At the next-door estate, shortly before Ligon’s arrival in September 1647, a series of land deals had taken place that had seen Thomas Middleton become the sole owner of the Mount Estate in St George’s parish, while the Drax brothers took control of Drax Hope and Drax Hall to the northeast of Mount. Soon afterwards, in May of that year, James bought out his brother William’s part of the plantation for ‘five thousand pounds sterling’, and became the sole owner of an estate of 700 acres in what is still the most fertile part of the island – the high acreage that straddles the border of St John’s and St George’s parishes, where the soil is a rich, water-holding red clay, and the rainfall is abundant.
Drax’s wife Meliora had by now produced four or five sons and two daughters, although neither she nor the children are mentioned in Ligon’s account of his trips to the Drax estate, so we have to assume they were kept in the background. Instead, the field was given over to entertainments. Ligon reported several visits, in particular one on a Sunday. Drax, for all his Puritan background, was, apparently, ‘not so strict an observer’ of the Lord’s Day ‘as to deny himself lawful recreations’. This consisted, to Ligon’s delight, in more showing off on the part of Drax. He was rich enough not only, uniquely in the island, to serve beef at his table, but also to recruit and use his slaves for entertainment, in the Portuguese fashion. One visit by Ligon was brightened by the spectacle of two of Drax’s ‘Portugal Negroes’ giving an elaborate display of fencing, in which they were ‘skilful’ and ‘nimble’. At the end of the show, they ‘give their respects to their Master’, followed by a song ‘very loud and sweet’.
On another occasion, the slaves provided a different diversion for Drax and his entourage. A Muscovy duck was brought to one of his ponds and the Negroes were charged to catch it without diving under the water. This provided excellent ‘sport’ for the onlookers, until a newcomer, unaware of the ban on diving, caught the prey. It was a ‘Negro maid’. Ligon pleaded on her behalf and she was allowed to take the duck away.
In these ways, successful planters like Drax demonstrated their wealth, their hospitality and their power. In fact, Drax himself came to personify the opportunities available on the island – the chance of riches from a small beginning; and the enormous power that a successful man could wield over his world and the people in it.
Drax may have been the stand-out success story of the 1640s, but other more middling sugar farmers and processors clearly shared in the new bounty. Inventories of estates made before 1647 rarely included beds. Farmers slept in cotton hammocks in low-slung shacks. But thereafter, even the smaller-scale planters moved to four-poster beds, and for the first time other furniture such as stools, chests and leather chairs start appearing in inventories, together with pictures, candlesticks, books, mirrors and lamps. Brass kettles and other kitchen implements replaced iron versions, and in 1648 silver objects made their first appearance, alongside other obvious tokens of wealth and success such as gold watches, silk stockings and lace handkerchiefs.
The torrent of cash that the Sugar Revolution poured down on the heads of those farmers fortunate enough to be well placed for the change and hardy or lucky enough to survive the ever-present threat of disease now made Barbados a serious market for English manufactured goods. By 1650, the tiny island of Barbados, less than 170 square miles, had a white population of more than 30,000. This was about equivalent to Virginia and Massachusetts combined, and on average far richer. A visitor to Barbados that year wrote that the island ‘flourisheth so much, that it hath more people and Commerce then all the Ilands of the Indies’. Traders found that they could double their money bringing goods from Europe and then make a further 50 per cent on the sugar they carried on the return journey. By the end of the 1640s, 100 ships a year called at Bridgetown, the majority of them Dutch; four years later, that number had doubled.
Richard Ligon noticed a transformation of the island in just the three years he was there, from 1647 to 1650. When he arrived, the land was largely uncleared, provisions were short, and the houses of the planters low-roofed and unbearably hot and squalid. He himself designed a wooden frame house on a new style and scale for Thomas Middleton, and noted the vast improvements in lifestyle for the planters. It was all down to sugar. In just the few years Ligon was there, sugar-processing technology – and therefore output and profits – had improved enormously. By 1648, sugar had become the means of payment in 60 per cent of transactions on the island, and, as Ligon wrote, the ‘soul of Trade in this Island’. If the process of the consolidation of the acreage into large estates, ‘fit for plantations of sugar’, continued, Ligon reckoned that Barbados would shortly become ‘one of the richest spots of earth under the sun’. In fact, it had already become, quite suddenly, the wealthiest English colony in the world. In the 20 months before the end of the decade, the total value of Barbados exports had reached the amazing sum of £3,097,800.
It had helped enormously that during the short but transformatory period of the Sugar Revolution, Barbados had enjoyed minimal interference from home, and had basked in the advantages of free trade. Alongside this laissez-faire attitude to commerce had flourished a friendly, hospitable attitude between the rich white planters, and religious toleration found in few places in the world at this time. Jews and Roman Catholics were left unmolested, and Dutch, French and other foreign settlers made welcome. While the colonists in the mainland North American colonies fell out, often disastrously, over what seem now obscure differences of religious doctrine, in cosmopolitan Barbados most rubbed along fine and concentrated on the main deal: making money as fast as possible.
Not that the island was in any way complacent or laid-back. Every sugar planter faced severe risks: livestock, crucial for driving the mills, could be laid low by a mysterious illness; a crucial piece of machinery could break; fire could break out. Any of these could ruin an entire crop and see the descent of the planter into bankruptcy.
Perhaps even more worrying was the threat to the ‘masters’ inherent in the unequal and coercive new system from its victims – the servants and slaves. A letter from 1648 mentioned ‘many hundreds Rebell Negro Slaves in the woods’. Ligon, whose book’s accompanying map included an illustration of runaway slaves being rounded up, commented how the planters built their houses ‘in the manner of fortifications, and have Lines, Bulwarks, and Bastions to defend themselves, in case there should be any uproar of commotion in the Island, either by the Christian servants, or Negro slaves’. The planters, he reported, collected supplies of water to see them through a siege or ‘to throw down upon the naked bodies of the Negroes, scalding hot’. Nonetheless, Ligon considered it ‘a strange thing … [the Negroes] accounted a bloody people’, that they didn’t ‘commit some horrid massacre upon the Christians, thereby to enfranchise themselves, and become Masters of the Island’.
Richard Ligon’s West Indian adventure ended in disappointment and disgrace. In his book he warned that in Barbados, ‘sicknesses are there more grievous, and mortality greater by far than in England’, and early in 1650 he himself became seriously ill. It started with a fever, and, as Ligon described with typical candour, led on to ‘gripings and tortions in the bowels’, with ‘not the least evacuation’ for a fortnight. This led to an ‘excessive heat’ within him, ‘which stopt my passage so as in fourteen days no drop of water came from me’. Unable to sleep because of the ‘torment’, he fell to fitting, and was three times pronounced dead by his host Thomas Modyford. But he recovered, not, he wrote, thanks to the ignorant ‘Quack-salves’, but because of an effective cure: drinking in solution the ground-up dried ‘pisle’ of a ‘green Turtle’.
With the help of Humphrey Walrond, Ligon got himself a place on a ship home. On 15 April 1650, after three months prostrate from sickness, he boarded a vessel for England, which left Bridgetown at midnight to avoid a pirate ‘that had for many dayes layn hovering about the Island’. After more adventures at sea, Ligon reached home only to be promptly fined for his previous Royalist
activities and then imprisoned for debt. ‘We have seen and suffered great things’, he wrote from his gaol cell.
Rehabilitated after the Restoration, he attempted to regain the lands lost to him during the early part of the Civil War, but with no success. He died in 1662 at Pill, a small village a few miles north-west of Bristol. In his will he left to his cousin his estate in the Fens, but it was never recovered.
Even in the bitterness of his cell, Ligon retained his huge admiration for the planter elite of Barbados, and for what he saw as the stupendous achievement of the Sugar Revolution. But very soon after his departure, the easy-going camaraderie of the colony’s leaders would dramatically come to an end.
6
THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR IN BARBADOS
‘It may excite some surprise that I should have selected so small a portion of the globe as the island of Barbados as the field of my researches … but I believe … the history of Barbados is by no means barren of events which have materially effected the British Empire. If the navigation laws led to England’s supremacy on the seas, that small island was the cause which led to the navigation laws.’
Sir Robert Schomburgk, The History of Barbados, 1848
While the fabric of the British Isles, from countries to cities, to towns, and even families, was torn apart by the Civil War, for a long time Barbados had remained isolated from the conflict. Individuals had sympathy or allegiance for one side or another and refugees from both parties washed up on Barbados’s shores, but on the island a very English agreement was in place: don’t mention the war. There was even a jokey forfeit for anyone who did: the compulsion to provide a roast turkey dinner for everyone in hearing. By the late 1640s, there were recognisable groups – the Roundheads led by James Drax, and the Royalists by the Walrond brothers, Humphrey and Edward – but friendships and marriages crossed the divide, and for now everyone pressed on with growing sugar and getting seriously rich.
In the same way, Governor Philip Bell pragmatically retained the neutrality of the colony, making it effectively independent. Both sides in England petitioned him, with threats and bribes, to declare for their cause, but Bell responded that ‘against the kinge we are resolved never to be, and without the friendshipe of the perliment and free trade of London ships we are not able to subsist’. The needs of the sugar economy came before any principles; the island was doing well out of trading with all comers, and the longer they held out, the better the inducements from either side became.
But all the time, some kept the strength of their party feeling under wraps. As the King’s cause faltered and failed, a number of young, impressionable Royalist officers arrived in Barbados, and were carefully taken under the wing of the Walrond brothers, who had begun to win a firm grip on the council and assembly and the sympathetic ear of the now elderly Governor, Philip Bell, through the cultivation of his influential wife.
News of the execution of the King at the end of January 1649 seems to have sharpened feelings on the island, with the Royalists experiencing what a contemporary called ‘heart-burnings’ ‘towards those that wished the Parliament prosperity’, none more so than the Walronds. While their loyalty to the royal cause was sincere, the brothers also looked to the events at home to give them a chance to take control of the island. Their first move in mid-1649 was to clear away a rival leader of the Royalist faction, the island’s treasurer, Colonel Guy Molesworth. Playing on the fears of the Roundhead planters, they declared that Molesworth was planning to seize their estates to hand over to poor Royalist refugees. This was somewhat brazen, as it was exactly what the Walronds themselves were now plotting. But Drax was tricked into acquiescence, and combined with the Walronds to overawe the Governor and have Molesworth arrested. According to Molesworth’s later testimony, he was ‘by the malice and false suggestion of Sir James Drax and others’ imprisoned for three months, and saw his friends tortured – mainly by partial strangulation – in the hope of extracting ‘some pretence to take away his life’. Then, when that effort failed, he was expelled with his household of about 40 ‘in a vessel of no force and by that means fell into the hands of pirates to his utter undoing’. In his place, the Walronds got William Byam, a key Royalist ally and known ‘malignant’, appointed to the important post, along with responsibility for the island’s arsenal and defence. In the meantime, pretending a Spanish threat, they had the island put on a war footing, with their supporters in charge of the militia.
Drax and his Roundhead party still had enough clout to block a proposed alliance with Bermuda, which had declared for the King in late August 1649 and now came to Barbados requesting official support and arms. The Walronds had backed the deal and were furious at the rebuff. Their response was to put it about that ‘Independents’ were poised to seize the magazines and put the King’s supporters to the sword. A special ‘Committee of Public Safety’ was put together by Edward Walrond, which, sworn to secrecy, debated the ‘quietest and most peaceable wayes of sending these malignants into Exile’. Diehard Royalist William Byam even argued that it would be better to kill than to exile the ‘Independent’ Roundheads, to prevent them stirring up trouble in England. An effort at compromise by Thomas Modyford, a moderate Royalist and above all a pragmatist, was hijacked by Edward Walrond, and what emerged from the secret meetings was a new Bill, backed by the assembly and Governor, which demanded from everyone an oath of allegiance to the King, and threatened severe punishment for any non-conformist religious practices.
This was too much for some of the more moderate Royalists, such as Christopher Codrington (whose two brothers had fought on opposite sides in the Civil War in England). While supposedly ‘the worse for Liquour’, Codrington revealed the contents of the plot to his brother-in-law James Drax (for which crime he was fined 20,000 pounds of sugar and ordered into exile). Drax quickly mobilised his remaining support and organised a blizzard of petitions against the Bill, while demanding of the Governor fresh assembly elections.
Governor Bell, desiring peace above all, now flip-flopped again, and at a council meeting sided with the petitioners, withdrawing the Bill on a technicality and agreeing to the demand for new elections. The Walronds and their party then stormed out of the meeting, leaving just two of the twelve councillors still with the Governor. In place of secretive political manoeuvrings, the Walronds now launched a pamphlet offensive. Bills started appearing all over the island, announcing the threat of a Roundhead plot and attacking in particular ‘Colonel Drax, that devout Zealot of the deeds of the Devill’. One Royalist pamphleteer promised not to rest until he had ‘sheathed my sword in [Drax’s] Bowells’. Another declared: ‘My ayme is Drax, Middleton and the rest. Vivat Rex!’
It was no idle threat. The Royalists were now openly arming themselves, and soon a well-mounted troop was at large in Humphrey Walrond’s parish of St Philip. The brash young Cavaliers rode about swearing to slaughter all ‘the Independent doggs’ who refused to ‘drink to the Figure II’ (Charles II).
Governor Bell once more tried to put a lid on the growing uproar by publishing a declaration on 29 April 1650 ‘That no man should take up Armes, nor act in any hostile manner upon paine of death’, but it was too late. The following day, the Walronds persuaded two impressionable militia leaders, Colonels Shelley and Reade, to mobilise their men to prevent a supposedly murderous plot by the Independents. Bell ordered them to send their soldiers home, but they refused, at which point the Governor turned to Drax, requesting that he raise his own force to preserve the peace.
Drax briefly had Edward Walrond and Major Byam under arrest, but he could only find about 100 men, far fewer than were now marching on Bridgetown under the King’s colours with Humphrey Walrond at their head. There was no option left to Bell except to agree to the humiliating terms demanded by the Walrond party: complete Cavalier control of the arsenal and the body of the Governor himself; the disarmament and punishment of the Roundheads; and a declaration of loyalty to Charles II. The last was publicly made on 3 May.
So now the arrests started. Drax was one of the first, confined to his estate under armed guard. His neighbour Thomas Middleton was also seized, along with 90 more ‘delinquents’. Drax was fined 80,000 pounds of sugar, twice as much as anyone else, and left the island soon afterwards for England, seemingly taking his wife and children with him. Others, perhaps with less local status, suffered more. Several prominent Roundheads were banished, and saw their estates confiscated. A Captain Tienman and a Lieutenant Brandon were disenfranchised, their plantations seized, their tongues cut and their cheeks branded with the letter ‘T’ before both were banished. Another, John Webbs, had his ‘tongue … bored through with a hot iron’. In the meantime, the headstrong young Cavaliers celebrated by requisitioning all the island’s best horses and toasted their victory in lavish style, even by the standards of the time. At one single feast, it is reported, ‘vast quantities of Flesh and Fish’ were consumed, along with 1,000 bottles of wine.
The Walronds’ violent reign was to be brief, however. At the end of July 1650, Francis Lord Willoughby arrived, having been appointed by Charles II as the new Governor of the ‘Caribbee Isles’. Willoughby had started the Civil War as a Roundhead but had switched allegiance to the King. Having fled England in 1647, he had served as vice-admiral on Prince Rupert’s Royalist privateering fleet operating off the east coast and in the Channel.
Willoughby urged moderation, ending all sentences of banishment and dismissing the Walronds from official positions. In an attempt to secure an agreement with Parliament, he sent a Barbados planter whose brother had been one of the regicides to London to start negotiations. But by now news of the outrages against the Roundheads had reached England, along with a number of refugees including James Drax, his brother William and Reynold Alleyne, another influential Parliamentarian. Drax had corresponded from Barbados with the influential Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick, so it is likely that he was given a chance to air his grievances at a very high level. Parliament responded by pronouncing the islanders ‘notorious robbers and traitors’, and, in October 1650, ordering a trade embargo, which also included other rebellious Royalist colonies: Bermuda, Antigua and Virginia. The embargo covered not only English vessels, but ‘All Ships of Any Foreign Nation whatsoever’. Indeed, its primary purpose was to attempt, unsuccessfully, to stem the flow of arms and ammunition from Dutch vessels to the Royalist American colonies. In the same month it was resolved in London to send a fleet to subdue Barbados; by January 1651, the force was ready.
The Sugar Barons Page 9