Beckford had more in common, though, with Robert Charles Dallas, who arrived in Jamaica in 1779. Like Beckford, Dallas had been born in Jamaica, and his father, a Scottish doctor and plantation owner, had died while he was young. Robert was sent off the island at the age of 10 to be schooled first in Musselburgh, New Brunswick, and then at the Scottish school in Kensington run by James Elphinstone, a friend of Dr Samuel Johnson and outspoken opponent of slavery.
In his book on the island, Dallas described arriving in Jamaica as if for the first time – either for literary effect or because he had not returned since leaving as a young boy 15 years earlier. The lack of twilight, the insects and the extreme heat all seemed new to him. ‘The heat becomes intolerable’, he exclaimed on landing at Kingston. ‘Oh! for a glass of rasp-berry ice! – I am melting away – the sun is exhaling all my juices – I feel them passing through my pores … The slightest action throws one into a violent perspiration.’
Like Somerly, he arrived to find that his estate had been badly mismanaged by the attorneys. It was also mired in legal actions, and now ‘in the last stage of its disorder’. A small debt, less than a fifth of its value, had, since the death of his father, increased ‘to almost its whole value’. The aim of the managers or trustees – ‘really the locusts of the West Indies’ – was to supply the plantation from their own stores and, he wrote, ‘get a debt upon his estate, then, by management with the overseer, to keep down the annual produce till the debt encrease so much, that the proprietor is glad to take anything, or till a chancery suit foreclose a mortgage; and thus … make the property their own’.
Dallas was unimpressed with the white Jamaicans he met during his time on the island. The children were spoilt and the adults greedy and lazy, spending their time eating and drinking too much, and doing little else except playing cards and backgammon. ‘With some exceptions’, he concluded, ‘the country is generally inhabited by rapacious agents, inhuman overseers, ignorant and cruel negro-jobbers, and usurious traders.’
One such exception was Beckford of Somerly, whom Dallas seems to have found a kindred spirit. He spent some time at Hertford Pen, engaged in ‘Conversation, books, music, drawing, riding, bathing, fishing’. It was the most agreeable time he had on the island, and he described Beckford, who clearly had little in common with the Beckfords of old, as ‘accomplished mild and pleasing … as a friend, sincere; as a husband, delicate and affectionate; as a brother, warmly attached; as a master, tender and humane; as a man of business, alas!’
Indeed, Somerly’s aim to reduce his debts was not going to plan. Reading between the lines of his two books, written under very different and unfortunate circumstances, he made a series of bad mistakes, including experimenting with untried new theories about planting, and buying ‘superfluous coppers, stills and stores’.
Beckford had also learnt to his cost that sugar producing itself remained, as a Barbadian planter had lamented 100 years before, ‘a design full of accident’. He had endless problems with his water-powered mills: sometimes the flow was insufficient; other times it was so heavy that the dam on the mill pond was carried away. Machinery was always breaking down. The sugar cane itself, he wrote, ‘is so treacherous a plant’, often promising much but delivering little, so that ‘the life of a planter is a continual state of uncertainty and trouble’. In 1777, he was forced to take out a mortgage of £25,000; and no money had been repaid four years later.
Dallas and Beckford, both educated in England at a time when slavery was being questioned, no doubt discussed their views on the matter. Dallas described his shock on seeing, on his first day on the island, a slave given a severe punch on the face for allowing a fly to land on his master’s butter. ‘My blood rebelled against the blow’, he wrote. ‘I felt an affection for the poor negro, and an instant detestation for his master.’ Later, he detailed the callous treatment of slave women by the white overseers, and various cruel tortures inflicted on even the youngest slaves. Slavery, he concluded, was ‘tyranny, cruelty, murder’, and he started to worry that he was getting used to it. The mind, he wrote, underwent ‘a total change’ from the state in which it arrived in the West Indies. ‘There is a kind of intoxication’, he continued. ‘I have not lost my natural abhorrence to cruelty, yet I see it practised with much less impatience than I did, and I have only to pray, that I may not feel an inclination to turn driver myself.’ Before this could happen, Dallas left the island, explaining later that he ‘daily sicken’d at the ills around me’.
Dallas was one of a number of Creole-born English who came out to the West Indies and found that it was not a place in which they could live. His younger brother arrived in 1781 with his wife, but also disliked Jamaica and moved to Philadelphia two years later.52 Walter Pollard, from an old Barbados family, had been educated in England from a young age, and spent a friendless and unhappy childhood longing for his parents and tropical home. But when at last he returned in 1788, he discovered it was not the bucolic paradise of his memory. ‘A well constituted mind ought not to remain happy in the West Indies’, he wrote. ‘I feel such repugnance … [for] negro slavery … a system cruel to the master and the slave and where a pure mind that reasons must shudder at the thoughts of residing and perhaps of marrying.’ He moved away quickly, first to the United States, then back to England.
Thomas Thistlewood told the story of Robert Kenyon, who bought the Egypt plantation from the Copes in 1781. In February of the next year, Thistlewood reported a ‘miff’ between Kenyon and his overseer ‘about flogging the Negroes. Mr K. can’t bear to see them flogged.’ Kenyon never got used to it, and sold up and left two years later.
Robert Dallas’s book about Jamaica was published anonymously, to avoid offence to people he knew on the island. He did, however, return to Jamaica after marrying in England, and left the island again only because of his wife’s health. Ten years after his first book, he wrote a history of the maroons, in which he backed away from his earlier anti-slavery sentiments. By the time he was in his forties, he was regretting ever having published his first book. It was ridiculous of him, he wrote, ‘as a West Indian, to argue against that system upon which the prosperity of every West Indian is built. My answer is that I was young and intoxicated with the Utopian ideas of liberty, which I had imbibed in the course of my education in England.’
The case of Beckford of Somerly is slightly different. He wrote in detail about the lives of the slaves in Jamaica, and displayed his characteristic sensitivity and, it has to be said, naivety. He called the transportation of slaves from Africa a ‘stream of misery … repugnant to our religion’; the manner of their sale once arrived ‘harrowing’. He deplored the sadistic, often drunken violence of the overseers, inflicting ‘excruciating bodily sufferings’, and was highly critical of the hard work imposed on the old, the sick and the very young. At one point he noted that many slaves were so ‘desperate’ that they committed suicide.
But, like Richard Ligon, and many sensitive Englishmen who followed, Somerly failed to see the obvious conclusion of the evidence he himself presented. Conditions on slave ships should be improved, he suggested, rather than the trade abolished. Discipline in the fields should be ‘steady, not severe’ and general treatment more carefully regulated (but only ‘if it can be done without infringing upon the rights of individuals’). Small children should be employed, he wrote, ‘in some light work’ like hand-weeding, ‘in which they may take delight’. For all his obvious and deeply felt compassion, he went on to repeat the mantras of those who were then defending slavery against its growing opponents: the lot of Africans in the West Indies ‘under a kind owner’ was, in fact, better than if they had stayed in Africa, and their conditions compared well with those of the ‘labouring poor’ in England; removed from his ‘natal soil’, the African had the chance ‘to taste the comforts of protection, the fruits of humanity, and the blessings of religion’. Having criticised owners for forgetting the ‘humanity’ of the Africans, he pronounced: ‘The negroes a
re slaves by nature.’ Although clearly appalled by the practical application of slavery, he could not imagine a West Indian world without it.
In 1770, having recently become Lord Mayor of London for the second time, Alderman William Beckford died, aged 61. He was, reportedly, the first English commoner to die a millionaire. His son and heir, William of Fonthill, was nine. William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was one of those appointed to look after his interests while a minor. Another was Thomas Wildman, who had worked for Alderman Beckford, and who, together with his two brothers, would run Beckford of Fonthill’s interests in Jamaica, as well as act as his bankers in England.
Like his cousin, William Beckford of Somerly, Beckford of Fonthill was a very different creature to the bold, violent, determined Beckfords who had built their enormous fortune in Jamaica and then marched to the top of public life in England.
Beckford of Fonthill was highly strung and acutely sensitive. He refused to hunt or shoot. He was a brilliant amateur painter and talented composer and writer. He is best known today as the author of Vathek, a successful Gothic novel he wrote originally in French, but published in England in 1796, and for his jaw-dropping extravagance. When he turned 21 in 1781, Beckford of Fonthill came into an inheritance of more than a million pounds, together with an annual income of about £100,000. It was a staggering amount of money – ‘the largest property real and personal of any subject in Europe’ – and Fonthill was determined to spend it fast. The following year he travelled round Europe with such a vast entourage that he was mistaken for the Emperor of Austria and, the story goes, charged accordingly.
His father had collected art, but the son took his acquisitions to a new level, building up one of the world’s largest collections of paintings, books, furniture and objets d’art: 20,000 books in his own binding; paintings by Titian, Bronzino, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Rubens and Canaletto – 20 of the paintings he once owned now hang in the National Gallery, London – as well as the major contemporary artists; a table from the Borghese Palace whose centre consisted of the largest onyx in the world; Jacobean coffers; Venetian glass; the largest collection of Japanese lacquer in the world; and thousands of objects of porcelain, bronze, jewellery, silver, gold and agate.
In March 1783, Beckford married Lady Margaret Gordon, the 21-year-old daughter of the Earl of Aboyne. The following year the couple were presented at court, and Beckford was elected MP for Wells. At the same time he started jockeying for a peerage, and in October his name was gazetted with others about to be made peers. He was to be Lord Beckford of Fonthill – the family’s rise to the very top looked set to be completed.
But Fonthill had a guilty secret. He was predominantly homosexual, and since the age of 19 had been carrying on an affair with William Courtney, a famously beautiful boy whom he had met when Courtney was only 11. In November 1784, Beckford was staying with Courtney’s family, Lord and Lady Courtney. Early one morning, Courtney’s tutor, passing by his bedroom, heard a ‘creeking and bustle, which raised his curiosity, & thro’ the key hole he saw the operation, which it seems he did not interrupt, but informed Lord C [Courtney], & the whole was blown up’, as the event was described. Beckford denied everything, but Courtney was forced to hand over to his father incriminating letters.
There was no prosecution – sodomy was at that time a capital offence – but Beckford’s good name was gone for ever. The newspapers had a field day; it was the biggest sex scandal of the Georgian era.
Fonthill’s wife Margaret, who was pregnant with their first daughter, advised fleeing the country, but for a while Beckford remained in England, cloistered away at Fonthill. Then, in 1785, the Beckfords retired to Switzerland. There Lady Margaret died the following year, having just given birth to their second daughter. The two baby girls were packed off to be looked after at Fonthill’s mother’s house in Wimpole Street, London. Beckford hardly ever saw them again. Newspapers blamed Lady Margaret’s death on Beckford’s behaviour. Even friends who had remained loyal now ceased to correspond.
In January 1787 Beckford returned to England, and shortly afterwards decided that he ought to visit his properties in Jamaica, now being managed by James Wildman. March that year saw him in Falmouth, writing to his mother: ‘We are waiting in this most detestable town for a wind to carry us into a still more detestable situation. – the very sight of the waves gently heaving the vessels in the harbour makes me sick – so I leave you to judge what will be my sensations when on board. – However I am in for it – now – I cannot escape …’ ‘I cannot help confessing that no one ever embarked for transportation with a heavier heart’, he wrote to Thomas Wildman in London. ‘The more I hear of Jamaica, the more I dread the climate – which I fully expect will wither my health away.’
In the event, Beckford got as far as Madeira before leaving the ship and abandoning his Jamaica estates to the tender mercies of his attorneys. Instead he sailed to Portugal, where he stayed for about two years, in spite of being shunned by the British expatriate community. Further travel followed, until a return to Fonthill in October 1789, where he inspected expensive redecoration work being undertaken on Splendens. His sole companions were two oddballs he had picked up on his travels: Gregorio Franchi, the young son of an Italian court singer, and a Spanish dwarf, Perro. No visitors called, except his old tutor, who reported that there were three chefs and one confectioner employed in the kitchen and 10 footmen waiting at table upon three persons.
The return to England had also been prompted by concerns about the Wildmans’ management in Jamaica. On one letter received from Thomas Wildman in April 1789, Beckford scrawled: ‘Infernal rascal this Wildman!’ In January, Beckford was complaining that his estates were not producing what they did in his father’s day, and instructed the Wildmans to sell one of his smaller plantations. In the event, a large plantation known as Quebec, with 800 slaves, passed this year from Beckford to the Wildmans, possibly after the latter had threatened Beckford with calling in outstanding mortgages. Later Beckford would lament of the Wildmans that ‘Between this harpy and two brothers who played in concert at proper time half my substance has been devoured.’ The profits from the Quebec plantation would allow Thomas Wildman to purchase Newstead Abbey from Lord Byron in 1817 for £94,000.
Beckford wanted his money out of Jamaica to pay for his grandiose plans at Splendens. ‘My Works at Fonthill Building planting etc are going on very briskly’, he wrote in a letter to his Jamaica agent in August 1790. ‘I have been raising Towers and digging Grottos, your Brother thinks I mean to imploy almost as many whites as Blacks very shortly.’
After further travels, Beckford returned to Fonthill in 1796, pretty much for good. He bought an additional 1,700 acres for the estate and planted hundreds of thousands of trees to shield himself from prying eyes. An enormous wall was built around the grounds, eight miles long, 12 feet high and topped with iron spikes (a wall of similiarly vast proportions surrounds the Drax estate at Charborough). Furthermore, Beckford was now bored with the classical sobriety of Splendens. He decided to raise himself a spectacular new building. ‘Some people drink to forget their unhappiness’, he is reported to have announced. ‘I do not drink, I build.’
Although none were on the scale of Beckford of Fonthill, this generation of the sugar barons, many of whom were inheritors of huge fortunes, is characterised by furious extravagance, and, in particular, eccentric building projects.
Rose Fuller died childless in 1777, and his substantial estate passed to his brother Henry’s son Jack, who was then 20 years old. Like Beckford of Fonthill, Jack could not spend the money fast enough. Soon becoming enormously fat, his great weakness was for building expensive and worthless follies in the grounds of his manor at Brightling in Sussex, earning him locally the nickname ‘Mad Jack’. One was a 35-foot-high cone designed to look like a sugar loaf, built to win a bet. Even the otherwise sensible Draxes were constructing a huge tower of no discernible purpose in the grounds of their magnificent Charborough Park. But none came close
to what Beckford, soon to be known as ‘The Fool of Fonthill’, now intended.
In Jamaica, Beckford of Somerly’s fortunes continued to sink through the late 1770s as he struggled to service his debts amid mounting prices for provisions and supplies caused by the war. In 1780 came the hardest blow of all.
On Monday 2 October, his near neighbour Thomas Thistlewood noted in his diary that it was ‘gloomy, dark & dismal in the south’, the sea roared ‘prodigiously’, and the skies looked ‘very wild’. The following morning came heavy rain, then, from midday, the wind picked up alarmingly.
Thistlewood ordered all his slaves to take shelter in the hall of his house. Moments later the Negro houses were all blown down, amid flashes of lightning and roars of thunder. The air ‘darkened with leaves & limbs of trees &c. which flew with great violence’. Torrential rain flooded his garden, as the cookroom, store house, horse stable, sheep house, bee houses and ‘even the Necessary house’ were all destroyed, blown ‘quite away over the hill into the morass’. A little before sunset, the wind was at its height, ‘raging with the utmost violence & irresistible fury, tore in pieces the remainder of my house, dispersing it in different ways’.
The hurricane continued until midnight, by which time only one wall of the main house still stood. Here Thistlewood and the slaves ‘stood all night in the rain which came like small shot’. The following morning Thistlewood surveyed his property: ‘The external face of the earth, so much altered, scarce know where I am. Not a blade of grass, nor leaf left, or tree, shrub or bush.’ His carefully tended garden was wrecked; his sheep were almost all dead or dying; buildings had simply disappeared.
The Sugar Barons Page 44