In spite of his influence, Beckford had a reputation in Parliament as brash, irascible and long-winded. In smart society, he was ‘loud, voluble’ and ‘self-sufficient’, but would sometimes be the butt of jokes, ‘which he could not parry’. Nonetheless, he was re-elected for the City in 1761, and the following year was made Lord Mayor of London. Following his swearing-in, he gave four entertainments, reportedly unrivalled in ‘splendour and hospitality’ since those of Henry VIII. One cost an amazing £10,000. Guests included the Emperor of Germany, the King of Denmark, and the Dukes of Cambridge and York. ‘The costly magnificence he displayed astonished the public’, wrote a contemporary, although Beck-ford himself was ‘remarkably moderate in eating and drinking, always living with great temperance, and hence somewhat out of place in City epicurism’.
Beckford had married for the second time in 1756, to Maria, a member of the family of the powerful Duke of Hamilton. William was 47, Maria was 32, much more religious than him and very proud of her superior blood. Beckford already had a large number of illegitimate children, possibly as many as 30, but in 1760 his son and heir, another William, was born.
As a babe in arms, this young Beckford was carried by a paternal aunt, who was a Lady of the Bedchamber, into the royal presence at St James’s Court. This set the tone for a gilded childhood. William Pitt the Elder was one of his godfathers, and at the age of five, William Beckford received piano tuition from Mozart (himself aged only nine). Beckford of Fonthill (as the younger William Beckford is commonly known) was also amazingly precocious: he was speaking and reading French by the age of three or four, and had mastered Latin by the time he was seven. Eventually he would also speak Italian, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Persian and Arabic. His tutor recorded of him at seven years old: ‘He is of a very agreeable disposition, but begins already to think of being master of a great fortune.’ He was not sent to school, so led an isolated life with no friends of his own age.
His father was often absent. Alderman Beckford did not like the local country gentry who looked down on him as nouveau riche, and spent most of his time at his London base at 22 Soho Square. In the city he threw himself into politics, becoming a key supporter and ally of William Pitt against the power of the court party. This would be useful for Pitt: he used the commercial expertise of Beckford to win battles in the Commons over foreign policy; during the coming war, Beckford was tireless in raising money to pay for the military. But it was also helpful to Beckford and the sugar interest; enemies accused him of promoting expeditions – such as that of 1758 against French slave forts in Africa – for his own rather than the national interest.
The Seven Years War (known in North America as the French and Indian War) was blundered into by France and Britain after skirmishing in North America and at sea. The conflict, from 1756 to 1763, saw fighting in Europe, India, North America and the West Indies, where it was the most severe struggle yet.
The war started with the loss by Britain of Minorca, and the famous execution of Vice Admiral John Byng, ‘pour encourager les autres’. This led to the fall of the government and a new ministry being formed, led by the aggressive imperialist William Pitt.
In Jamaica, invasion fears at the beginning of the war saw the imposition of martial law. Thistlewood recorded in his diary hearing ‘great guns fired out at sea’, and several attacks on coastal estates by enemy privateers. On one occasion, he wrote, raiders ‘plundered Mr Thos. White’s house [at nearby Bluefields] … of his plate, furniture, wearing apparel, &c; the girl he kept &c., even made him help carry his own things down to their canoe, stripped him naked except an old dirty check shirt they gave him’.
But in late 1758 a powerful fleet and reinforcements arrived, freed up after victory at Louisburg in North America, and the British were in a position to launch offensives. French privateers based in Martinique had been causing havoc, so in January 1759 a force of 6,000 troops and 10 ships of the line launched an attack. But Martinique had strong defences, and three days later the British withdrew, and landed at Guadeloupe instead. Although there were soon 2,000 men down with sickness, the French capitulated on 1 May.
Victory in Canada by September 1760, and the earlier defeat of the French fleet at Quiberon Bay, gave Britain command of the seas, and freedom to concentrate on the West Indies. Dominica was captured by a North American force in June 1761, and in January 1762 some 16,000 troops, including nearly 600 men from Barbados, descended once more on Martinique. Well led by Rear Admiral George Rodney, and with massive superiority in numbers, the British were at last successful, although the capitulation of the French on 16 January might have been motivated in part by what they had seen happening in Guadeloupe. Since its British capture, the island had been doing rather well selling its sugar into the British market and buying thousands of slaves from Liverpool traders. St Lucia and Grenada were captured soon afterwards, leaving only the hugely valuable St Domingue still in French hands.
Spain, under the new leadership of Charles III, who had a deep hatred of the British, joined the war in January 1762. Britain responded with a decision to attack Havana, the heart of Spanish power in the Caribbean. A bold approach through the Old Bahama passage along the north coast of Cuba, together with complacency and incompetence on the part of the Spanish governor of the city, allowed a successful landing on 7 June. But a drawn-out siege followed, and by the time the city surrendered on 13 August, the British force had suffered appallingly from yellow fever, with only 3,000 men still in action out of an original force of nearly 15,000. Spain’s best defender against attack from European rivals, the mosquito, had almost succeeded again. The losses contributed to Britain’s decision to return Havana to Spain at the end of the war the following year.
Britain gained Florida from Spain in return, and Martinique was given back to France in exchange for Minorca. Britain also acquired St Vincent, Dominica, Tobago and Grenada. When it came to the fate of Guadeloupe, the sugar lobby, led by William Beckford and Rose Fuller, intervened. Since its capture, the huge sugar production of Guadeloupe – at 80,000 hogsheads a year more than all the British Leewards combined – had arrived on the English market. This jump in supply saw the sugar price fall by over nine shillings per hundredweight, to the horror of the British planters. Pitt stayed loyal to his friend Beckford, and at the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris, the French were given the choice of retaining Guadeloupe or ceding large parts of Canada; they did not hesitate to hand over the undeveloped and relatively worthless wastes of the north.
From the beginning of the war, West Indians and North Americans had launched themselves with gusto into privateering and illegal trade. As in the previous conflict in the 1740s, the ‘flag of truce’ scam, where vessels sailed to enemy ports ostensibly to exchange prisoners, was widely deployed. Rhode Island alone sent 32 in the first four years of the war. This kept the French privateers manned, to the fury of the Royal Navy, who complained that several prisoners had been taken by their cruisers four times in less than two months.
The Brown family, Obadiah and his four nephews, John, Moses, Nicholas and Joseph (the eldest brother, James, had died in his twenties), invested in privateers and flags of truce. The records show that they lost at least three vessels to the ‘enemy’ – that is, the Royal Navy – but such were the profits of the trade that these setbacks could be borne.
A year into the war, a committee was established in Rhode Island to investigate allegations of trade with the enemy. Obadiah Brown had himself appointed a member. A year later, at the urging of the Board of Trade in London, the colony appointed a committee to inspect the holds of flag-of-truce ships to ensure they carried no trading goods. The committee consisted of Elisha Brown, the four brothers’ uncle, and family friend Daniel Jenckes. They were happy to sign off the paperwork promising that the ships only had on board enough victuals for the crew and prisoners, without checking what the vessels actually left port carrying.
French officials ordered their men-of-war and privateers not to
tamper with American vessels trading with French islands. Some even sent agents to the English colonies selling safe-passage passes for $200. One such pass was found concealed on the person of William Carlisle of New York, master of the sloop Dove, ‘sewed in the hinder part of his britches or drawers’.
As had occurred earlier, neutral Caribbean ports such as St Eustatius, St Thomas and St Croix were used by American and West Indian traders to supply the French indirectly. Until the entry of Spain into the war, the most popular port for the North Americans, though, was Monte Christi, just inside the border between Spanish and French Hispaniola, and near the important French sugar port of Cap François. Dealing through Spanish middlemen, or direct with French merchants at Monte Christi, the North Americans delivered provisions and lumber, and loaded up sugar. Until condemned by London in 1760 as traitorous (with the charter colonies of Rhode Island and Connecticut deemed the worst offenders), this was technically legal, but only if the sugar was Spanish. In fact Spanish Hispaniola neither grew nor processed sugar. The Spanish governor even erected a sugar mill in his province to make the chicanery a bit less blatant.
In August 1760, Pitt, having been told by his commander in North America that the Rhode Islanders were ‘a lawless set of smugglers’, wrote a circular letter to all the American governors railing against the ‘illegal and most pernicious trade … by which the enemy is … supplyed with Provisions and other Necessaries whereby they are principally, if not alone, enabled to sustain, and protract, this long and expensive war’. He urged that offenders be severely punished. But although some states passed new laws against the trade, this had little effect. The following year, while Royal Navy ships languished in port for want of victuals, the French were plentifully supplied. Indeed, flour was 50 per cent cheaper in Hispaniola than in Jamaica.
It was immensely frustrating for British naval commanders, who could see that the illegal trade had effectively negated important advantages of their supremacy at sea. In 1762, Admiral Augustus Keppel complained that the French fleet and garrison at St Domingue were not likely to want for food, because of ‘the large supplies they have lately received from their good friends the New England flag of truce vessels’. During the siege of Havana, the British naval contingent found that they had to ‘guard as much against’ North American vessels supplying the Spanish garrison ‘as our professed enemies’.
Not all North Americans showed so little imperial sentiment. On 12 August, the brigantine Prudent Hannah, owned by Obadiah Brown and his four nephews, and captained as a flag of truce by Paul Tew, was seized by a British man-of-war off the coast of Virginia. Tew urged the British captain to take him to a northern port, but instead he was taken to Williamsburg. Paperwork signed off by Elisha Brown stated that he had five barrels of pork or beef and 30 of flour. In fact the Prudent Hannah carried 47 barrels of flour, 37 of beef and pork, 213 barrels and hogsheads of fish and firkins of butter, as well as bread, and 1,000 bunches of onions. When he got to shore, Tew wrote to the Browns, ‘they Looked on me as an Enemy and Trator to my Country’.
This was certainly the view in England, and the illegal trade in sugar and molasses by the North Americans would have some very important consequences. More than ever, the colonials were seen in Britain as corrupt and self-serving, having preferred to trade with the enemy rather than support the war effort. Measures taken by the Royal Navy against this traffic led to a review of the whole system of enforcing trade and revenue laws in America, and the use of the Royal Navy to suppress smuggling found a ready place in George Grenville and Charles Townsend’s plans for a new imperial system.
In many ways the decade after the end of the war in 1763 represents the high-water mark of the ‘first’ British empire. Peace brought a further expansion of trade in tropical and subtropical commodities: not only sugar, but also tea and spices from India and China, tobacco, rice and indigo from the southern mainland colonies of North America, rum, coffee, cotton and dye woods from the West Indies flowed into the mother country to raise standards of material welfare, pay for the reverse flow of British manufactures and employ ships and seamen for the Royal Navy, which provided global security for the system.
But in other ways, it was the beginning of the end. There were danger signs in the disloyalty and lack of respect for the law shown by the illegal traders, particularly now that France had been expelled from North America, removing the threat that had kept the Americans close to the British. Furthermore, the war had left Britain with a colossal debt of £140 million and vastly enlarged imperial responsibilities, problems and expenses. Difficulties with hostile Native Americans meant that 8,000 soldiers were to be stationed in America, twice as many as in 1754, and a North American squadron maintained of 26 ships and 3,290 men, the largest in the Royal Navy apart from the Home Fleet. British taxpayers thought the ungrateful colonials should start to share the expense.
Meanwhile, in the West Indies, the expansion of the empire achieved at the Peace of Paris was to have unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.
PART THREE
The Inheritors
26
LUXURY AND DEBT
‘Sugar, sugar, is the incessant cry of luxury, and of debt.’
Reverend James Ramsay
Gedney Clarke, the Barbados-based trader, customs collector, planter and friend of George Washington, had not had a good war. It appears that the government victualling contracts that he had secured had not been as profitable as expected, and a loan of £15,000 from the Lascelles was needed to keep the operation going. In 1763, the London money market took a sharp downturn, and speculators were badly burned, Clarke among them.
The same year, a huge slave revolt broke out in the Dutch colony of Berbice, where the white population had been decimated by an ‘epidemical disorder’, and where Clarke had substantial estates. As soon as he heard, Clarke, at huge expense, dispatched four armed vessels to Berbice. On board were 50 Barbados militiamen, whom Clarke had persuaded to come with ‘Threats, Arguments & the force of money’. This body was augmented by 100 marines and sailors aboard HMS Pembroke, lent to Clarke by his friends in the Royal Navy, even though there was no official sanction for the task force, whose role was clearly to protect the property of Gedney Clarke. Other recruits made the force up to 300, and its contribution to the defeat of the rebellion was crucial.
But in August 1764, Gedney Clarke junior, who had settled in London and recently succeeded George Maxwell as a partner in the Lascelles firm, heard news ‘of the Extream Illness of Col. Clarke’. Due to the ‘severity of his Feaver and other disorders’, Gedney Clarke Sr was dying. What was more, his business affairs were in turmoil. ‘Thus I am placed in his shoes’, his son wrote soon afterwards. Clarke Jr had been enjoying establishing himself in London, but he now had to return to Barbados to sort out the mess and to take over the family customs position.
In the 10 years after 1744, Henry Lascelles had lent Clarke around £30,000. After Henry’s death in 1753, his sons had continued to proffer assistance. Now the debts were out of control. Clarke Jr’s first move was to sell his holdings in the Dutch colonies. It was good timing, but he simply exchanged one imminent disaster for another. With the proceeds he purchased four new plantations in the recently-ceded territories of Grenada and Tobago. In Tobago alone he bought more than 2,000 acres on his own account or in partnership.
After the end of the Seven Years War, many others, a lot of them Scots, rushed to plant the newly British and relatively undeveloped islands of Dominica, St Vincent, Grenada and Tobago with sugar. The lure of sugar profits led to a wave of speculation in land, with prices rising to ridiculous levels. Thus Gedney Clarke paid inflated prices for the land in Tobago, using mortgages that could be financed only for as long as sugar prices remained high and interest charges stayed low. But profits were disappointing. The new plantations in the ceded islands, together with an increase in production from the Dutch in Surinam and the French in St Domingue, saw the world sugar price start to slide.51 T
here was also a great increase in demand for slaves, pushing up the price considerably. A field worker who had cost £25 in 1755 went for £60 in 1770.
Income from the new estates and those on Barbados hardly covered Gedney Clarke’s current account with the London Lascelles company, and so interest on the overall debt kept rising. In desperation, Clarke took to embezzling customs revenue. In 1771 this was spotted, and a commission of inquiry was dispatched to Barbados. Clarke, it emerged, had taken more than £15,000, plus large balances in kind. He was suspended, but amazingly had the political contacts to get himself reinstated, just as his father had done, and the Lascelles brothers before him.
But a credit crisis and a sharp fall in the price of sugar in 1772–3 saw the end for Gedney Clarke. By now the Lascelles were owed some £130,000. It seems from their books that they had been illegally charging compound interest. Either Clarke did not know about this, or he was so desperate that he was forced to agree to the terms. Worried about competition from other creditors, the Lascelles family took over the Gedney Clarke property. It was the most spectacular bankruptcy the West Indies had seen so far, described in a letter of 1774 as ‘the greatest failure that ever happened here’. In all, Clarke was in the red to the tune of about £200,000. Four years later and now paupers, Gedney Clarke and his wife both died on Barbados.
Although none were quite so noteworthy, there were many other early failures in the ceded islands, where planting was often hindered by difficulties with the terrain, with slaves who had escaped during the capture of the islands, and with the Caribs who still lived on several of the islands, most notably Dominica and St Vincent. Among those going under was the Attorney General of Grenada, Joseph Baker, who ended up arrested and imprisoned for debt in England.
The Sugar Barons Page 40