and by the 1660s Barbados was a sugar island. It has been estimated that for every ton of sugar consumed in England in 1600, ten tons were eaten in 1700 and 150 in 1800. Money poured in, the income per head for plantation gentry by the end of the century a third to two-thirds higher than for their stay-at-home cousins in England. The island was a rough, frontier place, a ‘Mighty Colossus of Vice’,4 thrusting, licentious, dishonest and drunk.
A generation later, as gentry like the Lascelles brothers set up as sugar merchants, those frontier days were over. Barbados had become a place of sophistication, run by ‘men of highest Distinction … of bright Characters and good figure’,5 or so they said themselves. It was the most densely populated and intensively cultivated area in the whole of the English-speaking world, with access to money less from the productivity of the plantations, whose soil was by now partly exhausted, than from the volume of trade passing across the island’s quays. The Barbadians imported the luxury life from England. Canopied feather beds, leather chairs, silks, lace, pearls, silver candlesticks and sauce boats, oak and walnut furniture (mahogany was not yet fashionable), elegant chaises in which to drive along the dusty roads, tutors from Oxford and Cambridge for the children (£150 a year for a top-quality master, £60 for those fresh out of university; any with Glaswegian accents or ‘mere scholars and not men of breeding’6 need not apply), knives and forks from the best Sheffield makers: the whole gentry ensemble was shipped out to the Tropics.7
The houses they built on their plantations were reproductions of English manor houses, with heavy oak staircases and pointy gables, ‘delightfully situated … with pleasant prospects to the sea and land’. ‘No people in the world’, it was said in 1695, ‘have been more remarkable for a Luxuriant way of living.’8 They had an assembly and assizes as they did at home, a militia as they did at home, and they cultivated ‘hospitality’ as they did at home. ‘In point of numbers of people, cultivation of the soil, and those elegancies and conveniencies which result from both’, Edmund Burke wrote in 1750, there ‘was no place in the West-Indies comparable to Barbadoes.’9
Even the Horatian dream of rural, gentlemanly completeness made its way out to the Caribbean. ‘There is something particularly picturesque and striking in a gang of negroes’, one English planter would write some years later,
when employed in cutting canes upon the swelling projections of a hill; when they take a long sweep, and observe a regular discipline in their work … The colour of the negroes, when bending beneath the verdant canopy of the canes, and these softened by the branching shadows of the majestic cotton-tree which rises in all the pride of vegetation and height, from the lowly glen in which its roots have taken earth … contribute to the moving landscape.10
That was written by an Englishman from Jamaica in 1790, when the Horatian vision had become deeply imbued with the picturesque, but everything about the way in which the Barbadians spoke of and developed their island – its giving soil, the warmth of the air, the constant twenty-five knots of clean, sweet wind off the Atlantic, the frequent showers of rain, even ‘the high, large and lofty trees with their spreading branches and flourishing tops’11 – was evidence that their vision of this place was not of somewhere that would give them untold amounts of money, but of acres that were continuous with their dreams of perfection at home. The heat might have meant that linen shirts, linen drawers and linen stockings replaced their English woollens but this was a place for delight where ‘you shall find as cheerful a look, and as hearty a welcome as any man can give to his best friends’.12 The fact that to make their plantations work they had to be ‘stocked’13 with African slaves, to use the word they consistently used, made no inroads into that vision. The great African fact behind the sugar riches was for all but a tiny, usually nonconformist minority no more than a technicality. It is the most extraordinary instance of the adaptability of the gentry frame of mind: to very nearly all of them, enslaving Africans seemed entirely acceptable. The world of the Lascelles was taut with anxiety but the unspeakable inhumanity of the slave trade and the chronic cruelties of the plantation system were not its source.
It was perfectly possible, in the midst of that essential and underlying barbarity, to cultivate a life that was courteous not abrupt, trustworthy, legal, co-operative and dignified. The two frames of mind, the dark and light of the cultural revolution of the eighteenth century, sat easily alongside each other.
As the century progressed, an element of femininity became increasingly important in the world of sensibility. In a pioneering 1740s essay, David Hume had identified the qualities of the ‘true sage’ as ‘the softest benevolence, the most undaunted resolution, the tenderest sentiments, the most sublime love of virtue’.14 That feminized vision of moral behaviour was also in play here, out in the Atlantic settlements of the English gentry, and the story of Eliza Pinckney, the astonishingly young woman from South Carolina who saved the fortunes of her family, is a long dialogue between David Hume’s vision of goodness and the demands of her extraordinary situation.15
She was the heir to the great controlling and sustaining women who have preceded her in these stories – both Lady Plumptons, Mrs Throckmorton, the two Mrs Thynnes, Lady Oglander and Lady Hobart – but even so it seems as if there were qualities in her which had not appeared before: neither constrained by the public realm nor defensively self-assertive when confronted with it, confident, for all her self-deprecation, of the validity and interest of what she had to say, calmly fusing public and private, political and domestic, with an acute awareness of the role played in all of it by image and appearance.
As she grew older, the life of this Englishwoman became increasingly and emblematically American: self-reliant, brave and self-assertive, gathering an equally motivated family around her. The irony of their lives is that the more American they became, the more gentry-like they appeared. When the prospect of revolution finally raised its head, there was no question which side they would be on: they would fight for America against the British crown. But in doing so they were turning ancient gentry principles back on the British themselves. Perhaps like any revolution, it seemed to them a revolt of the honourable against the tyrannical, a defence of ancient freedoms rather than a new claiming of them, driven by the idea that America was the true heir to a tradition which an increasingly centralized British
state was abandoning.
1710s–1750s
Dominance
The Lascelles
Yorkshire, Barbados, Richmond and London
At his horrible death in October 1753, Henry Lascelles was probably the richest man in England. The accounts are slightly difficult to disentangle but, including money he had already assigned to his sons, he was worth somewhere near £500,000.1 In the 1750s that was enough to buy twenty-five good English estates of 4,000 acres each, with an excellent modern country house on every one;2 or to buy your way, at the going price, into 100 seats in Parliament; or to acquire a fleet of several hundred well-laden, ocean-going merchant ships for the Atlantic business,3 or 20,000 Africans on a Barbados quayside, or half as many again at one of the trading fort hells on the Guinea shore.4 It was wealth of a kind few Englishmen had ever enjoyed and it came from the five key ingredients of the newly surging imperial British economy: sugar, shipping, finance, government office and African slaves. Lascelles was one of the gentry who had entered an ungentrified world.
Henry Lascelles was no parvenu, nouveau riche or arriviste – English terms thought to be unintelligible to those they described. The Lascelles were old, literate and educated if minor Yorkshire gentry. They – or at least people of that name; there is some question about whether the two families are connected – had owned land in Yorkshire at least since the late thirteenth century. They were based outside Northallerton, plumb in the middle of the Vale of Mowbray, grassy, rolling, comfortable country, where horses were bred for coach and saddle, and ‘the old common stock of the Vale’, according to William Marshall, the late eighteenth-century improver, was ‘a thin-carcased, ill-formed, white-faced hornless breed’ of cattle.5
Only part of the Lascelles’s house survives at Stank Hall, a sheep farm now, perhaps named after the ponds or moat that once surrounded it. It seems to be a perfect monument to gentry decline. Large modern sheds cluster around the old stone building. There is a coat of arms above a blocked doorway, where the big, bobble-ended cross of the Lascelles arms is impaled with their neighbours and relations the St Quintins. You can still detect the faint turfy outlines of a Jacobean garden with its corner mounts.6
This might have been a picture of remembered glory and sunken destinies. It isn’t. Stank Hall had been nothing but a stepping stone for the Lascelles. They had only bought it in 1608 on the proceeds of successful land management elsewhere in the Vale. They were on the up, ‘rising gentry’, Puritan and politically engaged. Henry Lascelles’s grandfather Francis had become a Roundhead colonel in the Civil War.7 He was a committed Parliamentarian but no rabid ideologue. When accepting the surrender of Scarborough Castle after a brutal siege in 1645, the conditions he and the other Parliamentary officers imposed on the surrendering Royalists were the model of gentry grace: the Governor and his ‘Gentleman Soldiers’ were allowed to leave for Holland, or to rejoin the Royal Army, taking their own belongings with them, on horseback and wearing their swords; the Governor’s wife and the common soldiers were allowed to go home. These articles ‘were much grumbled at by some of the Parliaments Party as too favourable’,8 but the incident is a window on to Lascelles’s non-ideological nature. When as a Republican Member of Parliament for Northallerton he had sat in judgement on Charles I, he absented himself on the day the King’s death warrant was signed.
This steering for the middle ground meant that although Colonel Lascelles remained an MP and was one of the Cromwellian Commissioners for Yorkshire, at the Restoration in 1660, unlike other regicides who were imprisoned, exiled or executed, he made his peace with the new regime and suffered no more than an enormous fine (a year’s income) and a ban on ever occupying public office again.
It is tempting to see the passions of the Lascelles being steered into commerce by this political exclusion, but that is not quite true.9 The family retained its Yorkshire lands but there were business interests already, at least from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, and commercial connections to Belfast and Scotland. The regicide’s eldest son, also called Francis, became a nonconformist merchant, based in London, dealing with Virginia. His sister Lucy married a Virginia merchant (from another Yorkshire family). In 1648 an Edward Lascelles – probably a cousin, but the links are unclear – bought an estate in Barbados, where he also owned a warehouse and shipping. By the 1680s, four Lascelles brothers, including Edward, were in the Barbados trade together, one based in London as the anchor of the English end of the business, one a transatlantic ship’s captain and the others out in the West Indies. With no excess of imagination they called their ships the Frigate Lascelles, 220 tons, its replacement, 300 tons, the Lascelles, and another the Edward and Mary, after the most successful of the brothers and his wife. This organization of a business and its ethos around family connections was an extension of the gentry understanding, of which this book is full, that siblings and children had an inherent unity of interest. In a world riddled with deceit and betrayal, the corporation of the family became the safest and most reasonable basis on which to arrange one’s affairs.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the culture of the whole clan was a rich and potent mixture: gentry, Anglican but with nonconformist connections, anti-absolutist, anti-Catholic, contributing to local government in Yorkshire but entrepreneurial and ambitious. Gentry had fused with trader. They were Whigs, firmly opposed to the Stuarts. In December 1688, Henry’s father, Daniel, had taken part in the Yorkshire rising which had helped eject the Catholic James II and replace him with the Protestant William III. Daniel became Sheriff of York, briefly a Whig Member of Parliament for Northallerton and a man of business himself.10 The records for his life are patchy but he may have been out to Barbados himself. These people did not abandon their Yorkshire roots, but that was not where opportunity lay.
Trade for the Lascelles was not the dumping ground for junior brothers, nor the next best option after the church, but the highway which an entire family could take to money, significance and power. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, perhaps inspired by the success of their cousins, Henry Lascelles and his brothers began to establish their own family business on the booming Atlantic networks. Nothing is known of them or their upbringing before they emerged on to the commercial stage. The eldest brother, George, went out to Barbados in 1706. In 1712, when he was twenty-two, Henry joined him there. Three years later, their half-brother Edward came out too and George returned to manage the London office. The system that might in the past have run adjoining blocks of farmland in the Vale of Mowbray now had the magnifying lens of imperial riches applied to it. It was long-distance kinship capitalism.
Barbados, whose original Amerindian population was decimated by Spanish visitors in the sixteenth century, was first colonized by the English in 1625 and by the middle of that century was 85 per cent white. The land was largely worked by indentured servants, poor young English and Irish men and women who had (temporarily, for three, five or seven years) traded their freedom for the price of the voyage out to the West Indies.11 But they had not coped well with the climate and had usually died young. By the time of the Lascelles, Barbados was worked by Africans, a slave to every two or three acres of sugar plantation. To stock a 500-acre plantation, about 130 slaves were required. The price varied between islands and from year to year but hovered around £20–25 for each slave, a capital cost in slave stock of £3,000. The blacker their skin and the curlier their hair, the more expensive they were, perhaps, ironically enough, on the grounds of Enlightenment taxonomies. Classifiers liked to think in terms of distinct species and varieties: a black person was regarded as distinct from a white person. Colours in between were a mixture of both and, so the theory went, less predictable and possibly less strong. Consistently, over many decades, merchants required their captains to seek out the blackest people they could find. Young men and women in their mid-teens were the most sought after.12 The land they worked and the relatively high expense of equipping a plantation with wind-driven rolli
ng mills to extract the juice from the cane, as well as the boiling, curing and distilling houses, the cisterns, stills, tubs and barrels, might well come to another £15,000 or £20,000. This high level of capital investment could easily produce an annual income of £9,000 on a 500-acre estate.13
The running costs were not minimal. Between 3 and 4 per cent of slaves would die each year. Clothing and feeding the slaves, servicing and repairing the equipment, the costs of transport and porterage, medical attendance, local taxes and payments to local managers, overseers and bookkeepers could all add up to between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of gross revenue. The cost of keeping the slaves alive was only part of this: the barrels for the sugar cost more than looking after the people who produced it. It was a place of torment. At the slave markets on the quaysides, the Africans were stood naked in front of the buyers and had their flesh squeezed to check their condition. Agents recommended that a man’s penis should be handled to ensure it was good for breeding. Unbought slaves in unsatisfactory condition were left to die on their own. When slaves rebelled on the island, they were exposed in iron cages in which they were attached to the branch of a tree or left to die of hunger and thirst, a punishment known as ‘hanging out to dry’.14
Conditions on plantations meant that life expectancy at birth was dismal: more than half of all slave babies would be dead before they were five. Another 10 per cent would die before they were ten. As the historian Simon Smith has said, many slave lives spanned less time than a butterfly’s.15 An unrelenting work regime, which began at the age of five, and exposure to the greed and cruelty of overseers meant that most adult slaves died before they were fifty.
Rainless years in which the cane did not grow could drastically reduce productivity, but you need look no further than the spectacular margins of the sugar business to understand the mechanisms at work. An investment of some £25,000 would be paid back in three good years, the profit a measure of the value created by an enslaved workforce which cost next to nothing to keep going. Demand was ever growing and that fat sweet river of slave-based money was the foundation of the Lascelles story. It was a long way from any beef or butter in the damp fields outside Northallerton.
The Gentry Page 22