The Sugar Barons (35 page)

Labat was impressed that Codrington spoke fluent French throughout, and declared the general ‘far more sober than are most of his nation as a rule’. Beneath the bonhomie, both sides attempted to prise information from the other. ‘General Codrington asked a hundred questions about my voyage to San Domingo’, says Labat, ‘and about many other things. But he spoke so quickly that he asked two or three questions before I had time to answer.’ However charming Labat found Codrington, he added an interesting criticism: ‘I could not help observing how very vain are the English, and in what little esteem they hold other nations’.

Certainly Codrington’s entourage was revealing of a man with a very high opinion of his own grandeur and position. When he left, ‘two trumpeters rode in front of him and he was accompanied by eight persons who appeared to be servants’. He also had a chaplain and a soldier, a major general, in his party. ‘Nine or ten negroes ran in front of the trumpeters
although their horses always travel at a canter’, says Labat. ‘I felt sorry for a small negro about fifteen years old who was being taught to be a runner. He only wore a pair of pants without a seat, but was made to take off even this garment and run naked in front of everyone. He was followed by a negro with a whip which was applied every time he came within range.’

Not all of Codrington’s confidence was bravado. When he received orders to attack the French in St Kitts in the event of war, he replied to London with a scheme for capturing all of the French islands. And at last he managed to line up some militia fighters from Nevis and Antigua to be ready to reinforce the English on St Kitts. During the spring, everyone waited. Out at sea, warships stopped vessels from Europe to see if war had begun.

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.