Then in November 1745, Maxwell, who was now in his mid-forties, wrote movingly to the younger man.
I am extremely sorry, Dr Sir, at the many disappointments you found in Barbados, and that things appeared quite different from what you had been used to here and expected there. The treatment of the negroes I might have foreseen, had I considered, would ill Suit the Gentleness of your nature, but that I happened to overlook, after having lived many more years in that Island than you have done in the wourld. It was become familiar to me by use. But I must declare that I was once Owner of above 100, and perhaps was one of the mildest Masters. None clothed or fed better, yet they are by nature so Stupid that I found none so ill served as I was; and therefore some correction is necessary. I used to pity their abject state at first, but afterwards found they were just as happy as their nature was capable of being.85
Among the planter gentry, the humanity of that statement is exceptionally rare, and it is perhaps a measure of George Maxwell’s civility that he could recognize the unsuitability of John Brathwaite to the world in which Henry Lascelles thrived.
There had been some kind of violent incident in Barbados in which Brathwaite had become involved and which had left him shaken. Maxwell continued to encourage him. ‘I wish you would afterwards return to this place’, he wrote from London,
as nothing here could give me greater pleasure than to see you well. You ask me, if I will not think my Self much happier than you are, by living free from such tumults. Did you know truly my Condition, you would not think it to be envied. My mind is in Continual agitation about business, and bating [i.e. leaving aside] my being in good health which I own is a great blessing, I have as little enjoyment of Life as anyone. Most people have real or imaginary Crosses, which are the same in effect. I confess I love Solitude, and hate to be in a Croud, but forever expect to have my choice. Some Friends I had in Barbados used to talk of our retiring Some where out of the busy world, and the most proper place to retire to was proposed to be Bermuda. When you have been there, pray inform me how you think it would do for 3 or 4 Select friends? I imagine you would incline to be of Such a Company.86
Here, ever green, the Horatian dream had re-surfaced – the loathed crowds, the continual agitation of business – with Arcadia now taking the form of a beautiful island in the Atlantic:
You give one great Pleasure, Dr Sir, in mentioning the affection that was between us while you was last in London. I am pleased as often as I reflect on the agreeable hours we passed together and I shall ever think it my happiness that I was acquainted with you.87
Amidst all his explanations of the way in which higher risk in war meant that money was more expensive and the apologies for the hard bargaining of Mr Lascelles – ‘for I am sorry he once disappointed you’ – these letters are an oasis of gentleness and longing.
‘I should be glad to enjoy a Continuance of your Correspondence,’ Maxwell had written to his young friend, but the Lascelles & Maxwell Letterbooks never come to this emotional level again. Between the two of them, loans are negotiated, problems with debts and overseers encountered, the spoiling of his sugars described, first in an Atlantic storm and then at the hands of some lightermen on the Thames who had failed to pull the tarpaulin over: all take their place alongside hundreds of equivalent pages. Only once, in April 1757, does an invoice appear in the accounts for ‘210 romalls [a kind of Indian silk check] handkerchiefs which Mr Brathwaite sends over as a present for his negroes’.88 That last phrase is unique in this rich and deeply detailed archive. Perhaps Maxwell’s example had carried with him and Brathwaite had joined the ranks of ‘the mildest Masters’.
No doubt Henry Lascelles was one of the crosses which George Maxwell had to bear. His rages and intemperance, his going back on his word, the nifty increases in the interest rates he charged, his open contempt for his brother and other associates in their business dealings, his refusing to pay out to those officers who had worked for him on the African shore: all of that points to a man for whom contentment was no more than a distant dream.
One letter in particular reveals the man he thought he was. It was written in October 1741 to Thomas Stevenson, a Barbados official who not only had borrowed money from Lascelles but who also held the office of Marshal on the island. His job was to collect debts from non-payers. A quarter of the fees generated by Stevenson was paid to Henry Lascelles and his half-brother Edward. In 1741 Lascelles wrote to him to explain the principles on which debtors should or should not be forced to pay up:
I am not urgent to have the Money for Debt, I only want to have it ascertained & fixed beyond contradiction to receive the interest of it annually but if this should not be instantly complied with, & secured to me, it is my positive order that the executions be forthwith levied without any pretense or evasion whatsoever.89
No verb to be without its intensifier, no instruction without its intolerant adjective: either people paid the interest they owed without delay or they should be pursued for the whole debt. Henry Lascelles was a man with no comprehension of the word ‘latitude’. In that way, he had left the gentry world behind.
Next to nothing is known of Henry’s wives, first Mary Carter, who died in 1721, and then Jennet Whetstone. Of his own son Daniel, a little more can be made out. He returned from Barbados aged about twenty-five in 1739 and joined the firm. But he must have been a Hogarthian ne’er-do-well, as in 1740 Daniel got married secretly to a beautiful and impoverished young woman called Elizabeth Southwick. Henry did not hesitate and cut Daniel out of the business. By June the following year, Daniel had left his wife and was looking for a reconciliation with his father. This was achieved first by Daniel going on a tour of Italy and France and then in 1742 being sent to the East Indies, where he remained until 1750.
The Act of Parliament granting Daniel’s divorce came through in November 1751,90 the grounds given that Elizabeth had been sleeping with a man called Henry Parminter of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a bankrupt,91 which may or may not have been true. It was the sort of thing that was often concocted in the circumstances. She became a pauper, pawning all her possessions, including her portrait from the Lascelles moment in her life, ‘set in gold & a fine India white satin Counterpane’, pledged for £6.92
Henry was now one of the great men of England, sitting in Parliament for the family seat of Northallerton, commanding the sugar trade, one of the great financiers of the City, a voice in the ear of crown ministers and government officials, accumulating funds which after his death would be invested in Yorkshire estates for his sons Edwin and Daniel. Among Daniel’s acquisitions was the ancient hall and lands of Plumpton near Knaresborough, where an earlier gentry family had flowered and died.
In 1750, Henry retired from the business to spend his time in Richmond with Jennet. He drew up his will, leaving most of his business interests to the rehabilitated Daniel, and an enormous fortune to his eldest son, Edwin, who had been cultivated at Cambridge, in the salons of Europe, on the battlefield (against the Jacobites in 1746), in Parliament for Scarborough and in his own newly acquired Yorkshire estates as a nascent grandee. It was Edwin who as Lord Harewood began the construction of Harewood House, its mahogany doors and its Arcadian landscape re-importing rich, exotic dreams into Yorkshire’s damp, ancestral acres.93
If you expect Henry Lascelles to slide quietly towards oblivion and the grave, to retire as the childless George Maxwell did, leaving his estate to a grateful nephew, who would in time become a Hampshire squire, his grounds landscaped by Capability Brown, his children burbling around him, it wasn’t like that.94 On 6 October 1753, at Lichfield House in Richmond, Henry Lascelles ‘killed himself, by opening the veins in his wrists’.95 A Yorkshire diarist, Thomas Gyll, heard that he had ‘cut his throat and arms and across his belly’.96 He bled to death in a pool of his own blood.
Is there any explanation for such an end to such a life? He had been suffering for years from cataracts in both eyes, a horrible condition which in the eighteenth century could
be remedied only with a pair of scissors and no anaesthetic.97 But Henry Lascelles was too hardboiled for a little blindness to drive him to suicide. Nor is it realistic to think that his life of slave dealing would have made him do it. He might have been one of the regents of hell, but he would not have known that. Up until the end he was pursuing those members of the government who wanted to give Jews the right to trade in the City of London. The threat which that represented to the Lascelles loan, mortgage and finance business meant neither he nor, it is fair to say, most of the English financier-merchants could tolerate the idea. There is no evidence of any final sweetening in the mind of Henry Lascelles.
There are perhaps two possibilities. The first is to do with the time of life at which he killed himself. It was an idea with deep classical roots that human existence naturally divided into phases of seven years each. Our celebrating twenty-first birthdays is a faint memory of that but in the eighteenth century these moments were seen more systematically. Each seven-year transition was known as a ‘climacteric’ and the sixty-third year, nine times seven, was the ‘grand climacteric’, described by the literary scholar Pat Rogers as ‘a sort of autumn equinox in human existence, corresponding to the vernal marker of 21’.98 The sixty-third year was the moment a man entered his terminal decline. Sir John Oglander (Chapter “Steadiness”) had realized that ‘about theyre Cleymiterricoll yeare 63’ most of the men of his own family died.99
As Henry Lascelles confronted the approach of his own grand climacteric, his sixty-third birthday on 20 December 1753, he may have looked on it with horror: the dissolution of his commanding self. Guilt may not be the appropriate word, but he must also have known what his life of corruption, domination and rage had done to his name. He was not loved. Not a single artefact among the huge, gathered riches at Harewood House records the founder of the Lascelles fortune. No portrait of him exists and his memory continued as a dark ghost over the name of the Lascelles well into the nineteenth century. He was buried in a lead-lined coffin in a vault in Northallerton church. In 1814, it was opened and Henry’s memory was recorded then as ‘one of those unprincipled men who were concerned in the shameful South Sea Bubble business, whereby he amassed great wealth to the ruin of many’.100
Lascelles had abandoned the way of the gentry, recognizing not only that greater rewards lay in the realms of the Atlantic, but that an uncompromising frame of mind, a readiness to gamble all, at least when combined with relentless and rigorous vigilance, would set his family on the road to impregnable riches. Perhaps he could be seen as a martyr to his own posterity?
1730s–1790s
Courage
The Pinckneys
Wappoo and Charleston, South Carolina, and Richmond, Surrey
If the story of Henry Lascelles was founded on a willing departure from gentry norms, the life history of Eliza Lucas Pinckney is its opposite: the emergence of gentry virtues in a world that might have been entirely hostile to them. Her father’s family, the Lucases, had been in Antigua in the Caribbean since the 1660s. It was a harsh place, a small island twenty miles by seventeen, very dry and subject to both devastating fires and ‘the terrible Hurry Caines that doeth everie year distroye their Houses & Crops’.1 The French islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique and the Spanish bases in Cuba were just over the horizon and Antigua lived for year after year in a state of armed tension. Pirates cruised the intervening seas.
In many ways the strain of Antigua’s exposed predicament seeped into the quality of life there. By 1729 the 3,700 whites on the island were living close alongside their 24,400 African slaves, in conditions which even for the eighteenth-century Caribbean were acknowledged as horrible. The English population lived in fear of a slave revolt. They had nowhere to run in a crisis and repressive measures were harsh. Any white man who killed a runaway slave was given £3 by the governor, £6 if he caught him alive. When runaway slaves were caught, they were prosecuted for theft and invariably found guilty of stealing themselves.2
The Lucases had about 700 acres in three sugar plantations, hundreds of slaves to work them and four windmills with which to process the cane, but it was no luxury life. Even the richest of contemporary planters in the Leeward Islands had houses of no more than five rooms, three on the ground floor, two above.3 The island was hard driven, with more windmills per square mile than anywhere else in the Caribbean. It was a slave camp in the service of sugar and money.
The distance from the regulating Board of Trade and Plantations in England meant that a sequence of early eighteenth-century royal governors in Antigua ran corrupt and aggressive regimes. George’s father, John Lucas, found himself on the wrong side of one of them, Christopher Codrington, who threatened him and his family, threw him in jail, demanded £5,000 bail, murdered one of his slaves and had ‘his son [either Eliza’s father or an uncle], a youth of tender years, hunted with dogs and heathen’.4
Eliza Lucas was born in 1722 into this jagged, frontier world, the daughter of her father’s ‘Curtizan’ – his unmarried mistress.5 A coat of gentry civilization was laid over the brutal slave-worked realities of their lives. John Lucas became Speaker of the Antigua Assembly and a Justice of the Peace. His son George followed him in both positions and in 1713 bought himself a commission in the army, providing access to government finance, a means of gentry survival when the sugar markets looked difficult.
In common with every planter family in Antigua, the Lucases were living on credit. Most of the land was mortgaged and the debts to London creditors went unpaid for decades. In about 1700 John Lucas had arranged with a consortium of London merchants to transport to Antigua a cargo of ‘merchandizes, negro Slaves, goods and other valuable effects amounting to a very considerable value’. But he had failed to pay his co-investors their share of the profit. Not until thirty years later in 1729, after his father’s death, did his son George finally pay the debt, then amounting to £1,080 plus £990 interest, by mortgaging to them a plantation on Antigua of 300 acres of land and its 200 slaves.6
By then, the sugar business was in steep decline and as Eliza grew up it sank further. Between 1729 and 1737, the Antigua sugar trade slumped by 83 per cent. Years of drought devastated the crops. In 1736 the island was ‘almost burnt up’ by a plague of insects called the ‘blast’. In October 1736 a conspiracy to kill all the leading planter families was discovered, led by an African called Tackey at the head of ‘a numerous and disaffected herd of African slaves’.7 Early in the next year, 88 of the rebels were executed and 37 banished. Their owners were compensated for the destruction of their property but it marked the end of what contentment there had been here, the gentry of the island ‘believing the Negroes will accomplish their Designs sooner or later’.8 In what the Antiguans called ‘the decade of misfortune’, the island had become ‘a meare grave’.9
A few years later, George wrote to his friend and new son-in-law Charles Pinckney explaining the chronic burden of
the Incumbrances on my Estate [which are] so large and heavy That I have no expectation of any thing from [the sale of it]. It will be sold for payments of debts due from it and that th[ere will be] no remains … The estate left me by my father hath been sunk in his Debts, and such [debts] as [I was] obliged to create in improving a large Tract of Empty land, being over[come wi]th excessive low Marketts.10
It was a hard-bitten upbringing, in which, you might imagine, it must have been difficult to nurture many gentry virtues. Nevertheless, somehow, from the midst of this tension and trouble, came the remarkable sensibility of Eliza Lucas, undoubtedly fed by the love and trust of her father – he called her Betsey – and perhaps by his need to find in her an ally and joint sustainer of the family project.
‘I was very early fond of the vegitable world,’ she wrote at the end of her own life. ‘My father was pleased with it and encouraged it, he told me the turn I had for those amusements might produce something of real and public utility.’11 Even in the rough circumstances of 1720s Antigua, George mentored and tutored hi
s daughter in botany and gardening, and perhaps in bookkeeping and estate management. In 1732, when she was ten, he sent her to London to be educated. She spent five years in England, staying with her father’s commission agent, Richard Boddicott, in Savage Gardens, a few streets away from the Lascelles office in Mincing Lane in the City, and receiving her education at Mrs Pearson’s boarding school for young ladies, probably in the airy suburban village of Hackney.12
Fanny Fayweather and a Miss Parry, both cousins from Antigua, were there with her, as well as Catherine Martin, whose father, John, was one of the truly rich, inheritor of a fortune from the family bank, Martin’s, to which he contributed nothing but ‘appears to have chosen as a profession that of being his father’s heir’.13 There was some status gap here: Catherine was never referred to in Eliza’s letters as anything but ‘Miss Martin’.
At the school, as the South Carolina historian Harriet Simons Williams has described,
The governess taught ‘the acomplishments’ with great emphasis on fine sewing. There would have been a dancing master, a French master, and a writing master who also taught reckoning and simple household bookkeeping, English literature, history, ‘the globes’, and a smattering of science, especially botany for girls.14
As Eliza’s later letters show, she was at home with Plutarch and Virgil (in translation); she read John Locke, the governing mind of the eighteenth-century gentry; and studied music. Polish had been applied and in late 1737, shepherded by one of her father’s fellow members of the Antigua Assembly, she sailed home to the Caribbean.
None of this was exceptional. The other girls at Mrs Pearson’s were undergoing the same training. But what happened next, driven by a combination of her father’s chronic indebtedness, her mother’s lack of command, the developing military situation in the western Atlantic and George Lucas’s deep trust of his teenage daughter, pushed Eliza Lucas’s life far out of the ordinary.
The Gentry Page 25