War was declared by Queen Anne on 4 May 1702 (William III had died in March), but confirmation of the news did not reach Codrington in Antigua until 28 June. By now, the Governor had fallen sick. He also remained furious at the accusations made about him to the Council of Trade the previous winter (still being laboriously scrutinised), writing, rather pompously, that ‘My honour is much dearer to me than an employ more valuable than mine is.’ In May he had asked for a furlough of six months to come to London to clear his name, which was refused, but clearly his private thoughts were about returning home. In June, just before he received the news of war, he wrote to a friend how he was looking forward, ‘If ever I return from the Indies’, to touring Europe looking for books for his library, which he wanted to make ‘as curious as any private one in Europe’.
As soon as he heard of the declaration of war, Codrington dashed off a letter to London. ‘I am so weak and spiritless that I am not able to hold up my head’, he wrote, in a markedly more shaky hand than usual. ‘I am much fitter for my bed than the field, but we are not to sleep now at St Kitts; the cause must be decided and our people won’t go where I don’t lead.’ ‘If I dye in the action, my Lords’, he ended, ‘believe I dye an honest man. If I live, I’le satisfy the world I am so.’
As good as his word, Codrington mustered all his available forces and rushed to St Kitts, straight away sending 20 vessels full of troops to bombard French settlements and demand their surrender. A force was also sent overland to advance against enemy positions. After only a brief skirmish, the French commander (later court-martialled for cowardice) capitulated on 5 July 1702.
‘Her [Majesty’s] Flag is now flying on ye French fort … better success than I could have wished for’, reported a triumphant Codrington the next day. The French were cleared out of St Kitts for the last time, as it later transpired; thus Codrington fulfilled his father’s thwarted ambition.
But this was the high point for the English in the Leewards. For the rest of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–13), the familiar litany of incompetence, wanton destruction, greed and crippling losses from disease took hold. The English on St Kitts quickly fell out over distribution of the spoils. Codrington, a little recovered from his sickness, turned his thoughts once more to peace and a return to England, writing, ‘When this is over, I shall deserve to come home, for I am unalterably determined to return … if I live to see England, I will pass my life in my Library and be buryed in my garden … please to let one of your under-gardiners plant me some fruit trees and vines at Dodington.’
The course of the War of Spanish Succession would be decided in Europe, in particular by the victories of the Duke of Marlborough, but in the West Indies, fortunes fluctuated depending on who had command of the sea. Island colonies from both sides looked anxiously at the comings and goings of rival fleets, while their respective privateers took a heavy toll on shipping and trade, causing hunger and dissatisfaction everywhere. In October 1702, naval power shifted sharply after the rout by English and Dutch warships of the combined Spanish and French fleets in Vigo Bay in northern Spain. The chance to drive the French out of the West Indies, as Codrington had urged, had arrived. Before the end of the year, a powerful fleet under Rear Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker was dispatched from England boasting six men-of-war and 10 transports carrying no fewer than 4,000 men.
As before, in the tradition of the wild optimism experienced by the likes of Wheeler, Penn and Venables, there were great hopes for the expedition – it was to meet up with a further force of English and Dutch, and having destroyed French settlements on Guadeloupe and Martinique, proceed via Jamaica to attack Havana and Cartagena to induce the Spanish to break their alliance with France. Thereafter it was to deliver a blow against the French in Newfoundland and, some even suggested, with the help of the New Englanders it could take Quebec and drive the French out of Canada.
But even before they reached the West Indies many of the soldiers were sick, and there were hardly enough seamen fit to man the boats. On Walker’s own ship, 100 men were buried at sea, and another 100 sick when they reached Bridgetown on 5 December. There, the situation worsened. To Walker’s fury, the Englishmen of Barbados did not seem to care about the larger, grandiose imperial picture, refusing to quarter many of the men (who thus remained on their stinking, crowded ships), instead concentrating on blatant illegal trade with the French enemy. They did, however, sell the troops copious amounts of rum (against official orders), with disastrous consequences. As Codrington later wrote, they ‘murdered them with Drinking’. Old West Indian hands might have ‘bodies like Egyptian mummys’, said Codrington, but for ‘a New-Comer’, such rivers of rum ‘must certainly dispatch [them] to the other World’.
Speed was of the essence: Martinique, the key French bastion in the Leewards, was denuded of men, as most were at sea as privateers, and as vulnerable as it had ever been. It was imperative that Codrington be informed of Walker’s arrival in Barbados and plans made to strike quickly. This necessitated sending a fast sloop to Codrington, but the Barbados assembly owed money to the owner of the usual vessel, and the treasurer refused to release the necessary funds. Unbeknownst to Walker (now ill himself), no message was sent for weeks; meanwhile, about a quarter of his force – 1,000 men – were lost in Barbados to sickness, drink and desertion, and the alerted French called in their men, numbering some 1,800, to defend Martinique. A great chance was thus lost.
Eventually, on 20 January 1703, word of Walker’s arrival got to Codrington, who had, with great difficulty, raised a force of ships and men from his islands. As Martinique was now too hard a nut to crack, it was decided instead to descend on Guadeloupe.
Before he set sail from Antigua with his forces, Codrington, with signs of his illness returning and facing dangerous battles ahead, made what would turn out to be the most extraordinary will of any of the sugar barons.
The will, dated 22 February 1703, strikingly revealed how immensely rich he was; it is no surprise that he was considered the wealthiest man in the West Indies, with sugar plantations in Barbados, Antigua and St Kitts, as well as ownership of the entire island of Barbuda and the valuable estate of Dodington back in England. In his will he doled out huge sums, in the hundreds of pounds, to cousins; in England, the Codring-tons from the previously dominant line of the family were, in contrast, writing wills bequeathing £5 here and £10 there. The largest single beneficiary of the will was to be Christopher’s cousin William, his ‘neirest kinsman’, who was to inherit Dodington, the main Antigua estate at Betty’s Hope (which now included the next-door Cotton plantation, so totalling just over 800 well-developed acres), the lands in St Kitts and most of the island of Barbuda.
Christopher’s illegitimate son William was to get an allowance and £500 at the age of 21, paid out of the proceeds of another Antigua plantation in St John’s left to two local friends. The scanty evidence available suggests that this William, then aged 10, was living in Antigua, presumably at Betty’s Hope, but nothing about the nature of his relationship with his father, or the whereabouts of his mother, the mysterious Maudlin Morange, has come to light.
From cousin William’s lavish inheritance was to be paid £10,000, in £2,000 annual instalments, to All Soul’s College Oxford; £6,000 for the building of a library, with the rest for the purchase of books. Codrington the Younger’s own book collection, now numbering more than 12,000 volumes and one of the finest in the world, valued at £6,000, was to provide the nucleus of the library, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, which even today remains second in Oxford only to the Bodleian. This donation was utterly unprecedented for the sugar barons, but an even more surprising legacy followed: the valuable Barbados estates, comprising two highly profitable plantations on the east coast – Consetts and Didmartins – ‘I give to the Society for the Propagation of the Christian Religion in Foreign Parts.’ Part of the value of the island of Barbuda was included as well. This society had been founded two years before by King William to improve the calibre
of the clergy in the English Americas in order to convert ‘heathens and infidels’, including black West Indian slaves. Codrington stipulated that the two plantations should be kept up and running, with at least 300 slaves, to provide money for the construction and maintenance of a new Codrington College. Here, a convenient number of professors and scholars, under vows of ‘poverty, chastity and obedience’ (this phrase, considered ‘popish’, was later quietly removed by the Society), were to ‘study and practice physic and chirurgery, as well as divinity’, so that they would be able to minister to the ‘souls’, as well as ‘care for the bodies’ of the island’s ‘Heathens’.
Codrington had failed the previous summer to persuade the planters to improve the slaves’ legal rights, but now, perhaps, he had his revenge. He was no abolitionist; part of the aim of conversion and better medical care was to improve the slaves’ efficiency as workers and obedience to their masters. In this respect, he was the inheritor of the ideas of the likes of Godwyn, Baxter and Fox. Like them, he was compassionate, sensitive and appalled by the cruelties meted out to the slaves, without quite making the leap to turning against the institution of slavery itself. But he must have known how hated this innovation would be by the planters, for whom slave conversion – treating enslaved Africans as people, rather than property – was a dangerous anathema that undermined the whole foundation of their society and prosperity. In this respect Christopher showed himself to be an expatriate Englishman, rather than a proper West Indian Creole like his father, one of the few differences between them.
The Society (correctly, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Overseas) would, in coming into its inheritance, find itself in a very difficult, and subsequently embarrassing, position. Every effort was made, including by Codrington’s heir, to thwart his vision, and for some, the Church of England becoming a substantial slave-owner – branding its slaves ‘Society’ – would be unforgivable. But the radical experiment of Codrington College would serve as a laboratory for the later crusade for the Christianisation of native peoples in India, Australia and elsewhere, and it gave a toehold in the mother of the slave colonies, Barbados, to an organisation that was firmly opposed to the vicious world that the planters had created. In 1711, the year after Codrington’s will was proved, the preacher of the Society’s Annual Sermon would declare that ‘Negroes were equally the Workmanship of God with themselves [the planters]; endowed with the same faculties and intellectual powers; Bodies of the same Flesh and Blood, and Souls certainly immortal.’ The sermon would be distributed widely, with 2,000 copies sent to the West Indies. The slaves on the Codrington plantations had to be instructed in the Faith of Christ (and therefore educated to a degree) and brought to baptism, the preacher declared. ‘This will be preaching by Example’, he went on, ‘the most effectual way of recommending Doctrines, to a hard and unbelieving World, blinded by Interest, and other Prepossessions.’ It would, of course, be more than 100 years before the logical outcome of this approach – abolition – would occur; but Christopher Codrington, writing his will in Antigua in 1703, while ill and facing battle, had, however unwittingly, radically undermined the system on which his family had built their fortune.
On 5 March 1703, the English armada, consisting of Walker’s much-reduced force and Codrington’s Leewards militias, sailed from Antigua. At noon the next day they sighted the tall, vividly green mountains of Guadeloupe. For a number of days they reconnoitred the coastline, looking for unfortified landing spots. But the French engineer Labat had been busy, throwing up defences, including tall towers, and the French commander did a skilful job of moving his forces around to demonstrate strength that he really did not have. The first landing by some 500 troops was quickly driven off. But then the English went ashore in three different places simultaneously and were soon advancing on the fortified town of Basse Terre. By 2 April, Codrington, leading from the front, had taken the outer trenches and established batteries to open fire on the French walls.
Marches and counter-marches by both sides followed, as the English soldiery extensively burned and looted the plantations of much of the island. Soon the French would abandon their redoubt and take refuge in the hills, but not before Codrington had fallen out with his naval commander, Walker, and become seriously ill again. It might have been malaria, which is recurring and often leads to depression, or a form of rheumatic fever. Codrington reported that he was ‘afflicted with terrible pains’, lost the use of his limbs, and was blinded from the huge quantities of laudanum he took to relieve the agony. As he was invalided off the battlefield, the French managed to bypass Walker’s cumbersome armada and land reinforcements from Martinique. On 5 May, the English, suffering widespread sickness, decided that they did not have the provisions to stay on the island any longer, and abandoned the conquest.
For Codrington, reporting to London some time later, the fault for the failure could be attributed to the lack of light frigates to prevent French reinforcements being landed, the paucity of artillery and siege equipment and the poor standard of the troops and their leadership – ‘no one to take care of them … save one drunken Major who soon dispatcht himself’. Also at fault, yet again, was the divided leadership. Walker had cut and run, Codrington alleged, ‘just when we were to reap the fruit of our hazards & fatigues’. Walker, for his part, blamed the Creole contingent for a lack of fighting spirit.
After Guadeloupe, both sides in the war relegated the West Indies to a low priority compared to Europe, although privateers continued to wreck trade in the region. In one month the following year, out of 108 ships that left Barbados and the Leewards for England, only 61 arrived at their destination, with 43 taken as prizes into French ports. During the summer of 1703, Codrington remained desperately ill, disappointed and depressed, writing to his superiors in August that ‘I still continue so wretchedly weak and my head so dizzey that I can scarce read your Lordships’ letters, much less answer them as I should … I expected a Furlow by this ordinary, but find myself abandon’d by all my friends. Never man who liv’d was ever reduc’t to so low a condition as I have been; having lost every drop of blood in my veins, my eyesight and the use of my limbs. I believe I cannot perfectly recover without a voyage to Europe.’
Hearing nothing more from Codrington, and receiving no replies to their further letters, the authorities in London agreed in October that he should be allowed to return home. However, for the ‘security of those Islands’, they appointed a new governor, Sir William Mathew. As soon as Codrington discovered that he had, in effect, been dismissed, he was mortified, and found his considerable pride severely affronted. In February 1704, with this health seemingly restored, he wrote to London that if a deputy governor was deemed inadequate to hold the fort during his ‘furlow’, then he was happy to stay on in his post. But the decision had been made; the new governor arrived soon after. Writing to London at this time, Codrington struck a heroic but aggrieved pose, while stressing that his earlier physical weakness was a thing of the past: ‘Thank God I have perfectly recovered my limbs & strength’, he said, ‘and will serve the Queen somewhere or other during the War, tho it be with a Muskett on my shoulder.’
As it turned out, Sir William Mathew would join the crowded ranks of those swiftly undone by the mortal dangers of the tropics. In November he wrote to London that he, his wife and his secretary, as well as most of his family, were seriously ill. The following month, on 4 December, he died. Codrington saw his chance, and two days later wrote to the Council of Trade begging to be reinstated to his old position, one that he seems to have considered his by right of birth and merit: ‘Since I am upon the place and now season’d’, he said, ‘I shall be willing to serve her [the Queen] here during the war, and beleive I may serve Her better than an another at present.’
But ‘an another’ was about to be appointed, leading to a tragic and bloody series of events. The Lords of Trade supported Codrington’s application, but to the former governor’s bitter disappointment, it was not to be. Afte
r the Battle of Blenheim, the news of Marlborough’s great victory had been carried to London and delivered to the Queen by Daniel Parke, a 35-year-old lieutenant-colonel, described as of ‘fine appearance and handsome bearing’. Parke’s reward for being the bearer of such good tidings was 1,000 guineas, a miniature portrait of the Queen and, in due course, the governorship of the Leeward Islands.
Parke was a Virginian; he had sat on the colony’s assembly and council in the 1690s before relocating to England, where he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. Joining Marlborough’s army, he caught the eye of the Duke and served as his aide-de-camp.
Although he was appointed in March 1705, Parke took his time before taking up his new position. In the interim, the islands were run by John Johnson, previously Lieutenant-Governor of Nevis. Johnson, who was from humble origins, owed his promotion entirely to Codrington; one of his first acts was to give his former patron a further grant for Barbuda for 99 years at the rent of a fat sheep yearly. He also backed Codrington in a dispute over the highly contentious estate at Godwin in St Kitts. Johnson made a commendable attempt to improve the islands’ defences, but lacked the authority to have his instructions carried out, particularly in St Kitts, where a dispute led to soldiers being turfed out of their indifferent quarters into open fields. ‘I heartily wish for Col. Park’s arrival’, wrote Johnson in July 1705, ‘for I have such ill-natured and troublesome people to deal with, that I am already weary of my Command.’
In early 1706, the French found themselves in a position to exact revenge for the depredations carried out in Guadeloupe. On 4 February, a fleet of 30 ships, including seven men-of-war, appeared off the Antiguan coast. A strong northerly gale prevented the French vessels from beating in close to shore, so they bore away to Nevis, anchoring in front of the main port of Charlestown. For five days the French exchanged fire with the forts of the town, before pulling away towards St Kitts. Here, as Johnson had warned in vain, the defences were much less potent. Three columns were landed in different parts of the island, with the English, outnumbered 2,300 to 700, retreating in panic to the redoubt at Brimstone Hill. The French lacked the heavy guns needed to reduce the fort, but for several days they devastated the island at will, wrecking every plantation and mill and carrying away 600 slaves and huge quantities of sugar-making equipment.
The Sugar Barons Page 27