Henry Lascelles did not go into West Indian land, beyond the ownership of a single plantation on Barbados, called Guinea. Increasing competition from other islands both raised the price of slaves and dropped the price of sugar. Trading in the key commodities, not producing the sugar itself, was where the future lay. Within months of his arrival, Henry Lascelles locked into the business community. He quickly married the daughter of Edward Carter, a leading planter and slave trader, who every decade was importing about £40,000 worth of slaves. Henry began trading slaves on his own account, on something like the same scale as his father-in-law. For those with entrepreneurial flair, the huge profits of the business meant that there was plenty of credit available. You didn’t need to be rich to start as a slave-and-sugar man, only a modicum of courage and a grip on the figures. Victory went to those who had grasped the foundational fact, as one of Lascelles’s business partners later expressed it, that ‘The Larger the Concern ye better. We are now a tolerable Judge of our Expences, so that the more Cargoe Disposed of, the greater advantage the Concern will recieve.’16
Henry, still in his mid-twenties, was on a drive. ‘Negros’ and hogs-heads of sugar were commodities to be shipped around the Atlantic. In 1712, there were 42,000 slaves in Barbados (against 12,500 white people) but as their life expectancy was short, constant re-supply was required from Africa. But that was only one aspect of what soon became a multi-headed business.
At the most basic level, there was money to be made out of victualling the Royal Navy ships which called at Bridgetown, for which Lascelles bought bread, biscuit flour and dried peas in Philadelphia17 and New York, and shipped cheese, butter, beef and pork from Cork to the Caribbean.18 He also courted the good offices of naval captains and made deals with them to ship goods as freight within Navy holds.19
He owned shares in ships, often an eighth or a quarter, never an entire ship, as risks in the Atlantic trade made it safer not to concentrate your assets, but it was agenting which fuelled his boom. Captured French indigo,20 mahogany from Nicaragua,21 tortoiseshell, cocoa and ‘Jesuit’s bark’, from which a treatment for malaria could be extracted,22 joined the rather weak Barbados rum,23 the dark, sticky muscovados,24 the molasses25 and the more expensive part-refined or ‘clayed’ sugars26 on the seas to London. There the Lascelles office sold the goods on and charged a commission on the sale. Storms in which ships would lose their masts, or even founder if deep laden,27 and both French and Spanish privateers were a constant hazard.28 Lascelles recommended ‘a very stout ship well provided with men and guns’,29 but he could make money there too, taking commission both on the goods themselves and on their insurance.
Plenty of goods and men came back the other way. The London office arranged for plumbers,30 brick-layers,31 bakers and other tradesmen to be sent out from England, along with watches32 (which had to be sent back to London from Barbados if they were to be mended), sugar-processing machinery manufactured in England on the basis of models sent to London from the Caribbean,33 swords with scabbards (4 guineas),34 cracked bells which had been re-cast, suits of night clothes for the planters’ wives,35 candles, claret, ‘beef tongues’36 and re-dyed gowns.37 One planter had an organ sent from England, which the Lascelles office in London arranged to be tried and tuned by a musician before it was shipped on board in the Thames, along with a tea chest covered in shagreen, a form of elegantly worked sharkskin, ‘with silver furniture & 3 chased canisters’.38 ‘Pipes of good wine’ (600 bottles in each pipe)39 loaded in Madeira joined medicines from London. Large quantities of metal hoops, for the West Indian coopers to make sugar barrels with, filled many of the outgoing holds.
Every transaction involved a commission; every aspect of life was networked. On reading the Lascelles business correspondence that has survived, the overwhelming sensation is of normality. From our perspective now, the trafficking of over fifteen million Africans from one side of the Atlantic to the other may rank as the greatest crime ever committed by this country. ‘No nation in Europe … has … plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain,’ Pitt the Younger would say in the House of Commons in 1792,40 but in the great growth years of the Lascelles business, there is no sense of aberration or wrongness. The tone of the correspondence is, on the whole, solicitous, civilized and Georgian, as if there were no crime to be recognized, let alone hidden. There was undoubted guilt here; there is not even a whisper of shame.
Lascelles certainly made a great deal of money out of these multifarious transactions, but none was as valuable as the government office he landed in 1714. The Whigs under Robert Walpole had just come to power in England and Henry’s appointment as Collector of Customs at Bridgetown, Barbados, was a small outer ripple in the maze of interest and mutuality which was eighteenth-century politics. The family had long resisted the Stuarts and their Tory supporters; this was the reward.
A levy of 4½ per cent was raised on all sugar leaving Barbados for England. The Collector was meant to levy that tax in kind and then ‘the Specifick Goods received for the Duties to be Shipt and sent home’41 to an officer of the Customs Service in London known as the Husband of the Sugars. The Husband, based at Custom House Quay in the Pool of London, would then sell the sugar on to the grocers and the ‘sugar-bakers’. Needless to say, Henry’s standing at one of the key gateways of imperial finance was one of the most valuable posts in the whole of the British Customs Service. For the next three decades it remained in Lascelles hands, first Henry’s and then those of Edward, his half-brother.
Both of them milked it for all it was worth, defrauding the British Treasury itself, and in several different ways and quite systematically tampering with the documents: erasing the quantity of goods landed; later inserting goods of lower value; pocketing the difference between the amount of tax they charged and the amount of tax which the amended documents showed; and straightforwardly selling blank documents to merchants so that they could enter what they liked on their customs returns. In this position of power, they were able to maximize all kinds of influence, extorting money from ships’ masters, selling slaves from ships taken as prizes, the proceeds from which should have gone into official coffers.42 No sense of any guilt over this behaviour is apparent anywhere in the Lascelles papers.
In 1720 Henry was summoned to London to answer charges, as was his half-brother Edward in 1744. And although the outlines of the long-running and bitter double case are far from clear, and political rivalry and faction fighting clouded both the issues and the outcomes, there seems too much smoke for there to have been no fire. The Treasury was aware that any Collector of Customs was chronically vulnerable to corruption of this kind and so they appointed an official known as the Comptroller, who ‘ought to have been a Cheque on the Collector throughout his whole Management’.43 Both Lascelles brothers bought the Comptroller off by promising him a cut and then embarked on their thieving spree.
The key change they made was to levy the sugar tax in cash not in kind. As the later government report expressed it, ‘This practice of Commutation was the Foundation of the Frauds.’44 It meant that the Lascelles had in hand large amounts of ready money, which they could lend out to planters and merchants, establishing credit networks on which they could keep the interest themselves. As interest rates in the Caribbean could rise as high as 10 per cent (against a 5 per cent legal maximum in London), this was valuable business. They also consistently estimated ‘wastage’ at 3 per cent of the sugars landed, when in other Caribbean islands it never ran at more than 1½ per cent. And they took to entering high-quality sugar in the books as if it were low-quality, pocketing the difference between the amount of tax that should have been raised and what was actually returned. When in the 1740s the government inspector Robert Dinwiddie came to see what was going on and asked for ‘the Keys of the King’s Warehouse to see the Duty Goods due to the Revenue, the Collector told him there were no Goods in the Warehouse, but a little Cotton and Alloes, and that he had Commuted the rest of the Goods for cash’.45
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br /> Overall, ‘it was strongly suggested the Collectors had defrauded the Crown and made great Advantages to themselves.’ It is thought that Henry pocketed between a half and a third of what should have gone to the Treasury. The London authorities accused him of cheating on the valuations of rum, sugars and lime juice ‘and therefore they had directed him to be surcharged with the difference’ – to the spectacular tune of £39,995 14s. 4d. in Barbados currency, or £30,000 sterling.
Lascelles, in his submission to the disciplinary hearing, ‘absolutely denied’ that he had anything to do with undercharging, or pocketing any difference that might have resulted, and in the first sign of a kind of bleakness that hangs around his character, blamed his underlings, the junior officials who actually supervised the landings on the quays: ‘This charge is unjust to be made on the Collector who is an Indoor Officer, the Landwaiters & searchers only being answerable for an accusation of this sort, whose business is to attend the shipping, and compare the Quality of the Sugars.’46
Henry was let off, as was Edward in the 1740s, largely by politicking in London and by calling in political favours, but not before they had conducted a bitter correspondence with the government inspector, Robert Dinwiddie. The Lascelles’s own letter does not survive but Dinwiddie’s reply does. Edward and the Comptroller had been (temporarily) suspended from the job that had been bringing so much money into the Lascelles coffers and Henry, clearly in a rage, had asked Dinwiddie for the names of people who had betrayed them. Dinwiddie replied:
As you seem to write in a Passion, I shall not go thorow the whole Contents of your Letters.
I have passed my Word to the Persons that have furnished me with the Accts under your Hand, not to make use of their names here, but they will be Transmitted with my reports to the Commissioners.
I shall sacredly keep up to my Orders & shall endeavour to Act consistently and impartially in the whole transactions of my Duty.
I shall evade going into a Paper Warr on this Head … I think I have acted with friendship and Honour in giving you the Principles on which I shall Surcharge your accompt & the reasons for Suspending you
I wish you & yr Family well and am Sir
Your Humble Servant
Robt Dinwiddie47
Corruption, anger, passing the buck, greed, fearless hard-headedness, the alliance in crime with the younger brother: these were the foundations of Henry Lascelles’s triumph.
After the death of his elder brother George in 1729, Henry returned to England to take control of the London office and became one of the big panjandrums of the City. Like many Barbados men, he was loathed by his fellow London merchants. Although, as they said, they had ‘as good English Bloud in our Veins, as those that we have left behind us’,48 ‘Phlegmatick Londoners’ continued to treat them as colonial vulgarians. Barbados men were said to have ‘fiery, restless tempers’ and ‘put no median between being great and being undone’. They were extremists with ‘a more volatile and lively Disposition, and more irascible in general’ than your average Londoner, with a penchant for ‘Parade and Shew’.49 They were ‘foolish, ridiculous, inconsistent, scurrilous, absurd, malicious and impudent’.50 They were also – which may explain some of these bitter and jealous adjectives – unconscionably rich.
Henry bought himself a mansion, Lichfield House, in Richmond-upon-Thames. The site is a block of 1930s Deco-ish flats now but his house survived until the age of photography and the old pictures reveal the building in which Henry Lascelles lived until his death on 6 October 1753: a pedimented façade from the early 1700s, a big, plain, masculine mass of brick, dedicated to commodity and firmness more than delight, nothing flirty or charming about it, not a rococo flounce to be seen, a house suited to the dignity, solidity and comfort of one of the great self-made men of the age. Its long garden stretched north to a glazed orangery, the whole ensemble a few minutes’ walk from the river. London, with its ‘smoke and dirt, sin and seacoal’,51 as Daniel Defoe had coolly described it in the 1720s, lay fourteen miles to the east, downstream and downwind.
There is no doubting the manliness of the Lascelles style: rugs on the finest clean deals or Dutch oak boards; the rooms all wainscoted or painted in ‘a costly and handsome manner’; marble chimneypieces; the doors thick and substantial, with the best sort of brass locks on them; walnut-veneered chairs, with leather or damask seats; mahogany tables and chests of drawers, the timber from the West Indies, the silks inside them from Spittalfields; gilded mirrors above the chimneypieces and brass fenders around them, equipped with tongs, poker and shovel. Beds were made with beautiful linen, screens stood in front of the fires; silver candlesticks and sauce boats shone on the mahogany ground. The windows were fitted with wooden shutters; patterned chintz curtains were drawn across them. This was not about vainglorious display but undeniable substance, the irremovability of a man of worth.52
Richmond was London’s most enviable suburb. Daniel Defoe called it a ‘glorious Show of Wealth and Plenty, a view of the Luxuriant Age which we live in, and of the overflowing Riches of the Citizens’.53 The suburb was a monument to the prodigious fortunes which England’s first great commercial age had created, full of men ‘whose Beginnings were small, or but small compar’d, and who have exceeded even the greatest Part of the Nobility of England in Wealth, at their Death, and all of their own getting’.54 It was a commuter suburb and Defoe had to explain the new phenomenon that although these were enormous houses, they did not have ‘any lands to a considerable value about them’.55 Land and significance were for the first time pulling apart.
As a result, something else lay hidden in the great cellars of these modern, ‘opulent Foundations’:
It would take up a large chapter in this book, to but mention the overthrow, and catastrophe of innumerable wealthy city families, who after they have thought their houses establish’d, and have built their magnificent country seats, as well as others, have sunk under the misfortunes of business, and the disasters of trade, after the world has thought them pass’d all possibility of danger; such as Sir Joseph Hodges, Sir Justus Beck, the widow Cock at Camberwell, and many others; besides all the late South-Sea directors, all which I chuse to have forgotten, as no doubt they desire to be, in recording the wealth and opulence of this part of England.56
This money was different from old landed money in one all-important quality: it was not safe.
The Lascelles business was based in the City of London. Their counting house and office was first in Mark Lane, then Mincing Lane and then in a court off Great Tower Street, all of them a few minutes’ walk from the quays of the Pool of London, lining the Thames between London Bridge and the Tower. It was the greatest port in the world. In streets described by John Strype in 1720 as ‘garnished with very good Houses, which for the generality are taken up by Merchants, and Persons of Repute’,57 the Lascelles office was a merchant’s house, adapted for business. From here Lascelles ran his shipping network, extended credit, charged commission on other merchants’ sales as well as trading on his own account, negotiated with office holders in the Customs and in the Treasury, berated his brother by letter in the Caribbean and maintained the giant invisible network he had created across the Atlantic ocean.
Windows on the ground floor were enlarged to bring as much light as possible into the counting house.58 The central door, flanked by pilasters and with a moulded hood, was up a short flight of stone steps. A stone hallway, with a stair at its far end, greeted you as you came in. To one side was a waiting room, entirely panelled and painted, with window seats looking out on to the street and a fireplace, whose surround in the best offices would have been carved. On the other side of the hall was the counting house with its own fireplace, where goods were accounted for, bills paid, credit issued and custom dues reckoned. Wrought-iron railings and gates shut anyone unauthorized away from the money.
On the floor above would be the most important rooms in the house, facing on to the street, the panelling here richer, the mouldings b
older and more substantial, each of the two rooms up here with their own fireplaces, with fluted friezes and panelled pilasters, perhaps with some swags or carved eagles. Other members of the office had rooms on the floor above, where yet more coal-burning fireplaces kept them warm.
Everything about the set-up exuded gentlemanliness, a refuge of order and control away from the turbulence, hurry and incipient anarchy of the streets outside. It was a suddenly speeding city, an endless competition, as the journalist and dramatist Edward Moore described it in May 1755:
If we observe the behaviour of the polite part of this nation (that is, of all the nation) we shall see that their whole lives are one continued race; in which every one is endeavouring to distance all behind him, and to overtake, or pass by, all who are before him; every one is Flying from his inferiors in pursuit of his superiors, who fly from him with equal alacrity.
Every tradesman is a merchant, every merchant is a gentleman, and every gentleman one of the noblesse. We are a nation of gentry, populus generosorum: we have no such thing as common people among us: between vanity and gin, the species is utterly destroyed.59
Lascelles’s London was a place in which all definitions were up for grabs. Mazy, cobbled streets ran downhill from Mincing Lane to the warehouses and quays on the scurfy tidal river, the money-conveyor to the Atlantic. The tide surged through the narrow gaps between the piers of London Bridge, a rushing passage which, as a visiting Frenchman had told Pepys, was terrifying in prospect but in fact ‘le plus grand plaisir du monde’.60 Offices were interspersed with the coffeehouses in which agents, merchants and investors met and did their business. Slave boys, spices, rare birds from the tropics, all were sold here. London was too busy to observe old customs: the rural and colonial habit of doffing your hat to a gentleman you met in the street had been abandoned. Slave boys in elegant coats wore silver collars like napkin rings around their necks on which the coat of arms and sometimes address of their owner were stamped. The City churches were crammed in between the offices, panelled with memorials to the successful City men, their achievements lauded in gold leaf (from Brazil) on mahogany (from Jamaica). The halls of the great City livery companies stood marooned in backstreets, the whiff of dinner never quite escapable in them.
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