But this “interest,” as it was called, was in many cases insufficient for overall control. In the counties and larger boroughs, there were enough floating votes to ensure that the result was not a foregone conclusion. This meant that other methods had to be used. To label these methods as bribery is to oversimplify how contemporaries understood them. Voters were aware of their own value and had to be courted. Very occasionally, outright bribes were offered, but more often local goodwill was cultivated by spending a great deal of money. Charitable donations, provision of jobs, lavish treats and dinners, compensation for the expense and trouble of traveling to the polls—all were part of the business of getting a man elected to Parliament.4 Although electoral managers would have liked to have the power simply to designate candidates, this rarely happened in practice. In the election of 1722, by dint of hard work, the Duke of Newcastle was able to engineer the return of sixteen members to Parliament. But only in two “pocket boroughs,” each controlled by a handful of electors, was he able to appoint his own personal choices as parliamentary candidates.5 Electioneering could be ruinously expensive, and so it would prove for Lord Howe.
The 1722 election proved to be a political turning point for Nottinghamshire. The Duke of Newcastle brought forward Scrope Lord Howe and Sir Robert Sutton as candidates for the county. Both seats had been seized by the Tories after Scrope’s father had died in 1713, and Newcastle was determined to regain them for the Whigs. He spent a small fortune visiting the area, holding open house twice weekly at his Nottingham Castle residence, and offering financial support to his candidates. “I have scarce been sober since I came,” he complained. It was a hard-fought election, but in the end the Tories were so thoroughly ousted that they would not challenge the Whigs in Nottinghamshire again.6 Lord Howe was reelected unopposed in 1727. By now, however, he was so deeply in debt that it hardly mattered.
Scrope’s debts were not just due to a contested election. Since his marriage in 1719, he and Lady Howe had lived well, mixing with the wealthiest figures in the county, improving the hall and pleasure gardens at Langar, joining in the Belvoir Hunt and keeping racehorses.7 The Howes were not as wealthy as their neighbor, the Duke of Rutland, but they strove to keep up with him. This has the look of vanity, but there was more to it. For genteel families like the Howes, a high profile at the royal court or in Parliament offered the opportunity for lucrative offices or sinecures. This was seen as a wholly respectable and natural way of improving the family fortunes.8 Young Lord Howe had a growing family and sisters who required dowries. In the quest for advancement, he needed to spend money in order to put himself where he was likely to receive an offer, and the House of Commons was such a place. Ironically, however, the post that was to repair Scrope’s fortunes obliged him to resign his seat in Parliament. In 1732, on the recommendation of the Duke of Newcastle, he was appointed governor of Barbados, at a salary of £7,000 a year.9
Barbados! Surrounded by the Caribbean Sea, with a tropical climate and hurricanes, what could be more different from rural England? It was one of Britain’s colonial American possessions, which extended in a vast arc from Newfoundland to the West Indies. The most profitable of these were the plantation colonies that produced such valuable crops as tobacco, rice, and sugar. The island of Barbados, less than a quarter the size of Nottinghamshire, was devoted to the cultivation of sugar. Like the other plantation colonies, it was dependent upon enslaved labor. Settled for more than a century, Barbados in the 1730s had a ratio of four blacks to every white. The grueling conditions of labor on the “sugar islands” were such that continuous imports of enslaved Africans were necessary to maintain the slave populations on the plantations.10
A passage to Barbados from England took up to six weeks by packet boat.11 Lord Howe had heretofore only boarded a ship to cross the English Channel; now he would make a sea voyage of more than four thousand miles in an age when wooden vessels, at the mercy of the elements, sometimes never reached their destination. There were many preparations to be made. Scrope delayed his departure, remaining at Langar until the arrival of daughter Juliana in September; Lady Howe and the girls were going with him.
Caroline, Charlotte, and the baby, Julie, were bound for Barbados, but the Howe boys would remain in Britain. George and Richard were enrolled at Westminster School in London. George, who was eight, had probably already been boarded at Nottingham School for a year or so, but Richard was only six; this would be his first experience away from home.12 While they were there, the two boys would be under the watchful eye of their aunt, Lady Pembroke, who lived on the outskirts of the metropolis. Three-year-old William and toddler Thomas would remain with their grandmother at Langar, although one of the two youngest, probably William, was brought to town to see the rest of his family off.13
Everything had to be done in style; Scrope Lord Howe was determined to look the part of the new governor of Barbados. He put on a lavish going-away banquet for the freeholders of Nottingham at Langar Hall, “an Ox and 3 Sheep being roasted whole, and ten Hogsheads of strong Beer.”14 His kinsman and neighbor, the Duke of Rutland, presented him with a new state coach.15 He arranged transport of a large quantity of elegant furniture for his governor’s mansion in Bridgetown, and he engaged English servants to accompany the family, although the enslaved service on the island would undoubtedly come cheaper.16 An onlooker might be forgiven for not suspecting that his lordship was taking up his post in order to claw his way out of debt.
From the start, things went awry. First, the coach carrying the three girls to their port of embarkation overturned. Next, when the family finally boarded their ship at Portsmouth in late February, they were detained by contrary winds. When HMS Rye finally sailed very early on March 3, 1733, the entire party was beset by seasickness. To add to their distress, a messenger arrived, informing Lord Howe that the ship carrying his baggage and state coach had been lost off the coast of Ireland.17 At least they were spared the news that one of their sons at Westminster had just fallen dangerously ill, an emergency Lady Pembroke was obliged to handle in her new role as surrogate parent.18 All in all, it was an inauspicious beginning for a sea voyage in late winter. The reduced circle of the Howe family finally reached Bridgetown, Barbados, by mid-April.19
Numerous testimonies have survived to bear witness to Lord Howe’s popularity as governor among the white planter population of Barbados, but one wonders what his wife and daughters thought of it. In many ways, colonial Barbados could be described as a vast slave compound punctuated by the homes of English planters who so desired normalcy that they ruined their health wearing London fashions in the sweltering heat, while their slaves went about clad in just a single garment.20 The plants, the food, the climate, the African servants in house and in field, the landscape that ended relentlessly with the limitless blue of the Caribbean—all must have seemed alien to Caroline. Since her chief amusements in Langar had been outdoors, she was not well placed to ignore her new environment. And raised as she was in the English values of civil and political liberty, Caroline was now confronted by the hypocrisy of a British colony where human beings were treated as chattel and brutal punishments were routinely meted out for disobedience. She may have been screened from the whippings and beatings, but she must have been aware that white supremacy and the subjugation of the majority population of black slaves was sustained by force.21 Whatever she thought while there as a girl, she gave no sign of ever wanting to visit the West Indies again; almost fifty years later, when she heard the news that a friend had just been appointed governor of Barbados, she referred to it as a banishment from society.22
Barbados was a place where life expectancy for even the well-todo whites was low, with many not living past their forties.23 Lady Howe was pregnant again once they were ashore, and another daughter, Mary, was born in the tropics. Ironically, despite his wife’s condition, it was Lord Howe who succumbed. On March 21, 1735, hardly two years after his arrival, Scrope fell ill; six days later, at barely thirty-six, he was dea
d. Onlookers recalled that he took leave of his family “in the most tender and affectionate manner.” For Scrope and Charlotte, it was the end of a love affair. “More obliging Expressions never drop’d from the Mouth of a Bridegroom to his beloved Bride,” wrote one observer feelingly. Yet the Howe trait of stoicism was conspicuous throughout. Lord Howe appeared from the first to know he was going to die, and he spoke of it “as of any other common subject,” trying to make all ready for the inevitable event.24 He arranged his funeral and appealed to the leading planters on the island to assist his “prudent tender and most affectionate wife” in undertaking the difficult return voyage to England.25
By June, Lady Howe was back in London with the new baby in her arms and her three older daughters and servants in tow.26 Such was her haste to leave Barbados that her husband’s body had to follow; not until October was the 2nd Viscount Howe finally laid to rest in Langar.27 His widow had done what was necessary with determination and dispatch, but even she had her limits. Within a few weeks of stepping ashore in England, Lady Howe was dangerously ill. For a brief period, the children were in danger of losing both parents in one year. But their mother survived, and when she returned from convalescing in the countryside, the extended family surveyed the damage done to the Howe fortunes.28
The West Indian adventure had worsened the tottering family finances, and a donation from the colony of Barbados did little to mend the loss of £7,000 a year. Lady Howe had brought pensions and annuities into her marriage, the gifts of her uncle King George I, and royal generosity again intervened to increase her income, but it never totaled more than £2,750—at a time when £3,000 was deemed barely enough to sustain an aristocratic lifestyle.29 The Howes were faced with a minority, a period when the boys were all under the age of twenty-one. For at least the next decade, the family would not be able to gain income from any of its male members. Following the Barbados disaster, the children would be scattered among their English relatives for the remainder of their growing-up years.
The Howe dynasty was in a precarious position. Although to modern eyes the charm of a title is that it ensures an unassailable social standing, in practice rank had to be sustained with money. Contemporaries expected it, and without conspicuous wealth, peerages could decline and disappear. A case in point is Henry Bromley, 1st Baron Montfort, who fell deeply into debt, in part through the expense of electioneering. His suicide in 1755 ushered in two generations of escalating ruin. His grandson, the 3rd Baron Montfort, ended up in a debtor’s prison, where he married the warden’s daughter.30 The lesson was clear.
If the Howes wanted to retain their position near the top of the British hierarchy, they needed to make real changes. Retrenchment was immediate. George and Richard were withdrawn from Eton, where they had been placed only the previous year as a progression from Westminster. There would be no grand tour to finish their education, as their father before them had done. Further large savings could be achieved by closing down the family seat and maintaining only a skeleton staff. This appears to be what happened at Langar Hall. The hospitable “public days,” which were expected of local aristocracy, were discontinued as an unnecessary extravagance.31 Only elderly Lady Juliana Howe, Scrope’s mother, remained in residence at the Hall, or at her nearby house in Epperstone. With her was her grandson William, who had lived with her since 1733, and Mary, born in Barbados, who was only two. Their grandmother assumed charge of their education.32
For Caroline, George, Charlotte, Thomas, and Julie, life shifted away from Nottinghamshire to the environs of London. Their new world was close to the fashionable life of the city and the court. The children had probably seen London before, but now its amusements—Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens, the opera, the theaters, royal parks and gardens, museums and bookshops—came to the foreground of their lives as Nottinghamshire receded. Lady Howe shared guardianship of the children with Thomas Page, the husband of her sister-in-law Juliana.33 The Pages had a townhouse on Old Bond Street in London’s West End and a roomy old mansion, Battlesden, forty miles from the city. This was the property of Uncle Page’s fantastically wealthy older brother, Sir Gregory Page, who had loaned it to his younger sibling for life.34 Sir Gregory himself lived at Wricklemarsh in Blackheath near London, a magnificent Palladian mansion with an art collection that included works by Van Dyck and Rubens.35 The Howe brood was filling a gap in the Page households, for, despite their wealth, neither of the Page brothers had children. In the years to come, Aunt Juliana would take a great interest in the lives of her nieces and nephews.
Lady Pembroke—their Aunt Mary—lived in Parsons Green, a London suburb.36 In the heart of London’s West End, on Gerrard Street, lived Aunt Anne, her husband Colonel Charles Mordaunt, and their sons, Charles Lewis, Osbert, and Harry.37 The widowed Lady Howe made regular forays into the countryside with her older children, to visit William and Mary at Langar Hall or to stay at the country seat of the Mordaunts at Halsall Hall in Lancashire.38 But her center of gravity was now the residences of her two sisters-in-law, Mary, Lady Pembroke, and Anne Mordaunt, in London.
For Richard, however, something very different was in store. In 1736, at the tender age of ten, the future “Black Dick” Howe began his career as a sailor, enlisting in the merchant service. His most distinguished biographer, David Syrett, casts doubt on this humble beginning to Lord Howe’s notable naval career, for service on merchant vessels was incompatible with the status of a gentleman. “It is highly unlikely that Richard Howe owing to his family background, would be removed from school at the age of 10 and be sent to sea before the mast on a merchant ship,” argues Syrett. Nevertheless, Richard’s lieutenant’s passing certificate states that he served for more than three years on “the merchant ship Thames, William Merchant, Master,” and there is no reason not to believe it.39 It has been estimated that more than one-fifth of young men who passed their lieutenant’s exams had served in the merchant navy. Surely they were not all lying, as Syrett claims Richard did in order to strengthen his case for qualification for a lieutenant’s commission. And another Howe, Richard’s youngest brother, Thomas, would become captain of an East Indiaman ship, a commercial and ungentlemanly occupation perhaps, but at least a lucrative one.40
The unvarnished truth was that the Howe boys needed to find gainful employment. Their previous biographers have presumed that they began their military careers from positions of privilege, based on wealth and advantageous connections. But this was not the case, particularly for Richard. The conventional choices for the sons of aristocracy—the army, the church, the law—all required money, whether for an army officer’s commission, a university education, or a stint at the Inns of Court. The navy was cheap, and acceptable for a man from a good family. But a naval career was far too risky for George, the eldest and heir to the Howe estate, so it was second son Richard who was packed off to sea.
After three years’ service as a merchant mariner, Richard entered the Royal Navy in the rank of ordinary seaman on HMS Pearl in 1739. Here again, the Howes’ lack of influence in high places was evident, for the coveted entry point for a young gentleman joining a ship-of-war was on the lowest rung of the officer class, as a midshipman, but competition for midshipman berths was strong.41 A year later, on July 3, 1740, Richard was finally made a midshipman aboard HMS Severn. He achieved that promotion on his own merits, for it would still be several years before his mother acquired influence at court.
Midshipman Howe experienced the worst of life at sea aboard HMS Severn during its disastrous attempt to round Cape Horn at the tip of South America, resulting in the loss of more than four hundred men. Writing to Lady Howe a few weeks after the Severn limped into Rio de Janeiro, in July 1741, fifteen-year-old Richard provided a graphic description of “the pretty place your dear Dickie has seen”: it was a chronicle of “sails splitting, the supports to the masts breaking, men continually dying, the rest almost all sick, and those that stood the deck and were left to take care of so large a ship, were not above 30, and the
y left every man half eat up with the scurvy and little water aboard.”42
Yet Richard remained undeterred by the hardships he encountered. He experienced battle before his brothers, who would not begin their army careers until the mid-1740s. The year 1739 saw the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’ Ear against Spain, and in 1740 it widened into the War of the Austrian Succession. As a midshipman in the 70-gun ship of the line HMS Burford, Richard participated in a bloody British defeat off the coast of Venezuela in 1742. He passed his lieutenant’s examination in English Harbour, Antigua, in May 1744. Two years later, he had his first command, HM Sloop Baltimore. The Pages may have been able to help him with this crucial promotion, for they had influence with the Duke of Bedford, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Richard’s first mission was to cruise the coast of Scotland on the lookout for Jacobites. A blow to the head in a battle with French privateers near the Sound of Arisaig left his companions convinced he was dead, but he was soon restored to consciousness.43 For more than twenty-five years, he was keen to serve in both wartime and peacetime, spending little time ashore between 1736 and the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. By 1760, the newspapers reported that he had been involved in fifty-seven sea battles since joining the Royal Navy.44
It was a rough life that took Richard to far-flung parts of the world, and it was a very different life from that of his brothers George and William, who remained in England throughout most of their teenage years. The two soldier-brothers would not see action until late in the War of the Austrian Succession, and, in any case, an army life was less of a complete departure from home and hearth than a navy life. But Richard’s lengthy duty at sea did nothing to dampen his attachment to his home. Of all his siblings, he was the one to return most often to Langar, with its childhood memories and country quiet.
The Howe Dynasty Page 4