All the ingredients of Lascelles’s life were in play here: inherited courtesy; a straightforward commercial drive which allowed him and his colleagues to treat black people as just another commodity, not unadmired or unappreciated for what they were, but considered valuable only in commercial terms; a level of tension and anxiety at the degree of risk in the business; and at times a savage rage and severity in dealing with others. The atmosphere that survives in the letterbooks of his business is a picture of gentry harshened in a commercial world.
On the day in the 1720s when Defoe ‘had the curiosity to count the ships’ either at anchor or tied up at the quays in the Pool of London, he ‘found above two thousand sail of all sorts, not reckoning barges, lighters or pleasure-boats, and yachts’.61 The volume of transactions, the sheer scurry of this world city dazzled contemporaries. At the Custom House, where ‘in the Long Room it’s a pretty pleasure to see the multitude of payments that are made’, in the Excise Office, the Navy Office, the Bank, the offices of the South Sea Company (‘South Sea’ meaning at this time not the Pacific but the slave-worked Caribbean), the East India Company, the Royal African Company, in the insurance offices and in the Exchange, a ‘prodigious conflux’ of gentry were engaged in ‘a negotiation, which is so vast in its extent, that almost all the men of substance in England are more or less concerned in it.’ This frantic pace and scale of negotiation were transforming the geography and habits of the country.
Many thousands of families are so deeply concerned in those stocks, and find it so absolutely necessary to be at hand to take the advantage of buying and selling, as the sudden rise or fall of the price directs, and the loss they often sustain by their ignorance of things when absent, and the knavery of brokers and others, whom, in their absence, they are bound to trust, that they find themselves obliged to come up and live constantly here, or at least, most part of the year.62
Henry Lascelles cruised this brutal reef, his life in perpetual tension between gentry courtesy and commercial imperatives. He could be rudeness itself. His ‘Daming, Villifying & abusing’ was ‘ye Public Taulk of ye Coast by all masters of ships out of London, Bristoll, or Leverpoole’.63 But he was a man of power and his finance business became enormous: he had loans out on all sides of the Atlantic totaling some £200,000 in 1750, perhaps equivalent to £300 million today, delivering on average 7 per cent a year, a rate of return which English land could never hope to have matched. The other branches all boomed on the expansion and deepening of the Atlantic networks: the commission business selling sugar to London traders; the victualling and shipping businesses (his own son Henry was a ship’s captain); and the Africa trade. In 1736 with seven other merchants he entered a joint enterprise which they called the Concern, committing £4,000 each, to establish a set of ships called the ‘Floating Factory’ and shore stations on the African slave coasts.64 A permanent presence off Anamobu in modern Ghana would regularize the trade in Africans, gold, ivory, gum and pepper. It was an attempt to apply rational, Enlightenment methods to a previously ad hoc system. Supply ships from Europe made regular deliveries to the Concern’s officers on the coast, shipping gold and ivory back to Europe, slaves to the Caribbean and Brazil. The money involved was enormous in this too. In December 1739, the Concern had £74,000 of assets afloat in Africa,65 over £100 million in modern terms. A year later, one of the other partners reckoned that ‘the Produce of the Gold & Teeth’ alone was £37,000.66
The famous triangular trade – goods to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, sugar to London – was only one configuration in a net of connections. The Concern stocked their ships with an enormous variety of goods: silk hats, shaving bowls, even horses (one horse could buy twenty-five slaves), beads, brass pots, silks, and sets of porcelain from the Far East which were loaded in Rotterdam, and a great deal of cloth: there was a steady market in the cold winds off the Atlantic for bolts of English serge.67
In return they bought gold, ivory, gum, wax and people. The Concern’s captains kept the Africans in horrifying conditions either on shore in lightless cellars, or on board ship off the coast where high nets were rigged on deck to prevent the desperate men and women throwing themselves into the sea. Some were then shipped to Barbados and Jamaica in the Concern’s own holds but they were mostly sold on to Portuguese slavers on the coast for gold or silver from South American slave-worked mines. The Concern was in effect running a slave shop for these Atlantic traders. The advantage for the Portuguese was that they did not need to spend any time on the disease-ridden coast. The advantage for the Concern was that they could charge a premium on such convenient delivery. Lascelles’s profit was quite straightforwardly on the back of African slaves’ and English sailors’ lives.
The way in which the business was conducted was no stroll through life. Vigilance, arrogance, quickness, tension, exhaustion and worry hang over it all. ‘Uneasy’ is the eighteenth-century word. It occurs again and again in the correspondence of Lascelles’s business partners. ‘The Times makes him very Uneasie & it is a very large Concern … Mr Lascelles [is] most Uneasie for fear of either of your Deaths,’ his partner wrote to George Hamilton, their leading sea captain in Africa in 1740. ‘No Body will Insure on the Argyle or any of our Ships on the Coast.’ Lascelles was ‘tired of’ his business, he was ‘peevish’, ‘sick of it’.68 Hamilton thought Lascelles had turned ‘Threatening’69 in his own letters. Treachery was in every corner. From the Argyle anchored at Anamobu, Captain Hamilton had written back to London about Edward Jasper, one of the partners in the Concern:
The eyes of a hundred of people are on us, and I make no doubt Severall that trade this way hartily wishes our overthrough whatever we ship home, the privater itt is Kept the better, Mr Edward Jasper, has that great failing, what ever Mr Lascelles & you acquaint him with, he will tell it to Every Body.70
Every last penny had to be squeezed from the business. Lascelles wrote to one of his captains, Richard Crookenden, in February 1741, that when taking on freight in the Caribbean, he ‘must urge the extravagant charge of every kind & risques wch the ships now sail at wch is still much increased to what it was last voyage & that the shippers ought to consider it’.71
When in late 1740, his half-brother Edward allowed the captain of a ship to provide the casks in which the sugar was to shipped back to England, Henry could barely control himself.
I desire you will let none of the captains for future have any hand in it, which will cut of the profit … Could handle [the captain] very severely but at this time of Day it may not be proper. Pray never suffer Casks to be furnished by any captain again.72
Edward was thirty-eight, Henry fifty-one when given this dressing down. The following year it happened again when Edward ordered flour and ‘bisket’ for the Navy from Philadelphia. He hadn’t been dealing hard enough. Savage letters were sent from Henry to Edward when he failed to collect the debts that were due to the business or when Edward decided to sell slaves in Barbados and not in Jamaica, even though the price was 75 per cent higher there.
In the autumn of 1741 they had 237 ‘very choice’ slaves which ‘would have sold for any money [in Jamaica] the demand being so great for them.’ But they had missed the opportunity.
I see you were a fortnight getting off these, whereas at Ja[maica] the sale wd not have lasted a week & you’ve 1/3 of the slaves left on hand so I plainly see what’ll be the consequence & the Gentlemen in the Concern wld rather have run the hazard of the ships going to the Bottom, they expect the difference will be at least £1,000.73
This was not the world in which a Harry Oxinden or an Oliver le Neve had ever lived. A certain modernity had entered the way the Lascelles spoke and wrote, a tautness, a rudeness, a shortness, a lack of gentility. Nonetheless, they had their gentry inheritance to consider and a man’s word continued to be one of the key commodities. It was meant to be the basis on which gentlemen, so described, could do business with each other but the correspondence between Lascelles and his many trading partners is full
of anxiety about just this. Could a man be trusted? When the gentry world revolved, in essence, around neighbourliness, a man’s keeping his word would be in his own interest. When that culture found itself dispersed across the enormous widths of the Atlantic, where it took at least three months for a reply to come to a letter sent from London to the West Indies, any sense of neighbourliness, and of the principles of honour, worth and a man’s word which relied on that mutual supervision, were stretched to the point of fragility. Something that might have been assumed before, in a pre-imperial gentry world, now required vigilance and policing. One of the investors in Lascelles’s Africa concern, Charles Benyon, wrote to another, Thomas Hall, after a family dinner party:
I trouble you with this to returne you and Mrs Hall many thanks for yor last kind entertainmt to me & mine, and to lett you know that Mr Pallett is not a man of his Word, for after he had ordered the Bill to be taken down on my Acco he has altered his mind & wants to lett it ready furnished, so that I am disappointed of the House.74
In October 1741 Thomas Hall had sent on his own behalf a valuable consignment of diamonds, 550 carats in 2,700 stones, worth £11,748 to an English dealer in Amsterdam. The dealer, George Clifford, had assured Hall of a sale.
Sir
We are sorry and ashamed to tell you that when we applied to ye person, who we advised you had made an offer for your Diamonds, he run back from his Word, and said that since that time so many Diamonds were come to Town that he absolutely could not afford to give so great a price for them which is mere trifling, but when we tell you it’s a Jew, you’ll wonder the less at such a Breach of his word, they having few sentiments of honour, had it however happened to be a sworn broker, or more witnesses than one when the offer was made we could have forced him to take them, but as the word of a Broker who is not Sworn goes for nothing in these cases, we can do nothing herein but have patience, …
George Clifford and Sons
Amsterdam75
The ranking was clear: Africans were not entirely human; Jews were human but with no concept of honour; only gentlemen understood the workings of society. But for all this mutual assurance and assumption that a gentleman’s word was his bond, it seems clear that Henry’s practice of cheating, pursued so carefully as Collector of Customs in Barbados, never left him. Other partners in the Concern reckoned he was taking more than his fair share of the proceeds. George Hamilton didn’t like the smell of the man Lascelles was employing to oversee their business.
Capt Tho Hill is a very capable man, but in my opinion not to be Intrusted in that affaire; for itt gives him an opportunity to know Every Thing we do, see most of ye letters we send home, and the Sortment of goods we write for att times. He is concerned in ships this way, which may be of greate prejudice to the concerned.76
It may be that the relative unprofitability of the Concern on the African coast – at least compared to the money Lascelles was making on his loans to planters and merchants and on the commission he was charging on the sugar landed at the London quays – led him to deceive his partners. The story is murky but the Concern came to a messy end in the early 1740s and a letter survives in the papers of Thomas Hall, one of the Concern’s partners, from one of their aggrieved captains, John Dunning:
July 19 1747
The treatment you saw I suffered from Mr Lasselles last Evening, was so insulting, scurrilous, & unGentlemanlike that I am oblidged to ask your pardon, for the Manner he oblidged me to leave; I am determined never more to meet him, unless in Westminster Hall
I shall join my own demands, and the demands of all the Captains, and others whose hard-got wages Mr Lascelles detains.77
By Westminster Hall, Dunning meant the law courts, where the argument did indeed end up.78 Another set of relationships had foundered on Lascelles’s single-minded pursuit of his own ends and his breaking of the community of honour. The gentry inheritance had disappeared under the demands of the huge, new imperial market in which he was determined to prevail. There is no reason to generalize this, or to see Lascelles as symptomatic of a bad world. It was perfectly possible to be a courteous merchant in eighteenth-century London, but Henry Lascelles was a driven, greedy, hard-line individual who may well have recognized – none of this was committed to paper – that only a truly enormous fortune would lift his family into the unassailable reaches of the aristocracy. Hard driving in one generation was the price of long-lasting significance.
In September 1743 he had acquired a new business partner, the cultivated Scotsman George Maxwell. Maxwell had been a customs searcher and slave owner in Barbados. He brought a new atmosphere to the Mincing Lane office and a change of the company’s name: Lascelles & Maxwell was a new start.
An air of friendly, complicit, gentlemanly discussion, of ease and politeness spreads across the Atlantic in Maxwell’s letters, an extension of the familiar neighbourliness of the gentry world. Very much the junior partner, he seemed to be everything Henry Lascelles was not. On arrival from six weeks at sea, shivering in the London fogs, Maxwell wrote charming gossip to his friends and contacts still in the Caribbean: how much he missed the warmth and sunlight of the Caribbean; the smoky nastiness of coal fires; the efficacies of cold baths as a way of fending off the ’flu; how Sir Robert Walpole’s new dog kennel at Houghton in Norfolk was bigger than most of their houses in Barbados; the spectacular way in which the Duke of Argyll had gone crazy; and how Dean Swift in his madness was being displayed by his family to passers-by in the street for money.79
The charm sashayed into marketing: ‘If Mr Lascelles and I can be of any use to you here in any Shape we shall gladly serve you.’ ‘As it is my happiness to know I am of the number of your friends, I think it incumbent on me to embrace the first opportunity of writing to you after my arrival.’ These were sentences written with a smile on the writer’s face. And he could be more relaxed too, buying lottery tickets for his friends (£11 7s. 6d. each) ‘& we do wish you good success therein.’80 If a ship was late reaching Bridgetown, he would write to apologize. If a ship’s captain behaved boorishly, he would write to apologize for that too.
Partly this is the world of business, partly of mutual, gentlemanly obligation. When a Barbados planter, Nicholas Willcox, wanted to borrow money in November 1745, it was difficult because although Lascelles & Maxwell had already offered him a loan, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion had disturbed the markets and as a result interest rates had gone up. Henry was forced to raise his price for the loan to 6 per cent.
We mention these things Dr Sir, only to shew you how much times are changed. We have however so high an opinion of your worth and because we are much obliged to you that as we have said it shall be at your own pleasure to allow us 5 or 6 pr ct in case you should have occasion to draw on us for any considerable sum.81
This is fascinatingly transitional language, in some ways the forerunner of the obsequious Dickensian shopkeeper, in others the descendant of gentlemanly talk from the seventeenth century and beyond. The notions of ‘worth’ and ‘honour’ have started to slide away from general qualities of a man’s character to calculable aspects of his bank balance. To ‘honour’ a debt, or the ‘worth’ of a man, was now half a moral and half a financial consideration, the sentences hovering between gentlemanly courtesy and the hand-wringing of the merchant. Was the whole idea of interest embarrassing to these people, an aspect of ungentlemanly usury? What did ‘credit’ mean in this world? When something was to a man’s credit, was that a description of his soul or his wallet?
But there was more to Maxwell than this sophisticated, manly talk. His deep longing for release from the grinding world of businessmen (‘the wiseacres of the City’,82 as he called them) emerged in a series of kind and melancholic letters written in 1744–6 to a young Barbadian planter called John Brathwaite.
20 October 1744
I hope this will find you sitting with great tranquility in your own Porch or under your delightful shady trees, after numberless Perils reflecting on the vicissitud
es of humane life. If there is anything in this world that has any appearance of what is counted happiness, you must I think enjoy it where you are, and it is some kind of happiness to me to imagine that you are contented with your present situation, & while I have the pleasure of telling you so, and I would desire to do nothg else for one hour at least, I am called off by many impertinences, one comes with a Bill for payment, and another with one for acceptance, and a third to drag me away to Lloyd’s, a place I hate as much as you do, to meet some people about business.83
London reeked of gloom for the lonely Barbadian, whose wife, Dorothy, had for some reason stayed in the Caribbean. The following January Maxwell had to write to Brathwaite again, as Lascelles had promised him a loan and had then withdrawn it, or so Brathwaite believed. ‘That his first order was afterwards contradicted’, Maxwell wrote, embarrassed, ‘I was quite ignorant. He said you must have misunderstood him … I do not chuse to dwell any longer on this Subject.’84
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