The Sugar Barons (52 page)

In 1755, William Beckford’s expensively refurbished mansion, Fonthill, burnt to the ground. Beckford is reported as announcing, ‘I have an odd fifty thousand pounds in a drawer. I will build it up again!’ The result became known as Fonthill Splendens, a lavish stately pile designed in the Palladian style, stocked with the best furniture, objects and paintings that money could buy. On the ground floor was an immense Egyptian Hall, from which radiated numerous vaulted corridors. Upstairs was a suite of stately apartments, all with marble floors, and further up were found galleries filled with precious art and furniture. It was, said one visitor, a place ‘where expense has reached its utmost limits in furniture and ornaments, where every room is a gold mine and every apartment a picture gallery’. Descriptions of Splendens by contemporaries paid tribute to its lavishness while hinting at touches of vulgarity. One referred to the ‘utmost
profusion of magnificence’ of the
piano nobile
, ‘with the appearance of immense riches, almost too tawdrily exhibited’. In fact, there were few visitors: local gentry considered Beckford a nouveau riche ‘radical’, and were unimpressed by his morals, as evidenced by his huge brood of illegitimate children.

The house lay at the foot of a wooded valley on the western margin of an artificial lake, complete with bridge, grotto and boathouse, designed to look like a rococo basilica in miniature. Beckford also rebuilt the local church, replacing it with an ugly and pretentious building that resembled an ill-proportioned Grecian temple. Villagers were unimpressed with the new building, and regarded the fact that ancient monumental inscriptions from the previous church had been buried as an ill omen.

The Beckfords were not the only West Indians entering Parliament. By mid-century, most of the biggest sugar names had at least one family member as an MP, including the Lascelles, the Tomlinsons and the Martins from Antigua, the Dawkins and Dickinsons from Jamaica, the Pinneys and Stapletons from Nevis, and many others. Christopher Codrington’s heir, Sir William, baronet, who had been steadily increasing his acreage in Antigua, was MP for Minehead until his death in 1738. His brother-in-law, Slingsby Bethell, managed the Codrington plantations in Antigua as a young man and then moved to London to establish a sugar factorage business, acting as a commission agent for the Byams, Martins and Tomlinsons. He was Lord Mayor of London in 1756 and represented the City in Parliament. Sir William’s son represented Tewkesbury. The Draxes of Barbados were also now English MPs, a tradition that has continued to this day.

In 1767, Lord Chesterfield’s offer of £2,500 for a seat in Northampton was disdainfully refused by a borough jobber. His lordship was told that ‘there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for the rich East and West Indians had secured them all, at the rate of three thousand pounds at least, and two or three that he knew at five thousand’. ‘The landed interest is beat out’, wrote another member of the aristocracy in 1768. ‘Merchants, nabobs, and those who have gathered riches from the East and West Indies stand the best chance of governing this country.’

Indeed, in 1765 it was estimated that there were more than 40 MPs who were ‘West Indians’, able to ‘turn the balance on which side they please’, as the agent for Massachusetts Bay complained. In contrast, the North Americans had no comparable lobby, causing Benjamin Franklin to bemoan that in Britain, the ‘West Indies vastly outweigh us of the Northern Colonies’.

In 1754, Rose Fuller returned to England from Jamaica and the next year became MP for Rye. In 1764, his younger brother Stephen became Jamaica’s agent in London, a post he held for 30 years, praised above all his predecessors in the role for his ‘vigilance to the welfare of the colony represented’ and his ‘intelligent and perfect’ ‘comprehension of its essential interest’. Perhaps Stephen Fuller’s greatest coup came when he persuaded the Royal Navy to adopt rum in place of brandy. He also organised the purchase by the government of vast amounts of molasses to be distributed to Poor Houses.

The West Indian lobby now held very considerable sway over national policy, able to persuade the government that what was good for the sugar interest was good for the empire. Congregating in the King’s Arms Tavern in Cornhill, the Mitre Coffee House in Fleet Street, or the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street, the absentee planters planned their lobbying and wove their webs of influence. Any attempt to raise the import duty on sugar to a level nearer that for other imported products, or to open the huge British market to cheaper foreign-grown sugar, was fought tooth and nail. Efforts by sugar refiners in England to combine to fix prices, or to demand that more land in Jamaica be planted in sugar to lower the price, were successfully brushed aside, with Alderman William Beckford leading the lobby in the House.

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.