The Gentry

by Adam Nicolson

  She maintained this busy pitch of life, taking her mother to dinners and parties in Charles Town, looking after her sister and pursuing in particular the cultivation of indigo, the valued blue vegetable dye, whose trade was dominated by the French. Her correspondence with her father on the subject was as constant as the war would allow. He, now the deputy Governor of Antigua, had been involved in two futile raids on the Venezuelan shore, but, when he could, he sent her advice and even experts in the cultivation of the plants and the complex processing of the seeds; she sent him news of her experiments and those of her neighbours to whom she distributed the seeds.

  We please ourselves with the prospect of exporting in a few years a good quantity from hence, and supplying our Mother Country with a manifacture for wch she has so great a demand, and which she is now supplyd with from the French Collonys, and many thousand pounds per annum thereby lost to the nation, when she might as well be supplyd here, if the matter was applyd to in earnest.36

  The cultivation did not go easily from the start and her father suggested that the brick vats in which they were steeping the indigo plants might have been the cause of trouble; timber might have been better. Frost ruined entire crops; the germination rates of the seed sent from the Caribbean were often poor. The man sent by Colonel Lucas from Montserrat in the Caribbean was failing, either deliberately or not, to produce a rich and deep enough colour in the cakes of dye. Another was sent. There was a valuable prize at stake, as the British had been buying £200,000 worth of indigo from the French islands every year. In 1744 the seed was largely saved and as an act of communal and neighbourly solidarity distributed free by Eliza to her gentry neighbours, ‘in small quantities to a great number of people’.37 Nothing about this enterprise, her engagement with experimental agriculture, with the Atlantic markets or with trade itself, seemed in any way contradictory to the gentry culture she was embracing with such fervour at the same time. One was a means of delivering and sustaining the other. The Horatian tension between otium and negotium, ease and business, elegance and struggle, had been swept away.

  By 1747, 135,000 pounds of indigo dye cakes were made in South Carolina and exported to England for sale. Within the decade production had reached a million pounds of finished indigo a year. The British government immediately offered a premium of sixpence a pound on the dye, a protectionist measure which excluded French indigo from British markets. Eliza had added another commodity to the rice which South Carolina had been exporting to Britain for decades and South Carolina entered a long mid-century war-economy boom, during which the planters were doubling their capital every three or four years, all part of ‘the transformation of a semi-tropical swamp into the most profitable colony in mainland America’.38

  Ever since the Lucases’ arrival in South Carolina, the gentry neighbours had attended to the fatherless family’s wellbeing, none more carefully than the cultivated planter-lawyer Charles Pinckney. He had been born in Carolina but had been educated and trained in the law in London. He lent Eliza his books, to supplement the library her father had left for her, and introduced her to the string of elegant Virgilian plantations distributed around the Ashley and Cooper rivers that met at Charles Town. In early 1744, Charles Pinckney’s wife, who had been ill for months, sickened and died. It was later said in the Pinckney family that the first Mrs Pinckney was so attached to Eliza that ‘she had more than once declared, that rather than have her lost to Carolina, she would herself “be willing to step down and let her take her place”’.39

  Pinckney followed his dead wife’s suggestion to the letter. Within a month or two of the first Mrs Pinckney’s death, Eliza became the second. Her dowry was paltry and she wrote to her father to thank and forgive him:

  I have had too many instances of your paternal affection and tenderness to doubt your doing all in your power to make me happy, and I beg leave here to acknowledge particularly my obligation to you for the pains and money you laid out in my Education, which I esteem a more valuable fortune than any you could now have given me.40

  This was more than filial courtesy. Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s understanding of herself was not as an heiress but as an educated and self-educating operator in the real world. Allied now to the Pinckneys, she was established as a ‘person of Character and Distinction’.

  This is how her life continued. Solid silver sauce boats and candlesticks were ordered from London workshops, emblazoned with the impaled arms of Pinckney and Lucas. Eliza experimented with the cultivation of silkworms and planted the mulberry trees whose descendants still grow wild in the lands bordering the ancient Carolina plantations. The Pinckneys built themselves a large, beautiful columned house on the shorefront in Charles Town itself, looking across the waters of the harbour where it reached out towards the Atlantic. It was made of small, dark, English bricks, with stone copings, and a tall slate roof. A wide flagged hall stretched from front to back of the house, and two drawing rooms on the first floor, with high coved ceilings and heavy cornices, looked over the water.

  The whole house was wainscoted in the heaviest panelling, the windows and doors with deep projecting pediments and mouldings … The mantel-pieces were very high and narrow, with fronts carved in processions of shepherds and shepherdesses, cupids, etc., and had square frames in the panelling above, to be filled with pictures.41

  In a life with no hint of provincialism, Eliza and Charles administered the Pinckney properties that were scattered along the rivers leading in towards the South Carolina hinterland. Charles became rich, children emerged, beautiful and adored, with ‘fine black Eyes’42 and parties were held. The Pinckneys rode a happy boom and Eliza loved and revered her husband: ‘I can indeed tell you I have the greatest esteem and affection imaginable for you; that next to Him that form’d it, my heart is intirely at your disposal, but this you knew the day I gave you my hand.’43

  The presence of this contented rich family and the new and intimate father figure in her life meant that when it was announced in The Gentleman’s Magazine for 11 January 1747 that ‘Geo. Lucas, Lieut. Col. of Dalzel’s Reg. and Lieut. Governor of Antigua’ had not only been ‘taken in an Antigua ship’ and was now a prisoner at the great French naval port of Brest, but had then died in captivity, Eliza’s life – she was now twenty-four – did not capsize.44 For a culture which put such vivid emphasis on the beauty and importance of human affections, the demands of the Atlantic world were particularly harsh. Not only was the separation by distance very long – ten weeks to Carolina from England, three weeks from Carolina to Antigua – but there was also the threat of illness and death; and other hazards of war.

  In 1753, Charles was appointed interim Chief Justice of South Carolina, but within a couple of months, against all expectations, the appointment was not confirmed, and he was replaced by a venal English politician, who was being conveniently shuffled off to the colonies so that he would be absent from Westminster. The disappointment for the Pinckneys was enormous and early that summer they decided to sail for England – Pinckney did not want to be in Charles Town as his replacement arrived. England would be where they would educate their sons and set themselves up as English gentry.

  Soon after arriving, they moved into a rented house in Richmond-upon-Thames – not poky: they had two spare beds for visitors45 – just down the road from Henry Lascelles. The Pinckneys did not operate on anything like the scale which Lascelles had engineered for himself but they were, as one of their new Richmond neighbours said, ‘persons of Character and Distinction in the Country from whence they came’.46 They had their two sons with them, Charles and Thomas, both in London to be educated, and their daughter Harriott, still only seven. She had brought with her some beautiful American birds: an Indigo Bunting in the mineral, lapis blue of his summer plumage; a red-breasted and blue-headed Painted Bunting, or the Bruant Nonpareil; and an American Goldfinch, whose flickering, dancing su-weet, su-weet filled the air like a canary’s. The presence and song of these exotic birds sets this family apart from
anything you might have found in the Lascelles house. Here was the eighteenth-century gentry domesticated, civilized, familial, cultivated, in love with nature and at ease with themselves.

  On Eliza’s arrival in Richmond, chat poured from her pen. ‘We visit 10 or a dozen agreeable familys’, she told a Charleston matron47 and recounted at length the 700-mile tour they were to take around the south of England. All was fine except that the English played cards too much. The Americans were already working harder. There were plans for a tour of the north. Charles was being difficult and ‘has many [y]earnings after his native land’48 but Eliza had her mind on something else. She was set on paying a visit to the Princess of Wales, who lived a mile away from their Richmond house in Kew. Eliza’s long, discursive letter about this meeting describes an emblematic eighteenth-century gentry moment, an encounter with inherited authority between people who – in some ways – had ceased to believe in it.

  That year, Augusta, ‘The Princess Dowager of Wales’, as she was known, was in her early thirties, only three years older than Eliza.49 She had begun life as an obscure princess in the principality of Saxe-Gotha, deep in the agricultural heart of Germany, and had arrived in England in 1736, aged sixteen, homesick for her governess and unable to speak a word of English, destined for the hand of the difficult, sophisticated and argumentative Frederick, Prince of Wales. But Augusta was a subtle and instinctive politician and was soon loved in England for her air of innocence and simplicity, which she cultivated carefully as the foundations of influence on court and English life. The Waleses had many children and she had herself painted with them clustered around her, a model of refined, domestic sensibility, wearing only simple English fabrics, unlike the court of George II, her father-in-law, which was stiff with mistresses in lace and French silks. Augusta became the patron and promoter of the new botanical garden at Kew and a paradoxical heroine for those who loathed the King. When the Prince of Wales died suddenly in 1751, Augusta acquired the unique and powerful role of Mother to the Future King, George III, and became for a while (her reputation would sink later) the guar antor of national virtue, a mother-governor of the nation, living with her large young family in their elegant and simple William Kent villa at Kew. This was the woman Eliza Pinckney wanted to meet.

  Her interest was not, in the light of this history, mere royalty gawping. The two women were of a generation. Both of them put a high and public priority on the needs of their children, both combined family management with a commitment to British commercial enterprise, both were deeply interested in experimental botany, and both as young women had engaged with an alarmingly powerful masculine world and triumphed within it. It is perfectly possible to suggest that Eliza Pinckney was visiting her hero.

  The Americans had some contacts in England but, as Eliza wrote to a friend in Charles Town, actually getting in to see the Princess

  was attended with great difficulty as the attendance about the Princess are extreamly causious who they admit to her presence. We mentioned our desire to see the Royal family and to have our little girl present the birds to a gentleman here [Richmond] who we know to be well acquainted with some about the Princess, he very readily undertook it, and next day went to Kew where the Princess of Wales and all her family reside during the Summer Season; they gave the Princess a Prodigious Character, and said they would mention it to her Royal Highness; but let him know at the same time how great a favour they did him, by saying it was a thing very rarely permitted, especially to those they were not acquainted with.50

  This is Eliza’s manner: proper but direct, her gossiping energies constrained by a corset of dignified, classical language. From her tone there is no doubting the scepticism she felt about these flunkies, puffed up as usual, and it might be tempting to see that impatience as American; but it is indistinguishable, for example, from John Oglander’s 1630s distaste for the degenerate courtiers around Charles I. The gentry tradition had never been obsequious. But the Pinckneys were given an appointment, ‘at Eleven o’clock any day the next week’. They duly turned up, if a little late,

  and we found the Princess gone a airing with the Princess Augusta [her eldest daughter, then sixteen], and it was uncertain when she would return. We carried the birds in the Coach with us, and wrote a card to give the child in her hand, in case we should not go in with her. The card was this.

  Miss Harriott Pinckney, daughter of Charles Pinckney Esqr, one of His Majesty’s Council of South Carolina, pays her duty to her Highness and humbly begs leave to present her with an Indigo bird, a Nonpareil, and a yellow bird, wch she has brought from Carolina for her Highness.51

  They left the birds, with the card, and went home, ‘lamenting as we went the uneasy situation of those who had favours to ask or are dependance on a Court!’52

  That night they had a message that the birds had done their work and the Princess ‘would be glad to see Miss Pinckney at one o’clock the next day’. It was another mark of the nature of this hybrid eighteenth-century civilization: the formal invitation was issued to the seven-year-old Harriott. They went to Kew the following day ‘in full dress’ and, after a delay talking to an old German lady, were taken through a suite of grand, public rooms until they arrived at the Princess’s dressing room, where the Princess

  came forward and received us at the door herself, with Princess Augusta, Princess Elizabeth, Prince William, and Prince Henry. She mett us with all the chearfulness and pleasure of a friend who was extreamly glad to see us; she gave us no time to consider how to introduce ourselves or to be at a loss what to say, for she with an air of benignity told us as soon as we entered she was very glad to see us, took Harriott by the hand and kissed her, asked her how she liked England, to wch she answered, not so well as Carolina, at wch the Princess laughd a good deal, and said it was very natural for such a little woman as she to love her own Country best. She thanked her for the birds, and said she was afraid one of them might be a favourite of hers; spoke very kindly sometimes to Mr Pinckney, sometimes to me, and then to the Child.53

  The attendants and courtiers withdrew and the Princess went through the conventionalities, all of them standing talking in the room, which was decorated with ‘a great deal of China upon two Cabinets’ and presumably with the bright American birds singing in their cages.

  But Harriott was a little overwrought and her distress broke through the crust. The Princess suggested that she should sit down in a chair, which alarmed Eliza’s sense of propriety:

  I told her I could not suffer her to sit in her presence. Puh-Puh, says the Princess, she knows nothing of all that; and sat her down and told her she had no pretty things here for her, but when she went to London she would get something that was pretty and send to her.54

  Puh-Puh: the culture of sensibility addresses the rigidities of the past. The younger Wales children then went to have dinner and the Pinckneys were left with the princess and her eldest daughter for more intimate conversation.

  She asked me many little domestick questions as did Princess Augusta among wch if I suckled my children. I told her I had attempted it but my constitution would not bear it. She said she did not know but ’twas as well let alone, as the anxiety a mother was often in, on a child’s acct, might do hurt. I told her we had Nurses in our houses, that it appeard very strange to me to hear of people putting their children out to nurse, we had no such practises in Carolina, at which she seemed vastly pleased; she thought it was a very good thing, the other was unnatural. Princess Augusta was surprized at the suckling blacks; the Princess stroakd Harriott’s cheek, said it made no alteration in the complexion and paid her the compliment of being very fair and pretty.55

  Their talk ranged beyond the domestic, to political affairs in Carolina, the relationship of the colonists with the Indians and the French, earthquakes and hurricanes (waters the year before had surged four feet deep into the Pinckneys’ Charles Town house), the growing of silk there (in which Eliza was experimenting) and how far South Carolina ‘extended bac
k’ – away from the Atlantic coast into the great unknown interior of America. This chat, the world of Puh-Puh, breastfeeding, the psychological benefits of calm in motherhood: Eliza was undeniably modern.

  After a couple of years, their time in England turned from delight and pleasure in their country house at Ripley in Surrey, their visiting of neighbours, their hobnobbing with the minor aristocracy, ‘to gloomy anxiety’.56 Once the Seven Years War against the French had started in 1756, the Pinckneys received ‘continual alarms from abroad’ and they decided to sever all connections with America. But to do so they had to go back there. ‘Mr. Pinckney came to a resolution to return to Carolina for two years, and wait an opportunity to dispose of the greatest part of what he has there, and fix it in a more secure tho’ less improvable part of the world’.57

  The instinct in mid-eighteenth-century Americans, when conditions looked bad, was to cut and run for ‘Home’, ‘the Mother Country’. In 1758, with deep reluctance at leaving their sons behind at school in England, Charles and Eliza decided to sail back to Carolina, preparing to wind up their operations there.

  How uncertain are human dependancies! four years ago we left a fine and flourishing Collony in profound peace; a Collony so valuable to this nation that it would have been lookd upon as absurd to have the least doubt of its being protected and taken care of in case of a Warr, tho’ a Warr then seemed a very distant contingency, and indeed I lookd upon an Estate there as secure as in England, and upon some acct more Valuable, especially to those who have a young family; but how much reason we have had to change our sentiments since the beginning of this Warr, is too plain to every one ever so little acquainted with American Affairs.58