Slavery, Sugar and the Sublime

Victoria Jane Perry University College London The Bartlett School of Architecture Doctorate in Philosophy September, 2009

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I, Victoria Perry confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis.

Victoria Perry

September, 2009

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Slavery, Sugar and the Sublime The study examines the relationship between eighteenth and early nineteenth century British visual culture and the wealth created from slave-trading, Caribbean sugar plantations and the colonial transatlantic trade. Influenced by Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism - and drawing on the evidence of buildings, landscapes and archives - I demonstrate that imperial links were manifest not only, as Said argues, in British literature, but also explicit in the architecture, interiors and landscapes commissioned by Britain’s eighteenth century elite.

But the visual connections between Britain and its maritime colonial empire were not just manifest in the design of individual buildings or landscape gardens. The growing prosperity of provincial ‘Atlantic’ ports such as Bristol, Liverpool, Lancaster, Whitehaven and Glasgow had a profound effect on Britain’s ‘cultural geography’ - a shift towards the Atlantic west that was manifest in new aesthetic attitude towards wild and untamed landscapes. The profits from colonial plantations helped transform the perception of remote, often agriculturally unproductive uplands of western Britain into places of aesthetic value. I show, for instance, how financial investments made by ‘Atlantic’ colonial planters and merchants in north Wales, Cumberland and Scotland were instrumental to the creation of ‘Snowdonia’, ‘The Lakes’ and ‘The Highlands’ as ‘scenic’ tourist destinations.

The fashion for landscape tourism was not just confined to Britain. The celebration of uncultivated ‘Nature’ also became a means to dignify colonial exploration and travel. I investigate the significance of landscape theorists Edmund Burke’s and William Gilpin’s connections with the colonial Atlantic trade, the critical influence of absentee planters on the popularity of picturesque landscape tourism and discuss how landscape art was used to represent the Caribbean colonies at a time of growing anti-slavery sentiment in Britain.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

5

Acknowledgements

9

Introduction

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Historical Background

14

Academic Context

18

Sources and Methodology

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Chapter Structure

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Chapter One Sites of Slavery

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Chapter Two Arts and Elegancies

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Chapter Three Trade and Plumb Cake

66

Chapter Four Painted Memorandums

90

Chapter Five Refining the World

110

Chapter Six Nature’s Prospects

130

Chapter Seven Cultivating the Remote

151

Chapter Eight Bitter-sweet Edens

169

Conclusion The Mock Turtle’s Story

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A Bitter-sweet Heritage

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Appendix: British country estates with historic links to the former Caribbean colonies

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Bibliography

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Illustrations Introduction Figure 0.1 Figure 0.2

Conch Shell Source: Courtesy of Mary Healey. Piercefield House Source: Author

Chapter One: Sites of Slavery Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 1.4

Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6 Figure 1.7

Figure 1.8 Figure 1.9 Figure 1.10 Figure 1.11 Figure 1.12

Ottley’s, St Kitts Source: Rob Philpott Guest Cottage at the Hermitage Inn, Nevis Source: Author Chattel houses in Nevis Source: Author Map of the Caribbean [online image] Source: lib.utexas.edu/maps/Americas/Caribbean [accessed on 12 September, 2009] View from Mount Nevis Hill to St Kitts Source: Author Richard Ligon: A topographical description and Admeasurement of the Ysland of Barbados 1657. Source: British Library William Jackson, British slave ship c. 1780 Oil on canvas. Source: Liverpool Museums and Art Gallery Abandoned windmill, Nevis Source: Author Abandoned coal-fired sugar mill, Nevis Source: Author Former boiling house, St Kitts Source: Author Brimstone Hill Fort, St Kitts Source: Author Image of plantation house, St Kitts Source: Author

Chapter Two: Arts and Elegancies Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6 Figure 2.7

The Entrance elevation of Danson House Source: Architects Journal The Entrance Hall at Danson House Source: Architects Journal The Salon at Danson House Source: Architects Journal The main staircase at Danson House Source: Architects Journal Thomas Luny, The Pool of London c.1805. Source: The Museum of London No 11, The Crescent Source: Author. Bance Island Source: The British Library 5

Figure 2.8 Figure 2.9

Thomas Malton water-colour of Danson Source: Bexley Museums and Archives Plan of proposed landscaping at Danson Source: Bexley Local Studies Centre

Chapter Three: Trade and Plumb Cake Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6 Figure 3.7 Figure 3.8 Figure 3.9 Figure 3.10

Joseph Turner. Harewood from the South, 1798 Water-colour on paper Source: The Earl of Harewood Decorated plaster ceiling Source: Earl of Harewood/Chris Mason. Sugar moulds Source: The Bowes Museum/ The World of Interiors Frontispiece of The Tweflth Day Gift Source: The British Library Thomas Malton, The North Façade of Harewood House Source: The Earl of Harewood. Decorated plaster ceiling in the Gallery Source: Chris Mason/The Earl of Harewood Detail of a tobacco merchant’s painted parlour (1696) Source: Sir John Cass’s Foundation Primary School Former ‘pinery’ at Dunmore Park, Stirlingshire. Source: The Landmark Trust Harewood from the south c. 1994. Source: The Earl of Harewood Joshua Reynolds, Edwin Lascelles at Harewood Oil on canvas Source: The Earl of Harewood

Chapter Four: Painted Memorandums Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2

Figure 4.3

Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5

Figure 4.6

Figure 4.7

Johann Zoffany: Sir William Young of Dominica and his Family Oil on canvas Source: Liverpool Museums and Galleries (The Walker Art Gallery) Richard Barrett: The Boyd family Oil on canvas Source: Bexley Museums and Archives Richard Brompton: Henry Dawkins and his family Oil on canvas Source: Penrhyn Castle/The National Trust Johann Zoffany: Detail of Young Family Piece Source: Penrhyn Castle/The National Trust Augustino Brunius: Negroes Dancing in the Island of Dominica Engraving by Augustino Brunius in Brian Edwards: History of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 1792 Source: The British Library Johann Zoffany: Mrs Oswald Oil on canvas Source: The National Gallery Johann Zoffany: The Murray Family piece Oil on canvas Source: The Duke of Atholl 6

Chapter Five: Refining The World Figure 5.1

Figure

5.2

Figure 5.3

Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5

Figure 5.6 Figure 5.7 Figure 5.8

Anthony Walker, Prior Park, The Seat of Ralph Allen Esqr, near Bath Engraving (1752) Source: The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford John Pinney’s house, George Street Bristol (1791) Source: Bristol Museum and Art Gallery Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Byam and their daughter Selina, c.1762 Oil on canvas. Source: Holburne Museum of Art, Bath. Thomas Malton Junior: The South Parade at Bath, 1784 Source: Bridgeman Art Library/ Victoria Art Gallery, Bath The Royal Crescent as Building works near completion Water-colour by Thomas Malton Junior, 1769 Source: Bridgeman Art Library/ Victoria Art Gallery, Bath Pulteney Bridge, Bath Source: English Heritage/James O. Davies Grosvenor Place Hotel Façade by John Evleigh Source: English Heritage/James O. Davies Thomas Malton Junior: The Royal Crescent Source: Bridgeman Art Library/ Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

Chapter Six: Nature’s Prospects Figure 6.1

Figure 6.2

Figure 6.3

Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5 Figure 6.6

Figure 6.7

Figure 6.8

Etching of Piercefield from William Coxe A Historical Tour through Monmouthshire, 1804 Source: Chepstow Museum Thomas Hearne: Chepstow Castle from Piercefield, c.1794 Water-colour over grey wash and pencil 18.7 x 22.4 Source: The Trustees of the British Museum. Map of Piercefield from William Coxe A Historical Tour through Monmouthshire, 1804 Source: British Library View from the River Wye towards Piercefield’s cliffs, 2001 Source: Archie Miles/Wye Valley ANOB The path at the Giant’s Cave in 2004 Source: Author Claude Gelee: Landscape with Ascanius shooting the stag of Sylvia. Oil on canvas Source: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford George Cumberland: Tour in North Wales, 1784 Scenes at Piercefield, No. 6 The Giant’s Cave Source: The National Library of Wales William Gilpin: Aquatint of Tintern Abbey From Observations on The River Wye, 1783

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Chapter Seven: Cultivating the Remote Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4

Figure 7.5

Henry Thompson: Portrait of Richard Pennant Source: The National Trust Water-colour view of Penrhyn Castle, c.1785 Source: Penrhyn Castle/The National Trust Richard Wilson Speculum Dinae with Dolbarden Castle (c 1765) Source: Bristol Museums and Art Gallery Keswick Lake Etching on paper engraved by Beller, c.1755 Source: Cambridge University William Gilpin: Keswick Lake Pen and wash on paper, c.1770 Source: The British Library.

Chapter Eight: Bitter-sweet Edens Figures 8.1–8.5 George Robertson Water-colour on paper Source: Penrhyn Castle/The National Trust Figure 8.6 A view of the River Cobre near Spanish town Etching on paper Source: The British Museum Figures 8.7-8.9 Detail of West Aspect of St John’s Town, Antigua Pen and wash on paper. Source: The National Library of Wales Figure 8.10 Detail of Jolly Hill Estate Antigua belonging to Govn. Morris. Pen and wash on paper, c.1772 Source: The National Library of Wales Figures 8.11 Thomas Hearne: Parnham House and sugar plantation Antigua, 1779 -8.12 Water-colour over pen and ink on paper 33.2 x 53.7 Source: The Trustees of the British Museum.

Chapter Nine: A Bitter-sweet Heritage Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2 Figure 9.3

Figure 9.4 Figure 9.5

Beckford’s Tower: Belvidere Source: Joshua Briggs/The Beckford Trust The Mock Turtle, the Gryphon and Alice. John Tenniel: Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland, 1865 The Ruins of Fonthill Abbey. Drawn on stone by W.Westall from a drawing by J.Buckler. Source: The Beckford Trust. Former sugar warehouses in London’s West India Dock Source Author Samuel Jackson: View of the Avon at Hotwells with the Clifton Suspension Bridge And the Paddle Steamer ‘Wye’, c.1836 Source: Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

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Acknowledgements It is not usual to thank one’s family first. However, had it not been for my toddler and six month old baby, I would have not have dared take a sabbatical from my work as an architect and return to university. And had it not been for the support of my husband, Paul, I would also have been unable to do so. Indeed, although illness and the birth of a third child have made my ‘career break’ far longer than I first intended, he only rarely raised a sigh when my projected date of completion extended yet again.

I would also like to give my profound thanks to my supervisor Professor Adrian Forty at the Bartlett School of Architecture, U.C.L. not only for academic advice but for his realism regarding the sometimes conflicting demands of small children and writing timetables. Professor Catherine Hall in the History department of U.C.L. also reassured me when I had doubts about my ability to tackle the cultural issues that my study unearthed.

A grant from my professional institute, R.I.B.A., helped towards the cost of my extensive travels to visit buildings, landscapes and archives in Britain. Awards from The Bartlett School of Architecture and University College London enabled me to travel to the West Indies to present my work at a conference held to mark the completion of a three-year, British Academy-funded research project on the ‘colonial landscapes’ of St Kitts and Nevis. The conference tours, run under the aegis of Portsmouth University Department of Archaeology, the Institute of Post-Mediaeval Archaeology, the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society, St Christopher’s Heritage Society and the St. Eustatius Centre for Archaeological Research, proved an inspiring and invaluable introduction to the historic sites of the Caribbean. I would also like, in particular, to thank Georgia Fox, Rebecca Ginsberg, David Rollinson, Rob Philpott and Jonathan Gray for their comments and help following my presentation and also my parents, Jacqueline and David Perry, for looking after the children while I was abroad.

In Britain, I have found the staff at the British Library to be outstandingly and unfailingly helpful, knowledgeable and cheerful. Although I visited them less frequently, the staff at Harewood House, the Museum of London in Docklands and Lancaster Maritime Museum were also notable for their approachability and enthusiasm. I want to thank Anne Rainsbury of Chepstow Museum and members of The Georgian Group and The Friends of the Society of Georgian Jamaica, too, for useful contacts and information. Finally, I would also like to thank Josie Barnard, Robert Beckford, Slaine Campbell, Emma Cheadle, Madge Dresser, Melinda Elder, Mark Fisher, Douglas Hamilton, Eamonn O Ciardha, David Mackay, Jessie Mallock, Andrew Mackillop, Paul Strathern and Alex Perry for their help, support and advice.

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Introduction These Cane ocean-isles, Isles which Britain for their all depend … What soil the Cane affects; what care demands; Beneath what signs to plant; what ills await; How the hot nectar best to christallise; And, Afric’s sable progeny to treat: A Muse, that long hath wander’d in the groves Of myrtle-indolence, attempts to sing James Grainger, The Sugar Cane (1763)

Once, when I was still an architectural student, I spent an idyllic summer working in the grounds of an English country house. I was with a team repairing a derelict garden grotto, part of a wider programme of the restoration of the 18th century ‘follies’ that had been built to adorn the landscape park. We camped within the former, walled vegetable garden. In the long evenings after work, the landscape was ours alone. It was a magical experience. We picnicked in the shelter of a ‘classical’ temple and admired the ‘Gothick’ ruins. It was, as its creators had intended, a landscape of the senses, a grassy version of a mythic Arcadia.

Autumn approached all too fast and we prepared to return to our studies and the student world of shabby bedsits. During one of the final evenings around the campfire, our project director announced that he was to make a research trip to the Caribbean. We groaned with envy as he explained how he was to spend the next three weeks combing beaches and markets to find shells to match the few originals that remained in the grotto.

0.1 Caribbean conch shell or Abeng - enslaved Caribbean workers blew them like horns to communicate between plantations.

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But then something began to trouble me. The grotto, which had once seemed to be such a fun, frivolous building, suddenly became intensely serious. All I knew then of the eighteenth century West Indies was some school history about the transatlantic slave trade - the triangular link whereby European manufactured goods were bartered for enslaved West Africans to labour in the tobacco and sugar plantations of Britain’s American colonies. But what could the connection be with this English garden grotto, thousands of miles away?

Three years before, as a backpacking teenager, I had visited a rundown Indian Ocean beach hotel at a place called Bagamoya in Tanzania, East Africa. A little removed from the fraying palm-leaf roofs of the beach bar was an incongruous, grey stone building that looked somewhat like a nineteenth century Scottish church. It was, indeed, a museum commemorating the Scots missionary David Livingstone and his part in the abolition of the Arab slave trade in East Africa.

The village, namely, had once been the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade: captives were corralled on the beach where I had been sunbathing, before being shipped to the nearby island of Zanzibar and sold on to Arab traders. Indeed, the Tanzanians explained that in Swahili Bagamoya means ‘lay down your heart’ and local legends described the elegant merchants’ houses of Zanzibar’s Stone Town as built ‘on foundations of Africans’ bones’. It was a haunting metaphor, at once linking fine buildings with the terrible economics that underpinned their construction. It also had resonance with my discovery of the Caribbean seashells. Had I held a shell collected by an enslaved African from a Caribbean beach 250 years ago? Had this grotto, too, been built on the ‘foundations of Africans’ bones’?

They were intriguing questions, but, as a young architect, I neither had the time nor resources to attempt to find the answers. Years later, however, while reading a new architectural guide about the borders of South Wales, the area where I grew up, my thoughts began to resurface. For the book mentioned a ruined eighteenth century country house and estate called Piercefield near Chepstow, which I had never visited before. Not only was it registered Grade I, a category reserved for just a few of the English landscapes, parks and gardens nationally recognised to be of ‘special historic interest’,1 its patron was a Caribbeanborn heir to several Antiguan sugar plantations named Valentine Morris.

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Register of Landscapes Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Gwent, Part 1, Parks and Gardens, CADW/ICOMOS UK, 1994.

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0.2 Piercefield House in 2004

Little-known today outside a small, specialist circle of landscape historians, I discovered that Piercefield had once been one of the most popular and influential gardens in eighteenth century Britain. Following its creation in the 1750s, hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors experienced the ‘sublime’ views of ‘wild’ and ‘cultivated’ nature from the cliffside walks. Indeed, by the end of the century, a boat tour along the river Wye to visit Piercefield and the nearby ruins of Tintern Abbey had become a fashionable activity for genteel tourists.2 ‘Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,’ wrote William Wordsworth in one of his bestknown poems, ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.’3 ‘Again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur.’4 It was an experience that would have been shared by many.

Those questions during work on the grotto many years before, I realised, were now directly relevant to the landscapes of my own childhood. Why had an eighteenth century Antiguan sugar planter chosen to live in the wooded hills of the Wye Valley? 2

I have used the terms ‘genteel’ or ‘polite’ to describe an educated eighteenth century British elite – as the terms ‘upper,’ ‘middle’ or ‘lower’ class did not then exist. See Amanda Vickery: The Gentleman’s Daughter, pp.14-37. William Wordsworth: Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during th a tour: July 13 1798, See Marjorie Levinson, Insight and Oversight: reading ‘Tintern Abbey’ in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, pp.14 –57, Cambridge, 1996. 4 Ibid. 3

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Moreover, there were apparently other historic links, too, between the Caribbean and these Welsh border landscapes. Was it just coincidence that an elderly sugar heiress ‘Miss Tate’ had lived in the big house on the hillside close to my home village? Indeed, how had a sugar company come to own the forests and pheasant shoots where my friends and I used to explore? Was it just rumour that ‘Jamaican money’ had funded the construction of the large early nineteenth century stone house in the valley below? And what were the origins of the exotically named Barbados Woods shown on the Ordnance Survey map above Tintern Abbey, a few miles downstream?

The historic economics of land ownership were only part of the conundrum: I was struck, too, by the wider issue of British, and indeed American, aesthetic attitudes to ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’. The very cliffs and woods that Wordsworth, and so many others, had closely associated with emotional and physical freedoms, with liberty itself, had also, it seemed, been intimately connected with slavery and human bondage. How could this contradiction be explained?

I strapped my baby daughter into her pushchair and walked to the West Indian café at the end of the inner London street where we now lived. While she slept I sat, conspicuously blonde and alien, eating salt fish, ackee and black bean-speckled ‘rice n’ peas’. What was the connection with this close-knit, urban immigrant culture and the woods and fields surrounding my childhood home? Could a closer study of the origins of Piercefield Park give clues? The shell grotto suggested that there might be other British country houses and landscapes funded by Caribbean wealth. What would a closer look, therefore, reveal?

In his influential book Culture and Imperialism (1993) the literary critic Edward Said showed how the colonial experience was incorporated in European literature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most detailed examinations of these works is Said’s ‘rereading’ of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. In this, Said shows how Austen’s portrayal of an absentee Antiguan plantation owner, Sir Thomas Bertram, subtly but deftly connects domestic life in a British landed estate with the ‘actualities of British power overseas’.5 But if, as Said so persuasively argues, the literary culture of late eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain was profoundly influenced by colonial experiences, what about painting, sculpture, architecture and landscape design, too? Indeed, it seemed possible that there were many wealthy eighteenth century patrons who also had close connections with the Caribbean.

5

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993, pp.100-116.

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The study examines the relationship between eighteenth and early nineteenth century British ‘visual culture’ and the wealth created from slave trading, Caribbean sugar plantations and the colonial transatlantic trade. I demonstrate that imperial links were manifest not only in British literature, but also in the architecture, interiors and landscapes commissioned by eighteenth century Britain’s elite.

But the connections between Britain and its Atlantic colonies were not only apparent in the design of individual buildings or landscape gardens. The growing prosperity of provincial ‘Atlantic’ ports such as Bristol, Liverpool, Lancaster, Whitehaven and Glasgow also had, I argue, a profound effect on Britain’s ‘cultural geography’. The profits from colonial plantations helped transform the remote, often agriculturally unproductive, uplands of western Britain into sites of aesthetic and spiritual sustenance: I demonstrate, indeed, how financial investments made by ‘West Indian’ merchants and planters in north Wales, Cumberland and Scotland were instrumental in the creation of ‘Snowdonia’, ‘The Lakes’ and ‘The Highlands’ as tourist destinations. The fashion for landscape tourism, which this helped develop, indeed, marked a profound change in how Britain’s population, starting with its eighteenth century elite, came to view their own country.

But the fashion for landscape tourism was not simply confined to Britain: the celebration of uncultivated ‘nature’ became a means to dignify colonial exploration and travel, too. In this thesis I also investigate, therefore, the significance of the landscape theorists Edmund Burke and William Gilpin’s connections with the colonies, the critical influence of absentee planters on the popularity of ‘picturesque’ landscape tourism and discuss how landscape art was used to represent the Caribbean colonies at a time of growing anti-slavery sentiment.

Historical Background Since I first started my research in 2002, there has been a dramatic change in understanding of the historic relationship between Britain and its former Caribbean colonies. The bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007, together with generous projectrelated government funding, encouraged many museums to produce excellent exhibitions and publications about British colonial slavery and its eventual abolition.6

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‘Uncomfortable Truths’ at the V&A, London; ‘Breaking the Chains’ at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol; ‘Portraits, People and the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ in the National Portrait Gallery; ‘Abolition 200’ at the Lighthouse, Wolverhampton; and ‘Chasing Freedom’ at The Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth were just some of the many exhibitions held to commemorate the abolition of the British slave trade.

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Cities like London, Bristol, Liverpool and Lancaster, Glasgow and smaller towns such as Whitehaven in Cumbria now publicly acknowledge that the trade in both slaves and slavegrown products, such as sugar and tobacco, played a substantial part in the development of their eighteenth century ports.7 Institutions like The National Trust and English Heritage now recognise that some of their eighteenth and early nineteenth century estates were made possible by wealth created by enslaved Africans.8 A subject that, when I began my work, was regarded as belonging to minority courses in ‘Black Studies’ is now taking its rightful place in mainstream British history. Still, however, many questions remain as to the wider legacy of the vast wealth created from sugar and slavery.

More than half a century ago, in 1944, the future Prime Minister of the independent Caribbean state of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, wrote a provocative book Capitalism and Slavery, which argued that Britain’s ‘Industrial Revolution’ was in large part funded from the proceeds of Caribbean sugar plantations and the slave trade. The thesis ignited a debate that has occupied economic historians for more than half a century. However, nearly seven decades later, the consensus seems to be that Williams’ hypothesis was not entirely correct.

Kenneth Morgan, for example, author of Slavery and the Atlantic Economy, which summarises many of the arguments, concludes that far more money was spent on the construction of country houses and landed estates than was ever invested into industrial enterprises:9 ‘the private fortunes made from sugar did not lead to industrial investment as a whole. It could be said that the propensity of West India merchants and planters to channel investment into conspicuous consumption boosted British economic developments in so far as building country houses and laying out landscape gardens stimulated the construction industry and one important aspect of agricultural improvement: but it is doubtful whether the impetus was on a sufficient scale to have had a major impact.’10 It is an opinion shared by an earlier historian, Richard Pares, who remarked - referring to a particularly famous country house built by a sugar planter - that slavery’s profits were spent on ‘more Fonthills than factories’.11 The eighteenth century British country house and landed estate, therefore, seemed a particularly good route through which to explore the global

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In 2007, the International Slavery Museum opened in Liverpool and The Museum in Docklands added a new gallery ‘London and the Slave trade’. Both Bristol and Lancaster have established ‘slave trade trails’ showing buildings linked to the trade. The Rum Story, in a former bonded warehouse in Whitehaven, is one of most atmospheric of all the museums. 8 Katherine Hann and Jacqueline Roy: ‘Addressing the Past,’ The National Trust Magazine, spring 2007, pp.20-23. 9 Kenneth Morgan: Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy 1660-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp.94-98. 10 Morgan, ibid, p.95. 11 Richard Pares, quoted in Morgan, ibid, p.54.

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relationship between political and economic power and the patronage of buildings, art and landscapes.

But why should this wealth have been channelled into the purchase of British land and the construction of country houses? There are, I argue, two main reasons. Firstly, there were close family links between many colonial settlers in the Caribbean and Britain’s eighteenth century landed cultural and social elite. The Act of Settlement of 1688 had established England and Wales as a parliamentary monarchy, with regional land owners forming a powerful oligarchy. However, the Act also strengthened the ruthless English practice of primogeniture (whereby land and its income was inherited solely by the eldest son). This, together with the upheavals and estate confiscations of the Civil War, meant that in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain there were many educated, well-connected young men who needed to earn their own living.12 And as the richest of Britain’s ‘American’ colonies, the ‘sugar isles’ offered an attractive route, therefore, to make a fortune. …ambition was my aim, To raise a fortune, or erect a name: Midst tropic heats, and sickly climes…

So wrote the anonymous eighteen year old author of A poetical epistle to a gentleman of the Middle Temple, describing his sojourn on a Jamaican sugar plantation.13 His youth, aspirations and evident familiarity with the Georgic poetry of the ancient Roman writer Virgil were not unusual among eighteenth century British emigrants to the Caribbean.

But it was not only ambitious teenagers who saw the West Indies as a means to advancement. Posts in colonial administration such as customs collectors - or, for the bestconnected, a governorship itself - provided generous state salaries and afforded opportunities for investment and speculation. Governors of Jamaica, Britain’s largest and wealthiest sugar colony, for example, included the Earl of Carlisle, one of the Caribbean’s earliest investors, Sir William Beeston (of Beeston Castle in Cheshire), the Duke of Albemarle, Lord Hamilton and the Duke of Portland.14

Close connections, indeed, with an educated elite partly explains why, unlike emigrants to the Spanish, Portuguese and French Caribbean sugar colonies, the aim of most successful

12

See Robin Blackburn: The Making of New World Slavery, Verso, London and New York, 1997. Anon - Jamaica: A poem in three parts. Written in that island in the year MDCCLXXVI, London, William Nichol, 1777. 14 William Beckford: A descriptive account of the island of Jamaica, London, 1790, p.vii. 13

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speculators and colonists in the British Caribbean islands was to return to Britain and acquire their own British estates, or else to expand and improve long-held family lands.15

The second reason for the close link between the country estate and Caribbean slavery was the propensity of Britain’s international shipping merchants to invest trading profits into agricultural land. And during the eighteenth century, the fastest growing sector of all was the ‘Atlantic trade’ with Britain’s tobacco and sugar colonies in America and the West Indies. While not all successful sugar planters came from landed backgrounds, and nor did all thriving West India merchants use their profits to purchase British estates,16 the boasts of one imperialist historian were not without foundation: ‘It is not too much to say that there are few, if any noble houses in England without a West Indian strain. Younger sons of the better classes went out to the plantations, and when they had gained fresh strength – physical, material or intellectual – returned home to raise their family higher in the social scale. If not, their daughters married peers or country gentlemen. In this way the Dukes of Fife and Hamilton, the Earls of Rosebery, Radnor, Westmoreland, Lilford, Devon, Caernarvon, Gainsborough, Onslow; Lord Sudely, Yarmouth, Colebrooke, Colchester and scores of others can trace their descent from a West Indian ancestor either in the male or the female line.’17

Of course, at the time, British colonial business and investment was not just confined to the Caribbean. The tobacco trade with Virginia, for example, was for much of the eighteenth century as lucrative as that of sugar. A post in the state-backed East India Company, which allowed unofficial opportunities for independent trade and bribery, was a popular alternative, too, for ambitious fortune-seekers. Indeed, there are often global links - personal and financial - between colonial adventurers, whichever route they chose.

Investigating the historic relationship, however, between the Caribbean sugar islands and British country estates is a particularly rewarding, if somewhat daunting, task because of the quantity of historic material that remains in British archives. There are several reasons for this. The first is the (comparatively) short distance between the British Isles and the Caribbean colonies. In the eighteenth century, it took six or seven weeks to sail the Atlantic, whereas a voyage to the British trading post in Calcutta, for example, lasted seven to eight months.18 In consequence, written transatlantic communication was relatively frequent.

15

Apart from a brief period in Brazil, Dutch nationals tended to be shippers and traders rather than plantation owners. See Blackburn, op. cit., pp.192-211. 16 See David Hancock’s study of 23 London-based Atlantic merchants, Citizens of the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 17 C De Thierry, ‘Colonials at Westminster,’ United Empire Magazine, Vol. III, January 1912. 18 Indeed, much East India Company trade was carried out within Asia itself: in 1771, for example, the volume of trade between Britain and its American colonies was five times as much as the trade with the East Indies. See Ralph Davis, The Rise of the British Shipping Industry, London, 1962.

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Moreover, in the Caribbean, an export-driven plantation economy was well established by the late seventeenth century. This created a need for detailed, accurate records of investments, suppliers, plantation profits and agricultural techniques so that information could be shared on either side of the Atlantic. In India this type of record-keeping, revealing direct links between geographic sites thousands of miles apart, did not occur until the nineteenth century creation of tea plantations.

The third reason is that the Caribbean sugar islands, unlike the export-based plantation colonies in Virginia, remained British possessions until the latter half of the twentieth century. It is possible, therefore, to use documentary evidence to examine financial and cultural connections between British estates and Caribbean plantations over a period of centuries. Indeed, in some cases, it is possible to identify directly enslaved individuals whose labour funded the construction of houses and landscapes thousands of miles away. A 1777 inventory of the Caribbean holdings of Piercefield’s owner Valentine Morris, for example, reveals that the ‘movable assets’ of his Antiguan plantation Looby’s included a man also named Piercefield. He was valued at ten pounds, one shilling and five pence.19

Academic Context

Given the cultural importance of the history of transatlantic slavery, unsurprisingly the volume of research on the topic is vast and constantly increasing. And, although currently a less fashionable subject, the bibliography of works examining eighteenth and early nineteenth century British architecture and landscape is significant. Yet, despite the extent of the debate about the legacy of slavery’s profits in Britain, at the time of writing few serious attempts have been made to examine the buildings, landscapes and other artefacts funded from colonial plantation wealth.20

While Raymond Williams clearly identified the contribution of colonial trade to the economics of country houses from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in his book The Country and the City (1973), there is little detailed analysis of exactly how this was manifest.21 Indeed, it seems that until recently how planters, merchants and investors made their money was considered historically important, but how it was actually spent was not.22

19

Inventory of Looby’s Plantation, Antigua, 1777, quoted in Ivor Waters: Piercefield on the Banks of the Wye, p.7. The 2007 bi-centenary celebrations have, however, done much to stimulate new studies. 21 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford University Press, 1973, pp.279-80. 22 February, 2007 saw the beginning of a change in attitudes with a conference held at the V&A Museum, London ‘From Cane-Field to Tea-cup: the impact of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade on Art and Design’. 20

18

In Citizens of the World (1995), David Hancock’s otherwise wide-ranging and excellent book about West India and Atlantic merchants, the section on the country house, I feel, lacks a critical aesthetic analysis. For example, Hancock’s description of how a London-based West India merchant built a Robert Adam-designed, gothick ‘tea house’ on his newly purchased Scottish estate does not address the way that the folly was a poignant expression of the link between a growing ‘polite’ Scottish cultural identity and the wealth derived from colonial trade.23 Simon Smith and James Walvin have published exemplary research on the financial origins of Edwin Lascelles’ Harewood House (2003), but hesitated to relate this closely to the architecture and landscape of his country estate.24 In Slavery Obscured (2001), Madge Dresser briefly investigates West Indian patronage of buildings and art, but confines her study to the city of Bristol and the immediate area. She, too, does not attempt any aesthetic analysis.25

Moreover, few of the many histories of the art, architecture and landscape art in Georgian Britain investigate the relationship between patronage and eighteenth century British colonial expansion. Indeed, in An Eye for the Magnificent (2004), a lavishly illustrated catalogue of the collections of the sugar magnate William Beckford - the patron of Fonthill - the source of his wealth is dismissed in two lines.26 An Economy of Colour (2003), a collection of essays on ‘visual culture and the Atlantic world’, promised a more critical approach to the relationship between colonial slavery and eighteenth century British patronage. But, aside from an essay by Geoff Quilley on the representations of Caribbean colonial landscapes in paintings, the essays focused principally on images of enslaved colonial subjects.27

It was in the field of historical geography, rather than art history, therefore, that I found the most useful background reading. One particularly relevant work is an article ‘Estate and Empire’ (1998) by Suzanne Seymour, Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins. This excellent case study not only looked the management of two estates owned by the same family, one in Herefordshire and the other in Grenada, but also addressed the ways the two estates were represented in maps and paintings.28 I also found Fields of Vision (1993) by Stephen Daniels useful, as it examined how imagery of landscape was used to establish national

23

David Hancock: Citizens of the World, Cambridge, C.U.P. , 1995, pp.320-381. Simon Smith, James Walvin, Douglas Hamilton: ‘Private enterprise and public service: naval contracting in the Caribbean, 1720-50’, Journal for Maritime Research, April 2003. 25 Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured, The Social History of the Slave Trade in an English provincial port, London, Continuum, 2001. 26 Derek Ostergard (Ed): An Eye for the Magnificent: William Beckford 1760-1844, Catalogue of an Exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 27 One of the authors, Kay Dian Kriz has recently published Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: picturing the British West Indies, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 28 Susanne Seymour, Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins: ‘Estate and Empire: Sir George Cornewall’s management of Moccas, Herefordshire and La Taste, Grenada, 1771-1819’, Journal of Historical Geography 24, 1998, pp..313-351. 24

19

identities both in England and in its former colonies.29 Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism discusses how eighteenth century European settlement in the tropics influenced ideas about nature and landscape in Britain.30

Indeed, while there has been much work during the last two decades looking at the relationship between political structures and the forms of British landscape,31 Grove’s, Daniels’ and Seymour et al’s works are unusual in that they also address the links between the nascent empire and British landed estate. For example, Tom Williamson’s Polite Landscapes(1995), although an excellent overview of British eighteenth century landscape design, only makes a fleeting reference to empire.32 In The Politics of the Picturesque (1994), Stephen Copley and Peter Garside do discuss the British eighteenth century fashions for touring picturesque wild upland landscapes, concluding that it is an ‘aesthetic of redundancy’ in those parts of the country ‘least implicated in the economic changes from which their own prosperity derived’.33 However, as I will show, upland areas such as the Lake District and north Wales were, in fact, undergoing profound changes at this time due to their proximity to the rapidly expanding Atlantic ports of Liverpool, Whitehaven and Lancaster.

Indeed, in A Floating Commonwealth (2008), Christopher Harvie argues that the growth and expansion of Britain’s Atlantic trade led, by the nineteenth century, to the creation of two distinct spheres of influence within Britain itself: ‘a land-based core, centred on the capital, with its establishment parties and elites … and ‘the commercial, bourgeois, seaborne chord or arc – now ambiguous and overshadowed – of the ‘the west’’.34 Nor was this solely an economic identity: the political and cultural bonds between port cities such as Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow and Dublin, he suggests, formed a ‘consciousness of the western littoral’, conveyed by literature, religion, history and the arts. Harvie’s focus is on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; however, he traces the roots of the ‘floating commonwealth’ to a far earlier period, acknowledging the catalyst of a ‘predatory economy’ of ‘slave-harvested’ sugar, tobacco and cotton to the formation of a culture of the ‘Western Littoral’.35 His concept, indeed, seemed to have a strong affinity with the findings of my own research begun in 2002.

29

Stephen Daniels: Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Cambridge, Polity, 1993. 30 Richard Grove: Green Imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens and the origins of Environmentalism 1600-1860. Cambridge, Cambrdge University Press, 1995, pp.2-4. 31 See, for example, Stephen Daniels, ‘Re-visioning Britain, Mapping and Landscape Painting’ 1750-1820’ in Katherine Baetjer (ed): Glorious Nature: British Landscape Painting 1750-1850, Denver, 1993. 32 th Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes:: Gardens and Society in 18 century England, Stroud: Sutton, 1995, p. 28. 33 Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (eds), The Politics of the Picturesque, Cambridge: C.U.P., 1994, p.7. 34 Christopher Harvie: A Floating Commonwealth, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p 7. 35 Harvie, ibid, p.iv.

20

Lastly, although my thesis is fundamentally grounded in historical research, I should acknowledge the influence of Jurgen Habermas’ work on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (trans. 1989) in eighteenth century Europe. Miles Ogborn’s stimulating investigation into Spaces of Modernity (1998) in eighteenth century London, which not only draws on his conceptual model but covers a similar period to my own research, has been especially useful, too.36

Sources and Methodology

The starting point for my research was a database search of the National Register of Archives held by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. This revealed more than 60 large British country houses and estates with historic connections to the Caribbean colonies and these were just the ones where written evidence of both British estates and West Indian plantations survives together in the public domain. Other estates, for example Althorp in Nottinghamshire, Lady Diana Spencer’s former family home, show strong hints of close Caribbean links. The majestic stone tomb of Thomas Jordan Spencer, replete with flamboyant coat of arms, who died in 1763, aged 20, can still be seen today in a Jamaican garage forecourt. 37 John Spencer, the first Earl, meanwhile, stood for election as a Member of Parliament for Bristol, Britain’s second West India port.

British Caribbean schoolchildren, too, learn of the seventeenth century foundations of the island colonies by the ‘Lords Proprietors’, the Earls of Pembroke and Carlisle, the Earl of Warwick and Lord Francis Willoughby,38 while Robin Blackburn notes the influence of absentee Barbadan plantation owner Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftsbury, on British colonial policy.39

However, with all these prominent families, the trail is far more complex to follow. Historic private papers, if they survive, are not always available for public view, and it is difficult to make a precise connection between wealth created in the Caribbean colonies and expenditure on estates in Britain itself. The National Register’s database search, however though far from a comprehensive historical record - does provide researchers with the location of information that can reveal the precise details of this relationship.

36

Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680 –1780, New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1998. Lucinda Lambton, Georgian Jamaica, Vol. 13. No.1, Spring 2005. 38 William Claypole and John Robottom: Caribbean Story, Book One: Foundations, Jamaica, Trinidad, Harlow: Longman Caribbean, 1990, pp. 63-69. 39 Robin Blackburn: The Making of New World Slavery, op.cit. p.244. 37

21

From the 60 or so examples listed in the Register, therefore, I chose seven estates to investigate in detail: Danson Park, in Bexleyheath, near London; Harewood, near Leeds; Delaford Park in Buckinghamshire; Penrhyn in north Wales; Dunmore Park near Stirling in Scotland; Lowther Castle in Cumbria; and Piercefield Park in Gwent.

Why these particular choices? I had two main criteria. Firstly, as well as inspecting archival evidence, I wanted to be able to experience a physical object myself: a building, a landscape or at least a painting of them. Thus all of the buildings and landscapes I study in detail are open to the public and the vast majority of illustrations or paintings that I examine are displayed in public collections. Secondly, I wanted to recognise the geographic spread of Caribbean wealth within Britain. Although there were particular concentrations of wealth near Bristol and Liverpool, the ports of London, Lancaster and Glasgow were also important for the West India trade (I have, however, excluded Ireland, even though there are strong connections with the Caribbean, because of the complexities of eighteenth century Ireland also being a British colony itself).

My principal sources for archival materials, therefore, have been the various county record offices throughout Britain. Some historic papers have been retained in private family archives; while not all owners were forthcoming, others kindly permitted me access. The information gained from these sources has also been supplemented by papers, prints and drawings held in the British Library, The British Museum, The Institute of Genealogists and The Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, The Public Record Office, The National Archives of Scotland, The National Library of Wales Rhodes House and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, while Andrew Mackillop kindly shared the fruits of his research at the Huntington Library in Pasedena, California with me.

As I proceeded with my research uncovering individual family histories, however, I discovered a notable similarity in the way that eighteenth century absentee planters, Atlantic merchants or Caribbean investors spent their profits. The records of each estate told a similar story. No matter where in Britain their newly purchased or family estate was located: just a few miles from London, in coastal north Wales or the remote hills of Cumberland, all were patrons of fashionable architecture, art and landscape design. They also all were agricultural improvers and keen investors in new turnpike roads.

This began to make me think more closely about the wider effects of wealth created by Caribbean sugar plantations and the expanding colonial Atlantic trade. Richard Grove had argued that there was a link between British colonial development and the growing 22

appreciation of the aesthetics of ‘natural’ untamed landscapes during the late eighteenth century. My research suggested that absentee sugar planters and Atlantic merchants played a key role in the creation of this relationship. The scope of my investigation, therefore, widened beyond the individual patronage of country houses, and the ‘designed landscapes’ that surrounded them, to the way that these landscapes were perceived and represented in paintings, prints and the written word.

Chapter Structure

One of the hazards of an investigation of the history of British art, architecture and landscape design, particularly in the eighteenth century, is the obvious need to focus on elite patronage to understand why buildings and landscapes - and images of them - take the form they do. This can easily lead to a warped historical perspective that concentrates on the aspirations of the rich and powerful, at the expense of other sections of society.

With a topic as culturally and historically sensitive as transatlantic slavery, I felt this would be inexcusable. However, as an architectural historian, of course, I also had other sources: the actual buildings, sites and landscapes themselves. Indeed, while manuscript evidence such as letters and maps is naturally predicated on the lives of a literate European colonial elite, buildings, landscapes and archaeological sites also provide a means of immediate engagement with the lives of enslaved Africans,40 who often have no written record of their existence. In my first chapter Sites of Slavery, I have, therefore, used depictions of eighteenth century buildings and landscapes in the Caribbean and coastal West Africa to give a historical ‘background’ to my investigation and also to provide a counterpoint to the studies of elite patronage in subsequent chapters.

This approach, however, also presented challenges. Naturally, I had my own responses, both aesthetic and emotional, to the places that I visited. Touring an old plantation works in the Caribbean, for example, I could certainly empathise with the plight of enslaved workers who had once toiled there - and the irony that the complex was now an expensive hotel. However, I could not feel the ‘anger’ felt by an African-American colleague. I have, therefore, thought hard about how to describe these buildings and landscapes. The ‘neutral’ vocabulary of architecture, for example, a description of construction materials, window layout or room size, was, it seemed to me, inadequate for such emotionally charged spaces. Nor, I felt, would photographs, whether my own or taken by others, be sufficient. I decided, therefore, that I would record my subjective response to these ‘sites of slavery’ as a white 40

I have, in general, used the term ‘enslaved Africans’ rather than the common, but dehumanising word ‘slaves’ to describe individuals and communities in held in bondage.

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British female at the beginning of the 21st century and accept that other readers’ interpretations might differ.

Having provided an explanatory backdrop in the first chapter, I then investigate in detail how money generated from the profits of colonial slavery was spent in Britain. In Chapter 2, Arts and Elegancies, I examine the creation of Danson, a Palladian villa and landscape park sited in Bexleyheath on the outskirts of London. Designed by the renowned eighteenth century architect Robert Taylor, the villa is today listed Grade I and has recently been the subject of an extensive and meticulous restoration under the auspices of English Heritage. I show how the patronage of this villa was instrumental in the transformation of a Caribbean-born sugar planter, slave trader and City merchant of French and Irish descent into an English ‘landed gentleman’, and also how its architecture alludes strongly to imperial trading links.

The rich Caribbean mahogany doors at Danson were popular in other late eighteenth and nineteenth century ‘polite’ British interiors, too. So this Palladian construction is by no means alone in demonstrating that patrons and designers in British polite society of the time did not just look to Europe for inspiration. Many other colonial influences were to be found in the period.

To explore this further, in Chapter 3, Trade and Plumb Cake, I look at Harewood House near Leeds - built by the Lascelles, another influential family of absentee sugar planters and London- based merchants. Here I show how eighteenth century visitors would have been able to ‘read’ the colonial origins of the owner’s wealth, not only in its architecture and interior decoration, but in the acres of rolling parkland that surrounded the house.

In the following Chapter 4, Painted Memorandums, I then start to investigate in more detail Richard Groves’ suggestion that the late eighteenth century British interest in the aesthetics of ‘nature’ was closely connected with colonial development. I do this by first examining family portraits commissioned by absentee West Indians and other families with financial interests in the Caribbean and the Atlantic trade. Drawing on Marcia Pointon’s work on eighteenth century British portraiture, I show how these paintings are not only intimate domestic records, but also richly detailed historical documents. The backgrounds of these ‘family pieces’ - which, with few exceptions, are images of the owner’s newly-acquired British country estates - give clues, indeed, as to how wealth derived from the Atlantic colonies began to affect what can perhaps best be described as the ‘cultural geography’ of the British Isles.

24

As the economist Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the expansion of Britain’s ‘Atlantic‘ trade during the eighteenth century began an economic shift that favoured western ports against those facing south and east towards mainland Europe.41 I suggest, however, that this was not only an economic shift, but a cultural one. Indeed, the expansion of Bristol to become a prominent West India port during the early years of the eighteenth century was to have a profound effect. In Chapter 5, Refining the World, I argue that Bristol’s expansion was instrumental to the growth of the spa resort of Bath, eighteenth century Britain’s most fashionable town.

While the stone facades of Bath’s crescents of terraced houses and paved streets of glassfronted shops were a model of a ‘polite’ urban environment, eighteenth century Britain’s ‘bourgeois public sphere’, was not only manifest in the cities. The British fashion for landscape tourism - the viewing, discussion and aesthetic analysis of ‘natural scenery’ and recording of the ‘sights’ in words or sketches - also provided a forum for a ‘polite, literate public’ to demonstrate their ‘wit’, ‘breeding’ or ‘taste.’ Moreover, the trend for picturesque landscape tourism was intimately connected, too, with the expansion of the British Atlantic trade.

In Chapter 6, Nature’s Prospects, I show how a visit to Piercefield in the nearby Wye Valley not only became a fashionable excursion for wealthy Bath residents and visitors, but also helped popularise the idea of ‘landscape tourism’. I also examine how influential theorists of landscape including Edmund Burke, author of An Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), and William Gilpin with his Observations on the River Wye (1784), for example, had close personal and financial connections with the slave-based, transatlantic trade.

The following Chapter 7, Cultivating the Remote, then examines how investments by Atlantic traders and absentee planters based in the rapidly expanding ports Liverpool, Lancaster Whitehaven and Glasgow began to affect cultural perceptions of the wet, hilly uplands of north Wales, Cumberland and Westmoreland and of the west coast of Scotland.

I show how the influx of new merchant wealth into the purchase and ‘improvement’ of landed estates begin to transform areas that once were poor and inaccessible into places where ‘gentlemen’ might reside. I also examine investments in the construction of turnpike roads, which were crucial to the development of Snowdonia, The Lake District and the Scottish Highlands as popular tourist destinations. 41

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, London, Strahan and Cadell, 1776, Vol.II, p. 200.

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In the penultimate chapter, Bitter-sweet Edens, I take the concept of the ‘cultivation of the remote’ further. Turning full circle, indeed, I examine how an aesthetic ideology intimately connected with profits generated from colonial development was also used to depict British colonies. Drawing on the work of art historians such as Tim Barringer and Kay Dian Kriz, I show how landscape art and the aesthetic theories of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘picturesque’ were used to provide a European ‘frame of reference’ to the way in which colonies were represented in text and images and how West Indians played a key role in their usage. I also investigate how art and landscape was used in the growing political debate about the abolition of Caribbean slavery.

The concluding chapter The Mock Turtle’s Story and A Bitter-sweet Heritage returns to Britain and uses buildings and landscapes to explore the West Indians’ fall from power and influence during the nineteenth century. I also reflect on the wider legacy of slave-generated investment in the British Isles and consider what it means for today’s multi-cultural society.

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Chapter One Sites of Slavery One of sour and two of sweet, Three of strong and four of weak. Recipe for Caribbean ‘planters’ punch’: lime juice, sugar, rum and water.

If you are fortunate enough to take a winter holiday in the Caribbean, some of the most atmospheric places in which to stay are the old plantation inns. One such inn on the island of St Kitts is a former merchant’s home filled with antique mahogany furniture and eighteenth century china, while, high up in the hillside on neighbouring Nevis, the whitewashed timber boarding and verandas of a former plantation house contrast with the azure skies and verdant foliage. At other Nevis inns, the owners have transformed eighteenth century sugar works into elegant lounges and dining rooms set in tropical gardens; indeed, at one hotel on St Kitts the walls of the former sugar works form a spectacular frame to the outdoor pool.

1.1 The pool at Ottley’s, St Kitts

Part of the appeal of these plantation inns is their link with the past. Rather than an anonymous, beach-front hotel, you experience a taste of Caribbean history. Indeed, the 27

inns’ owners and managers stress the importance of their former colonial connections. One brochure, for example, portrays the hotel as ‘a place of heritage and memories’,1 while another describes how, following ‘gentle conversation’ in the antique-filled drawing room, ‘two rings of the bell’ announce the call to dinner, ‘as they have done in the West Indies for hundreds of years’.2 For the European or North American visitor escaping the gloom of dark winter days, the combination of brilliant sunshine, sparkling blue seas and lush vegetation is truly seductive. As one journalist exclaimed: ‘it was the nearest thing to Eden I have ever experienced’.3

But, of course, when these buildings were first constructed, the British viewed Nevis very differently. George Maxwell, a London-based sugar trader - and former plantation owner wrote to one of his Caribbean clients in a cold English November in 1743 (when Britain was embroiled in a war with the French and Spanish to dominate the region). ‘GM [George Maxwell] does sometimes reflect upon times past and almost envies you for your warm sunshine in Barbados, but when he considers again the excessive heat of your weather and that the island is grown hotter still since he came away, by parties brewing up again, he repines the less of his lot and submits to the poking his fire in the country house and warming his fingers and feet over it and often wishes that you would get out of that wilderness.’4 For mid-eighteenth century Nevis was not seen as a tropical paradise. ‘Wilderness’ was not then a term of approval: it was to be another generation before Europeans began to appreciate the ecological importance of tropical rainforests and Rousseau was to publish his celebration of the ‘noble savage’.5 In the 1740s, when Maxwell was writing, Nevis and Barbados - like other British islands in the West Indies, which at that time included Antigua, St Kitts and Jamaica - were instead offshore farms. The colonies’ sole purpose was to grow intensive cash crops - predominantly sugar - for consumers in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It was a business whose demands profoundly influenced British colonial policy for over 200 hundred years and an industry that, for several centuries, was reliant on the labour provided by enslaved Africans.

At The Hermitage Inn on Nevis, guests sleep in timber ‘cottages’ set among the palms, breadfruit trees and bougainvillea of the hillside gardens. Simple one-roomed timber structures, painted in sun-bleached pastels, they are miniature versions of the adjacent main house. However, if you leave the hotel to tour the island, it is obvious that the ‘cottages’ are identical to the cramped ‘chattel houses’ lived in by the poorer families on Nevis.

1

Montpellier Nevis, 2005 brochure. The Hermitage Inn, Nevis 2005 brochure. 3 Quoted from the Daily Mail in the 2005 brochure, The Hermitage Inn. 4 Letterbook of Lascelles and Maxwell 1743-5, 14th Nov. 1743, George Maxwell to James Bruce, Fo. 58. 5 See Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, tropical island Edens and the origins of environmentalism 1600-1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 2

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1.2 Guest ‘Cottage’ at the Hermitage Inn, Nevis

These buildings in turn, as shown by eighteenth century prints of the islands, are identical to the huts constructed from imported lumber to house enslaved African plantation workers. Painstakingly restored, the former cabins have metamorphosed into ‘classic Nevisian colonial’6 bedrooms. Such are the subtle distortions of history that owners of old sugar plantations need to make to accommodate today’s visitors.

1.3 ‘Chattel’ houses in Nevis

29 6

The Hermitage Inn, Nevis, 2005 brochure.

In 2005, changes in trade laws abolished the longstanding subsidies for Caribbean sugar producers.7 Faced with competition from mainland sugar growers in Central and South America and from European sugar beet production, many have abandoned the crop. Indeed, throughout Nevis acres of acacia scrub have replaced cane fields as plantation owners have turned to tourism for an alternative income. When I first visited neighbouring St Kitts in the summer of 2005, the harvest of the last commercial crop on the island was just underway. The fields of two metre high, green, bamboo-like canes whispered in the breeze, heralding the end of more than 300 years of history. Down a path away from the road, an Afro-Caribbean colleague discreetly took a penknife from his pocket, hacked and sawed through the base of a cane, until it snapped in two. He then cut the stem into sections and handed us each a piece. It was an action charged with significance. For, in the harsh world of the eighteenth century British Caribbean, if his enslaved ancestors had been caught stealing the valuable crop, they could have been punished by flogging or even amputation.8

We crouched in the shade, in silence, chewing on the fibrous interior of the cane. It was a gentle, perfumed taste, quite unlike the aggressive sweetness of refined white sugar. However, in our eagerness to try the fresh juice, we had not noticed that the cane was covered in tiny resinous barbs. Picking the sticky prickles out of my palms, I reflected on the profound effect that sugar cultivation had exercised on the Caribbean. Sugar’s uncomfortable history could not be ignored.

1.4 The Caribbean islandsj

7 Apart from a period in the late nineteenth century, British Caribbean sugar producers have received some type of subsidy, whether through state-protected markets as in the eighteenth century, or direct support to producers from the 1930s onwards. 8 See J.R Ward British West Indian Slavery 1750-1834: The process of amelioration, Oxford 1988, pp. 27-8.

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St Kitts is just one of the long chain of several hundred islands - known collectively as the West Indies or the Antilles - that sweeps south in an arc over nearly 2,000 miles of sea from the Florida peninsular of the United States to Venezuela. The islands vary in size: from Cuba, which is hundreds of miles long with wide variations of climate and terrain, to those that are little more than rocks. Several, like Montserrat, are actively volcanic, and with one exception - the distance between any of these islands is fewer than thirty miles. That one exception is the gap between Grenada and Tobago at the southern end of the chain, which once formed the main seaway to the Spanish colonies on the mainland Central America. The whole chain benefits from the north easterly trade winds, which blow moisture-laden air - and, in former times, drove sailing ships - across the Atlantic towards them. Indeed, such is the winds’ regularity that they gave the islands a permanent windward side, the eastern, where the swell made it too dangerous to land, and a permanent leeward side, the western, where it was possible for ships to ride at anchor in tolerable safety. Most of the islands’ major towns and harbours were built, therefore, facing west towards the calmer waters of the Caribbean than the Atlantic’s rolling swell.

Since independence, the development of much of the former British West Indies has been relatively low key. It is thus possible, certainly in The Leewards - the collective name for Nevis, Antigua and St Kitts - to imagine what the islands would have looked like two hundred years ago. For the first-time British visitor, indeed, the familiarity of the style and form of many of the old buildings is striking. While the tropical plants and strong African roots of popular culture in the West Indies are exotically different, the stone churches and court houses would not look out of place in a provincial English market town or village.

Of course, as former British colonies, it is hardly surprising that public and ceremonial buildings should resemble those of the ruling imperial power. However, bizarrely, the landscape itself also seems recognisable, particularly to those who know the upland parts of the west of Britain. Indeed, the intimate scale of the hilly landscapes of St Kitts and Nevis, with green cane fields on the lower ground and woods on the steep slopes, together with the scudding clouds of a maritime climate, prompted a British colleague on my visit to remark that it looked like ‘the Lake District in a heatwave.’

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1.5 View from Mount Nevis Hotel towards St Kitts

British colonists first settled in the islands of the eastern Caribbean in the early 17th century, after King Charles I granted a charter to the Earl of Carlisle to colonise St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat and Barbados. The initial aim was to replicate the success of the colony of Virginia and grow tobacco for British markets. However, unlike the Spanish colony of Cuba further to the west, climatic conditions proved unsuitable, and the crops were poor. It was not until the importation of sugar cane and plantation techniques from Brazil in the middle of the 17th century that the British Caribbean colonies began to flourish.9

Originally from the Far East, sugar cane was first cultivated by the Italians in Cyprus and then by the Spanish and Portuguese in their Atlantic colonies of Madeira, the Azores and the Canary islands and on the coast of Brazil. The strong sun and frequent rainfall of the eastern Caribbean islands proved ideal for sugar. The combination of prevailing winds and currents, giving good shipping access, and increasing demand for sugar in Britain transformed the fortunes first of Barbados, then St Kitts and the other islands. Within half a century, these struggling small Caribbean colonies became, in the words of one historian, ‘the cockpit of the British Empire’.10

9

For the growth of the plantation economy in the British Caribbean see Robin Blackburn: The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800, Verso London, New York, 1997. 10 Algernon E. Aspinall: West Indian Tales of Old, London, Duckworth & Co, 1912, p. v.

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1.6 Richard Ligon: A topographical description and Admeasurements of the Ysland of Barbados

Richard Ligon’s 1657 map A topographical description and Admeasurements of the Ysland of Barbados shows the colony shortly after the introduction of sugar cane to the island. It is a poignant representation of the island at the beginning of the era of the export–driven, colonial plantation economy. The map shows the south-west part of the island fringed with long narrow strips of cultivated land reaching down to the sea. These, as Ligon identifies, were ‘The tenn thousand Acres of land which Belongeth to the Merchants of London’. Each plot, indeed, is marked with the name of its owner. However, the map also reveals how much of a speculative and individualistic venture this early colonisation was. For example, no harbour is marked, and each plantation owner appears to have his own coastal access to shipping, while the image of camels depicts experiments to find animals that could be imported to work in the tropical heat.

But, while some of the London-based merchant investors were eventually to reap the rewards of sugar cultivation, they did not, of course, do the work themselves. The first plantation workers were indentured labourers from Britain, people fleeing the upheavals of the English Civil War, convicts and those desperate enough to risk their lives for a new start several thousand miles away. Most labourers ‘sold’ themselves to merchants or plantation owners for five or seven years in exchange for a passage out and food and clothing. At the end of this period, if they survived, they could hope to acquire some land, perhaps five acres or so, of their own.

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However, British plantation owners soon discovered from the Spanish and Portuguese planters, from whom they had adopted sugar planting techniques, that there was another readily available and more efficient, if initially more expensive, labour force: enslaved people from West Africa.11 For, not only were they more accustomed to manual work in the searing heat and humidity, Africans often had resistance to the diseases that killed so many Europeans. Moreover, unlike indentured labour, this workforce never had the opportunity to become free: indeed, even their children belonged to the plantation owner. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, therefore, the majority of inhabitants on Barbados and the other British islands were of African descent.

The west coast of Africa from Senegal to Angola is scattered with the remains of European colonial forts and settlements built during more than three centuries of slave trading across the Atlantic. Indeed, set amid the pastel-coloured houses, cobbled lanes and lush vegetation of the former French island of Goree (off Dakar in Senegal) there is a museum called La Maison des Esclaves. Built in 1786, this pink lime-washed building, with its colonnaded first floor verandah, was renovated in 1990 with help from the French government.12 From the gloom of the rough stone interior of the ground floor, there is a poignant view through a small rectangular opening to the vivid blue ocean beyond.

It is an image of such power, that it is easy to understand why the building has become a site of pilgrimage for Europeans and Americans with African ancestry. However, it is debatable whether the island played a major role in the slave trade itself.13 Moreover, as the museum’s ‘doorway’ overlooks dangerous rocks, it is doubtful if any captive slaves were transported across the Atlantic from the building. Rather than a centre of transshipment, La Maison des Esclaves appears, in reality, to be a former merchant’s house with living quarters on the first floor and storage on the ground floor.

However, if you follow the main road leading south of Dakar, through a dry dusty landscape of peanut farms and mud-walled, tin-roofed huts, you reach the tiny former British protectorate of The Gambia, which was indeed a major slaving centre, Moreover, the very shape of the country, a fifteen mile strip of land either side of the winding Gambia river, is an uncomfortable reminder of why many British ships first came here: the ‘hinterland’ for the supply of live human cargoes could not be more clearly or graphically illustrated. The ruined and overgrown Fort James, built on an island in the middle of the river about 15 miles up stream from the capital Banjul, was once a major slave collecting point. But in The Gambia many captives were not chained in stone cells, but rather taken directly onboard ship. The River Gambia, indeed, was particularly popular with slave

11

See Robin Blackburn:The Making of New World Slavery, ibid, pp. 315-327. Chris de Wilde in The Gambia and Senegal Lonely Planet Guide, Hawthorn Australia,1999, p.282. This issue was raised by Raymond Mauney, professor of African history at the Sorbonne, in Le Guide Bleu: Afrique de l’ouest, 1958 edition. 12 13

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traders from Lancaster who sailed from England in small, fast, two-masted vessels known as ‘Snows’ or ‘Briggs’.

Ambitious young men of modest means, the sons of innkeepers, clockmakers and small farmers from the villages of the southern edge of the Lake District came here in search of the fortunes to be made in the ‘Africa trade’.14 Unlike Bagamoya beach in Tanzania, however, the palm-fringed Atlantic beach resorts of Kololi, Kotu, Fajara and Bakau (certainly at the time I visited The Gambia) contained no memorials to the men, women and children who were shipped over the ocean to British colonies in the Caribbean or mainland America. It is, after all, the British themselves, in search of ‘exotic’ winter sun, who provide the custom for the air-conditioned hotels that line the ocean shore.15

Olaudah Equiano, a leading figure in the British eighteenth century anti-slavery movement, described his first encounter with British slave traders in his testimony The Interesting Narrative: ‘The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea and a slave ship which was then riding an anchor waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment which was soon converted into terror…When I was carried on board I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I were sound by some of the crew …were we not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair?16

1.7 Late eighteenth century painting of a three-masted British slave ship

14

Melinda Elder: The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Eighteenth Century Lancaster, Halifax, England. 1992, pp. 51-58. 15 At Jufureh, the village near Fort James featured in Alex Hayley’s celebrated novel Roots, there is, however, a small museum on the history of the Atlantic slave trade. 16 Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and other Writings, 1789 (1995 (ed) Vincent Carretta), p.55.

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Doubts have recently been cast on the veracity of Equiano’s story as autobiography.17 Nevertheless, the tale was representative of many thousands of Africans who were kidnapped by members of other tribes and then sold on to Europeans to work in the American colonies. Indeed Equiano’s vivid prose gives the modern reader a firsthand insight into the horrors of the six or seven week Atlantic crossing, while imprisoned in the oaken hold of a small sailing ship.

‘The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each scarcely had room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves many of which died.18 Following this ordeal, Equiano describes what happened when the ship arrived at Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados:

‘Many merchants and planters, now came on board though it was in the evening. They put us in several parcels [groups to be sold at the market] and examined us attentively…We thought by this that we should be eaten by these ugly men, as they appeared to us…(but) they told us that we were not to be eaten, but to work.’ 19

Equiano then tells how the captives were kept for several days in the merchants’ yard, ‘all pent up together like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age’20, before being sold once again to the plantation owners. As well as describing the horrors of the eighteenth century transatlantic slave trade, Equiano also portrays the British plantation colonies, of course, through the eyes of an African. When he arrived in Bridgetown in Barbados following his crossing, for example, he recalls: ‘As every object was new to me, everything I saw filled me with surprise. What struck me first was that the houses were built with bricks, in stories (sic) and in every other respect different from those in Africa’.21

From Equiano’s writings, it is impossible to trace precisely where in Bridgetown these buildings or the merchant’s yard would have been located. It is likely, though, to have been near the Careenage, the long finger of water that pushes its way into the city centre, where sleek yachts rather than slave ships are now berthed. On other islands, however, former slave markets are commemorated more openly. For example, in Basseterre, the capital of St Kitts, the site of the former slave market - now named Independence Square is pointed out with great frequency to European visitors.

17

Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: biography of a self-made man, Athens, University of Georgia, 2005. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, op.cit., p.58. 19 Equiano, ibid, p.60. 20 Equiano, ibid, p. 60. 21 Equiano, ibid, p.60. 18

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One of the most poignant sites in the Caribbean, however, is located on one of the islands least visited by tourists. The tiny Dutch colony of St Eustatia (popularly known as Statia) lies an hour or so by motorboat north west of Basseterre. The capital, and indeed only town, Oranjestad is now little more than a sleepy village perched on a steep cliffside. It is only the huge roofless ruins of the yellow brick synagogue and the vast stone church that hint at its former importance. Looking down to the seashore, you can see through the dazzling turquoise water the remains of more than 700 warehouses that once lined the harbour front. For in the eighteenth century Oranjestad was a Dutch ‘freeport‘ a place ‘of vast traffick from every corner of the globe.’22 From these warehouses Dutch merchants supplied the colonists of the eastern Caribbean with European manufactures, ‘buckets and tools’ and luxury items, ‘rich embroideries, painted silks, flowered muslins, all the manufacture of the Indies’.23

Further around the bay from the warehouses, almost completely covered by undergrowth, are the remains of a few crumbling walls which once formed the slave market. For until the mid-eighteenth century, when they began to face competition from English-based slave trading consortia, the merchants of Statia were also the major supplier of slaves for all the plantation owners of eastern Caribbean.24 In Oranjestad, a planter could stock up with tools for his fields, buy dress fabrics for his wife and daughters and also purchase men, women and children to work for him, for no reward, until they died. Perhaps nowhere else in the West Indies was the commodification of human life so potently laid bare as in the sweep of timber and stone buildings which once lined the bay of Oranjestad. 25

Like the other nearby Dutch Caribbean islands of Saba and St Maarten, the economy of St Eustatia was based on trading rather than planting, so there were few sugar estates on these islands. However, on neighbouring St Kitts and Nevis the acacia scrub that covers old cane fields is frequently punctuated with the majestic stone ruins of eighteenth and nineteenth century sugar mills. The older works have stumpy towers - the remains of windmills - while those from the nineteenth century display tall chimneys, the relics of attempts to make the industry more efficient by using steam power and imported British coal. Inside the roofless structures, frequently overgrown with creepers and tropical vegetation, you can often find abandoned, British-made plant and equipment. From iron cogs to copper bowls, they are evocative memorials to the effort involved transforming the canes into an edible, exportable product.

22

Evangeline Walker (ed.) Journal of a Lady of Quality, London, 1921, p.135. Walker, Journal of a Lady of Quality, ibid, p.135. 24 Thanks to Dr Richard Gilmore of the St Eustatia Archeological Research Project for this information. Dutch traders also supplied slaves to Brazil and southern Caribbean from their base on the island of Curacao. 25 During the last decade UNESCO has been running a project to record the historic sites of the transatlantic slave trade. 23

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1.8 Abandoned windmill, Nevis

38 1.9 Abandoned coal-fired sugar mill, Nevis

On neighbouring Antigua, indeed, the windmill at Betty’s Hope has been restored as a working museum. It shows how the canes were fed into iron rollers, to crush them and release the juice which would run through stone or wooden channels to the nearby boiling house. Fuelled by the cane waste or ‘bagasse’ the juice would then be boiled to remove impurities, and transferred between a series of four or five shallow copper bowls to reduce it to a syrup. When ready, the sticky mass was transferred to the curing house, where it crystallized and the excess liquid molasses were drained off. Finally the damp, dark brown sugar was packed into oak barrels for export.

1.10 Former boiling house, St Kitts

One of the most comprehensive descriptions of the eighteenth century British Caribbean sugar industry is found in a poem The Sugar Cane, written by young Scots doctor James Grainger. He had arrived St Kitts in 1759 as a companion to a wealthy friend and plantation owner, whom he had met while at university in Cambridge.26 Clearly intended as an update of John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757), a poem about the culture and economics of 39 26

See John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane, 2000, pp.1-15.

the English wool trade,27 The Sugar Cane was published in England in 1764, the year following the end of The Seven Years War and a time when a new generation of wealthy Britons were considering investment in the Caribbean.

As Shropshire estate owner William Shenstone, the renowned landscape gardener, poet and ‘man of letters’ 28 archly commented: ‘I build much on Dr Grainger’s Poem both on account of his SUBJECT & his ABILITIES; which I think extremely happy. He has taken Possession of a Field of Poetry, which is both large & fertile & yet un-occupied; And the Cultivation of which must be a popular measure to Many Amoungst us.’29 While The Sugar Cane is the Caribbean’s first example of Georgic poetry, it was also a practical guide for the novice sugar planter.

Grainger’s first advice is to choose land carefully. Canes should not be planted on level land near the sea, as they would be ‘burnt by the torch of day’. Mountainsides were a better location but ran the risks that ‘ravening rats destroy, Or troops of monkeys thy rich harvest steal’. The best place for a plantation, therefore, in Grainger’s opinion was ‘Nor from hill too far, nor from the shore’. Grainger advises the prospective planter to observe the climate carefully before ordering his slave ‘gangs’ to prepare the ground by hoeing the soil into deep ridges and furrows. As art transforms the savage face of things, And order captivates the harmonious mind; Let not the Blacks irregularly hoe; But, aided by the line, consult the site Of thy demesnes; and beautify the whole.30

Once the land had been hoed, the young cane shoots (known as ratoons, junks or Gemmy tops) could be planted. When the crop was growing well, the gangs were put to work at other tasks weeding, building tracks and walls, or planting hedges ‘to secure the Canes from the Goat’s baleful tooth; the churning boar; From thieves; from fire – casual or designed’.31

Grainger’s brief reference to arson attacks is one of the few hints in the poem to the tensions rife in the eighteenth century Caribbean sugar colonies. However, mighty stone fortresses such as Brimstone Hill, high on a volcanic outcrop on the north west coast of St Kitts are physical reminders of how valuable, and vulnerable, the distant Caribbean islands were considered to be. Designed by British engineers, but built, reinforced and extended by enslaved Africans, at any one time 800 British Army officers and enlisted men 27

The Fleece, was itself modelled on the Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. Shenstone owned an estate in Shropshire named Leasowes. 29 Duncan Mallam (ed.) Letters of William Shenstone, Minneapolis,1939. t,h No. 275, William Shenstone to Thomas Percy, August 10 1762. 30 Grainger, The Sugar Cane, lines 265 – 270. 31 Grainger, ibid, line 270. 28

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were stationed at the fort.32 But although the soldiers’ presence was principally to protect the island from invasion by other European powers - and, later, the forces of the newly independent United States - they were also there to deter potential insurrections by the enslaved Africans who toiled in the sugar plantations below.

1.10 Brimstone Hill Fort, St Kitts.

Although sugar cultivation was labour-intensive, arduous work, particularly during the five months of harvesting and processing, physical conditions in the Caribbean were, arguably, little worse than in many mid-eighteenth century industries in Britain. Indeed, late in that century, as the abolition movement gained ground in Britain, several plantation owners used comparisons with the working conditions of British coal miners to justify the continuation of plantation slavery.33

However, the semi-autonomous colonies were not subject to British laws governing treatment of servants and indentured workers. Colonists viewed ‘their’ slaves literally as ‘stock’, punishing them viciously when captive humans failed to behave like docile cattle.34 A Jamaican estate steward recorded in his diary: ‘Derby catched by Port Royal eating canes. Had him well flogged and pickled (his wounds rubbed with salt), then made Hector

32

The fort is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Archaeological studies have been recently carried out to document the role that enslaved Africans played in its construction and maintenance. Forty members of the St Kitts allblack militia and 200 members of the all-black Fourth West India Regiment were stationed there in the 1780s and 41 1790s. Thanks to Gerald Schroedl, of the University of Tennessee, for this background information. 33 Regatz, op.cit., p.26. 34 Eighteenth century sugar estate inventories frequently list enslaved humans and cattle as moveable assets.

shit in his mouth’.35 Nor was this an isolated incident. In 1745, for example, George Maxwell wrote to a young man who had recently returned to England from an unhappy sojourn in Barbados: ‘I am extremely sorry, dear sir, at the many disappointments you found… and that things appeared quite different from what you had been used to here and expected there. The treatment of the Negroes I might have forseen, had I considered, would ill suit the gentleness of your nature, but that I happened to overlook, after having lived more years in that island than you have done in the world. It was become familiar to me by use.’36 It is scarcely surprising that sugar planters lived in constant fear of violent rebellion. Yet despite the appalling treatment frequently meted out, it is clear that enslaved Africans managed, somehow, to keep many of their own traditions alive. Indeed, the Sunday morning market where they sold the produce they raised on their own ‘provision grounds’ - on land unsuitable for sugar cultivation - became a regular feature of life on many of the islands.37 As a European visitor observed:

‘The Negroes are the only market people. Nobody else dreams of selling provisions… Sunday is the grand day, as then they are all at liberty to work for themselves, and people hire workmen at a much easier rate, than on week days from their Masters. The Negroes also keep the poultry and it is them that raise the fruit and vegetables’. 38 And while some enslaved Africans lived in ‘chattel houses,’ supplied by the plantation owners, in the more established colonies many built their own homes from local materials in small villages close to the provision grounds. Because of the impermanent nature of the huts’ construction, however, little physical evidence survives, apart from the holes where the wooden posts supporting the walls and roof were dug into the ground. Nevertheless, in the last few decades, the sites several of these villages have been re-discovered. And while holes lack the immediate, haunting visual impact of ruined sugar works, a visit to isolated site of a former ‘slave village’ on the wild, wind-blown Atlantic coast of Nevis is a powerful experience, not just for those of African descent.

Looking at the vivid blue waters of the ocean beyond you are, indeed, intensely aware that Nevis is a tiny island, separated by a vast watery desert from both the west coast of Africa and Europe. However, this sense of solitude and distance gives a misleading impression of life in the colony during the eighteenth century. For the Atlantic then was not seen as a barrier, but a means of communication. While enslaved Africans, of course, would have had no contact with their kin on the far side of the ocean, the links between colonial families, friends and colleagues in Britain and the Caribbean islands were close.

35

Quoted in J. Ward: British West Indian Slavery 1750-1834:The process of amelioration, Oxford, 1988, pp. 27-8. 36 George Maxwell to John Braithwaite, Nov 1745, Lascelles and Maxwell letter book, fo.315. 37 The exception to this seems to have been Barbados, which was very intensively cultivated with sugar. 38 Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, op.cit., p.88.

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This, in the main, was due to the relative ease and frequency of sailings between the wealthy island colonies and British ports. Whereas voyages from Britain to colonial trading posts in India like, for example, Calcutta, took seven to eight months, sailing from the Caribbean islands to Britain would take only six to eight weeks. Moreover, the effects of winds and currents encouraged links between Britain and individual islands. The rigs and square sails of eighteenth century boats meant that beating (sailing at an angle, in order to progress in the direction opposite to the way the wind is blowing) was far more difficult than it is in today's yachts. A voyage from Barbados to Jamaica, sailing with the prevailing easterly winds, would therefore take around a week; but a return sailing from Jamaica to Barbados would take almost the same time as a voyage to the British Isles.39

The relative ease of communication between the West Indies and Britain, as well as family links to Britain’s own landed elite, encouraged planters to send their children to be educated in England, staying with relatives or at ‘boarding’ school. This was certainly given a sharp impetus, too, by the tensions of living in an area which, aside from the possibility of slave ‘rebellions’, was often a war zone between European colonial powers. One planter’s son recalled leaving the ‘passion flowers, palm trees, and ring-doves’ of his Jamaican home ‘for a child, an earthly paradise’,40 when he embarked, aged nine, on his voyage to Britain in the ‘stuffy and sweltering’ hold of a ‘black-sided sugar ship’, where the air was full of ‘bilge-water, sugar and rum’. 41 By the mid-eighteenth century, many of the wealthier planters moved their entire families to Britain, leaving their estates in the hands of attorneys and overseers.

This exodus was to have three major effects: the creation of a prominent group of expatriate ‘West Indians’ in Britain, the creation of a demand for young, educated men to run the plantations on site and a flow of capital towards Britain. One young British visitor, Daniel Mckinnen, on his first trip to ‘our valuable sugar islands’ in 1802 - a time of particularly high sugar prices -42 was shocked when he arrived in Barbados at Bridgetown to find that ‘its streets were in great measure unpaved: ‘the decayed and warped exterior of the wooden houses, the dirty and unfinished fronts of the brick dwellings, with smutty timbers and staggering piazzas (balconies)’. 43 At first Mckinnen ‘excited an idea that the national character was totally vitiated or lost in this torrid climate’.44 However, he then realised the reason for lack of maintenance was that ‘most of the principal inhabitants of the towns intend their dwellings merely as places of temporary residence, till they have

40

Alfred Desant, Annals of an Eventful Life, London, 1870, p.60. Desant, ibid, p.80. 42 Daniel Mckinnen, A Tour through the British West Indies, London, 1804, preface. 43 Mckinnen, ibid. 44 Mckinnen, ibid. 41

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acquired the means of removing to a more temperate climate, and naturally feel less solicitous to dispose of their money in objects of unprofitable and temporary concern.’45

In Jamaica, the largest and wealthiest of the British colonies at the time, he found even more evidence of the effects of absenteeism on the island:

‘ The many eminent and wealthy families of Jamaica to be met with in every circle of fashion where the English language prevails it is naturally a matter of some surprise to a stranger who visits the island to find it almost totally deserted by its principal inhabitants. In one of the richest districts it is said that of eighty proprietors not three are to be found in this time on the spot.’46

1.12 Plantation house, St Kitts

For today’s visitors to the British Caribbean, it is noticeable how modest the so-called ‘Great Houses’ tend to be. While a few grand eighteenth century examples survive, such as the stone-built Rose Hall in the parish of St James in Jamaica, the majority of plantation houses are far less sophisticated. Indeed, in comparison with the stucco palaces of eighteenth century colonial Calcutta, the cotton plantation houses of the independent United States or indeed those of Spanish sugar planters in nineteenth century Cuba,

44 45

Mckinnen, op.cit. 46 Mckinnen ibid, p. 108.

British Caribbean planters appear strikingly parsimonious. Money made from sugar, it seems, was reinvested into the sugar works rather than spent on domestic luxury.

But initial impressions are deceptive. For, as Mckinnen noted, the culture of absenteeism that developed in the eighteenth century British Caribbean meant that ‘all the wealth of the soil is transported and consumed in remote countries’.47 It is in Britain rather than the West Indies, therefore, that the spectacular proceeds and legacy of the sugar and slave trade are to be found.

.

45 47

Mckinnen, op.cit., p.108.

Chapter Two Arts and Elegancies ‘For the first time in my life here am I in England, at the fountainhead of pleasure, in the land of beauty: of arts of elegancies. My happy stars have given me a good estate and the conspiring winds have blown me hither to spend it.’ Richard Cumberland, The West Indian (1771) I, V

Danson Park lies near Bexleyheath, equidistant between London’s financial centre, the City, and the meanders of the Thames estuary. Now a suburban oasis within a sprawl of 1930s ‘semis’, shopping parades and superstores, you can still imagine how it would have been nearly 250 years ago. In the Kent landscape of wide skies and gentle contours, Danson would have had a commanding presence on the top of a low hill. In a county of clay bricks, flints and timber weatherboarding, Danson was faced in a honey-coloured limestone.

2.1 Entrance elevation of Danson

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To the south, a sweep of grassland, the ‘great lawn’, led down to a lake and a small ‘temple’ by William Chambers, one of the most famous architects of the day. To the north west, there was a view across another huge meadow towards Shooter’s Hill and the London road to Greenwich; to the north, there were glimpses of the naval dockyard at Woolwich and the dull grey glint of the River Thames beyond: and to the east, rolling fields and copses stretched as far as the eye could see. A great flight of stone steps led up to the main entrance, and the panelled, mahogany front door set with a glazed vision panel - a single sheet of glass almost 70 centimetres square, the technical limit of eighteenth century English glassmaking.1

Inside, on the first floor ‘piano nobile’ lay the formal reception rooms. The tone was set by the imposing entrance hall. Unheated, with a stone-paved floor, stone-coloured walls, niches and busts and sparsely furnished, its design suggested hot climates. Indeed, it was modelled on the halls of the 16th century Italian villas of Andrea Palladio, then extremely fashionable, but was in reality more suited to the sticky summers of the Venice hinterland than the cool, damp, English countryside.

2.2 Entrance hall at Danson

1

My thanks to Richard Lea of English Heritage for drawing my attention to this.

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Still, the hall was only a transitional space. From it led three further elegant mahogany-panelled doors. To the left was the dining room. Here, the calm austerity of the entrance hall gave way to a feast of decoration with glittering sconces, gilded mouldings, wall paintings and fine mirrors.2 To the right was the library, its walls painted in a deep dark green, an expensive colour to make before the nineteenth century invention of synthetic pigments, but one that set off the tall, mahogany-faced bookcases to advantage. A magnificent, finely crafted organ completed this sophisticated display of wealth.

2.3 The salon at Danson

A second door from the library, however, led to a room very different in character: an octagonal salon hung in a vivid blue ‘chinoiserie’ wallpaper covered in pagoda-roofed buildings, ‘oriental’ figures and flowers.3 But it was the central door from the entrance hall that revealed the ‘piece de resistance’ of the house: a magnificent, oval top-lit staircase. Its cantilevered stone treads and

2

Chris Miele and Richard Lea, The House and Park at Danson, London Borough of Bexley: The anatomy of a Georgian suburban estate, English Heritage Historical Analysis and Research Team Reports and Papers (36), 2000. 3 Richard Lea, Danson: the ‘Blue Silk Damask’, is this an accurate description of the saloon’s original wall covering?’, English Heritage Historical Analysis and Research Team, Reports and Papers, 2002.

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mahogany handrail spiralled up through the house to a trompe d’oeil coffered, top-lit dome, a miniature homage to the antique temple the Pantheon in Rome.

From the fashionable ‘natural’ style landscaping to the well-planned kitchens and servants’ quarters, from the elegant design of the counter-balanced, sliding box sash windows and folding shutters, to the oil paintings displayed on the walls, references to the great buildings of ancient Rome and the Italian renaissance combined with the latest in building technology. Everything about Danson proclaimed cosmopolitanism and artistic discernment. Clearly, this was the house of a gentleman of taste, as well as fortune. Or so, at least, it seemed. The client and master of the house, John Boyd, however, came from a more modest background than the sophisticated surroundings suggested.

2.4 Staircase hall at Danson

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John Boyd was born in 1719 on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, a colony that, at the time, was divided between French and British control. He was the only son of Augustus Boyd, a Scots-Irish émigré who had arrived in the island in 1700, aged 20, with little to his name.4 Augustus became first a plantation manager, then by ‘renting’ 49 enslaved Africans and some land he began cultivating sugar himself. Eventually, aided by marriage to a plantation heiress, he became the owner of an estate at Palmetto Point on the western side of the island.5 However, Augustus’ mixed heritage – his mother was French Huguenot – caused him many frustrations. So in 1735, with the threat of war between Britain and France looming, at the age of 58 and having spent nearly all of his adult life in the West Indies, he left with his wife and teenage son for a new beginning in London.

The contrast between St Kitts and the colonial capital could not have been greater. Although nowhere near the size of today’s sprawling metropolis, by the 1730s London was still one of the largest cities in the world. Moreover, as home to more than three quarters of a million people, almost one tenth of the population of Britain, London was already larger than Paris - the capital of Britain’s powerful European rival - notwithstanding France’s much bigger population. For, as well as being a centre of political and administrative power, unlike Paris, London was also a major seaport. Indeed, it was the prosperity founded on the salty, silt-encrusted Thames-side wharves and quays that attracted migrants from the provinces. Some historians estimate, indeed, that almost a quarter of London’s population at that time worked in the port and river trades alone.6

The later eclipse of London’s colonial shipping trade, together with the subsequent redevelopment along the banks of the Thames, means that mere fragments of the eighteenth century port survive today. To get an idea of the Boyds’ new home, it is, therefore, necessary to look at old maps, drawings and descriptions written by people who knew the city during this period. The size of buildings apart, one of the most notable differences between the riverside then and now, is the comparative emptiness these days of the river itself. Writing in 1723, four years after the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe described the spectacle of the Thames just to the south east of the Tower, a stretch of water known as the Upper Pool. ‘(In) that Part of the River Thames, which is properly the Harbour, and where the ships usually deliver or unload their cargoes, I have had the Curiousity to count the Ships as well as I could, en passant; and have found above 2000 Sail of all Sorts, not reckoning Barges, Lighters, or Pleasure-boats and Yachts; but of vessels that really go to sea.’7

4

For a more detailed account of Augustus and John Boyd’s background in St Kitts and their business dealings as London merchant, see David Hancock: Citizens of the World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1995. 5 An undated anonymous map of St Kitts - probably late eighteenth/early nineteenth century and on display at St Kitts Museum, Basterre - indicates estates owned by ‘John Boyd’ in this area. 6 See Ralph M. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry, London, 1962. 7 th Daniel Defoe: A Tour through the Island of Great Britain and Ireland, 1722-23,(6 edition, 1761), Vol II, p153.

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2.5 Thomas Luny, The Pool of London (c.1800)

Early eighteenth century Britain had a flourishing manufacturing industry - particularly of woollen textiles and iron goods - and Britain’s shipping merchants were assiduous in establishing export markets. The words of one contemporary commentator, Malachy Postlethwayt, give a flavour of the cosmopolitan nature of London’s trade during this period.8

‘The exporter of woolen goods, can as easily export tin or lead or hardware &c and have his returns by exchange in dollars of Leghorn, or ducats of Venice as well as dollars of Spain, or millrees, or moidores of Portugal. Or, cannot the merchant who sent woolen goods to Spain, or to Italy send another species of Woollen goods to Russia; and have his returns in roubles. ‘9 By the mid-eighteenth century Britain had become modern consumer society. A substantial proportion of the British population - who regarded themselves as the ‘middling sort’ - were eager and able to buy imported goods from around the globe. These included fine Turkish carpets, wine and citrus fruits from southern Europe, and, from further afield, easily washable cotton muslins and printed calicoes from India, spices from the East Indies, tea and porcelain from China, tobacco from Virginia, tropical timbers and, of course, sugar from the plantations of the British Caribbean.10

8

See Malachy Postlethwayt, The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation trade in America, London 1745, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, (n.d) Great Britain’s Commercial Interests Explained, London, 1756. 9 Malachy Postlethwayt, The Merchant’s Public Counting House or new mercantile institution, London, 1750, preface. 10 John Brewer, Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods, Routledge, 1993, pp.1-8.

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Indeed, the fastest growing area of overseas trade in the British Isles, and by far the greatest in volume, during this time was with Britain’s 26 mainland ‘American’ colonies and the Caribbean islands. Between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth century, the quantity of imports and exports to and from these colonies more than doubled and by 1771, this ‘Atlantic’ trade amounted to a third more than that with all European destinations combined.11 This rapid growth was in no small part due to the succession of Navigation Acts, which required not only that colonial produce be shipped solely in British ships,12 but forbade manufacturing in the American colonies themselves. Everything, therefore, that the colonists might need: tools for the plantations, tables, furniture, crockery, linen, lace and silks and even basic foodstuffs, was exported from London and Britain’s other expanding Atlantic ports.

By the time Augustus Boyd and his family arrived in the city, indeed, London was eclipsing Amsterdam as Europe’s premier port. With his first-hand knowledge of colonists’ requirements and his trading contacts in the Leewards, Boyd was, therefore, well-placed to compete with the merchants of Oranjestad for the expanding markets of the Caribbean. In 1735, he went into partnership with his brother-in-law James Perchell in a merchandising firm, charging a commission of between half and five percent on the goods that they exported and a similar amount on the barrels of molasses and damp, raw, brown sugar shipped from the West Indies.13

The firm was based in Austin Friars in the closely packed network of streets centred on St Paul’s Cathedral just north of the river. It was good spot to be. Almost everything a mercantile partnership required to develop a business of global reach was less than an hour’s walk away. In the immediate vicinity were major institutions: The East India Company, the Royal Africa Company and the Bank of England. To the south lay the Thames-side quays and Customs House. Other administrative offices The Navy Office and the headquarters of merchant shipping, Trinity House, were also on hand. Also close by were the wholesale produce markets for exports to the colonists: Smithfield for livestock and meat for the plantation owners and Billingsgate for the barrels of salted fish for ‘their’ slaves.

The valuable City location means that there are few eighteenth century buildings left in Austin Friars. Some of the structures in the immediate vicinity, however, such as the duct shrouded, crane-topped Lloyds building, still house institutions that owe their origins to the eighteenth century shipping industry. Visually, however, the huge scale of many of the new buildings, coupled with road development near the Tower of London, has cut off the close relationship that the City once had with the Thames. Indeed, at

11

In 1686 Britain traded 67,000 tons of shipping with mainland Europe, and 70,000 tons with the Americas. By 1771, this had increased to 105,000 tons and 153,000 tons respectively. By way of comparison, in the same year 29,000 tons were traded with the East Indies. Source: Ralph Davis, op.cit.. 12 See Davis, ibid, and Laws and Statutes IV Collections and Abridgements: An Abridgement of Several Acts of Parliament relating to the Trade and Navigation of Great Britain to from and in the British Plantations in America, London, 1739. 13 In this, Boyd and Perchell’s firm differed from ‘factors’, who bought goods on their own account and resold them at a profit. See Hancock, op. cit., pp. 46-47.

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street level it is hard to realise you are near the river at all. In places, however, stiff planning regulations have tamed centuries of global capitalism. Here, the mediaeval street layout still remains: an intricate network of tiny, pedestrianised alleys and courts, which cut through the blocks giving glimpses into the limestone and chrome atria of international banks. It is in these courts and alleys that you can find the remains of a far older, but still globally connected, City of London.

Just a few minutes walk from Austin Friars in St Michael’s Alley is the Jamaica Wine House housed in a nineteenth century building built on the site of the Jamaica House, the first ‘coffee house’ to be built in London. In the eighteenth century, City coffee houses were not just places for refreshment, they were important centres to glean information, Here, news could be obtained not just from newspapers, but directly from voyagers newly disembarked from the transatlantic ships anchored in the Thames.

The names of coffee houses, like those of pubs, often reflected the commodity or area of trade in which they informally specialised.14 The Jamaica would, naturally therefore, have been a centre for news of Jamaican and other West Indian information and it possible that Augustus Boyd was a regular customer. Formal business deals and the paperwork would, however, be carried out in a private office, known as a compting house. Boyd’s own compting house has long since been redeveloped, but if you walk a few minutes to the north east to the poorer areas just outside the bounds of the City, such as Spitalfields or Artillery Row where many eighteenth-century streets survive, it is possible to get an idea of what his office would have looked like. The combination of building codes instigated after the Great Fire of London and site valuations based on the length of street frontage, namely, means that most eighteenth century London buildings - whether domestic, commercial or a mixture of the two - were built to a standard developer’s format. Indeed, if you walk south east from Austin Friars to the traffic-blighted area around The Minories, you can still find a building which once housed the offices of Camden, Calvert and Kent, one of London’s largest firms of Africa traders.15 With its sober brick façade, elegant sash windows and iron railings, Number 11, The Crescent looks like a typical Georgian London, terraced town house. Its domestic appearance, indeed, makes it hard to believe that it was once the financial centre of a global slave-trading business. But, by today’s standards, eighteenth century shipping merchants were very small organizations: just the owner and several assistant clerks. The post of a clerk in an international compting house was, therefore, a potentially lucrative career opportunity. It is at first surprising, then, to find out that after his arrival in Britain, rather than becoming a clerk in his father’s office, Augustus’ son John left London to read theology at Christ Church College, Oxford. Although the ‘livings’ paid to eighteenth century clergymen could well provide a 14

Other coffee houses included, for example, The Colonial on Threadneedle Street or The Pennsylvania in Birchin Lane, The New York and The Portugal. See Hancock, op.cit, p.89 and p.308. Although so heavily restored that it almost looks new, The Crescent was actually built in 1767.

15

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comfortable life, it seems an odd career choice for the only son of a successful, international merchant. Rather than intending his son to follow a religious vocation, however, it is more likely that Augustus had another motives. For the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, along with schools such as Westminster and Eton, were institutions that had for many years provided an education to Britain’s landowning elite.16 The outcome of John’s theological studies would have been less important than the assurance that he would be spending two or three years in the company of ‘gentlemen’.

2.6 Number 11, The Crescent

The concepts of gentility or politeness and the definition of gentlemanly behaviour were of great importance in eighteenth century Britain.17 Indeed, at his death in 1729, Daniel Defoe, an acute observer of social mores, was working on manuscript entitled The Compleat Gentleman.18 It is to Defoe, therefore, that I turn to clarify what the terms meant during this period.

According to Defoe, the word ‘Gentleman’ was traditionally understood to ‘signify men of ancient houses, dignified with hereditary titles and family honours, old mansion houses …names deriv’d from the lands and estates they possess, parks and forests made by their own prescription and

16

See Linda Colley: Britons, Forging the Nation 1707 – 1837 for a discussion of the influence of these educational institutions during the eighteenth century. 17 See Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-83, Oxford, 1992 and Douglas Hay & Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth Century English Society, Oxford, 1997, pp18-36 for a discussion of the concept of a ‘gentleman’. Also see Amanda Vickery: The Gentleman’s Daughter, Yale, 1998, pp.14-37 for a an investigation of ‘gentility’. 18 Daniel Defoe, The Compleat Gentleman…edited from the first time from the author’s autograph manuscript’, Carl Daniel Buelbring (ed.), London, 1890.

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usage time out of mind and such like marks of the antiquity of the race.’19 Clearly, in order to be a gentleman, one had to have money, preferably income from agricultural rents. But by the 1730s, the success of the Navigation Acts and Britain’s aggressive colonial expansion had, as Defoe points out, also provided opportunities in ‘Law, trade, war, navigation, improvement of stocks, loans on public funds’ to create, in Defoe’s words, ‘vast and, till of late, unheard of sums of money amass’d in a short time’. Wealth was no longer simply seen as the prerogative of those with an inherited landed estate.

Though necessary, riches alone were not considered sufficient for social acceptability. Indeed, according to Defoe and other contemporaries, a merchant’s perceived habit of ‘ravening after money’ 20 would debar him from ever becoming a true gentleman himself. For a son, however, it was another matter. If spent correctly, inherited wealth would, in the eyes of many eighteenth century commentators, allow the possibility of social advancement. As Defoe argues: ‘Call him what you please on account of his blood, and be the race modern and mean as you will, yet if he was sent early to school, has good parts and has improved them by learning, travel, conversation and reading, and, above all, with a modest, courteous gentle-man like behaviour; despise him as you will, he will be a gentleman in spite of all the distinctions we can make’.21

Defoe’s call for ‘modest, courteous gentle-man like behaviour’ would have been of particular concern for absentees like Augustus Boyd and his wife. Caribbean colonists, namely, had notably different mannerisms from those found in ‘polite’ eighteenth century British society.22 Indeed, ‘West Indians’ - as they were popularly known in Britain - were notorious for their coarse manners and predilection for luxurious tropical foods such as turtles and pineapples. The flamboyantly brusque, barbecue-loving, Caribbean-born hero of the comedy The Patron (1764), for example, is described as ‘a West Indian of overgrown fortune, he saves me the trouble of a portrait’,23 while in the popular play The West Indian (1771), the young man in question is described as having ‘enough rum and sugar belonging to him, to make all the water in the Thames into punch’.24

These literary caricatures are borne out by contemporary records. In 1744, for example, the merchant Robert Maxwell wrote approvingly about a small boy who had been sent to England for his education:

19

Defoe, The Compleat Gentleman, op. cit., p.254. Defoe, ibid, p.256. See also Hancock, Citizens of The World, op. cit., pp.281- 282. 21 Defoe, ibid, p.258. 22 For the social status of the planter set against the background of attitudes to new wealth, see James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800, Oxford (Oxford University Press), 1992, p.208 and pp.221-48. 23 Samuel Foote, The Patron, Dublin, 1764, Act I Scene I. 24 Richard Cumberland, The West Indian, London, 1771, Act I Scene III. 20

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‘in short you would not know him again, his speech is almost quite changed and he will very soon lose the little that he has left of the Barbados accent and dialect’.25 And the failure of Jamaican-born William Beckford to adopt the requisite ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour meant that, even as a powerful City Alderman, Member of Parliament and Lord Mayor of London, he was never fully accepted by ‘polite’ British society. ‘Mr. Beckford wanted the external graces of manners and expression, adorned with those accomplishments, he would have made a first rate figure,’ one City commentator wrote snidely.26

While the acquisition of an appropriate education, speech and manners, were clearly important accomplishments for socially ambitious West Indians, one would imagine that absentees had already met one of Defoe’s requirements, namely ‘travel’. All absentees, naturally, would have made at least one substantial transatlantic sailing trip. However, a voyage from one of Britain’s colonies in the cabin of a sugar-laden ‘West India Man’, was not, it appears, the correct form of ‘travel’. A true ‘gentleman’ had to visit Europe: indeed, by the early eighteenth century one of the hallmarks of Britain’s male elite was the undertaking of a lengthy visit to the continent known as the Grand Tour, which culminated in a visit to Rome.27 Here ‘polite’ young men could see for themselves the physical remains of the civilisations they had spent so much time studying in their classics lessons at school. They could walk in the footsteps of Augustus and Hadrian, contemplate the fertile countryside celebrated in Virgil’s Georgics, or indeed, like Boyd’s architect Robert Taylor, gain detailed first-hand experience of ancient Roman architecture.28

From the records, while it is not clear whether John Boyd made a Grand Tour straight after graduating, he certainly undertook one with his wife and family later in life, visiting the classical remains in Rome and Naples. 29 And, like other wealthy British tourists, he brought back souvenirs of his trip in the form of paintings and antique sculpture.30 By his mid-twenties, however, having completed his gentlemanly education, he returned to the City and joined his father Augustus to form a new partnership, Boyd & Co., soon gaining prestigious and highly profitable new commissions to supply the British Army and Navy.31 .

Once traders on a far distant island colony, the Boyds were now merchants at the heart of a new, emerging imperial order. And three years later, Augustus and John, together with four other Londonbased West India merchants, became involved in one of eighteenth century Britain’s most lucrative branches of international commerce: the transatlantic slave trade.

25

th

Robert Maxwell to Thomas Finlay, 17 May, 1744, The Letterbook of Lascelles and Maxwell, Fo.168. Anon, City Biography, Memoirs of the Aldermen of London, London, 1800. 27 See Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century, Stroud and New York, 1992. 28 Marcus Binney: Sir Robert Taylor: from rococo to neoclassicism, London, 1984. 29 St Kitts absentee Ralph Payne (1739-1807), Governor of the Leeward Islands, also made the Grand Tour in his youth. Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The History of Parliament (The House of Commons) 1754-1790, London, 1985. 30 See Chris Miele and Richard Lea, op.cit., (appendix), for a list of paintings and sculptures owned by Boyd, who became one of eighteenth century Britain’s foremost art collectors. Thanks to David Solkin, Professor of Social History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, for pointing out the significance of his collection to me. 31 See Hancock, op.cit., pp.170- 213. It is likely that John’s social connections would have been valuable in gaining the introductions to finalise these contracts, making Augustus’ shrewd investment in his gentlemanly education clearly worthwhile 26

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Their purchase of Bance Island, an old slave trading ‘fort’ in the Sierra Leone River in West Africa, would undoubtedly have been a risky venture. It is most unlikely that the Boyds visited the island themselves before purchasing their shares. It is more probable that they gained their knowledge from conversations with other merchants and from several books that had been published in London in previous years, such as Malachy Postlethwayt’s The African Trade (1745) and his The National and Private Advantages of the African Trade (1747). Like the stone fort on James Island in the River Gambia, the fort on Bance Island had been built by the state-sponsored Royal Africa Company some 70 years before, but abandoned in the face of growing competition by independent merchants trading directly from slaving ships.32 It is clear, however, that Boyd’s consortium considered that by banding together to purchase and manage Bance Island, they could reap the advantages of the ‘fort trade’ once practised there. Africans, supplied with arms by the fort, would bring back captives from other tribes, who were then exchanged by barter with the fort. The captives were then sold on, at a premium, to the slave shippers who could then depart quickly with full loads on their transatlantic voyage.

2.7 A prospect of Bance Island in John Green, comp., A new collection of Voyages and Travels, London, 1746

32

David Hancock, op.cit., p.174.

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The Boyds’ gamble paid off. Bance Island proved to be one of the most successful business ventures they were ever to undertake.33 Between 1750 and 1769, the consortium exported 9,655 men, women and children to be sold to Caribbean planters. Some of the Boyds’ slaving profits were invested into East India Company shares (John Boyd, indeed, became a director of the company), some were put into a private bank, while other funds were used to purchase new lands and plantations in Grenada and Tobago. Much of the money, however, was spent on property in Britain itself.34

In July 1753, four years after his marriage and already the father of three young children, John Boyd took on a 21 year lease of a ‘mansion house’ near Bexleyheath just off the old Roman road from London to Canterbury and Dover.35 Due to its proximity to both the City and the River Thames, the area of north Kent near Bexley was particularly popular with successful merchants who wanted to move their families away from the filthy, crowded confines of the City. 36 John’s father Augustus had already leased a house in the nearby village of Lewisham and his colleague John Sergeant owned a rambling, much extended, fifteenth century manor house, May Place, just a few miles away.37 Indeed, this area of Kent was home to at least a dozen prominent Caribbean expatriates, such as the Mays, the Longs, the Kenyons, the Mannings, the Butlers, the Duponts, the Malcoms, the Adyes and the Willetts.38

Like May Place, Danson, too, was an large old manor house, which John leased together with 40 acres of land, barns, stables, outhouses and gardens, orchards, fishponds and a formal ornamental lake or canal. One can imagine that it was an idyllic location in which to raise a young family; indeed, six years later in 1759, John bought the freehold outright.39 However, it appears that, unlike Sergeant, John found his home inadequate. For, in 1760, he approached the architect Robert Taylor to design him a new family home: clearly, a man who aimed to be a ‘compleat’ gentleman required a different sort of residence.

In eighteenth century Britain, to be considered a gentleman one needed not only education and ‘polite’ manners, but also to spend money in the ‘right’ way: in short, to have ’taste’.40 And of all the objects that a wealthy individual might acquire during a lifetime, the commission of a new, custom-designed house and garden would have been one of the most public - and most expensive - ways of displaying gentility and discernment. Indeed, Danson Park can be considered a built exemplar of mid-eighteenth century British ‘good taste’. For the architecture of Danson, like the majority of ‘polite’ new buildings in eighteenth

33

David Hancock, op.cit., p.213. See Drummonds Bank, Customer Account Ledgers (John Boyd), Royal Bank of Scotland Archives, Islington. DR/427/160. 35 Danson Deeds, Bexley Local Studies Collection, Hall Place, Bexley DAN 3 July, 1753. 36 See Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias; The rise and Fall of Suburbia, New York, 1997 for a discussion of the growth of ‘suburban’ seats around eighteenth century London. 37 John Sergeant and William Cooke had also purchased manors in Kent and Essex respectively. See Hancock, op.cit,, p.322. 38 Hancock, op.cit., p.287. 39 Danson Deeds, Bexley Local Studies Collection. 40 See, for example, Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: the politics of architecture and design in Britain 1550-1960, London and New Haven: Yale, 1995, pp.10-174 and Amanda Vickery, op.cit., pp.161-194, for discussions of the eighteenth century British concepts of ‘taste’ and ‘elegance’. 34

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century Britain drew inspiration from villas designed by the Vicenza-born mason-architect Andrea Palladio over two centuries before.

In his villas, Palladio amalgamated features of Roman temples and other ancient civic buildings with the vernacular of northern Italy to create aesthetically sophisticated, rural headquarters for the newly acquired agricultural holdings of elite merchants of the Venetian Republic. 41 Two or three storeys in height, these rough-brick built ‘farmhouses’ were covered with render to imitate stone and were also dignified by a symmetric, geometrically-organised plan. A careful emphasis on proportions governed the entire layout, including heights of ceilings and sizes of windows and doors and, together with the judicious use of a few ornamental classical features, this gave Palladio’s architecture its simple splendour.

The reasons for the rapid growth and popularity of the neo-Palladian style of architecture in Britain during the early years of the eighteenth century have been investigated at length. In 1974, for example, Rudolph Wittkower suggested that the style, with its architectural allusions to the ancient Roman Republic, is a visual manifestation of the post-1688 Act of Settlement Whig political ideals. Palladianism was a style, he argues, of liberty and parliamentary democracy and one that directly opposed the flamboyant Baroque ‘of the Catholic Church and despotic powers’.42 More recently, (2002) Barbara Arciszewska has demonstrated how George I promoted Palladian classicism as a means to ‘underscore the Hanoverian dynasty’s Venetian roots’ and thereby legitimise its claim to the British throne,43 while Richard Jenkyns (2007) argues that the dissemination of the Palladian architectural style throughout the country provided a means to ‘recover’ a, largely destroyed, legacy of Roman rule.44

But why would such a visual representation of the contemporary British constitution have appealed to an absentee West Indian merchant of Irish-French ancestry? Why would a man who spent his formative years on a small Caribbean island have been interested in designs that alluded to the Roman occupation of Britain many centuries before? Why would John have found these an appropriate iconography for his new house? Was Boyd just blindly following this new fashion for Italianate architecture, anxious to prove his ‘good taste’ and his status as a ‘gentleman’? Or, given Palladio’s relationship with the merchants of the Venetian empire, the status of Italy on the influential Grand Tour and the allusions between Roman and contemporary British imperial power, did such classical style have real resonance for the Boyds, with their own family history and fortunes? 41

nd

For a wider discussion of Palladio and his influence, see James Ackerman: Palladio, 2 edition, Penguin 1977 and Reinhard Bentmann & Michael Muller, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture (English translation of Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur), London, New Jersey, 1992. The latter argues that Palladio’s appeal to the Venetians lay in the republic’s quest, following the loss of its Eastern empire, to establish the legitimacy of its rule over its Italian mainland colonies. The Palladian style was rooted in Roman antiquity, conferring the appearance of longevity and an imperial right, therefore, to rule over its dominions. 42 ‘English Neo-Palladianism, the Landscape Garden, China and the Enlightenment’ in Rudolph Wittkover, Palladio and English Palladianism, London, Thames and Hudson, 1974, p.177-190. 43 Barbara Arciszewska, The Hanoverian Court and the Triumph of Palladio, Warsaw, 2002. 44 Richard Jenkyns, ‘Remoteness and Aspiration: the United Kingdom’ in Craig Kallendorf (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, pp.265 -278.

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Sadly, few records of Danson’s actual construction survive: there is, therefore, no documentary evidence as to why Boyd chose to appoint Robert Taylor as his architect nor, indeed, notes of discussions between them. The architecture of Danson itself, however, can reveal much.

The study of classical civilisations was certainly used as an inspiration for the creators of the nascent British Empire,45 including the founders of the eighteenth century British Caribbean colonies, who seem to have been mindful of ancient Greek and Roman imperial history. For instance, the journal of Antiguan absentee William Young, the eldest son of the Governor of Dominica and himself the future Governor of Tobago, reveals his dismay when, during his Grand Tour in 1772, he decided to travel on southwards from Rome to visit other parts of former classical empires. ‘Where are the myriads of Etruria?,’ he asks: ‘Where are the Dominions of Carthage or Armies of Syracuse? But a straggling village for a city, a convent for a republic … Africa, the granary of ancient Rome seems scarcely more than a desert!’46

As we have seen, the architecture of Danson incorporates an eclectic mix of eighteenth century building technology and classical references. The decorative stone pediment on Danson’s entrance façade, for instance, the entablatures that surrounded the sliding sash windows or the metopes and triglyphs that embellished the cornicing, were all features that had originated on the temples of Rome. And while these classical motifs would, undoubtedly, have shown Boyd to be a member of a cultured elite, devices that recalled the wealth and might of the ancient Roman Empire would have had a particular resonance for a West Indian absentee colonial. The spectacular homage to the Pantheon above Danson’s main staircase, for instance, was not just a depiction of an architectural icon. It also alluded to the role that the Boyd family was playing - as Caribbean sugar planters, West India traders and victualling contractors to the Army and Navy - in the creation of a new British imperial order.

Palladio’s villas would have provided an intriguing design prototype for a London-based West India merchant like Boyd.47 His classical architectural details refer to the military empire of ancient Rome and the villas also reflected the power and prosperity of fifteenth century Venice’s maritime merchant elite. Indeed, as Linda Colley points out, the legends of the Venetian republic were used as an alternative to Rome as a historical exemplar for eighteenth century Britain’s development – a model that was particularly popular with City merchants. 48

45

See more recently, for instance, Linda Colley: Britons: Forging the Nation, London: Pimlico, 1994, p.168. William Young, A journal of a Summer’s excursion by the Road of Montecasino to Naples. And from thence over all the southern parts of Italy, Sicily and Malta In the year MDCCLXXII, British Library, Stowe Mss. 921. 47 Also see Saumerez Smith, ‘Supply and Demand in English Country House Building 1660-1740’, The Oxford Art Journal 11:2, 1988. In this he suggests how Palladianism may have been used to disguise a structural shift in the composition of the English elite. 48 Linda Colley, op.cit., pp 168 -70. One of Palladio’s most enthusiastic advocates in the early years of the eighteenth century was Richard Boyle, Lord Burlington, heir to a Yorkshire estate and ‘plantations’ near the prominent Irish Atlantic port of Cork. 46

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However, few eighteenth century British clients, or their designers, would have actually had direct experience of Palladio’s Italian villas. While many a gentleman visited the prosperous west coast port of Livorno (often known as Leghorn) on their way to Rome, the Venetians’ Adriatic trading empire had long since declined, and, for the British at least, the Veneto was little more than an inaccessible backwater. It would have been likely therefore that Boyd and Taylor would have either gained their knowledge of Palladio’s buildings through English translations of his treatise The Four Books of Architecture (1663) and the many books derived directly from it. 49

The Four Books of Architecture was illustrated with diagrammatic black and white prints and had focused on the sculptural and structural aspects of his buildings. The British translators and early architectural theorists, constrained by the limitation of eighteenth century reproduction technology, did likewise. It is striking, therefore, to visit Palladio’s villas and notice the differences between the sixteenth century Venetian originals and an eighteenth century British counterpart like Danson. Some of these differences can be attributed to variations in construction methods.50

Some, however, cannot be explained by building technologies alone. For example, rather than a render finish, which could be produced with locally available Kent gravels and sands, Danson’s brick shell is faced with stone. But it is not the grey-white Portland stone from Dorset that was used on many of the most expensive buildings in eighteenth century London; it is instead a yellow oolitic limestone like Bath stone. 51 Indeed, the unusual choice of material suggests that Boyd and Taylor drew on connections with West India merchants and developers in Bristol to obtain stone shipped along the Avon from Bath’s quarries.52 But the most profound difference between Danson and the villas designed for a sixteenth century Venetian merchant elite, however, is the way the buildings related to their surroundings.

At Danson, Taylor had used Palladio’s advice to put a frontispiece on the forward façade where the principal doors are because such frontispieces show the entrance of the house and add very much to the grandeur and magnificence of the work.53 Indeed, during the eighteenth century, the sweeping flight of steps to the main entrance and the prominent pediment would have been even more imposing than today. For while the house at Danson was not outstandingly large, two low curved wings (since demolished) gave the building the aspect of a grand palace. Indeed, an architectural illustration of the

49

For example James Gibb’s Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture (1732), Robert Morris’ Architectural Remembrancer (1751), Isaac Ware’s The Complete Body of Architecture (1756) or William Chambers’ A Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759). 50 The sash windows at Danson, with their fine mouldings and elegant folding internal shutters, are very different from the leaded light casements, chunky timber transoms and mullions and rough external shutters found in many of Palladio’s villas. 51 Lea and Miele, op.cit., p.26. 52 Taylor was surveyor to William Pulteney, a major developer in Bath (see further in Chapter Five, Refining the World). 53 Andrea Palladio, Il Quattro Libri, II, Ch. Xvi, quoted in Ackerman, op.cit., p.67.

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1790s shows how Danson’s composition - coupled with its prominent location on the top of a hill ensured that it visually dominated the surrounding area.

Fig 2.8 Thomas Malton: Danson House (detail)

This too, was a Palladian device: at Villa Barbaro, for example, Palladio had extended the apparent size of the house by forming symmetric arcades linking it to theatrically decorated farm buildings. The wings at Danson, however, were not designed as barns but as accommodation for people, twelve horses and three coaches.54 Despite their classical grandeur, most of Palladio’s villas were not only the sophisticated headquarters of country estates, but also working farmhouses surrounded by many hectares of productive fields and orchards. Boyd’s neo-Palladian villa, however, was enclosed by vast, ornamental lawns.

Since the purchase of the Danson estate in 1759, Boyd had been consistently adding to his landholdings. Indeed, by 1762 he owned almost 200 acres.55 In eighteenth century Britain, land ownership was a mark of social prestige. Privileges enjoyed by ‘landed gentlemen’ alone ranged from the comparatively trivial, such as the right to hunt, to the most important; the ability to act as a ‘justice of the peace’, for instance, and the right to be elected to Parliament.56 For the traditional gentry, of course, land was a central source of income, but as an estate plan made in that year reveals, the vast majority of the English land that Boyd owned was not intended to produce agricultural income.

54

See Lea and Miele op.cit. pp.94-97 Typical is an agreement from 12 August 1761 for the lease and release of 12.5 acres ‘in Consideration £166.13.4 in India Stock yielding £10 per annum interest.’ Danson Deeds, Bexley Local Studies DAN 109, 110 and 115. 56 Hay and Rogers: Eighteenth Century English Society, ibid, p.28. 55

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2.9 Proposed landscaping at Danson

Once attributed to Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the plan has now been identified to be by one of Brown’s former assistants, Nathaniel Richmond.57 Nevertheless, it displays the hallmarks of the ‘natural style’ of landscape design associated with Brown. By the early 1760s, the creation of vast grassy lawns or parks had become an extremely fashionable activity among British landowners. Indeed, as Tom Williamson shows in Polite Landscapes (1995), between 1750 and Brown’s death in 1783 almost 4,000 landscape parks were created, the majority to designs made by Brown’s ‘associates’ Richmond, Richard Woods, William Emes, Francis Richardson and Adam Mickle.58

The so-called ‘natural style’, of course, owed more to man than nature. For a landowner today equipped with the hydraulic arms and the toothed buckets of earthmoving equipment - gentle earth grading and seeding with some larger planting would not be an extravagant form of landscaping. In the eighteenth century, though, it would have been a substantial feat of construction. Earth had to be dug with a spade, thrown on to a cart or barrow, moved a few metres or more depending on the desires of the ‘improver,’ tipped out and compacted ready for the ‘topsoil,’ raking and seeding.

57 58

See Lea and Milne, op. cit., p. 100. Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes, Stroud: Sutton, 1995, p.85.

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Executed in pen, ink and wash, the plan for Danson shows the location of the new house on the highest point of Boyd’s landholding. To the south is a 70 acre grassed ‘lawn’ leading down to an irregularly shaped lake bounded by thickets of trees, while to the north is another ‘lawn’ of almost 40 acres. Cartographers of the time reflected society’s unease at bestowing the name ‘park’, with its historical association with medieval royal and aristocratic deer parks on a gentleman’s grounds. They preferred instead the term ‘lawn’ or ‘paddock’. However, as Williamson notes, ‘above a certain size – probably around 25 hectares if designed with care – an area of grass and trees would make a respectable park, and show the world that the owner was unquestionably a member of the landowning elite’.59

This was clearly the case at Boyd’s new mansion. The open lawn proposed to the north of the house would have allowed clear views of Danson’s pedimented entrance front by any traveller on the London– Dover road.60 Moreover, in the eighteenth century, when the land surrounding the Danson estate consisted largely of enclosed fields rather than houses, it would have been difficult to tell how big the Danson estate actually was. For the natural style of landscaping was remarkably flexible. Boyd was never actually able to achieve the wide expanse of lawn to the front of the house, as he was unable to purchase all the land he needed. Nevertheless, by building the new sweeping drive through the thicket of trees, the grounds of the smallholder who had refused to sell to Boyd were concealed from ‘polite’ visitors to Danson.61

Clearly, therefore, unlike his sixteenth century Venetian counterparts, Boyd was not attempting to present himself as a sophisticated farmer. Indeed, even his extensive kitchen gardens and orchards were concealed from public view, at some distance from the house. Rather than investing in agricultural improvements, Boyd’s desire was for status and display.

But Boyd, too, was a planter and cultivator. Indeed, during the 1760s, as the landscaping at Danson took shape, John sold East India company stock and borrowed extensively to fund the acquisition of new agricultural holdings. But this new land was not next to Danson’s lawns, nor even in another part of Kent, but on the other side of the Atlantic on the Caribbean island of Grenada. The crops on Boyd’s farms were sugar cane rather than oats, barley or wheat. Danson was, indeed the capital messuage - primary holding - of a productive agricultural estate, but it was an estate comprised of farms located thousands of miles apart. Like an international merchant’s compting house, Danson, too, was the headquarters of a global enterprise.

59 60 61

Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes, op.cit., p.89. Bexley Local Studies, Maps E18. Lea and Milne, op.cit., p.18.

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By the early 1770s, therefore, Danson had been completely transformed. No longer was it an ‘ancient house’, with all the historical associations of ‘family honours’ which that implied. Evidently, John Boyd had not been content to use his wealth just to emulate the life of Defoe’s traditional landed ‘gentleman’. Boyd clearly wanted - and, importantly, had the means - to make another kind of statement, one that used contemporary eighteenth century design for its impact. Of course, Palladianism had strong historical associations. But, to an educated audience, these meanings also had associations with powerful empires and a prosperous international sea trade. While Danson was clearly the residence of a landed gentleman, its design also allowed John Boyd to proclaim his colonial merchant roots.

In the next chapter, I expand on these themes, examining an estate more than two hundred miles away from London to the north, Harewood House in Yorkshire, whose founding family’s sugar, slavery and trading links to the colonial Caribbean also date to the turn of the eighteenth century. I progress, in particular, to further examine interior design and consider how the extensive use of mahogany (a Caribbean wood), by way of one example, exhibited the source of the West Indians’ considerable fortune. Such features, indeed, are one of the most striking aspects of Danson and reveal how wealthy absentees inflected classical building styles towards their West Indian roots.

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Chapter Three Trade and Plumb Cake ‘Even this cake before me, which you so longed for, is the product of Husbandry and Trade. Farmer Wilson sowed the Corn, Giles Jenkins reaped it, Neighbour Jones at the mill ground it, the milk came from Farmer Curtis, the eggs from John Thomas the Higgler; that plumb came from Turkey and this from Spain, the Spices from the East Indies the sugar we had from Jamaica, the candied sweetmeats from Barbadoes. John Newbury, ‘The History of Mrs Williams Plumb Cake’ in The Twelfth Day Gift (1767)

Harewood House on a beautiful afternoon in late spring: bright sunlight streams through the windows, illuminating pastel-coloured plaster ceilings, white marble overmantles and painted and gilded furniture. Delicately carved, white shutters frame views of seemingly endless, emerald green parkland. It is a breathtaking vision, demonstrating the talents of two of the best-known 18th century British designers: architect Robert Adam and landscape gardener Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

3.1 Harewood House and Park

Unlike Danson, Harewood House is still lived in by descendants of the family who first built it. Nevertheless, the park and ground floor of the house are open to the public, as they were for ‘polite’ visitors at least, during the eighteenth century. From the stone-paved entrance 66

hall, you walk anti-clockwise through a ‘circuit’ of public rooms hung with silk damask, and filled with family portraits, fine oil paintings, antique sculptures and ceramics. One of the finest interiors, and certainly the least-changed over the last two centuries, is found in the music room. Here, you can see Robert Adam’s decorative talents at their best. The ceiling’s circular roundels, which flaunt Apollo’s muses in flimsy robes, are echoed in the design of the pink and olive carpet, while the pale green walls balance the dark golden tones of Antonio Zucchi’s paintings of classical ruins.

3.2 Decorated plaster ceiling in the music room at Harewood. Today, however, the 21st century visitor can also turn clockwise left from the grand entrance hall. Two hundred years ago these would have been private apartments not on public show; now, though, they have now been converted into a series of exhibition spaces. At the time of my visit, there was small display entitled ‘600 years of Royal Sugar Sculpture’ on loan from the Bowes Museum, near Durham. Based around an obscure, but fascinating, collection of carved wooden French eighteenth and nineteenth century confectioners’ moulds, the exhibition showed how finely ground white sugar was mixed with egg whites, or gum, to form a stiff paste out of which ornaments were crafted to grace the feast tables of 67

the rich. The creation of fabulous sugar triomphi, indeed, had been a European court tradition that stretched back centuries.1

However, the most poignant of the exhibits was not part of the Bowes collection. It was housed instead in the small ante-room off the entrance hall. There, on a side table, resplendent in saccharine glory, sat a large, white, iced cake - like a typical British christening or Christmas cake - decorated as a miniature replica of the Adam ceiling above. The link between the architecture and landscape of Harewood house and the culture of sugar in 18th century Britain could not have been better symbolised.

3.3 Eighteenth and early nineteenth century sugar moulds.

Of all the ‘Atlantic’ trading colonial nations of Western Europe - Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Holland and France - it was the British who seemed not only to have ‘sweet teeth’, but to have been able to afford to buy the imported luxury. Certainly, Britain became the 1

See Ivan Day, Royal Sugar Sculpture: 600 years of Splendour, Barnard Castle, 2002.

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sugar merchants’ best customer. In the mid-seventeenth century sugar had been so rare and expensive, that it was only used by the very wealthy; half a century later, however, almost a quarter of the population were regular consumers. Indeed, such was the extent of the demand that by the mid-eighteenth century, sugar was Britain’s most valuable import.2

Some was used as a sweetener for fashionable hot drinks such as chocolate, coffee and tea.3 But eighteenth century cookery books reveal that sugar was already being used, too, for preserving soft summer fruits as jam and as a convenient, if expensive, replacement for honey, or carrots in puddings and cakes.4 Indeed, the different types of sugar produced by the refining companies located close to British ports reveals the sheer extent of consumer demand. While strongly flavoured, dark muscavados were preferred for fruitcakes, light brown sugars - which came to be known as demeraras - were used for baking sweet buns or sponges. White, close-grained preserving sugar was best for jam, so that it did not discolour the fruit, while loaf sugar cut into small chunks was designed for table use. But of all the varieties, the finest was the powdery, mechanically crushed, confectioner’s sugar used to make the sparkling, white icing that ornamented celebratory fruit cakes.

The most renowned of these festive confections were Twelfth Day cakes, baked for the feast of the Epiphany on 6th January. 5 The forerunner of today’s Christmas cakes, they consisted of a mixture of Mediterranean dried fruit, such as raisins, sultanas (known then as ‘plumbs’) and citrus peel, dark brown sugar and spices, such as cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg. These expensive imported ingredients were combined with eggs and flour and, sometimes, French brandy and baked to form a rich fruit cake. This was then covered with a layer of ‘marchpane’ - a mix of ground almonds and sugar - and then finally adorned with decorated, white icing.

With their mixture of indigenous and exotic imported ingredients, the cakes were an edible allegory of eighteenth century Britain’s rapidly expanding, global economic reach. John Newbery, a London publisher and author of a popular children’s book of ‘moral tales’ The Twelfth Day Gift, (1767) set out how the cake’s contents provided a lesson in basic ‘oeconomy’. Indeed the fronticepiece showed a crowd of children carrying a splendid iced offering through the streets of the City, crying ‘Trade and Plumb cake for ever!’ 6

2

See James Walvin, Fruits of the Empire: Exotic Produce and British taste 1660-1800, Basingstoke, 1997 and Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, op.cit,, p.272. 3 James Walvin, op.cit., p.144. 4 Alan Davidson, Oxford Companion to Food, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 5 See Bridget Henisch, Cake and Characters: An English Christmas Tradition, London, 1984. 6 rd John Newbery, The Twelfth Day Gift, London, (3 edition), 1774.

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3.4 Frontispiece of the Twelfth Day Gift.

In December and January the cakes formed the centrepiece of majestic window displays in London’s best confectioners, such as Birch and Birch in Cornhill in the City or The Pineapple in fashionable Berkeley Square to the west. However, unlike home-made, cloth-boiled plum puddings which shared similar ingredients, the skilled decorative icing work meant that Twelfth Day cakes were made only by professionals. Like writer James Boswell, therefore, the majority of people who passed by these showcases would ‘partake only by sight’.7 While many of the ‘middling sort’ could save up to purchase the ingredients for a plum pudding, the glittering white iced cakes were destined for the rich - and, in particular, the families of wealthy London merchants, like the Boyds at Danson and the Lascelles - the patrons of Harewood House.

Unlike Danson, where few records of the building and construction process remain, a large number of Harewood’s eighteenth century building and estate accounts have been 7

Quoted in Bridget Henisch, op.cit., p.174.

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deposited in the West Yorkshire Record Office. Mary Mauchline, indeed, refers to many of the manuscripts in her detailed architectural monograph Harewood House.8 However, like many architectural histories of eighteenth century buildings, her book provides a comprehensive account of the design and construction process, but little examination of the political and economic circumstances in which the house was built. Indeed, despite the existence of many records of the Lascelles’ West India interests, Mauchline does not address the family’s connection with the Caribbean at all.

Of course, many would argue that this does not matter. In 2003, indeed, as museums around Britain were preparing exhibitions to mark the bi-centenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, one of the directors of Harewood House stated that ‘there is almost nothing of West Indian origin, nothing of any significance (to interpret)… there is no plan for a wholesale permanent exhibition on the history of the West Indies. It would make a nonsense of the house.’9

Quite the contrary is true, however. Not only are there, indeed, items of Caribbean origin within the house, but an examination of Harewood’s West Indian connections shows how one family spent its slave-derived fortune, and also provides evidence as to how wealth derived from Britain’s nascent empire began to reshape the buildings and, crucially, transform the landscapes of the British Isles. Before I start to examine the architecture and design of Harewood, therefore, I will first set out a summary of the Lascelles’ connections with the Caribbean.

Like Augustus Boyd, Henry Lascelles - the founder of the family’s fortune - had voyaged to the Caribbean as a young man in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Henry came from a prominent Yorkshire landed family; his grandfather, indeed, had been a ‘republican’ MP at the time of Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ - his plan for Britain’s expansion in the Spanish Americas. It is probable, therefore, that Henry was not the first member of his family to venture on a transatlantic crossing: official documents, indeed, show an Edward Lascelles working as Barbadan-based merchant as early as 1697.10 Barbados was Henry’s choice, too. And he seems to have flourished there, thanks to his close relationship with the Governor, Robert Lowther, a Westmoreland landowner who had also seen the Caribbean as a means to improve his family finances.11

8

Mary Mauchline: Harewood House, Newton Abbot, 1974. Terry Suthers quoted in Felicity Heywood, ‘Bittersweet legacy’, Museums Journal, October 2003, pp.28 -31. 10 Public Records Office: Calendar of State Papers Colonial (America and West Indies), 1697-8, 28th August, 1698. 11 J.V. Beckett, ‘Inheritance and Fortune in the eighteenth century: the rise of Sir James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale’ in Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian Society, 87 (1987) pp.171–8. 9

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In 1714, three years after his arrival in the colony, Henry Lascelles was appointed to the important post of Collector of Customs in Bridgetown12, where one of his first official duties was signing for 5,259 ‘negro slaves’.13 It was, certainly, a most advantageous position Henry had secured for himself. Soon after his return to Britain in 1735, not only had Lascelles purchased his own sugar estate in Barbados and set up in business in the City as a West India trader but he had also expended £62,000 on the purchase of 3,969 acres of land in the Yorkshire Dales near his family roots.14

Yorkshire had a prosperous wool trade and, by the mid-eighteenth century, a thriving ‘polite’ social scene based around the cathedral city of York.15 However, it appears that the life of a provincial landed gentleman held little attraction for Henry: he seems to have spent most of his time in London, rarely, if ever, venturing north. Rather than a means to display status, therefore, it seems that Harewood was initially a safe haven for the profits he had made during his Caribbean sojourn. For, although returns from eighteenth century British agriculture were not as high as those from investments in stocks and shares, British financial institutions of the time were wont to collapse alarmingly quickly.16 Grassy hillsides, however, were unlikely to disappear overnight. Moreover, growing wheat and raising sheep, though less profitable, was much safer than sugar planting. There was, naturally, far less likelihood of tenant farmers setting fire to the crops, of a French invasion or a hurricane in the Yorkshire Dales than the West Indies.

It was only when Henry’s elder son, Edwin, inherited the estate in 1753 that Harewood began its transformation, effectively, from an agricultural savings account to a spectacular example of English landscape art. And it was soon clear that, like John Boyd at Danson, Edwin had rather grander architectural ambitions: to demolish the fifteenth century manor house, Gawthorpe Hall, that he had inherited with the estate and procure, instead, a more ‘fashionable’ style of building.

In November, 1755, the young William Chambers - who had just completed five years studying architecture - received a letter from a former school friend: ‘I beg you will prepare a plan for a house of thirty thousand pounds for Mr Lascelles as he has had plans from Everybody in England…This will be a great stroke of luck if you succeed, I don’t hear of any undertakings of

12

PRO: Calendar of Treasury Books, 1714-5, Pt. II, Barbados Out Letters (Customs) XVI, p.102. PRO: Calendar of State Papers (Colonial), August 1714 - December 1715, p.327, item 654.vi, 24th April, 1714. 14 West Yorkshire Record Office. Harewood: Survey 14, 14A, 1738/9. 15 See Amanda Vickery, op.cit., pp. 226-229. 16 See Hay and Rogers, Swords and Shuttles: Eighteenth century English Society, op.cit., for the relative returns of investments in stocks and land. 13

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that consequence at present.’17 Unlike Robert Taylor, the architect of Danson, Chambers was not born into a family with close connections to the building trade. He was, instead, the son of a Yorkshire merchant based in the Swedish port of Gothenburg; prior to his architectural studies, indeed, Chambers had spent two years with the Swedish East India Company.18 As a boy, however, he had been sent to boarding school in Yorkshire, gaining a ‘polite’ English education that clearly influenced his aspirations. By his early twenties he had already voyaged as far afield as Bengal and the Chinese trading posts at Canton (Guangzhou), and in 1750 he embarked on his own Grand Tour of Europe. It proved to be a highly extended trip lasting almost five years.

Whereas in eighteenth century Britain, you could not study architecture as an academic discipline, in France - Britain’s closest continental neighbour and, of course, principal colonial rival - you could. L’Academie Royale d’Architecture in Paris where Chambers spent most of his studies had been established in the previous century by Louis XIV to provide a training ground for royal architects19 and the Academie had it own offshoot in the city itself, L’Academie Royale de Rome, where the best students were sent on state-sponsored study trips.

Chambers’ proposal for Lascelles’ new country house - made at least five or six years before Taylor’s design for Boyd - was, at first sight, an exemplar of eighteenth century French neoclassical planning. The central section contained the public rooms - a circular tribune or entrance hall, a salon, two drawing rooms and two oval-shaped stair halls. Dramatic curved colonnades on either side linked the centre to the two wings, each set around symmetric rectangular courts. On close examination, however, it is clear that the inexperienced designer had not fully refined his layout. For example, in the west wing, a bedroom suite separated the bow-fronted dining room from the kitchen by a distance of more than 90 feet and access to the external colonnade was only through the maid’s bedroom. As the plan stood, it would have been an utterly impractical country home. Indeed, after Lascelles consulted with a fellow London merchant’s son, Thomas Coke (or Lord Leicester) - the patron of the Palladian country house Holkham in Norfolk - Chambers’ design was dropped.20

17

John Hall Stevenson to William Chambers, 3rd November, 1755, quoted in John Harris, Sir William Chambers: Knight of the Polar Star, London, 1970, pp. 20 and 29. Chambers’ brother John reputedly acquired ‘a large fortune’ in the East Indies. See ‘Memoir of the Life of William Chambers in William Chambers: A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture, Joseph Gwilt (ed.), London, 1824. 19 To date, I have not discovered any detailed studies of the finance behind the fashioning of Paris as an imperial capital at the time, one of the raisons d’etre of L’Academie Royale. However, I have noted that the Bourbon monarch’s bankers, the Rigaud family, had close connections with St Domingue (Haiti), France’s most successful sugar colony. Indeed, an eighteenth century portrait of the banker Hyancinthe Rigaud in the National Gallery in London shows him pointing to a map of St Domingue. 20 Mauchline, op.cit., covers the discussions and design changes in some detail. 18

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Given Lascelles’ close social connections with Coke, it is also hardly surprising that when the external shell of Harewood was finished in the mid-1760s under the direction of Yorkshire mason Robert Carr, it looked similar to Holkham and other houses built a generation before.21 There were no complex oval or circular rooms or colonnades requiring tricky construction and setting-out, just huge but simply constructed rectangular spaces built around two courtyards all set behind an imposing façade. With its pedimented entrance portico, Venetian windows and classical urns, Harewood clearly was to be a British version of the country houses that Palladio had designed for the merchant landowners of the Veneto. Indeed as a printed guide pointed out, if visitors should miss the allusions, Harewood’s façade was adorned with more explicit symbols: emblematic medallions representing ‘Liberty, Britannia, Agriculture and Commerce’.22

3.5 Thomas Malton: North (entrance) façade of Harewood House, c.1790

Yet, while the exteriors of Harewood, like Danson, clearly emulated Palladio’s villas, both were very different inside. In Palladio’s treatise, indeed, there was little guidance about interior design. The internal decoration of Harewood - and Danson - reveal more about

21

The façade bears a striking resemblance to Colen Campbell’s designs for the unbuilt Wanstead House in Essex featured in Vitruvius Britannicus, or the British Architect, containing the plans, elevations, and sections of the regular buildings, both publick and private in Great Britain, with a variety of new designs, London, 1717-25. 22 John Jewell: The Tourist’s Companion and Guide to the Antiquities of Harewood, Leeds, 1819.

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eighteenth century British sensibilities and family histories than the historical influence of their Venetian predecessors.

Like many eighteenth century country houses, both Danson and Harewood took a long time to complete. At Harewood, indeed, the external shell alone took eight years from 1758 to 1766. Moreover, in mid-eighteenth century Britain, today’s common practice of a professional building contractor giving a fixed price for a completed design was not used. Instead, an architect or surveyor would organise individual tradesmen to do the various parts of the job and then ‘measure and value’ the completed work. This meant, of course, that clients had less certainty about the eventual cost, but far more flexibility and time to change their mind.

The Scots-born designer of Harewood’s interiors, Robert Adam had also presented an architectural scheme for the house following his return from his own extended continental tour in 1757.23 Like Chambers, though, he too failed to convince Edwin Lascelles of the merits of French neo-classical planning and in 1759 had moved on south to London.24 It was an auspicious time to arrive in the capital. A succession of naval and military victories against the French during the Seven Years War had contributed to a growing economic confidence - and a building boom.

One of Adam’s first commissions was the interior of Hatchlands Park in Surrey for Admiral Boscowan - a national hero following his capture of Louisberg in Florida, known as the ‘Gibraltar of the West Indies’ because of its strategic location for sugar shipping route. Adam also produced interiors for the London house of the Spencers, a landed family with interests in the Caribbean; for a Jamaican heiress at Home House, again in London; and designs for new country houses for two of the wealthiest and most powerful London based West India merchants Richard Oswald - one of Boyd’s fellow investors in Bance Island - and William Beckford (whose influence and legacy I explore further in Chapter Nine).25 Despite his growing success and Lascelles’ rejection of Adam’s initial scheme, as a member of eighteenth century Britain’s colonial elite, Harewood’s owner was clearly too influential a patron to ignore. In 1763 Adam was, finally, engaged to work on the new house.

The designs for the interiors of Harewood House are part of the large collection of Adam drawings housed in the Soane Museum in London. Significantly, the collection comprises drawings from the Adams’ office and, therefore, contains schemes that were rejected by 23

See Alistair Rowan, Bob the Roman: heroic antiquity & the architecture of Robert Adam, London, 2003 and also Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: his interiors, New Haven and London: Yale, 2001. 24 Adam had tried to persuade him to incorporate two circular colonnaded courtyards into the plans of Harewood. See Mauchline, op.cit, pp.101-108. 25 See Hancock, Citizens of the World, op.cit., pp.320-381.

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clients as well as those that were actually carried out. Indeed, they show the Adam brothers grappling with a decorative iconography appropriate to their clients’ different global interests. Boscowen’s decorated plaster ceilings at Hatchlands, for example, contained seahorses and tritons, while palm trees featured on the walls of Spencer House. Nautical motifs, similar to those designed for Boscowen, were initially proposed for Harewood. These were rejected, however, in favour of classical symbols. Nevertheless, a maritime trading theme ran through the interior design. One of the large wall paintings in the music room, for example, is of ancient Naples, one of the Roman Empire’s prominent sea ports, while another is of the view of St Mark’s place in Rome on a busy market day. Both images stress the importance of international trade to the ancient Roman economy, and, by inference, the emerging British Empire. Moreover, while the central roundels in the ceiling are images of classical muses, those in the corners represent Europe, Asia, Africa and America - a continent, of course, unknown to the ancient Romans.26

3.6 Decorative plaster ceiling in the picture gallery

26

John Jewell, op.cit., p.30.

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Moreover, while the decorative motifs and allegorical scenes derived from the myths of Greece and Rome, the colour schemes were not at classical at all.27 The strong red ochres and vivid blues found on classical remains were rejected in favour of pale greens and pinks. Rather than echoing the buildings of Ancient Rome, the glittering white and pastel designs were more akin to the sparkling icing on Twelfth Day Cakes. Indeed, while there is no suggestion that Harewood’s grand ceilings were consciously designed to emulate decorated fruitcakes, the resemblance between Adam’s interiors and icing was certainly recognised by contemporaries.28 Horace Walpole, for example, used confectioner’s terms when he complained that ‘Adam our favourite is all gingerbread, filligrane and fanwork’,29 while Adam’s designs at Kenwood, the Highgate home of the judge Lord Mansfield, earned it the nickname ‘sweet box’,30 with one writer remarking ‘It is quite Twelfth Day style covered all over in panels of fillagree.’31

The allusions to icing sugar are far from the only reference to West Indian wealth in Harewood’s interiors. The internal doors - like those at Danson - are made from Caribbean mahogany. As with most of the West Indies, the British sugar colonies had once been covered in tropical rainforests, which had to be cleared to create open land to grow cash crops. Undertaking this task with the hand tools owned by seventeenth and eighteenth century colonists was particularly arduous. One writer describes the difficulties of felling the ‘huge and massive trunks, (that) mock the slower growth and softer woods of Europe’. 32 And, in an evocative phrase, he portrays these tropical trees as ‘denominated by iron’, describing how the axe of the ‘baffled workman …recoiled from his stroke, as if it had met another tool or struck against the material which composed it’.33

Nevertheless, the forests also produced valuable exports for investors in the Caribbean sugar colonies. In 1768, for example, records show that 443,920 feet of mahogany were exported from Jamaica to Britain, together with large quantities of ebony and Lignum Vitae.34 Indeed, for West India merchants, these tropical hardwoods would have been a useful cargo in the holds of sugar-laden West Indiamen, as they could be safely stored below the

27

Eileen Harris, Robert Adam and his Interiors, op.cit. The ceiling decorations at Harewood are also different technically from seventeenth and early eighteenth century plaster ceilings. Rather than hand-moulded and sculpted plaster, they used repetitive, cast ornaments set in carved moulds, not unlike those used for sugar decorations. See Geoffrey Beard, Stucco and Decorative Plasterwork in Europe, London, 1982, p.32. 29 Horace Walpole quoted in Bridget Henisch, op.cit. p.112. 30 Ignatious Sancho, Letters quoted in Bridget Henisch, ibid. p.113. 31 Civil Engineering and Architectural Journal 1, 1838, p.337; also quoted in Henisch, ibid, p.161. 32 Clement Caines, Letters on the Cultivation of the Otaheite, Cane, London, 1801, p.252. 33 Ibid, p.252. 34 Figures from Bryan Edwards, The History, civil and commercial of the West Indies, Dublin, 1793. 28

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waterline without risk of damage; if salt water seeped into a sugar barrel, however, it would badly affect the quality.

Some of these tropical timbers were valued principally for their industrial uses: Lignum Vitae, for example, was used in the dying industry and in the manufacture of ship’s pulleys where its hardness, naturally, was of great advantage. However, the fine, even grain of the timbers – they were not subject to the seasonal growth cycles and uneven lignin deposits of northern hemisphere species – also made them ideal for decorative joinery. Like British oak, timber from the vast mahogany tree could be polished to an attractive deep shine, while the dense, black heartwood from the centre of an ebony trunk would find use in inlaid marquetry work. It is not, therefore, surprising that some of the earliest examples of British houses using tropical timbers are those where the owners had commercial connections with the Caribbean and could easily purchase consignments for their own use. To give a further example, in 1725 Thomas Goldney, a Bristol merchant whose commercial interests stretched from Shropshire to the West and East Indies, installed several elegant, mahogany-panelled rooms at his home Goldney House in Clifton.35

It is likely, therefore, that the mahogany for the internal doors at Harewood, as at Danson, would have been obtained via its owner’s trading connections, too. Although, by the mideighteenth century, the wood was often found in ‘polite’ interiors - the stair balustrades in the expensive new town houses in the squares west of the City of London are one example - in such speculative housing developments the timber was used conspicuously but sparingly. Although the rich deep russet of the balustrade certainly made a ‘statement’, the small sections of timber needed to craft the elegant, sinuous rail would have been much cheaper to acquire than the far larger amounts needed, for example, to panel a room.

Indeed, if you examine the mahogany bookcases lining the walls in Boyd’s study at Danson, you realise how the timber was used to display its owner’s wealth. The flush cupboard doors at the base of the shelving look at first sight like modern veneers - a temporary measure, perhaps, until the proper panelling is restored. Only when you open them, do you realise that the doors are, in fact, framed constructions from solid timber sections. But, unlike most eighteenth century panel construction, where the infill panels slotted into rebates within the frame, the solid mahogany panels, almost a centimetre thick, are here mounted on its exterior. This would have been impossible to achieve in oak without cracking or distortion.

35

P.K. Stembridge, Goldney: a house and a family, Bristol, 1991. See also Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured, op.cit., p.12.

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The doors were evidently designed to display the widest - and, thus, the most expensive planks of this exotic timber to advantage. The 74 ‘handsome and massy mahogany doors,’36 the mahogany dining chairs, and Thomas Chippendale’s elaborately inlaid mahogany marquetry side boards at Harewood would have been a similar statement of wealth. Indeed, as Amanda Vickery points out in her study of Lancashire and Yorkshire gentry, by the mid-eighteenth century the ownership of mahogany furniture was regarded as one of the hallmarks of gentility.37 The Gillow’s furniture so popular with the lawyers, clerics, merchants and landowners of the north west would also have been a reminder of the region’s prominent Caribbean trading links. The Lancasterbased joiners, indeed, had started as a boat-building firm in a town that owed its economic revival through transformation into a leading sugar and slave-trading port. Indeed, many of the fine mahogany tables, chairs and cabinets were sent to the colonies, providing useful, high value export cargoes for eighteenth century Lancaster’s West India merchants.38

Like much eighteenth century British furniture designed for the ‘polite’ market, Gillow’s designs frequently drew on classical architectural precedents. The mouldings and easily damaged dentil course of many a Georgian linen-press or chest of drawers, for example, can be traced directly to the intricately carved cornices on the temples of ancient Rome. Indeed, much of Chippendale’s furniture at Harewood, such as the painted chairs in the entrance hall, was designed to co-ordinate with Adam’s neo-classical interiors. The lavishly decorated, green lacquered cabinets that Chippendale made for Edwin Lascelles’ bedroom, though, have very different roots - as fine examples of British eighteenth century Chinese style furniture, or Chinoiserie.

As we have previously seen, there were also close links between the Caribbean’s colonial planters and merchants trading with the East India Company. And international merchants commissioned decorative schemes that reflected the global origins of their wealth, frequently mixing symbols derived from the East and the West.39 Artist Robert Robinson’s panels, painted in 1696 for a merchant’s parlour in London, for example, combine images of both the ‘East Indies’ and the ‘Americas’ to produce a collage of motifs.40 In one panel, an enslaved

36

John Jewell, op. cit., p.17. Amanda Vickery, op.cit., p.161. 38 See Melinda Elder: The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Eighteenth Century Lancaster, op.cit,. 39 West Indian absentee Henry Dawkins added Chinese-influenced decorations to the hallway in Standlynch house, Wiltshire, c.1765. See Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry, The Buildings of England, Wiltshire, London and New Haven, 2002, p.49 and James Ganz and David Mitchell in Mireille Galinou (ed.) City Merchants and the Arts 1670-1720, Wetherby: Oblong, 2004. 40 The house has been demolished, but the panels are displayed at Sir John Cass Foundation Primary School, Aldgate, London. 37

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African is depicted tending tobacco plants, while another portrays the mythical South American city of ‘El Dorado’ – a wild architectural extravaganza where pagoda-style roofs are combined with classical porticos. Tobacco merchant Edward Carleton, too, commissioned murals featuring oriental traders, black child-servants, palm trees and tobacco plants to decorate the parlour walls of Carshalton House in Surrey.

3.7 Detail of decorations in a London tobacco merchant’s house (1696)

Half a century later, it is clear that both Edwin Lascelles and John Boyd had no compunction about using an equally catholic, but meaningful, range of influences for the interior design of their own grand houses. Decorative friezes and cornices that derive from the temples of Rome, for example, border the ‘Chinoiserie’ wallpaper in Danson’s salon;41 and on the dining room walls, among the figures of Apollo, Venus, Bacchus and Ceres and the vines and pomegranates - classical symbols of fertility and abundance - were plants that would not have been known to the ancient Romans: wisteria, chrysanthemums, hydrangeas, dahlias and pineapples, plants from Britain’s new colonial trading routes.42

At Harewood, indeed, perhaps the most striking testament to the Lascelles’ Caribbean connections is a building that is no longer there: a vast heated greenhouse or ‘pinery’. It is

41

The design of the current wallpaper is not an exact copy of the original; but a very similar pattern to the staining on the original plaster. See Richard Lea: Danson: the ‘Blue Silk Damask,’ is this an accurate description of the saloon’s original wallcovering?, English Heritage Historical Analysis and Research Team, Reports No. 75, 2002. 42 Celia Fisher in Chris Miele and Richard Lea: The House and Park at Danson, ibid, pp.73-74.

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strange to imagine anyone – let alone commercially sophisticated families like the Lascelles – wishing to grow pineapples on British shores. It would seem, indeed, an eccentricity; yet Edwin’s considerable investment had a serious intent, underpinned by considerations, once again, of status and potential further development of family holdings in the Caribbean.

Like the turtle, the pineapple occupies an intimate place in the history of West Indian absentees. In eighteenth century Britain, indeed, a pineapple had quite quixotically become an icon of prosperity which - like the icing on a Twelfth Day Cake or mahogany furniture alluded so demonstrably to the wealth produced in Britain’s West Indian colonies.43 Unlike sugar, pineapples were actually native to the Caribbean: they feature, for example, on the one of the two seals of Jamaica granted by royal warrant in 1661 following Britain’s original capture of the island from the Spanish. Pineapples were a popular dessert among the sugar planters in the Caribbean,44 and as families became absentees, the spiky-leafed fruits - like turtles - became increasingly sought after by customers in Britain. However, unlike barrels of sugar - or even live turtles pineapples did not travel well in a sailing ship’s hold. While the plants themselves were remarkably tough, the chances were that the fruit - which, unlike a banana, does not ripen after picking - would either be still hard, or else fermented and rotten, after a seven week journey from the West Indies. A recipe in The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director (1732) for a ‘Pineapple Tart’ with fruit ‘from Barbadoes’ that involved stewing the flesh in sugar and Madeira wine before pureeing and baking was, clearly, designed to transform unripe produce into an exotic, edible pudding.45

The difficulties of importing pineapples led to experiments in raising the tropical fruit in Britain; indeed, one of the first to do so successfully was Matthew Decker – a Dutch-born City merchant. By the mid-eighteenth century, a pinery was a fashionable accessory among wealthy landowners. However, growing the fruit in a northern climate was not cheap. The construction of a pineapple stove needed copious amounts of glass – an expensive, highly taxed building material - and to be stocked with plants shipped from the West Indies. Added to this was not only the expense of fuel, but also the constant supervision needed to maintain the hot and humid growing conditions over the three years that the plant took to grow to maturity.

43

See Fran Beauman: The Pineapple: King of Fruits, 2005, pp.112-115. Janet Shaw, Journal, op.cit. 9th August ,1774. 45 Richard Bradely: The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director, in the management of a house and the delights and profits of a farm, London, 1732, Part II, p.94 (this was followed by another West Indian derived recipe – instructions for dressing the giblets of a sea turtle). 44

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Indeed, that the cost of raising a single pineapple in mid-eighteenth century Britain has been estimated to be nearly £60 - twice a soldier’s annual wage or the price, then, of a new coach.46 Presenting a pineapple at a dinner - or as the London-based West India merchant and Ayrshire estate owner, Richard Oswald sometimes did as a gift 47 - would, therefore, have been an extraordinary status symbol for an absentee family. Certainly, the pinehouse at Harewood was a majestic affair: according to the author of an early nineteenth century guide to the house and grounds, ‘at a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide and fifteen feet high’48 it was for many years the largest heated greenhouse in the country. Pineapples had been cut in this house of nearly twelve pounds in weight, he enthused, ‘and in this hot-house are two very fine granadillas, which seem perfectly at home, and enjoy as much health and vigour as if they were in the island of Jamaica’. 49

3.8 The Pinery at Dunmore Park, Stirling (1763)

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a heated greenhouse was, however, not simply a means of producing ‘exotic’ fruits or blooms to adorn a dining room. Nor was

46

In 1764, a greenhouse 80 by 12 feet cost £80 to build in the London area; Lascelles’ great pine stove in Yorkshire at 100 by 30 feet would have cost probably double that sum. See also Fran Beauman, op.cit., p.84. 47 See Hancock, ibid, p.379-80 and also Seymour, Daniels and Watkins, ‘Estate and Empire,’ op.cit., p.343. 48 John Jewell, op.cit., p. 20. 49 Ibid.

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tropical botany just a genteel hobby for a gentleman of leisure: Lascelles’ ‘stove-houses’ were also, like Oswald’s, nurseries for new varieties of sugar cane. A heated greenhouse was an experimental station for tropical plant breeding – plants essential to the profitable development of British colonies.

The spectacular eighteen metre high, stone pineapple folly which adorned the former hothouses at Dunmore Park, near Edinburgh, for example, was a statement of where Murray, the new Lord Dunmore, saw money to be made: in the slave plantations of the southern colonies of America and in the Caribbean. Not long after the folly’s completion in 1763, indeed, he became Governor of Virginia and, following the American War of Independence, Dunmore was appointed Governor of the Bahamas, where he established new pineapple plantations to supply customers on the American mainland. 50

Harewood’s vast, but high maintenance, pineries have long since been demolished. However, the ‘Capability’ Brown-designed parkland, which is now such a signature of the ‘English style’ of landscaping, still remains, albeit altered from the original design. As we have seen already at Danson, the proceeds of sugar and slavery funded the construction of a huge landscape garden; at Harewood, however, the scale was even larger.

Like Boyd’s villa at Danson, Lascelles’ new mansion was built not on the site of the original manor house, but near the top of an escarpment overlooking the newly constructed lake. It was one of most prominent spots in the whole estate and Brown’s landscaping provided it with a dramatic backdrop. Today, the main entrance to Harewood Park is through a triumphal arch aligned with the rebuilt Harewood village. Most contemporary visitors, therefore, miss Brown’s original, sweeping approach to the house. However, part of the former drive is a now a publicly accessible footpath so it is possible to recreate the experience of eighteenth century visitors. Indeed, even walking along the track, rather than riding in a coach and horses, is an exhilarating experience. It is rural landscape as pure theatre. There are no tractor sheds, intensive poultry farms, grain silos, nor even ploughed fields in view. All you can see are glimpses of Harewood House and the serpentine lake through the belts of tree plantations and acres of parkland dotted with sheep.

The pragmatic investments made by Henry Lascelles were here transformed by the designs of Brown into glamorous landscape art. Indeed, it is striking how well the ‘natural style’ 50

See Public Record Office, Kew (CO 23, Original Correspondence relating to the Bahamas 24, 271) and also Anon, The Pineapple Industry of the Bahamas: A booklet of the archives exhibition held at the Art Gallery, Jumbey Village, Bahamas Public Record Office, 1977, as well as Fran Beauman, op.cit., and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

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adapted to two very different British land holdings. Lascelles owned tens of thousands of acres in the uplands of West Yorkshire whereas at Danson Boyd’s Kentish estate was far smaller and in a more densely populated part of England. The luxurious feeling of calm and space given by the huge undulating lawns, however, is common to both.

3.9 South elevation of Harewood today

In Polite Landscapes, Tom Williamson argues that the aesthetic origin of the eighteenth century British landscape park derives from mediaeval deer parks. These parks - set at some distance from the main house - were surrounded by high fences called pales and kept as reserves for the production of venison and timber. Parkland landscapes, like those at Harewood and Danson, though sharing a similar aesthetic of open grassland and belts of trees, were, however, very different. Although eighteenth century parks were indeed used for timber, grazing or raising game birds, fundamentally they were designed to be ornamental. Indeed, Williamson argues that from the 1760s to the end of the century, ‘the possession of land – and the candid, wasteful display of that possession – became an increasingly important marker of status.’ 51

Historically, British landowners had derived their income from agricultural rents and sale of estate produce. A landed family’s wealth, therefore, had a direct correlation with the amount of land they owned and farmed. The transformation of tens, if not hundreds, of acres of potential pasture and arable land into lawns or low intensity grazing was, therefore, a physical demonstration that a landowner did not have to maximise his agricultural profits. In 51

Tom Williamson, op.cit., p.24.

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Williamson’s view, this was an expression of the challenges laid down by those who had made their fortunes in ‘administration, trade and the law’ to the landed wealth of ‘traditional feudal families’.52 However, by the late eighteenth century, the acres of rolling grass would have given a further message: that the family owned - or aspired to own - land and wealth elsewhere. For, while the possession of British land brought security and social status, investing in colonial property realised far higher returns.

In the 1750s, for example, as he was embarking on his building and landscape projects at Harewood, Edwin Lascelles’ vast Yorkshire estate was bringing him an income of just over two thousand pounds per annum.53 Although considerable, and putting Lascelles among England’s 500 wealthiest land owners54, this was dwarfed by the income from a Caribbean sugar estate. Unfortunately, although the Harewood archives show that in the latter half of the eighteenth century Lascelles was buying more estates in Barbados and Jamaica, the accounts are from only 1805 onwards.55 And while they show that, in the years before the abolition of slavery in 1736, the Lascelles’ Caribbean holdings were making profits that varied between £ 9,150.per annum (1805) to £19,459 (1818),56 it is difficult to make a comparison with the income from the Harewood estate half a century before.

In the case of Danson, however, a more direct comparison is available. A candid letter that John Boyd’s son wrote to a friend in 1780, when the Danson estate had been increased in size to around 500 acres, sets out in detail the state of family finances. ‘I will begin with acquainting you exactly what F’s fortune consists of; First his place in the country, which you have been at; the estate round it is but trifling, about £500 per an…. His estate in St Kitts, very modestly stated at £8000 per an; clear of all charges & deductions, & with no other incumbrance than a jointure of £800 to G.M.’57 John Boyd junior was, of course, writing a generation later than Edwin Lascelles, at a time of high wartime sugar prices. Nevertheless, it appears that in investment terms, the purchase of a Caribbean estate promised a far greater return than from British land. Indeed, in 1763, when building work at Danson temporarily ceased, Boyd borrowed heavily to purchase a second estate in the former French Caribbean island of Grenada. By 1780, his son noted that although Boyd still owed £20,000, this new estate was producing ‘between £3,000 and

52

Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes, op.cit., p 24. The ‘moot rent’ from the 3,969 Yorkshire acres in 1739 was £2,172 per annum excluding taxes. See W.Y.R.O. HAR/Survey 14 A, 1738/9. 54 During this period most English landed gentry earned between £400 and £1,000 per year. See Hay and Massey, op.cit, pp.19 -21. 55 th See W.Y.R.O. HAR/Ac.c 2677/10, 29 June, 1786, ‘Bargain and Sale of Premises in Barbados’, William Daling to Edwin Lascelles and also HAR/Acc/ Box 7/119 ‘West Indies Accounts’. 56 W.Y.R.O, HAR WI/Bundle 1, Accounts and Miscellaneous Papers, 1790-1748. 57 th, British Library, Hardwick Manuscripts, Folio 35,517, February 8 1780, John Boyd (Junior). 53

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£4,000 per an & easily improvable to one half above its present value’.58 As John junior reflected: ‘The expense of a West India Estate is certainly great, but when it is once completely stock’d with slaves, cattle & buildings which is the case with F’s, the Rum sold in the Island is enough to defray the charges of keeping it so.’59

Indeed, it was not only West Indian absentees, like the Lascelles and Boyds at the turn of the eighteenth century, who were lured by the high returns and who ploughed their profits back into British landscape parks. The capture of the French sugar colony of Grenada during the Seven Years War (1756-63) was the catalyst for a new generation of British investors to become owners of slave plantations. George Amyand, for example, City merchant, banker and director of the East India Company, owner of Carshalton in Surrey and of modest Berkshire landholdings, purchased the 254 acre ‘La Taste’ estate in Grenada. A few years later in 1771, his eldest son George married Catherine Cornewall, heiress of a county family, forging a link between the Herefordshire estate of ‘Moccas’ - 3,875 acres complete with medieval deer park - and the colonial sugar plantation he inherited from his father.

Although he took a detailed interest in the management of La Taste, George Cornewall (he had taken his wife’s family name) never visited Grenada; indeed, the estate was let out to neighbouring planters until 1795. Cornewall’s focus was on enlarging and introducing agricultural improvements to the Moccas estate. In 1778, he too commissioned Lancelot Brown to design a sweeping grass ‘prospect,’ linking the old deer park to the proposed new house. Indeed, though the scheme was adapted to minimise the loss of arable fields and meadows,60 at the time it was proposed the loss of agricultural income would not have been too great a blow to the family’s finances; during the 1770s La Taste, namely, was providing nearly as much income as the entire Moccas estate. 61 Moreover, although Cornewall’s substantial land purchases and improvements were, over the next 40 years, to increase the income from Moccas to more than £8,000 per year, until the 1790s La Taste brought in rents over five times an acre more than the Herefordshire estate.62

Of course, not all of the more than 4,000 new landscape parks designed and created in Britain in the latter half of the century were funded from the profits of sugar estates, nor indeed from Virginian tobacco plantations. But by the mid-1760s, after Britain’s victory in the Seven Years War,Brown’s landscape business and those of his protégés and associates

58

British Library Hardwick Manuscripts, f. 35,517. British Library Hardwick Manuscripts, f. 35,517. 60 Seymour, Daniels and Watkins: ‘Estate and Empire’, op.cit., p. 323. 61 Seymour, Daniels and Watkins, ibid, p.132 and p.331. 62 Seymour, Daniels and Watkins, ibid, p.323. 59

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had become immensely successful.63 It is no coincidence, indeed, that this fashion for creating a ‘candid wasteful display‘ of British land should have coincided with an expansion of British territories in the Caribbean and the American colonies

As we have seen, the ‘natural style’ of landscaping appealed to eighteenth century clients for a variety of reasons. Aesthetically, the sinuous curves of the lawns, plantations and ‘sheets’ of water provided an elegant backdrop to showcase new classical architecture. Moreover, it was a style that adapted well to varying terrains. In addition, the techniques used to compose the landscapes meant that it was difficult to tell whether an owner possessed 200 acres or 20,000.

The fashion for such ostentatious use of precious land, however, was not universally popular. One of the earliest and most influential critics of the elite’s craving for parkland landscapes was Oliver Goldsmith. Indeed his poem The Deserted Village (1770) took a sombre view of the effects that the creation of new landscape parks, like those at Harewood and Danson, were having on Britain’s rural economy. The man of wealth and pride Takes up a space that many poor supplied; Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds Space for his horses, equipage and hounds.64 Goldsmith’s lines above have been quoted in histories of British landscape as a critique of agricultural enclosures.65 However, it is clear this was just a minor aspect of his concern. ‘Around the world each needful product flies. For all the luxuries the world supplies,’ he notes and then links the consumption of these imported ’luxuries’ - such as sugar - directly to the changes wrought on the British landscape. It is ‘trade’s unfeeling train’, Goldsmith concludes (that) ‘usurps the land and dispossess the swain; as ’small scale farmers leave the land and villagers emigrate ‘to distant climes Beyond the Western main.’ 66 ‘Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose...’ he complains; ‘Ye friends to truth, ye statemen who survey, the rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay.’ 67

63

See Dorothy Stroud: Capability Brown and Garden History, Vol. 29, No. 1, summer 2001, ibid. Two of Brown’s th earliest patrons were the 6 Earl of Coventry at Croome Court on marshy land between the Avon and Severn, and Francis Lord Brooke, later the Earl of Warwick, who were both heirs to substantial Caribbean investments made by their forefathers in the previous century. See Robin Blackburn, The Rise of Colonial Slavery, op.cit. 64 Oliver Goldsmith: The Deserted Village (Facsimile edition, ed. Desmond Egan), The Curragh, Ireland, 1978. 65 See Tom Williamson, op.cit., p.24 for a critical overview of this debate. 66 Goldsmith, op.cit., p.24. 67 Goldsmith, ibid..

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Goldsmith’s poem captured the imagination of the literate British public: it ran to five editions in the four months after it was published. Indeed, his criticisms were echoed by other writers: for instance, Henry Mackenzie in The Man of Feeling (1773) and in John Langhorne’s The Country Justice, published the following year.68 Indeed, so close seems to have been the connection between fortunes made in the colonies and the swathes of new parkland, that one critic argued it was impossible to contemplate ‘natural’ landscapes, without ‘guilty thoughts’ of the plunder of ‘Hindoos’ or the slavery of ‘Negroes’.69 Jane Austen uses the same associations in Mansfield Park (completed in 1800, but published in 1817) when sugar planter Sir Thomas Bertram engages a landscape gardener to improve his English estate.

In eighteenth century Britain, therefore, the Palladian grandeur and rolling lawns of Danson and Harewood clearly gave out mixed messages. While to some ‘polite’ visitors, they would, undoubtedly, have been the epitome of ‘good taste’, for others they were monuments to illgotten colonial fortunes and symbols of rural dispossession.

3.10 Joshua Reynolds: Edwin Lascelles

Joshua Reynold’s portrait of Edwin Lascelles (c 1762), which hangs today in the Cinnamon Drawing Room at Harewood House, naturally represents the first of these views.

68 69

Nigel Everett: The Tory View of Landscape, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. pp.70–82. John Scott: Critical Essays 1785, quoted in Everett, ibid. p.75.

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Lascelles, dressed in an embroidered russet suit, lace-cuffed shirt and silken hose, poses imperiously at the top of his new drive. In the background stands his palatial new house and the rolling lawns and serpentine lake of his landscape garden, while immediately behind him grows the gnarled trunk of an ancient English oak. The juxtaposition reminds that, while the Palladian house and rolling grass symbolised the Lascelles’ new wealth from their colonial trading exploits, the family also had old, deep roots in rural Yorkshire. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, the oak tree would have been recognised as a symbol of English ‘liberties’ - somewhat ironic, given the family’s slave owning interests.

In Chapter Five, we move from country estates, such as Harewood, which were funded by the proceeds of sugar and slavery, to a whole city – the most fashionable destination for ‘polite’ society in Georgian times, the elegant city of Bath. Firstly, however, having touched in this chapter on West Indian influences on interior design, furnishings and furniture, and ending the tour with Reynolds’ proud portrait of Lascelles, in the next chapter we will take a detour to examine West Indian influence on art, its patronage and depiction of architecture and landscape in Britain at the time.

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Chapter Four Painted Memorandums Around the globe each needful product flies For all the luxuries the world supplies While thus the land adorned for pleasure all In barren splendour feebly waits the fall. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, 1766

4.1 Johann Zoffany: Sir William Young of Dominica and his family

In the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool hangs a small oil portrait titled Sir William Young of Dominica and his family. Painted by Johann Zoffany between 1767 and 1770, it shows absentee planter William Young, his wife, children, footman and pets posed under the spreading boughs of a vast oak tree. The focus of the composition is a portly, suntanned Sir William playing the cello. Next to him is his wife Elizabeth who, helped by the toddler at her knee, accompanies him on the ‘orboe’. Behind them are his daughters by his first marriage Sarah, Portia and Olivia, holding bunches of flowers.1

1

I have based my identification of the members of the Young family on Mary Webster, Johann Zoffany: Catalogue of National Portrait Gallery Exhibition, London, 1976.

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To the right, his eldest son William sits with his sister Mary, holding a sheaf of papers, on the steps of a garden pavilion. On the left are his three younger sons. A young, black footman lifts the smallest on to a black horse, while a pet dog snaps playfully his heels. Immediately behind the group, parkland stretches into the distance. It is tempting to see the picture as a ‘snap-shot in oil-paint’ of a ‘genteel’ landed family at home on a pleasant English summer’s day. However, the painting reveals far more than a photograph ever could.

During the eighteenth century, creating a visual record of one’s family was, naturally, only possible for the artistically talented or the rich. Indeed, a picture like the Youngs’ was a particularly expensive form of portrait, as their artist Zoffany based his charges on the number of figures painted. A receipt dated 16th January, 1767 for another group portrait states: ‘Receiv’d eighty-nine pounds which with one hundred pounds formerly Receiv’d makes in all One hundred and eighty guineys, being in full for a family picture of nine figures at twenty guineys each’.2 Assuming a similar pricing structure, the Youngs’ picture, therefore, would have cost at least 240 guineas, a sum more than the annual income of a successful eighteenth century lawyer.3 Clearly, even for a wealthy family, the commission of this painting would have been a particularly important purchase.

Indeed, as Marcia Pointon shows in Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth Century England, this type of group portrait, known in the eighteenth century as a ‘family piece,’ had a pragmatic purpose. Pointon argues that a family piece offered, as no other historical document did, the possibility of ‘publicly enumerating material possessions to the point of fetishisation’.4 It not only combined the functions of individual portraits, but also visually linked the family directly to the house and land that they owned. The composition follows a familiar eighteenth century pattern: parents, children and pets to the fore with a rural landscape – often a representation of the patron’s estate - to the rear. ‘Indeed the male heir is always clearly picked out allowing the paintings to be interpreted as a kind of ‘living will’…an imaged set of domestic commands for future generations’. 5

However, as the title of the Youngs’ painting suggests, Sir William was not just the owner of a British landed estate, but also the proprietor of two West Indian sugar plantations. Moreover, he also played a crucial role in implementing British colonial policies in the Caribbean following the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. Sir William Young of

2

Sacherverell Sitwell, Conversation Pieces: A survey of English Domestic Portraits and their painters, 1969, p. 94. ‘Joseph Massie Survey of Family Income’ (1759), quoted in Hay and Rogers, Shuttles and Swords, op..cit., p.19. 4 Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head:Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth Century England, London and New Haven: Yale, 1993, p.162. 5 Ibid, p.167. 3

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Domenica is not only a domestic blueprint for a British landed family: it also provides documentation of the relationship between colonial wealth, imperial power and British land.

Nor were William Young, and Edwin Lascelles, the only absentee planters to commission paintings of British estates. In this chapter, I first look in detail at the Youngs’ family piece and compare it with two others commissioned by absentee West Indians around the same date: George Barratt’s view of the Boyds at Danson and Henry Dawkins and his family by Richard Brompton, which now hangs in Penrhyn Castle in north Wales.

4.2 George Barrett: The Boyd Family at Danson

I then examine two further paintings by the Youngs’ artist Zoffany for families with strong colonial links: a portrait of Mary Ramsey, or Mrs Oswald, a Jamaican absentee and wife of London-based West India merchant Richard Oswald and a family piece featuring the Scottish nobleman, the third Duke of Atholl. While the focus of my investigation here has been the pictures themselves, I have also, in the case of the Youngs, been able to access other records to help my interpretation. Sir William’s role as a colonial Governor of the Caribbean island of Dominica and his son’s later position as Governor of Tobago means that much of their correspondence - both public and of a personal nature - has been retained in public archives. I have also made use of manuscript notes or Interesting Memorandums, 92

written by William’s youngest daughter Mary, which give an unusual female perspective on the transatlantic domestic arrangements of an absentee family.6

Returning to the three paintings commissioned by absentee families, at first glance it seems that Zoffany and Richard Brompton were far more accomplished at this type of portrait than George Barrett. The latter’s composition, which attempts to encompass Danson house, the lawns and family at a mid-distance viewpoint, does not work well. The perspective is awkward and the group of figures featuring Boyd, his wife and children is small and contrived. While Barrett’s painting does indeed record property and lineage together in a single image, it is not particularly successful as a piece of art. In contrast, the focus of both Zoffany’s and Brompton’s paintings is people, not property. Though the extraordinary size of Brompton’s painting is at first disconcerting (a scale normally associated with biblical or historical epics than family portraits) the informal composition of husband, wife, children and pets is as engaging as the Youngs’ family piece.

4.3 Richard Brompton: Henry Dawkins and his Family (1773)

6

National Library of Wales, Ottley Family Papers, Interesting Memorandums (Unfinished), 1770-1801.

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Like John Boyd and Edwin Lascelles, both Henry Dawkins and William Young were born and had spent a substantial part of their childhood in the West Indies. Young was the son of an Antiguan plantation heiress and a Scots-trained doctor who had emigrated in the first decades of the eighteenth century,7 while the long-established Dawkins family owned several sugar estates in Jamaica.8 All, therefore, were first generation absentees, who owed their riches to wealth created in the colonies by their pioneering ancestors and ‘their’ enslaved workers. However, it is clear that like Boyd and Lascelles, Young and Dawkins were anxious that they, their wives and children be perceived, too, not as Caribbean colonials, but as the families of English gentlemen. Both Zoffany’s and Brompton’s paintings place the families ‘at home’ in England. The spire of Salisbury Cathedral is clearly visible behind the Dawkins family - while the Scots-Antiguan Youngs are, like Lascelles at Harewood, portrayed under an English oak tree.9

Just as the image of Danson’s Palladian architecture and its rolling lawn proclaims John Boyd’s status as a ‘man of taste’, Zoffany’s and Brompton’s do likewise. Behind the Dawkins family is the unusual Greek Doric portico which they had added to their Wiltshire country house Standlynch,10 while the Youngs’ painting features an elegant classical garden temple and acres of parkland stretching into the distance. However, there was more to the fortunes of the landed Young family than immediately meets the eye. While the Dawkins’ Jamaican estates and Boyd’s various planting and trading enterprises were, at the time their paintings were commissioned, providing them with substantial incomes, the Youngs were on a more precarious financial footing.

William Young had been born in Antigua in 1725 to a plantation owner’s daughter and a Scottish doctor. As Tom Devine shows in Scotland’s Empire (2003), despite the disastrous failure of the Darien Venture, the Scots’ own attempt to establish a colony on Panama in the late seventeenth century, many young Scottish men saw a sojourn in the Caribbean or the southern colonies of America as a way to augment family incomes and establish an independent fortune.11 Early eighteenth century Scotland was, compared to England, poor: the decline in the Baltic trade, combined with lack of quality agricultural land and the remnants of a feudal tradition that was not abolished until 1745, contributed to the desire of Scots, like Young’s father, to emigrate. 7

For the background to the Young family, I have used Namier & Brooke, History of the House of Commons 1754th 1790 and Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, Vol. 2 (106 edition), 1999. For a wider perspective see also Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2008. 8 For Dawkins’ background see Derrick Knight, Gentlemen of Fortune, op.cit, p.95. 9 See Seymour et al. ‘Estate and Empire’, op.cit., pp.326-9, for a discussion of the symbolic significance of oak trees and colonial development. 10 The house was built in 1733 for Dutch merchant Sir Peter Vandeput. Dawkins added the wings and the portico designed by Bath-based architect and builder John Wood. See Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry: The Buildings of England, Wiltshire, London and New Haven: Yale, 2002, pp.529 -31. 11 The death of most of the Scots settlers (the few survivors fled to the English colony of Jamaica) had profound financial and political repercussions. Indeed, the tragedy contributed to Scotland’s union with England in 1707.

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The reputation, too, of medical training in Scottish universities meant that one of the best opportunities for young men in the Caribbean was an appointment as a plantation doctor to look after both slaves and the planter’s family. Indeed, in 1731 there were 22 doctors recorded working in Antigua, half of whom were from Scottish backgrounds.12

It seems that William’s parents remained in the Caribbean - Mary’s Memorandums mention her grandmother still living in Antigua in the 1770s - and that William was sent to England for his education. However, documents show that when he ‘came of age’ in 1746, five years after his father’s death, and inherited two plantations on the island, he had no intention of returning to his family in Antigua. In 1748, aged just 23, he signed the first of a series of deals and mortgaged both plantations, Body Pond and Road Estate, for just over three and a half thousand pounds.13 Over the next 12 years, following his marriage and the birth of his first daughter, he re-mortgaged twice again; by 1760, and his second marriage, he had raised a total of 7,000 pounds against his Caribbean estates.14 Clearly, even the profits of sugar planting were not sufficient to fund the ‘genteel’ way of life to which Young and his rapidly expanding family aspired.

Indeed, as Young’s tanned complexion hints, prior to his portrait being painted, he had been spending time in the West Indies trying to augment his family’s income. In 1764, Young had managed to obtain a government post as a Commissioner of Land Sales, created following the expansion of British Caribbean territories during the Seven Years War.15 The new colonies - known initially as the Ceded Isles and later renamed the Windwards - comprised the former French colonies of Grenada and the Grenadines and three ‘neutral ‘islands, Dominica, St Vincent and Tobago which had not previously been officially colonised by the European powers.

Though tiny in terms of landmass, the British capture of the Windwards during the Seven Years War was considered a worthy prize.16 They were trophies, however, won at great cost to the public purse. On his appointment in 1764 as Commissioner, Young’s first responsibility was to ensure that that the new Crown lands were divided up equitably and sold off at maximum profit. But, while there was no shortage of purchasers for coffee and

12

See Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1750-1820, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, pp.112 -134 for more detail. of Scottish doctors in the West Indies. 13 Rhodes House Young Manuscripts, MS W. Ind. t.1, Vol 1, Fol.4. 14 Rhodes House, Young Manuscripts, ibid. 15 William Young’s background would have provided useful personal contacts. Not only was General Robert Melville, the Governor of Britain’s newly-acquired Caribbean territories a Scot, he had spent most of the war in charge of a Scottish regiment stationed on the island of Antigua. 16 Indeed, such was their value that the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, also taken by the British in 1761, were exchanged for the French territory that now forms a substantial part of Canada.

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sugar plantations in the former French colony of Grenada, finding investors to buy land in Dominica, St Vincent and Tobago was more difficult. Not only was the terrain mountainous, it was still largely covered in thick tropical rainforest which had to be cleared before any cash crops could be planted. After an initial enthusiasm for ‘sacrificing a few more years in this climate’ in order to leave behind ‘a little fortune’, the St Kitt’s-based plantation manager and poet James Grainger, for example, reflected the opinions of many – existing colonists and British-based investors and speculators alike – when he changed his mind arguing ‘that the first adventurers there will, all be ruined’.17 Faced with a potential public relations disaster for the British government, Young’s commission hastily drew up a series of measures including interest- free, state-backed loans and a prominent publicity drive focused on Scotland, his father’s birthplace, to encourage new investors.18

In 1764, the first of a series of articles was published in the magazine The Scotsman which promoted the Windward Islands as an investment opportunity.19 It drew particular attention to the rich soil and growing conditions compared to the intensively cultivated, drier islands in the Leewards and Barbadoes. Young’s campaign achieved substantial success: in Dominica, more than half the land was bought by Scots, a pattern repeated in the other islands. Young, indeed, was an active investor in the Windwards himself.

In 1766, he purchased four lots in Queens Bay, Tobago together with a man named James Stewart, Young providing the finance and Stewart to ‘superintend’. 20 A year later, he sold one of his Antiguan estates and in 1768 purchased 76 acres of land in the parish of St Andrews in St Vincent, not far from an estate purchased by John Trevanion, John Boyd’s son-in-law.21 It is not categorically certain whether Young’s position as Commissioner had allowed him to profit personally from land speculation, or to use new lands as collateral; however, in 1767, just three years after his appointment, he had returned to England with sufficient means to purchase the Delaford estate, near Iver in Buckinghamshire.

Mary’s reference to entertaining tenants at annual Christmas dinners suggests that the estate also included agricultural land, but it is clear that Young’s purchase of Delaford was as much a means of social advancement as a financial investment. Indeed, one of Young’s first activities was to begin a programme to divert the ancient common tracks and ways that 17

James Grainger to Thomas Percy, February 29, 1766, quoted in Gilmore, op.cit, p.20. See Douglas Hamilton, ibid, pp.93-95 and PRO: CO 106/9(246-253): Account Sales of plantation allotments in the islands of Tobago, Dominica and St Vincent, March to May 1767. 19 W Young: ‘Considerations which may tend to promote the Settlement of our new West-India Colonies, by Encouraging individuals to embark in the undertaking’, The Scotsman, 26 May, 1764, p.283; 27 April,1765 p.216; and 28 August 1766, p.443. 20 Rhodes House Young Manuscripts, MS W. Ind. t.1, Vol 4, ff.28-35. 21 Report of Committees of Legislature appointed by both Houses in Nov 1796 (compensation claimants after the French invasion and slave insurrection), Rhodes House Young Manuscripts, MS W., Ind. t.1,Vol. 5. 18

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lay near his newly purchased house in order to create the parkland that features so prominently in his family portrait.

But, of course, a family piece was not necessarily a true representation of reality. Though a painting was an expensive luxury, it was, of course, cheaper and quicker to create than a landscape park or a Palladian mansion.22 And it was not until November, 1770, the year the painting was finished, and just before his return to the Caribbean as Governor of Dominica, that Young was able to obtain the consents to close the eight tracks across the land close to his house.23 It was highly unlikely, therefore, that any parkland landscaping at Delaford would have been started, let alone completed, at the time Zoffany painted the picture.24 Rather than a topographical description of Young’s new estate, the parkland and pavilion, where his heir William stands set apart from the other sons, are visions of the landed dynasty that Young wished to create. Clearly a family piece could provide an ‘imaged set of commands’ not only for future generations’, but for those already living.

Intriguingly, however, the family is portrayed not in contemporary dress but in seventeenth century style ruffs and collars known as ‘Van–Dyke’ or ‘Masquerade’ costumes, which in the eighteenth century were often worn on the stage. As Mary’s Memorandums reveal, indeed, the Youngs were keen theatre-goers and friends of playwright and impresario David Garrick, borrowing costumes for their own amateur performances at home. 25 The choice of theatrical imagery, therefore, would not have seemed inappropriate. Indeed, it is possibly through this friendship that William Young was introduced to their artist, who had once worked for Garrick as a scenery painter.26 However, what it also shows is that Zoffany had an ability to use visual props which was far more sophisticated than George Barrett and Richard Brompton. For the choice to paint the family in fancy dress can be interpreted in two ways: a straightforward portrayal of the Youngs’ love of the performing arts, or else a subtle reminder that that the image of a cultivated ‘pater familias’ on the rolling lawns of his English country estate was, at the time it was painted, a fiction.

Indeed Zoffany, who had trained in the German courts of Regensburg producing epic history and biblical paintings,27 had an apprenticeship in the use of symbolism and allegory of the kind that that few eighteenth century British artists - who lacked prominent state or church

22

Boyd’s family piece is also considered to date from 1766 or 1767, almost a decade before the parkland landscape At Danson was completed. See Lea and Milne, op.cit, p.103. 23 W.H. Ward and K.S. Block, A History of the manor and parish of Iver, Martin Secker 1933, p.198. 24 The pavilion resembles Robert Adam’s Shakespear’s Temple featured in Zoffany’s 1762 painting of the Garricks. 25 See Ottley papers, Interesting Memorandums, op.cit. 26 The garden pavilion bears a notable resemblance to the Robert Adam-designed Shakespear’s Temple that had featured in Zoffany’s painting of the Garricks a few years earlier. 27 See Mildred Archer, India and British Portraits 1770-1825 London, Karachi, Delhi 1979, p.132.

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patronage - would have experienced. And it is this subtle use of symbolism that makes Zoffany’s work so useful for a historian. A good example is found in his portrait of the German-born Queen Charlotte, the new wife of George II, and her two young sons dating from 1764. In this painting, rather than in a formal courtly pose, the Queen is portrayed ‘at home’ sitting in front of her dressing table at the window of her suite at Buckingham House, while the two princes play at her feet. But, as Marcia Pointon reveals, while ostensibly an informal family portrait, this royal family piece is also a political statement. For the Flanders lace covering to the dressing table, the richly decorated Turkish carpet (which inventories show was not actually in the room where the portrait was posed) the ornate French clock and the exotic Chinese figurines are not just images of the furnishings in the royal palace. All have been carefully chosen to illustrate eighteenth century Britain’s state-supported international trading economy.28

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Youngs’ family piece is the presence of their young black page. Without knowledge of their backgrounds, it would be difficult to tell from Lascelles’ portrait and the Boyds’ and Dawkins’ family pieces that these were images of West Indian absentees. Indeed, as we have seen, the symbols used in the portraits emphasis the families’ place in England. The Youngs’ piece, by contrast, clearly acknowledges the family’s close Caribbean links; it could be argued, too, that the black page’s presence flaunts the slave-based origins of their wealth. Absentee families, indeed, frequently brought some of their ‘house slaves’29 to Britain with them. For example, records reveal that Pero, also known as William Jones, moved to Bristol with Nevis planter John Pinney and his family and continued to work for them - unpaid - for many years after.30 From the evidence of many eighteenth century portraits, however, it is clear that in eighteenth century Britain an Afro-Caribbean manservant was more than a provider of cut-price domestic labour. Black servants feature prominently in paintings ranging from Hogarth’s sophisticated satires of metropolitan life31 to the family piece of provincial Herefordshire landowner Uvedale Price;32 from the imposing portraits of the Duchess of Portland and a black child in London’s National Portrait Gallery, Van Loo’s portrait of the Third Earl of Burlington and his wife and daughters to the naïf oil of a young horn-player at Erdigg in North Wales. Indeed, it appears that, just as mahogany furniture, hot-house

28

Pointon, op.cit., p. 161. Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: Life before Emancipation, London, 1995, pp.33-36. Christine Eickelmann and David Small, Pero: The Life of a Slave in Eighteenth-Century Bristol, Bristol, 2004. 31 th See David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in 18 Century English Art, Manchester, 1987. 32 Batholomew Dandridge (1691-1754): The Price Family, oil on canvas c.1740, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 29 30

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pineapples or turtle feasts alluded to fortunes made in the West Indies, so too did a smartlydressed, black footman.

4.4 Detail of the Youngs’ family piece

Yet the portrait of the Youngs’ page - sadly, I have been unable establish his name - is notably sympathetic. He is not pictured in the background shadows like the servants in Hogarth’s portraits, nor is he portrayed in a submissive pose or wearing a gilded slave-collar like an exotic pet. Indeed, the intimate way he is shown lifting one of the younger sons on to a horse makes him appear to be almost one of the family. Moreover, as we have seen from the evidence in Zoffany’s other paintings, it is clear that the artist was skilled in choosing meaningful ciphers. Portraying the Youngs seated on mahogany chairs or eating a pineapple, for example, could easily have been used to suggest Caribbean connections and, of course, would have been cheaper for his client. Given Zoffany’s pricing structure of twenty guineas a figure, the page’s presence is particularly significant. For twenty guineas was, at the time it was painted, an amount almost equal to a British domestic servant’s 99

annual wage or, indeed, the actual cost of buying ’a stout young negro, who can read and write and is approved of in domestic service’.33

What, therefore, might have been Young’s motive in choosing to feature his page so prominently within his family piece? The answer is worth pondering. For at the time, although there were strong social rules against miscegenation, enslaved African women were considered as personal property: they had no right to refuse their owners’ advances. During the eighteenth century, therefore, it was common for white West Indian men in the Caribbean to sire mixed race children. The lot of most of these offspring - known as mulattos - was, like their mothers’, a life of unremitting domestic slavery.

But not all were treated this way. Some, like Nathaniel, the illegitimate son of a St Kitts planter William Wells, were given their freedom, sent to Britain and educated.34 Indeed, several years after Young’s commission, Zoffany painted a portrait of Elizabeth Murray and her mixed-race cousin Dido-Belle Lindsay, the nieces of William Murray, Lord ‘Justice’ Mansfield, who were brought up together at Mansfield’s home at Kenwood just to the north of London.35 But although Mary Young mentions her elder sister’s ‘little mulattoe Nancy’36 in her Memorandums, it does seem unlikely that Young would have given an illegitimate son an equal visual status to his other children. To understand the significance of the black boy’s presence, therefore, it is necessary to examine William Young’s activities in the West Indies in a wider context.

As Richard Grove demonstrates in Green Imperialism, the settlement of the Ceded Isles was the occasion for one of Britain’s first attempts at tropical environmental management. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a growing realisation of the link between the mass felling of virgin rainforests for the intensive cultivation of sugar cane and severe droughts and environmental degradation.37 Young’s Commission, therefore, aimed to limit the amount of land made available to grow cash crops and to protect indigenous forests by creating ‘reserves’. As Young explained in The Scotsman, ‘certain portions of land in wood, will be preserved on the tops of hills and on other convenient places, for the publick benefit, and to prevent that drought, which in these climates is the usual consequence of a total removal of the woods’.38 The Commission, however was not entirely successful: many of the colonists

33

Granville Sharp, ‘A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendancy of Tolerating Slavery’, 1767, quoted in Grezina Gretchen, Black England, op.cit., p.97. 34 See Douglas Hamilton, op.cit. pp.46-48. 35 Gene Adams, ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle: A Black Girl at Kenwood’, Camden History Review, London Vol. 6 (1984). 36 Mary Young, Interesting Memorandums, op.cit. 37 Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens and the origins of environmentalism 1600-1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.133-5. 38 William Young in The Scotsman, quoted in Grove, op.cit., p.134.

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took a hostile view of the properties of primeval woodland, viewing it superstitiously as a promoter of disease and ‘insanitary winds’39 and Young was forced to modify his instructions to allow more agricultural land to be created.

In the eighteenth century, clearing tropical rainforest was, of course, a labour-intensive process. A century before, in Barbados and the Leewards, it had been English indentured labourers who had chopped down logwood trees, cleared the undergrowth, dug up roots and collected stones to make fields for planting sugar cane. In Britain’s new colonial territories during the 1760s it was to be ‘the children of Africa’ whom planters would ‘drag to the immense forests of our rank climate and there sacrifice them to the felling of trees’.40 Indeed, the demand for labour to create new plantations contributed to the rapid expansion of the British slave trade at the time - and explains why John Boyd and Richard Oswald’s investment in Bance Island proved so lucrative.

Like every other investor in the Ceded Isles, Young, too, had his part to play in the transatlantic slave trade. In 1767, he extended his partnership with his ‘superintendent’ James Stewart to create two plantations called Betty’s Hope and Delaford from the lots that he had bought in Tobago. Again, while Stewart built and managed, Young provided the ‘means for the building, purchasing stock and slaves’ to create and work the plantations.41

The expansion of Britain’s transatlantic slave trade coincided, however, with a small but growing public awareness in Britain about the vicissitudes of the plantation economy. The campaigns orchestrated by the abolitionist Granville Sharp, for example, were some of the first to recognise the contradictions between the political concept of British liberty and the reality of slave holding in the American and Caribbean colonies.42 Moreover, the debate was not just confined to political pamphlets; it also found voice in the Young family’s favourite form of entertainment.

One of the most frequently performed plays in the eighteenth century was Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, the story of a young African prince who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. In the early 1760s, however, a new scene was added to the First Act, changing the whole moral emphasis of the play from an individual tragedy into a broader critique of plantation slavery. 43 ‘Every time a Ship comes in, my money goes for a great raw39

Quoted in Grove, op.cit. p.134. Clement Caines: Letters on the Cultivation of the Otaheite, Cane, London 1801, p.252. Rhodes House, Young Manuscripts Vol. 4, Tobago, William Young, 1798 Appeal to King and Council, ff.26-27. 42 See Robin Blackburn: The Overthow of colonial Slavery and Adam Hochschild: Bury the Chains for an outline of the eighteenth century British anti-slavery movement. 43 See J R Oldfield: Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: the Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the slave trade, London, 1988. 40 41

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boned negroe Fellow that has the impudence to think that he is my fellow-creature,’ complains a wealthy Caribbean planter, ‘or for a young Wench, who will howl Night and Day after a Brat or Lover foresooth, which nothing can drive out of her head but a Cat’ o’ ninetails’.44

By way of further examples, Isaak Bickerstaff’s play Love in the City (1767) portrayed West Indian absentee Priscilla Tomboy in a poor light, too, as she threatens her servant Quasheba with ‘horsewhipping’ for a minor misdemeanour,45 while in The Patron, absentee Sir Peter Pepperpot curses his two servants complaining ‘this country has spoil’d them…get back to the colonies, you dogs!’46 They would have been uncomfortable words, indeed, for a theatre-going absentee family such as the Youngs.

Absentee plantation owners, however, including Young and his eldest son, the Governor of Tobago, were vocal in their defence of slavery and the slave trade as an unpleasant necessity. The cruelty and inhumanity described by some observers were, in their opinion, the result of poor management or supervision by individual overseers, rather than systematic abuse, and could be resolved by the introduction of new regulatory legislation.47 Indeed, in 1772 in a controversial case brought by Sharp (one of Zoffany’s clients), Lord Mansfield of Kenwood near London, a former Virginian plantation owner himself, ruled that a runaway slave named James Somerset could not be forced by his previous owner to return from Britain to the West Indies.48

The ‘Mansfield Judgement’ was popularly viewed as freeing slaves in Britain (however inaccurately, as the ruling did not remove the presumption that slaves brought to Britain were bound to serve their masters). The portrait of Mansfield’s two nieces, heiress Lady Elizabeth and illegitimate, mixed-race Dido Belle, together in Kenwood’s park with an image of St Paul’s in the background can, therefore, be interpreted as an allegory of Mansfield’s humane and ground-breaking judgement.49

The inclusion of the black page within Zoffany’s family piece, too, transforms the painting from an illustration of domestic arrangements into a political statement. However, here the message is somewhat different. The page’s presence is a deliberate retort to the abolitionist arguments. William Young, namely, is a ‘good master’.

44

Oronooko; a Tragedy pp.1-2, Act 1, Scene 1, quoted in Oldfield, op.cit., p. 24. Isaak Bickerstaff, Love in the City, London,1767, Act I, Scene II. 46 Samuel Foote, The Patron, op.cit., Act I, Scene I. 47 For the Youngs’ views see: Report of Commitees of Legislature appointed by both Houses in November 1796, Rhodes House, Young Manuscripts, MS W. Ind. t.1, Vol. 5. 48 See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, London, New York: Verso, pp.98-100 49 The painting, (c 1775)hangs in the collection of the Earl of Mansfield at Scone Palace, Perth, Scotland, and was previously attributed to Zoffany. Now, however, there seems to be some doubt. Nevertheless, it is important in that it depicts the two beautiful young women as near equals. 45

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Of course, such pieces, personal to colonial land-holding families were far from the only use of art as propaganda during the growing arguments about slavery. When William Young returned to Dominica in 1771 as its new governor, he was accompanied by the artist Augustino Brunius, who had until then been working as a draughtsman for Robert Adam. Indeed the titles of Brunius’ paintings Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, Cudgelling Match between English and French Negroes on the Island of Dominica , Negroes Dance in the Island of Dominica and Free Blacks of Dominica reveal that they were clearly designed as a public relations exercise.

4.5 Engraving of Negroes Dance in the Island of Dominica

Several were, indeed, engraved as prints and one, A Sunday Negro’s market in the island of Dominica was exhibited in London at the Royal Academy in 1777, where - according to a contemporary reviewer - ‘it was well grouped, and fancifully imagined and has every appearance of truth of representation’.50 Brunius does indeed accurately depict much of the detail. For example, the women’s doubled-layered skirts, pulled up in front, accord with contemporary descriptions of slave dress in French-influenced Caribbean islands, while the wide, sawn wooden boards and shingles of the huts reveal the use of imported American lumber, as Britain started a programme of colonisation.

50

Royal Academy, London, Vol 1, 1777, no 35 ‘Brunais, Augustin’, undated press cutting quoted in The Image of the Black in Western Art, p.32.

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But, of course, Brunius’ ‘truth of represention’ was highly selective. There are no images of the labour involved in clearing rainforest and creating plantations, for instance. Nor are there images of the island’s tiny capital Rousseau, which was rapidly growing into a major slave trading centre for the whole of the southern Caribbean. The paintings instead are exotic conversation pieces, presenting putative investors with reassuring but highly misleading image of the British West Indian colonies.

The life of a favoured page on a Buckinghamshire country estate would, of course, have been very different to that of a black youth back in Delaford, Tobago. Indeed, given Young’s leading role the colonisation of the Windwards, Zoffany’s painting is particularly poignant. For the page’s presence makes an explicit visual connection between the transformation of British landscapes and the wealth produced by slave labour in the Atlantic colonies. Indeed, the painting of the Youngs appositely illustrates Goldsmith’s linking of Britain’s global trade in ‘luxuries’ to the ‘barren splendour’ of land ‘adorned for pleasure’. In the Caribbean, on Young’s command, enslaved Africans cleared fecund tropical rainforests to provide new fields for the cultivation of sugar cane; but in contrast in Buckinghamshire farmland was taken out of production on his new estate and transformed into a sanitised vision of nature: the enclosed landscape park.

The Youngs’ family piece is not the only painting by Zoffany in which such explicit visual links appear. His 1765 portrait of Mrs Oswald, for example - which now hangs in the National Gallery - portrays Jamaican heiress Mary Ramsay, the wife of John Boyd’s fellow West India merchant Richard Oswald.

Like the Youngs’, Dawkins’ and Boyds’ family pieces, Mrs Oswald clearly has a northern European background. But in this work she is portrayed neither in a classical pavilion, nor under the branches of an ancient oak. Instead she is posed on a steep hillside in the dank shade of a gnarled old ash tree. In the background moreover, rather than rolling sward, this time there is the dull gleam of a lake and hills beyond: the Oswalds’ estate Auchincruive in Ayr about 30 miles south west of Glasgow, which her husband bought the previous year.51

51

For more detail about Auchincruive, see Hancock, op.cit, pp.321-381.

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4.6

Johann Zoffany: Mrs Oswald

Although the skies behind her are cloudy, and she is already wearing an elaborate headpiece, she holds a richly decorated, wide-brimmed sun hat on her arm like a shield. Was this just a cautious habit retained from her youth? For white West Indian women were notoriously careful to keep their faces shaded in order to retain their pale complexions.52 This is unlikely, for Zoffany never travelled to Scotland and Mrs Oswald’s portrait would have probably been painted in a studio or her London home, and the background added later. The superfluous sun hat - with its echo of Britannia’s shield - is instead, a deliberate symbol of the tropical origins of the wealth that had funded the Oswalds’ purchase of their Scottish estate.

52

See Janet Schaw’s observations on white West Indian women, ‘from childhood they never suffer the sun to have a peep at them and to prevent him are covered with masks and bonnets’, Journal of a Lady of Quality op.cit., p. 115.

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As Tom Devine and Douglas Hamilton show, the profits of the transatlantic trade were especially important for Scottish economic development. Until the 1760s Scotland had relatively poor wage levels, no more than half those paid in England.53 Moreover, the population was small - just around 1.25 million in 1755. Mass demand for manufactured and imported goods, such as in England,was, therefore, slow to develop. Glasgow’s growing status as a prominent Atlantic port, for example, originated in its role as a tobacco entreport: a facility where tobacco from the colonies was imported and then re-shipped to markets in continental Europe. And it was West India and American planters who bought the cheap, coarse linen made by the rapidly expanding eighteenth century Scottish cloth industries (which by the latter half of the eighteenth century were employing a fifth of Scotland’s population) to clothe their enslaved workers.54

But, industrial development aside, what effects did this new, colonial wealth have on Scottish landed estates? In Citizens of the World, David Hancock describes in detail how Scots-born Oswald invested profits from his merchant business into Virginian properties, a West African ‘slave fort’ and the profits from Mary’s Jamaican plantations into their estate. Here on a holding that, at its peak, comprised more than 80,000 acres, Oswald enclosed fields, planted hedges, built roads and introduced new agricultural techniques, as well as commissioning designs for a palatial new neo-classical house by the ubiquitous Robert Adam.55 Nor was Oswald the only Scot to invest colonial profits in the improvement of his country estate.

In Scotland’s Empire (2003), Devine argues that access to the opportunities afforded by the British empire ‘renewed the economic strength and resources of the old elite’ and saved many landed families north of the border from demographic catastrophe. 56 ‘There could have been few gentry families in Scotland after 1760 who did not reap some benefits from the profits of empire,’57 he concludes. Successful Glasgow merchants such as the ‘Tobacco Lord’ James Dunlop, or ‘Sugar Prince’ William Macdowell, emulated the example of Oswald and other City compatriots and invested their trading profits in the purchase of landed estates within reach of Glasgow. And while some returning Scottish emigrants, such as William Young, chose to make their family base in England, many eventually came back home, or at least repatriated some of their gains to Scotland.

The Malcolms of Poltaloch, for example - Jamaican planters and slave traders - invested heavily into property in Argyll, as did the leaders of the Campbell clan who had also gained fortunes in early

53

Tom Devine: Scotland’s Empire Empire and the Transformation of Scotland,. London: Allen Lane, 2003 and Douglas Hamilton, Scotland the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, Manchester University Press, 2005. Tom Devine, ibid, pp. 320-345. 55 Hancock, op.cit, pp.332 -347. 56 Tom Devine, op.cit, p.349. 57 Tom Devine, op cit, p.334. 54

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eighteenth century Jamaica. Indeed, Devine suggests that imperial profits – from India, as well as America and the West Indies – help to explain how ‘a relatively poor society was able to find the resources to sustain a rapid programme of costly agricultural transformation’.58

In the previous chapter, I argued that eighteenth century English parkland landscapes can be seen as an aesthetic expression of the close personal and commercial relationships between landowners and the creators of a far-flung maritime empire: the creation of vast grass lawns - and the accompanying loss of agricultural income - subtly implied that a gentry family had more land elsewhere. As we have seen, Scotland was particularly dependent on wealth remitted from the colonies and the Atlantic trade; moreover, this wealth, too, was invested in the purchase and improvement of agricultural estates. But did Scotland’s newly rich landowners also have aesthetic ambitions to create huge ornamental parks, like those in England? In this chill, northerly, largely upland part of Britain, where land suitable for cultivation was a premium, the conspicuous waste of potentially productive agricultural land would have had a different resonance.

Fig 4.7 Johann Zoffany: The Murray Family Piece 1765

58

Tom Devine, Scotland’s Empire, p.336.

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Another Scottish family piece by Zoffany gives further clues as to how colonial wealth was manifest in Scotland. The portrait was for William Murray, the third Duke of Atholl, in 1765 the year after the new Duke had inherited an estate on the east coast of the country at the southern edge of the Highlands. The focus of the painting is, naturally, the Duke, shown fishing together with his son and heir. The girls, younger boys and their mother (the Duke’s cousin) Lady Charlotte form a group to the right, with one son portrayed chasing a very unScottish animal up a tree. Indeed, family records identify as it as ‘Tom the racoon, one of the many exotic animals birds and curiosities sent back from the West Indies by Admiral James Murray’.59

However, Admiral Murray was not the only family member among Highland clan leaders to have connections with the sugar colonies. Charlotte’s grandfather and father, from whom the estate was inherited, had - during the early part of the eighteenth century - played an important role in developing the Isle of Man, which the family owned, as an Atlantic trading centre. Indeed as, Frances Wilkins notes, the island was prominent in the early eighteenth century British slave trade.60 Like Mrs Oswald’s sun hat and the Youngs’ page, the image of ‘Tom the Racoon’ can, therefore, be read in two ways: as a portrait of a favourite pet and as a symbol, too, of the family’s financial connections with the Caribbean.

But it is the background to the Murrays’ family portrait that is of particular interest. For the hills, sea loch and cliffs are not only images of the estate that the Duke had inherited from his uncle, they also hint at the dramatic changes to Highland landscapes that were created by the Murrays’ new colonial wealth. As Douglas Hamilton shows, Highland clan leaders were to benefit particularly from Scotland’s union with England and its colonies in 1707.

The adoption of English land laws shifted the nature of land holding, from being held by chiefs in trust for the clan towards legal title. This enabled clan chiefs to transform themselves from protectors to private proprietors and impose commercially-led imperatives upon the land: the restructuring of patterns of settlement to create sheep or cattle ranches and creating small industrial developments. However, this required capital investment. And in the Highlands, much of this was derived from the Caribbean either through mercantile investments or the purchase of plantations. It was Jamaican profits, for example, that in 1737 allowed John Campbell - the second Duke of Argyll - to eliminate traditional baile 59

Mary Webster, ibid. James Murray was to become the first Governor of Canada. Frances Wilkins: Manx Slave Traders: A Social History of the Isle of Man’s involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade, Kidderminster, 1999. pp.23 and pp.47-48. Two wealthy early Guinea traders (1700) were named John and William Murray and had close business relations with the Tarletons, Liverpool-based West India and Guinea merchants, who were to become the Duke’s bankers. 60

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townships, and create a pool of homeless migrants, from land that had become his personal property.61

By the 1760s, the new Duke of Atholl was adopting, or intended to adopt, similar ‘improvements’. In the painting, the hills behind the family are devoid of human life: a lowwalled stone enclosure - a sheepfold - suggests that sheep ranching was being considered. Indeed, given Zoffany’s use of allegory, and that John Campbell was exporting salted herring from the Moray Firth to feed his enslaved workers in the Caribbean, the image of the Duke and his son fishing may have been an allusion itself to the transatlantic links. It is the small, classical temple, on the hill top, however, which is particularly intriguing. Its presence, namely, transforms the empty hillside into piece of ‘polite’ art. It symbolises, indeed, how erstwhile clan chiefs not only used colonial profits to improve the productivity of their now privately-owned estates, but also adopted the manners of eighteenth century ‘polite’ English gentry and aristocracy. The Duke’s new highland sheep ranch was clearly also intended to be a rocky, upland Scottish version of an English ‘natural’ style, landscape park.

In subsequent chapters, I will investigate in more detail the relationship between the Atlantic slave colonies and the transformation of attitudes to upland landscapes in north Wales, the Lake District and Scotland. Now, however I want to return to England, and, in particular the area of the West Country near the port of Bristol. The fashionable eighteenth century resorts of Bath and Bristol Hotwells were a popular destination for English and Scots alike, returning to Britain after their ‘sojourn in the sun’.

61

Douglas Hamilton: Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, ibid, p.39.

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Chapter Five Refining the World Let Bristol for commerce and dirt be renowned; At Salisbury, penknives and Scissors be ground, The towns of Devizes, of Bradford and Frome, May boast that they can manage better the loom I believe that they may, but the world to refine In manners, in dress, in politeness to shine Oh Bath, let the glory be thine! Christopher Anstey, The New Bath Guide (1766)

In 1987 UNESCO, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, designated the entire centre of the small West Country city of Bath - eighteenth century Britain’s most fashionable centre - as a World Heritage Site. The reason for this global accolade was, according to UNESCO, because Bath demonstrated ’a unique combination of outstanding urban architecture, spatial arrangement and social history,’1 which ‘harmoniously’ linked neo-classical streets and terraces with Roman remains and the landscape of the surrounding hills. Indeed, if you walk through the centre of Bath at night, the floodlit golden limestone facades of the ‘Georgian’ terraced houses that make up most of the urban fabric have an almost magical quality. It is like stumbling into a glorious Renaissance stage set: a theatrical homage to the work of Palladio and the ancient Roman buildings which inspired his designs. The remains of Bath’s eighteenth century city centre have undoubtedly, as UNESCO claims, a ‘cultural heritage of outstanding value to humanity’.2

Like Tunbridge Wells, Buxton and Harrogate, eighteenth-century Bath was a spa and health resort that possessed an economy almost entirely devoted to the leisure activities of a ‘genteel’ elite.3 But no-one celebrated the Roman origins of Tunbridge’s spa. Nor could Harrogate or Buxton boast of a charitable hospital hung with works by Britain’s most fashionable artists.4 Bath, moreover, was the only spa where the shops were ‘richer and more extravagant in their show’ than those in London.5 In scale and status, this ‘provincial metropolis of fashion, taste and elegance’6 was, clearly, unique.

In an apposite allusion, indeed, the author of Bath: a Simile (1789) suggests that the city’s centre ‘with its environs’ should be regarded as a huge tea set, or ‘Tea Equipage’. The poet describes afternoon tea laid out on a tray or ‘board’, decorated with a landscape of the hills surrounding the town and the golden limestone houses ‘all of yellow ware’ - a reference to Josiah Wedgwood’s fashionable ‘creamware’ ceramics. The ‘well pav’d’ blue lias limestone setts (small paving stones) of 1

http:/whc.unesco.org/en/list/428, City of Bath. Ibid. See Amanda Vickery: The Gentleman’s Daughter, op.cit, pp.269-292. 4 The Royal Infirmary (1742), now known as The Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, still contains a small eighteenth century art collection. 5 Josiah Wedgwood, 1763, quoted in Susan Sloman: Gainsborough in Bath, New Haven, London: Yale, 2002, p. 9. 6 W Mathews: The New history, Survey and …Description of Bristol, Bristol, 1794, p. 215. 2 3

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Queen’s Square are a ‘fancy dish’ of sweetened bread rolls. The elegant King’s Circus - a circular development of terraced houses - is a ‘handsome Wedgwood plate.’7 The ‘stone clad’ sides and the thick yellow stream’ of the canalised River Avon are compared to a ’pot of cream’,8 while the quarries in the hills surrounding the town - whose owner, Ralph Allen, supplied honey-coloured stone to local developers, were the sugar bowl. 9 That quarry curiously scoop’d-out, Lumps of all size in view, Must be the sugar-dish, no doubt, And full of sugar too. From time to time the dish to fill, Least empty it should stand; Behold in every neighb’ring hill, A sugar loaf at hand.10

5.1

Etching of Prior Park, Bath - Ralph Allen’s country house (and showroom) also showing stone transport along rails to his wharf on the Avon (1754)

The comparison of Allen’s newly acquired wealth with the consumption of West Indian sugar would, indeed, have had a particular resonance for the resort’s numerous visitors. For Bath’s eighteenth century development as Britain’s pre-eminent urban playground had less to do with its natural warm water springs and Roman remains per se, than its proximity to the rapidly expanding Atlantic port of 7

Anon, Bath: a Simile, London, 1789. Ibid. 9 Cornish-born Allen developed a cross-country postal system which linked provincial towns to the American colonies via the port of Falmouth without going to London. He would, therefore, have played a key part in creating a culture of the ‘west’. See Hancock, Citizens of the World, op.cit., p.223–4 and also Jerom Murch: Ralph Allen, John Palmer and the English Post Office, London: Longmans, 1880 and Frank Staff, The Transatlantic Mail, Lawrence, Mass: Quarterman, 1980. Allen’s Bath town house and original post office in Terrace Walk (refaced and extended by Wood in 1727) is now a museum. 10 Bath: a Simile, op.cit. 8

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Bristol. Indeed, the teatime ritual chosen by the author of Bath: a Simile was not just an apt allegory for the town’s architecture and urban design. The English cream, bread and butter, Chinese tea and Caribbean sugar, all displayed on fashionable English ceramics, symbolised the wealth produced by British agriculture and Bristol’s growing part in Britain’s global ‘oeconomy’.

Bristol’s historic connections with the seventeenth and eighteenth century colonial plantations have been well documented. Indeed, Richard Pares’ pioneering economic history of the Bristol and Nevisbased Pinney family, A West India Fortune, was published more than half a century ago.11 More recently, Madge Dresser’s detailed research in her book Slavery Obscured (2001) has provided the basis for a ‘Slave Trade Trail ‘ through the city centre.12 The route shows how historical locations ranging from cliffside caves, pubs and small-scale sugar refineries to the sophisticated neo-classical architecture of Bristol’s Queen’s Square, the terraces of Clifton and the Pinney family’s elegant stone house in George Street - now a museum - are linked to the port’s African and West India trades.13

5.2 John Pinney’s house in George Street, Bristol

11

Richard Pares, A West India Fortune, London, 1950. Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured: the social history of the slave trade in an English provincial port, London: Continuum, 2001. 13 See visitbristol.co.uk/site/the slave trade trail. In 2007, Bristol Museums and Galleries established an exhibition and ‘sugar trail’ in The Georgian House, John Pinney’s former home. 12

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Aside from a brief reference in Derek Knight’s book Gentlemen of Fortune (1978), Bath’s links with slavery, however, have to date been less well publicised.14 The recent Pevsner guide, for example, does not mention slavery or the West Indies at all.15 As Gainsborough’s portrait of elegantly dressed Antiguan absentees Mr and Mrs Byam and their daughter Selina, on display in Bath’s Holbourne Museum indicates, however - and as I will show below - these connections were certainly close indeed. While barrels of dark brown raw muscovado were shipped from the West Indian colonies to Bristol’s sugar works, Bath, too, refined the products of Britain’s Atlantic empire. In this chapter, therefore, I will explore the financial, political and cultural connections between Bath, Britain’s 26 American colonies and, in particular, the wealthy Caribbean sugar islands. But before I do, I will briefly recount the reasons for Bristol’s eighteenth century growth and also examine the relationship between the two cities. For Bath and Bristol have always been intimately connected.

5.3 Thomas Gainsborough: Mr and Mrs Byam and their daughter Selina, c.1762

14

15

Derrick Knight, Gentlemen of Fortune: The men who made their fortunes in Britain’s Slave Colonies London 1978, p.81, Michael Forsyth, Bath: Pevsner Architectural Guides, London and New Haven: Yale, 2003.

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As an Atlantic port, Bristol was eclipsed by Liverpool in the late eighteenth century. However, the huge growth in industrial development in north west England and, indeed, western Scotland during the nineteenth century obscures the fact that, for much of the eighteenth century, it was the Severn rather than the Mersey or the Clyde that was seen as Britain’s second maritime gateway to the Atlantic. When the author of Britannia: a Poem (1767) wrote his patriotic celebration of Britain’s imperial ambitions, he was still (but only just) reflecting economic reality:

Commercial Chain! May Thames and Severn hence New Kindred gain’d their mutual Aids dispense; From Sea to Sea the watry Ways be seen And Fleets emit their plenteous Freights between.16 Bristol’s location near the mouth of the Severn meant that it was well-placed to supply goods for Britain’s expanding colonies in the Americas. Indeed, while voyages to South Coast ports were vulnerable to wartime attack from Continental fleets sailing in the English Channel, Bristol was sheltered by the counties of Devon and Cornwall, which formed a natural barrier to enemy shipping reaching well into the Atlantic. The Severn stretched north from Bristol via the towns of Gloucester, Tewksbury, Worcester and the Shropshire ironworks to Shrewsbury, allowing agricultural produce, timber, ceramics and ironwares to be brought downstream for export. Indeed, until the late eighteenth century, the Severn-side counties of Somerset and Gloucestershire were, outside London, two of the most densely populated and highly industrialised areas of England.

Although Bristol’s growing Atlantic trade gained from its Severn-side hinterland - the stretch of water between the coasts of Glamorgan and Somerset is still known as the Bristol Channel - neither the eighteenth century city, nor the docks, were built on the Severn estuary. Instead they lie several miles inland, away from the Severn’s huge tidal reach and shifting sands, on the banks of the River Avon. Bath, too, was also joined to the Atlantic by this watery umbilical cord. For, beyond Bristol, the Avon meanders roughly south east to the former Somerset textile towns like Bradford-on-Avon and Trowbridge, then passes in a wide loop by Bath.

Indeed, if you travel by rail, the close connection between the two cities is physically revealed. The track, namely, follows the route of the section of ‘stone clad’ River Avon that was canalised in the early 1720s. However, unlike later canal projects, the builders of this waterway followed the river’s existing winding course. Today’s passengers, therefore, have a surprisingly pastoral view of the treelined river meandering through lush water meadows. Indeed, it is not difficult to understand one Bath resident’s romantic view of the new canal at the time:

16

Anon, Britannia: A Poem, London, 1767, p.15.

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‘I look down from my study on a mile and a half of the gentle Avon gliding down the vale; and now and then seeing the swelling bosoms of deep laden barks freighted with merchandise; which I consider as returning messengers, whom I have sent forth to fetch me Tea from Asia, Sugar from America, Wine from France and Fruit from Portugal.17 The river, of course, had been canalised not to ferry imported luxuries from Bristol’s quayside to Bath’s spa visitors but, more prosaically, to transport woollen cloth and blocks of limestone to the rapidly expanding Atlantic port. Indeed, while earlier essays in classical architecture in Bristol such as Queen’s Square are constructed in brick, later developments - like West India merchant John Pinney’s house in George Street - are faced in honey-coloured Bath stone.

Nevertheless, it is clear that investors saw the potential offered by improvements to the Avon’s navigation for the development of Bath itself. Wealthy visitors had long been attracted to the town for both for its healing springs and amusements: as early as 1714, the poet Alexander Pope described how his ‘whole day is shar’d by the Pump-Assemblies, the Walkes, the Chocolate houses, Raffling Shops, Plays and medleys.18 However, in the early eighteenth century Bath was little more than cluster of gable-roofed, mullion-windowed houses, huddled around the ransacked Abbey. It was only in 1727, the year after the canal was completed, that entrepreneurial Herefordshire estate owner James Brydges and his designer, John Wood, began drawing up plans for the transformation of Bath into a sophisticated resort. And it is at this time that the link between Bath and the American colonies begins.

In his magisterial Bath: A Social History (1981), Ronald Neale describes how Brydges, (or the Duke of Chandos and Earl of Carnaervon, as he had become by then) had visited Bath in the spring of 1726. According to Neale, Brydges - who was seeking a cure for ‘twitching of the nerves’ - was accompanied by his wife, who needed help with her ‘hysteric fits’. It seems that their visit had little success, as they found their lodgings near the Cross Bath uncongenially ‘old and ‘rotten‘ and unsuitable for a ‘person of fashion’.19

It is likely that the visit to Bath and the West Country, however, was not solely for medical reasons. For Brydges, who had made a ‘fortune’ during his time as Paymaster General during the war which ended in 1713, was, at this time, investing his corruptly obtained profits in British colonial expansion. Son of the former British ambassador to Constantinople, he had correctly anticipated that the greatest future growth lay in trade with Britain’s new colonies and trading posts in the West and East, rather than with traditional trading partners in Europe and the Levant. He had, therefore, bought

17 18 19

Philip Thicknesse, Memoirs and Anecdotes of Phillip Thicknesse, London, 1788, p.302. Alexander Pope to Martha Blount, 6th October, 1714, quoted in R.S. Neale, Bath: A Social History, p.12. Quoted in Ronald Neale, Bath: a social history, London, 1981, p.131.

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large holdings in India Stock, South Sea Stock and Africa Bonds20, land in Barbados and Jamaica and also several businesses in the West Country near Bridgewater.21

Soon after his initial visit to Bath, Brydges started acquiring land and leases on buildings there. Nor, it appears, was he alone in seeing the potential of the spa’s location - a morning’s ride from Bristol and how the newly canalized river Avon would improve the transport of consumer goods from the port. As Neale notes, the majority of the finance invested in Bath’s buildings came, not from the locality, but through a ‘complex international credit network centred on London.’22 Indeed, while the supposed healing qualities of Bath’s spring waters provided a useful reason to spend time in the resort, it was not difficult for potential investors to ride to Bristol’s quays to talk to merchants first hand about opportunities in the American colonies. It was fortuitous, therefore, that the warm water springs and Assembly Rooms at Bristol’s own spa Hotwells located at the base of the Clifton Gorge were not only useful for ‘disorders’ where ‘Bath waters’ were ‘ improper ‘or ‘hurtful,’ 23 but provided a view of every ship sailing into Bristol’s harbour from the pump-room windows.24

While Bath’s proximity to Bristol helped to attract investment from other areas of Britain, it also meant that the resort provided a good introduction into ‘polite’ English society for Caribbean absentees. Indeed, its mild westerly climate, the cheap coal from the adjacent Somerset reserves and natural hot springs meant that, during the colder months, it was one of warmest places in England (Bath’s fashionable ‘season’ was, unlike London and other spas, in winter rather than summer).

The diary of St Kitts planter John Baker, for example, shows how members of his family spent their frequent visits playing cards and dancing, or catching up with gossip from the Caribbean at the Parade CoHo (coffee house),25 while Mary Young’s Memorandums reveal that, when her father, step-sisters and elder brother had departed for the West Indies, she and her mother would also regularly visit the resort. Bath’s medical facilities were another reason for wealthy West Indians to spend time in the city. As Barbadian absentee Thomas Pollard wrote from Oxford, to his elder brother at Cambridge, about their father’s visit in November,1772: ‘I was somewhat apprehensive that the journey from Bath at this rigorous season of the year would be prejudicial to our father’s

20

th

Neale, Bath a Social History, op.cit, p.127 (on 28 September, 1720, Brydges had £141,000 in India Stock and £40,000 in Africa Bonds). 21 The family owned the Hope and Middleton plantations in Jamaica. See also P.R.O, Kew, Close Rolls (Barbados). Also the Bodleian Library, Gough MSS, Somersetshire, Copies of papers relating to a scheme in the West Indies, 1723, HMC Principal family and estates collections A-K, 1996 (44a)(Stowe Collections). See also Huntington Library, CA. Stowe Collection, ST 58/vol. 9: Incoming Brydges Correspondence, 1711. 22 Neale, op.cit., pp.122 -131. 23 W Mathews The New History, Survey and Description of the City and Suburbs of Bristol, or complete guide, Bristol, 1794, pp.98-109. 24 W Mathews, ibid, p.109. 25 Philip Yorke (ed.), The Diary of John Baker 1751-1778, London, 1931, pp.107-9 and pp. 247–249.

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recovery.’ 26 As Douglas Hamilton shows, too, Bath’s status as a centre of medicine also attracted doctors, particularly Scots-trained, who had gained experience in the West Indies in the army, navy or on plantations.27 Philip Thicknesse (known popularly as Dr Viper) and Tobias Smollett, for example, both gained their medical training in Jamaica - the latter as a surgeon’s assistant in the navy after a brief spell at Glasgow University.28

Smollett, of course, is now better remembered as one of eighteenth century Britain’s first novelists: a vocation helped by his marriage to a Jamaican heiress with a ‘comfortable tho’ moderate estate’.29 His description of 1760s Bath in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker - while setting out further reasons for West Indians to visit the town - is, therefore, not a little disingenuous: ‘Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath. Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negrodrivers, and hucksters, from our American plantations enriched they know not how; agents, commissaries and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars on the blood of the nation… all of them hurry to Bath, because here, without any further qualification they can mingle with the princes and nobles of the land.’30 Historically, Britain’s landed elite had used artfully engineered marriages to cement dynastic wealth and power. Indeed, the balls, assemblies and other ‘polite’ social events that proliferated in provincial Georgian England were primarily stalls in the marriage market. However, if a young woman’s romantic desires, or her family’s ambitions, were for a handsome match, then a braving a ‘season’ in London or Bath was the surest strategy’. 31

In eighteenth century Bath, indeed, it appears that the choice of spouse was particularly wide. In Smollett’s novel, The Expedition’s hero Matt Bramble, a Welsh border landowner, describes how a ‘ball was opened by a Scotch Lord, with a mulatto heiress from St Christopher’s and the gay Colonel Tinsel danced all the evening with the daughter of an eminent tinman from the borough of Southwark’32 And in Christopher Anstey’s New Bath Guide33 a landed young man is captivated by the beautiful ‘Miss Towzer Simkin’ he has seen at ball: ‘T’is she that has long been the toast of the town, Though all the world knows her complexion is brown.’34

26

British Library, Hardwicke Papers Vol. CCCV11. 35,655 Pollard Manuscripts, fo. 27. Thomas Pollard to Walter Pollard, November 29, 1772, Douglas Hamilton,Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, op.cit., pp.112-134. 28 Quoted in Lewis Knap, Tobias Smollett, Doctor of Men and Manners, Princetown, 1949, p.219. 29 Knapp, ibid, p.219. 30 Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 1771 (1990 edition, University of Georgia) p.36. 31 See Vickery, op.cit, p.265. 32 Smollett, op.cit, p.47. 33 Christoper Anstey, The New Bath Guide, or memoirs of the B-f-f family, Dublin, 1766 (1978 reprint of 1820 edition, p.18). 34 Anstey, ibid, ‘A description of a ball,’ p.33. 27

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But the casual racism of Smollett’s and Anstey’s satires also reveals a slight sense of unease. For this was not just fiction designed to titillate male readers with thoughts of Miss Towzer’s ‘prodigious rough, black head of hair’ or her ‘sweet pouting lips’. 35 In Bristol, ‘negro slaves’ were bought and sold as cheap servants,36 but in Bath the mixed-race scion of a ‘chattel slave’ might indeed dance with or even marry a member of Britain’s landowning elite. St Kitt’s plantation heir, Nathaniel Wells, for example - ‘ A West Indian of large fortune, a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour that he is little removed from a Negro,’37 - spent much of his early adulthood in Bath before marriage and ‘retirement’ to a newly purchased country estate in nearby Monmouthshire.38 Eighteenth century Bath did, indeed, ‘refine the world’.

It is clear, therefore, that Bath’s proximity to Bristol and the wealth of the Atlantic colonies beyond was critical to the resort’s success. Not only was it a congenial place for potential investors to reside, it was also a resort where money from the colonies could be used to acquire ‘polite’ manners and dress. In Thomas Malton’s watercolour The South Parade at Bath (1775), for instance, one of the elegantly dressed women is carrying a parasol - a small, ornamental version of the sunshades popular in the British Caribbean.

5.4 Thomas Malton: Detail of The South Parade at Bath (1775)

35

Anstey, op.cit. p.33. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 9 January,1768, for example, contains a sale notice for a healthy negro slave named Prince, 17 years of age, together with ‘a four-wheeled chaise’. 37 th Joseph Farrington, Diary 24 April 1803. Quoted in J..A.H. Evans: ‘Nathaniel Wells of Piercefield and St Kitts: From Slave to Sheriff’, The Monmouthshire Antiquary, 2002, pp.92-106. 38 There has, to date, been little research on the extent of intermarriage in eighteenth century Britain. However, evidence suggests that in the West Country it was not infrequent. For example, an entry in Burke’s Landed Gentry (1937) reveals that Ralph Knight (1703–54), the youngest son of a landed Shropshire family, marries Mary, daughter of ‘Duppa Duppa’. This name indicates that Mary was probably the daughter of an enslaved African servant. 36

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Like his other paintings of eighteenth century Bath - including The New Assembly Rooms (1779), The Circus at Bath and Queens Square (1784) - Malton’s The South Parade portrays ‘polite’ couples and families strolling though uncrowded streets and squares. And in contrast with anarchic, sprawling mid-eighteenth century London, where ‘polite’ urban developments were interspersed with the squalor of overcrowded housing and manufacturing industries, Bath was a compact, easily walkable, well-mannered, urban centre. Eighteenth century Bath, indeed, can be seen as a model of the Scots philosopher David Hume’s contemporary vision of a civilised, bourgeois city: it is easy to imagine the genteel visitors displaying ‘their wit and breeding, their taste in conversation or living’,39 in the Parade Coho or Bath’s Assembly rooms. And, clearly, the Circus - where a pair of young women are pictured eyeing two gentlemen dismounting from their horses - was an environment where both sexes could ‘meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace’.40

5.5 Thomas Malton: The Royal Crescent, as building works near completion (1769)

However, Malton’s painting The Royal Crescent, as building works near completion (1769) gives perhaps gives a more comprehensive impression of the eighteenth century resort. For, despite its apparent visual cohesion, Bath was not built with a planned, unified layout. It is, rather, a collage of separate, largely unconnected and often incomplete, speculative developments, shaped by accidents of land purchase and constraints of topography, frequently curtailed by over-ambition and bankruptcy. Along the street and around the corner from Malton’s ‘polite’ urban spaces lay scaffolded construction sites.

39

David Hume, Essays, p.159. Essay XIV, Idea of a perfect Commonwealth, quoted in Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity op,cit., p.116. Ogborn, ibid, p.116.

40

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As Neale points out, the development of Bath fell into four main phases, each of which is connected with periods of economic confidence following British colonial gains.41 The first phase of expansion between 1726 and 1736, following the canalisation of the Avon, occurred at the time when Bristol was rapidly expanding both as a West India and Africa port, eclipsing Norwich to become England’s second largest city. In Bath, this era was marked by John Wood’s collaboration with James Brydges, and Wood’s striking designs to extend Bath’s walled mediaeval centre by drawing on the planning precedents of a classical Roman town. Wood’s ‘grand place of Assembly’ - Queen’s Square - dates from this period: a paved, formal quadrilateral surrounded by terraced houses, the facades of which were together designed to look like a Palladian palace. The eruption of war in 1739, however, halted speculative development and Wood left the city for Bristol where he designed the Merchants’ Exchange in Corn Street.42

The second wave of investment in Bath came between 1753-7, when Britain was competing with other European powers to consolidate and expand its colonial territories - an aggression which was eventually to culminate in the Seven Years War. It is this period that saw the construction of The Circus, a circular development of terraced houses set around a paved public space. Building work slowed during the war years, only to resume again with vigour in 1763.

It is this third period that saw the construction of the Royal Crescent by Wood’s son, John. It was also the time when finance derived from slavery and the slave trade began to be invested into the city. As Neale shows, in 1771, at a point when the Crescent was far from complete, John Wood was in debt for the development of Grand Parade, Pierrepoint Street and Queen’s Parade - to the south of the Abbey, along the meadows near the Avon just outside the old town walls. He was only saved through a loan from Harford Lloyd and John Marchant, two Bristol-based financiers of slave trading voyages and partners in Bristol Old Bank.43

Wood was not the only developer during this period to be underwritten by finance derived from African and West Indian trade. Colonial remittances, indeed, were instrumental in the construction of one of Bath’s most renowned monuments, Pulteney Bridge. Brydges aside, the Pulteney family – who were to become the Earls of Bath - were one of the biggest investors in the town’s development. Many of the family’s papers survive: a few in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and a far larger number in the Huntington Library in California. They show how in the eighteenth century, like Brydges, William Pulteney too saw the gains to be made from the improvements in the Avon’s navigation and Bath’s proximity to an expanding Bristol.

41 42 43

R. Neale, Bath: a social history, op.cit., p. 44. W Mathews, op. cit, p.102. Neale, op.cit, p.162.

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5.6 Pulteney Bridge in Bath

In 1727, the year the canal was completed, Pulteney bought a 600 acre manor and agricultural estate at Bathwick, just across the Avon from Bath’s pump room complex. While it is not clear precisely how Pulteney obtained the money to buy the estate, it does appear that he saw British expansion in the Caribbean as one of the keys to his future success. Not only did he have dealings with West India merchants, but a series of personal letters written to Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon (Commander-in-Chief of the West Indies) at Jamaica during the 1739-45 war reveal that he also had a very good knowledge of the area.44 However, when Pulteney died in 1764, his ambitions of settling Cuba with ‘Americans’45 and of developing Bathwick were still unfulfilled. And, following the sudden death of William’s son and heir in 1767, Bathwick may well have remained as fields, were it not for the global financial connections of his niece, Frances, the next heiress.

The previous year, Frances had married an Edinburgh lawyer, William Johnstone, brother of John Johnstone, one of Britain’s wealthiest East Indian nabobs and the future Governor of Florida. While his brothers attempted to make their fortunes in the colonies, Johnstone was responsible for investing their money ‘at home’’ improving the family’s Scottish estate and becoming a partner in a 44

45

See A letter to a certain eminent British Sailor (Admiral Vernon) occasioned by his specimen of Naked Truth, London, 1749. Ibid.

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Dumfries bank, which supplied credit for many colonial developments. Indeed, through a default on mortgage payments, in 1769 Johnstone himself became the owner of a sugar estate in the island of Grenada46 and later purchased another in Tobago. In the early 1770s, however, his focus was the development of the Pulteney landholdings in Bath. A new Avon crossing was essential to allow exploitation of the land in Bathwick and in 1770, William Johnstone (who had by then taken the Pulteney family name) engaged the fashionable Adam brothers to design his new bridge.47

The proposed crossing was extraordinary. Indeed, as Malton’s painting The New Bridge At Bath (1779) shows, at street level it hardly seemed a bridge at all. Over 50 feet wide and lined with shops and houses both sides, it extended Bath’s ‘polite’ urban environment seamlessly over the Avon to the site of future developments at Bathwick. But the conceit came at a price. The complex, threearched bridge was estimated to cost £10,998, over three times the amount Pulteney originally budgeted.48 In July 1770, indeed, not only did the Aldermen of Bath write to Pulteney asking him to ‘reconsider his plans’, but he was also refused an increased mortgage on the value of the Pulteney estates.49 He was clearly determined not to compromise, however. By the end of August, only a month after this initial refusal, archives show that Pulteney had written to Hope & Company in Amsterdam - Europe’s largest banking house - to say how he was looking forward immensely to meeting the two Hope brothers and thanking them for their loan of £20,000 on his ‘Grenadan Estate’.50 Not only had his brothers’ colonial trading links given Pulteney access to international credit at the highest level, it was only the personal security through his Caribbean sugar estate which allowed him to build the bridge in Bath which bears the family name.

Pulteney Bridge was completed shortly before the start of the war of American Independence in 1776 when speculative development in Bath all but ceased. Construction work did not begin again until the 1780s, when transatlantic trading also recommenced and architect Thomas Baldwin’s grand plans for the development of Bathwick itself finally began to be implemented. And it is during this period - the fourth great phase of Bath’s expansion - that we see the greatest effect of Caribbean wealth on the city.

As Madge Dresser shows in Slavery Obscured, West Indian finance was instrumental in the late eighteenth century development of the Bristol hillside suburb of Clifton. Overlooking, but at once removed from the shipping docked below, Clifton was home to wealthy merchants and West Indian absentees, together with genteel visitors to Hotwells Spa. Indeed, many families of Scots origin 46

Baccaye, later Westerhall Estate, Grenada and Port Royal Estate, Tobago. William Adam, Robert’s father had designed a five-arched, stone bridge over the River Tay, near Abefeldy in Scotland in 1733 as part of General Wade’s road-building programme. 48 Pulteney Papers, Huntington Library, Pasadena, California, Box 8: Spa. 49 Pulteney Papers, Huntington library, Box 8: Bath 30th July, 1770: Aldermen and Council of Bath-W. Pulteney. 50 Pulteney Papers, Huntington Library, Pasadena, California, Box 8: Spa, Germany 27 August 1770: William Pulteney to Messrs Hope & Co. 47

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settled there after a period in the Caribbean.51 This ‘continually new accession’ of inhabitants had ’occasioned the hill to be almost covered with elegant piles of building and separate mansions,’ wrote the author of a guide to the town: ’this place bids to become a grand city, and with the buildings below will constitute a sort of Westminster and Court end of the Town to Bristol it lying duly to the west of this ancient city’.52 Indeed, if you walk from Bristol’s old quaysides through the streets of neo-classical limestone houses of Hotwells, Montpellier, St Paul’s and up the hillsides towards Clifton Downs, you could almost be in Bath itself. But, although Clifton was ‘one of the most pleasant, healthy and elegant villages of the Kingdom.’ 53 it was, of course, a mere adjunct to a provincial port of ‘commerce and dirt’. An investment in Bath, however, put one on the national stage. The resort, therefore, continued to be an attractive alternative for wealthy Bristol-based West India merchants and absentee plantation owners, who wished to invest in real estate. Indeed, the Pulteneys and Brydges aside, among the most prominent investors in Bath were Jamaican plantation owners and Scots West India merchants Nathanial and Zachariah Bayly, the founders of Bath City Bank.54 Nathanial was particularly committed to the development of Grosvenor Place, a site some way north east from the town centre near the London Road, and loaned large sums to the developer John Evleigh to create a scheme comprising a new ‘pleasure garden’ on the banks of the river, overlooked by 140 houses and a hotel.

The bank also funded two other developments by Evleigh: Somerset Place and Camden Crescent on Lansdowne Hill to the north. All three schemes, however, were abandoned unfinished after the collapse of Bath City Bank in 1793, the year of the slave revolution in France’s largest sugar colony, St Domingue (Haiti) and Britain’s subsequent declaration of war on the French Republic.55 However, 41 terraced houses - and the ornate façade of the hotel - still remain, as do the sinuous golden terraces of Evleigh’s two other uncompleted developments. Moreover, it appears that Evleigh was not the only Bath developer to suffer from the crisis in confidence and banking collapses. If you cross Pulteney Bridge via Argyll Street and walk along the length of Great Pulteney Street to the small public park at Sydney Gardens (commemorating Britain’s new colony in Australia), you reach Beckford Road – the name of a further prominent absentee Jamaican family, whose story I take up in Chapter Nine. Halfway along the street, however, the development of five storey terraces stops abruptly and continues as modest, two storey, late nineteenth century villas clearly intended for a very different clientele.

51

Douglas Hamilton, op.cit. pp.213-215. W Mathews, The New History, op.cit, p.215. 53 W Mathews, op.cit. p.107. 54 Neale describes the investments, but does not pick up on the West Indian links (Brian Edwards, author of A History Civil and Commercial of the West Indies was their nephew) - Neale, ibid, p.246-256. 55 Several other British banks with prominent Caribbean connections including the Monmouthshire Bank also collapsed during this time. See Robin Blackburn: The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848, London, New York, 1996, pp.213-260 for a wider discussion of the crisis. 52

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5.7 Grosvenor Place

Eighteenth century Bath, therefore, was not just a larger version of a pleasure resort like Tunbridge, or even a ‘polite’ provincial centre such as York, but a town where the urban fabric was intimately linked with Britain’s imperial fortunes, and, in particular, the slave-based economy of the transatlantic colonial trade. As the author of an eighteenth century guide sardonically observed (following Britain’s loss of half its transatlantic colonies during the War of Independence): ‘The squares, obelisks, circus, crescents, and many magnificent and regular piles, remind the literary traveler of old Rome, of which Bath is the nearest resemblance that this country can afford’.56

While Bath, of course, was no imperial capital in a formal political sense, the resort’s ability to attract both Britain’s landed elite and the country’s colonial adventurers (whom, as we have seen, were often younger brothers or cousins of landed families) made it a formidable cultural power base. Indeed, Bath was not merely a playground for Bristol’s Atlantic merchants; it was a centre, during the eighteenth century, at least, of national cultural importance: the capital of the West.

56

W Mathews, The new history, op.cit., p.109.

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As the renowned economist Adam Smith - based himself in Glasgow, on the Scottish west coast noted as early as 1776, the success of Britain’s colonial expansion in the Americas had caused British overseas trade a ‘total change in its direction’57. It was westerly Atlantic-facing ports, indeed like Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow - that saw rapid expansion during the eighteenth century. This was very firmly at the expense of the eastern ports, which traded mostly with continental Europe, and by the mid-eighteenth century, in population terms, Bristol had eclipsed Norwich as England’s second city.

But, I argue, this move to the west was not just an economic shift, it was the start of a cultural transformation. Bath’s development, namely, marked the beginning of what can best be described as a shift in the ‘cultural geography’ of the British Isles towards the Atlantic-facing west. Accompanying this change of ‘economic scene’, was the very different physical topography of the western side of Britain. It was a shift that was not only depicted in paintings of the time, but it also marked a pivotal point in the development of British landscape art.

Despite the country’s growing wealth, mid-eighteenth century Britain was not a particularly propitious place for ambitious artists. There was little royal or church patronage, and most ‘connoisseurs’ of art - like John Boyd, one of the foremost collectors of the time 58 - preferred to buy paintings by established Dutch or French artists. The exceptions, as we have seen, were country house views and portraits. By the mid-eighteenth century, the concentration of the wealthy and fashionable in Bath meant the city had become a magnet to aspiring British artists seeking potential patrons. Indeed, the walls of Bath’s charitable hospital The Royal Infirmary became a public showcase for artists’ work. Joshua Reynolds, for example, was one of the many who settled in the city in the boom years of the 1760s, painting portraits of, among others, West Indian absentees Edwin Lascelles and Clement Tudway from Wells. Suffolk-born Thomas Gainsborough, too - introduced to the town by doctor Philip Thicknesse, a former neighbour - painted Britain’s colonial elite. Indeed, it was his success in the ‘cursed face business’59 that gave Gainsborough the financial security to experiment.

As is still clear to any traveller today, the topography between Bath and Bristol contrasts starkly with the wide, rolling, arable fields of eastern and central English counties. In north Somerset, on the western (and, therefore, wet) scarp slope of the Cotswolds, the limestone geology, together with human activity such as quarrying and mining, have resulted in a distinctive, intimately-scaled countryside of steep-sided ‘coombes’, small pastures, thickly-wooded hills and precipitous cliffs. And

57

Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the…Wealth of Nations, London, 1776, Vol II, Book IV, p.200. See Hancock, op.cit., appendix, for Boyd’s collection. Thanks to Professor David Solkin at the Courtauld Institute of Art for pointing out the significance of this to me. 59 Quoted in Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in Bath, London, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 58. 58

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it is these landscapes which Gainsborough used as backdrops for a series of paintings that, as their titles suggest, were very different from his portraits of wealthy clients.

Examples included Wooded Landscape with Figures, Cottage and Pool, Mountainous Wooded Landscape and Wooded Landscapes with Peasants in a Country Wagon. At the time, these works were not particularly popular with Bath’s wealthy visitors. Indeed, Gainsborough did not sell any during the 1760s, nor were any prints made from them. Nevertheless the composition of the paintings, which echoed the fashionable 17th century images of the steep-sided, wooded hills between Rome and Naples by artists Nicholas Poussin and Salvator Rosa, showed how the topography of western Britain was starting to be seen anew.60 Indeed, in the latter part of the eighteenth century the very hills, cliffs and lakes of the westernmost counties of England, Wales and Scotland began to be considered as landscape art.

In the next two chapters, I explore how the late eighteenth century fashion for landscape touring in the Wye Valley, north Wales, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands was intimately connected to the rise of Bristol, Liverpool, Lancaster, Whitehaven and Glasgow as prominent Atlantic ports. Before I do so, however, I first want to examine the architecture and layout of Bath in a little more detail.

One of the most striking physical features of Bath is the relationship between the crisp geometry of the limestone-faced architecture and the green amphitheatre of the surrounding hills. In its 1987 eulogy, indeed, UNESCO pronounced that, in terms of the connection between buildings and landscape, Bath feels ’more akin to 19th century garden cities’ than the ‘Renaissance cities’ of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.61 The ‘harmonious combination’ of architecture and landscape so admired by the United Nations, however, is - at least in Bath’s earlier building developments - as much a pragmatic response to site conditions as an aesthetic ambition.

Bath’s location in a steep-sided river valley meant that flat land was difficult to obtain. Creating formal urban layouts - such as the squares of London’s Bloomsbury, for example - was, therefore, complex. Wood’s earliest built scheme, Queen’s Square, is set on a slight slope, while the later Circus was constructed on levelled ground. Closer to the Abbey, The Parades62 and Great Pulteney Street were built on top of vast, vaulted basements. Techniques like this were, of course, expensive and therefore best avoided by speculative developers. Indeed, as the author of Bath a Simile observed, the most noticeable features of many of Bath’s streets are not the classically proportioned smooth

60 61 62

See Sloman, op.cit., Chapter 7, ‘Nature sat for Mr Gainsborough’. http:/whc.unesco.org/en/list/428 City of Bath See Michael Forsyth, Pevsner Architectural Guides: Bath, London and New Haven: Yale 2003, pp.24 -27.

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ashlar facades, but the rough, stone surfaces of the coursed rubble flanking walls of each house, as the terraces step down the slopes.

How the high town-a side view shows Of pil’d up cups you’ll wonder; And can’t perhaps the low’r suppose, As many saucers under.63

Wood the Younger’s later development at The Royal Crescent (1767–75), however, was very different. Indeed, he resolved the problems of creating neo-classical architectural formality, and minimising elaborate groundworks on a sloping site, by building an open-sided development of terraced houses set along the contours. Rather than continuing the Roman urban typology of the Circus, terraced houses that formed the curved street of the Royal Crescent were set on one side of the road, open to a view of fields and meadows beyond.

There are no surviving records of Wood’s intentions for the site, but it has a notable similarity to Wood the Elder’s theatrical design for Ralph Allen’s Palladian villa Prior Park (1743), to the south of the town. However, his financial difficulties coupled with the odd, corner approach to a formal monumental layout suggest that the Royal Crescent may have, in fact, been the first phase of a plan to emulate the grandeur of Rome’s Colosseum. The agricultural land which the building then overlooked would, naturally, have been more valuable as potential development plots; it was not until the creation of the municipal Victoria Park in the 1830s, that residents of the Royal Crescent were assured of the wide, bucolic views which they enjoy today. Indeed, Malton’s 1777 painting of the newly completed building, featuring a wealthy family, complete with grazing horses and dogs playing on fine lawns, has the air of a developer’s marketing image: it transforms a half-completed, unpaved urban layout into an aspirational vision of a vast, architecturally sophisticated rural palace.

Whether by accident or design, The Crescent created nevertheless a unique form of urban layout. Wealthy residents of The Circus, The Parades or Queen’s Square looked out of their sash windows on to elegant neo-classical facades, paved streets and formal gardens - a physical manifestation of a polite, urban ‘bourgeois public sphere’.64 The denizens of the Royal Crescent, however – such as Philip Thicknesse, Gainsborough’s patron and one of the earliest investors, who had purchased No. 8 in 1768 - overlooked open meadows with glimpses of the town centre beyond.65 Rather than forming part of a dense network of contained urban spaces, this monumental composition was connected to the city by means of a closely framed, semi-rural view. 63

Anon, Bath: A Simile, op.cit. I have used here a phrase coined by Jurgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the public sphere (trans 1989). 65 The landscaping of the Royal Crescent and the trees in the Circus are nineteenth century additions. 64

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5.8 Thomas Malton: The Royal Crescent

The layout of Royal Crescent was to have a profound effect on the subsequent development of Bath and, indeed, the Bristol suburb of Clifton. Houses built after the American War of Independence, such as Evleigh’s striking designs at Camden Crescent and Somerset Place on Lansdowne Hill in Bath and the Royal York Crescent in Bristol, all attest to the way that the curved single-sided street running along the contours was invaluable to developers attempting to create architectural impact on steep slopes. But it was not just the imposing appearance of these developments that was enticing to potential customers: the tree-framed views of the city below from the tall windows and balconies of the elegant first floor drawing rooms would have also been a great attraction.66

For in late Georgian Britain, the simple contemplation of landscape - quite apart from its expression in drawing or painting - came to be regarded as an important genteel pursuit. Indeed, for the cultivated, to display a correct taste in landscape was a valuable social accomplishment and almost in itself the practice of an art.67 By the latter part of the century, for instance, visitors were attracted to Bath as much for the ‘picturesque’ semi-rural views from the hillsides, as the urban activities pictured in Malton’s mid-century watercolours. Rather than promenading on the formal Parades in the centre, fashionable visitors walked to the nearby villages of Lyncombe and Widcombe to the south east of the city, where quarrying had created extensive cliffside views. Bath’s ‘bourgeois public sphere’ clearly encompassed much more than elegant Palladian streets and paved roads. 66

As a repeated urban form, the typology of an open-sided ‘Crescent’ has problems, for the ‘polite façade’ of one house looks onto the utilitarian back of another. The terraces at Bath, therefore, not only step down the slope, but are also separated from each other by a wide belt of trees and planting. 67 See John Barrell, The Idea of the Landscape and Sense of Place, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

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It is this genteel fashion for picturesque prospects, indeed, that is gently satirised by Jane Austen in her novel Northanger Abbey (completed in 1803, but not published until 1817). Austen’s heroine, Catherine, is given a lecture on the principles of landscape ‘appreciation’ during a walk up into the hills around Bath with Henry Tilney (son of the pineapple-growing owner of Northanger Abbey, General Tilney). At first Catherine is ‘quite lost’: she describes how ‘the little which she could understand appeared to contradict the very few notions she had entertained on the matter before. It seemed that if a good view were no longer to be taken from the top of a high hill, and that a clear blue sky were no longer proof of a fine day’.68 However, as her companion continues, ’her attention was so earnest, that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste’. Indeed, Catherine proved ‘so hopeful a scholar, that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole of the city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape’.69

Catherine’s abrupt dismissal of the aesthetics of eighteenth century Britain’s most fashionable town, would, no doubt, have drawn wry smiles from Austen’s early nineteenth century readers. For Bath, the cultural capital of the Atlantic West, was where the vogue for picturesque landscape tourism first took hold. Moreover wealth from sugar and slavery was instrumental to the opening up of the western landscape to picturesque tourism. It is a theme I shall develop further in subsequent chapters. In the next, I show how the patronage of an Antiguan absentee planter during the early 1750s made a visit to the wooded cliffs of the nearby Wye Valley a popular excursion for Bath’s genteel visitors.

.

68 69

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, London, 1816, p.110. Ibid.

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Chapter Six Nature’s Prospects A Creole there is and he lives at a place Which Nature and Art join together to grace . Monmouthshire Election Rhyme, May 1771

Early one morning in July 1760, a coach left Bath on its way to Hotwells, the fashionable spa just to the west of Bristol’s harbour. On board was ‘Miss M’ who, a few days later, described her ‘agreeable jaunt‘ in a letter to a friend.1 But the spa was merely a stop for breakfast and to pick up two more passengers: the true purpose of the expedition was to visit the gardens at Piercefield Park, recently created by an Antiguan absentee named Valentine Morris.

Piercefield was situated on the banks of the River Wye near Chepstow, a shipbuilding town on the far side of the of the Severn estuary. Following their breakfast, therefore, the company made their way from Clifton and set off for ‘Aust‘, the old passage over to Wales’2 around ten miles to the north. Despite treacherous currents, huge tides and hidden sandbars, Aust was a major crossing on the Bristol Channel, and by the eighteenth century there were regular ferry services transporting goods and people over the two mile stretch of water between the towns and industries of Somerset and (then largely rural) south Wales. From the perspective of a wealthy woman, whose daily activities in Bath would have been confined to assemblies, teas and balls, this was indeed a ‘wild and whimsical’ adventure ‘abroad’.3

On reaching the coast, the party ‘just took a little refreshment’ at the ‘passage house’; before driving over ‘rocks, amongst sea-weed and I can’t tell what’, they eventually reached their embarkation point.

‘With some difficulty we got into a Stable in which we were to cross the water…Yes, a stable! Littered from one end to the other with dirty straw and filled with as many horses as people. Oh we went most sociably over, Horses, coach and ourselves.’4 When they arrived in Wales, the party drove to Chepstow, where they went to the ‘best Inn to find accommodations.’ Lodgings secured for the night, ‘we made the best of our way to Persfield, the Seat of Mr MORRIS’. 1

Thomas Hull, Select Letters, London, 1778, ‘Miss M’ to W Shenstone, July 21 1760, pp. 285-294 (Shenstone was the Shropshire estate owner, who had been so enthusiastic about Grainger’s poem The Sugar Cane). 2 Ibid, p.287. 3 Ibid, p.286. 4 Ibid, p.287.

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6.1 Etching of Piercefield from the Wye, c.1801

At the time, the house was still the old manor, indeed, it was only replaced by the sophisticated John Soane-designed house later in the century. Morris, it seemed, was more concerned with creating landscapes than building. Indeed, as Boyd, Lascelles and Young were later to do, Morris had created a fashionable ‘natural style’ parkland approach to the front of the house.5 Although the visitors admired the ‘waving lawns,’6 it was not the garden itself, but the ‘prospects’ from it that most interested Miss M and her fellow travellers. For, to the rear of the house, the rolling contours abruptly became a 400 feet high cliff, through which Morris had cut numerous walks and pathways to take advantage of the views from the high vantage point. As Miss M exclaimed: ‘The Gardens are situated on the Rocks, I cannot call the Banks of the River Wye and cut into Walks, in themselves are excessively beautiful, but the superior beauty of the views they command, so entirely engrosses the eye, that they can be very little heeded.’ 7

5

There are no records to show when construction started, but the fact that Miss M could see a completed lawn in 1760 suggests that Piercefield was an early example of new parkland landscaping. 6 Hull, op.cit, Miss M. to W. Shenstone, July 21, 1760. 7 Hull, op.cit, p.288.

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Several of the views were towards the cliffs themselves, as they curved around in a vast natural amphitheatre. Miss M thought that they resembled ‘the Ruins of old fortifications’8, while some were covered by the ‘most pleasing variety of greens that the eyes can behold’. Other vantage points provided bucolic panoramas of livestock ‘grazing on sweet pastures,‘ in the farms that lay below the cliff while others allowed view of the nearby ruins of Chepstow Castle. There was an octagonal temple surrounded by ‘Chinese’ rails which gave ‘an extensive prospect of many counties,’ a cave ‘from whence are seen the Rocks, the wood, the River, with fine Lawns,’ a ‘Chinese’ bridge giving a ‘pretty, confined prospect’ and a spot which provided a distant view of ‘the two passages over the Severn from England to Wales.’9 Altogether, Morris had fashioned 23 different rural ‘scenes’ for visitors to admire. ’Such a place for the Variety and Beauty of its Prospects I never saw,’10 Miss M exclaimed.

6.2 Thomas Hearne: Water-colour view from Piercefield to Chepstow Castle (1794)

Indeed, the sheer scale of his endeavours proved too much for Miss M and her party: ‘The gardens are seven mile round so our poor old Lady was forced to occupy a Seat just by the house and the rest of us then walked as far as our legs would carry us. We could not

8 9

Hull, op.cit., p.288. Hull, ibid, Dodesley to W Shenstone, letter LXVII, October 12 1759, p.265. Hull, ibid, Miss M to W Shenstone, July 21, 1760.

10

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compass the whole round but saw all the principle prospects.’11 Fortunately, after their exhausting tour, one of the visitors was already ‘acquainted with a lady at Mr Morris’ house and they were invited inside ‘to eat a bit of cake and drink a glass of wine,’ before returning to their inn for the night.

The next day the party continued their excursion, but this time partly by boat along the steep gorges of the lower reaches of the Wye. Here the river runs along the north-western edge of the Forest of Dean. During eighteenth century, the forest was a major source both of mature oak for shipbuilding and of small trees to form charcoal for iron-making. After visiting the remains of a former monastery Tintern Abbey ‘the most curious piece of ruins I ever beheld’12 Miss M and her fellows stopped at the nearby ironworks, where they saw ‘the manner of making bar iron and the drawing of wire’, before the oarsman rowed them back down the Wye to Piercefield.

‘As we rowed along the River we had the pleasure of looking up to those beautiful Rocks we had looked down from in Mr. Morris ground. This Reverse of view made a second enjoyment and we were more sensible of the Height of the mountains in this situation than when we were at the summit of them. So delightful was this Water-Scene, that we all wished a continuance of it.’13 The party then asked the boatman if he could return them safely across the Bristol Channel. Coach, horses and servants were dispatched to the ferry, while the ‘polite’ party had ‘the most charming sail to the opposite shore to England’. After a reviving drink of tea, at the passage house they returned to Hot-wells where they visited the ‘Quaker’s grotto’, a Caribbean shell grotto built by a Bristol West India merchant Thomas Goldney in his garden before returning to Bath the next day.

Miss M’s writing is so evocative and her enthusiasm so infectious that it feels like her trip was made only a few weeks ago. But she was just one of many hundreds, if not thousands, of people who visited Piercefield during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the views from the cliffside walks were described and analysed by some of the period’s most respected writers on landscape aesthetics: from theorists such as Thomas Whately in his influential Observations on Modern Gardening14 and William Gilpin in his popular treatise on ‘picturesque’ aesthetics Observations on the River Wye, to poets such as William Wordsworth in Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’15 11

Hull, op.cit. p.288. Ibid, p.289. Ibid, p.289. 14 Thomas Whately: Observations on Modern Gardening, Dublin, James Williams 1770. 15 William Wordsworth: Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during th a tour: July 13 , 1798. 12 13

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Charles Heath, a printer from the nearby town of Monmouth and author of a 1793 guidebook to Piercefield - ‘sold by him in the market place and at all the inns in the county’ - was not exaggerating when he claimed that: ‘The scenes at Persfield (sic) have been examined by men of such distinguished taste, and the various beauties with which the place is surrounded, pointed out by them with such ability, that in their description the Stranger will find every feature noticed deserving of attention. No part of the kingdom has been more the object of general curiosity, nor seen with greater pleasure.’16

Today the walks at Piercefield Park are registered as Grade I, the highest form of statutory protection afforded by national legislation in Britain, as an ‘early and outstanding example of a sublime landscape’.17 But, despite the extent of Piercefield’s influence during the eighteenth century, it is little-known today outside a small circle of landscape and garden historians. This may be because the estate has been broken up into different ownerships; it is, however, still crossed by public footpaths and, with a little persistence and some imagination, it is possible to recreate the route taken by Miss M and so many other eighteenth century visitors.

6.3 Map of Piercefield from William Coxe: A Historical Tour through Monmouthshire, 1804

An elegantly drawn fold-out map incorporated into an 1803 guide book, shows a plan of the Piercefield estate in the late eighteenth century. The east boundary is marked by the sinuous 16 17

Charles Heath, Descriptive Accounts of Persfield and Chepstow, Monmouth, 1793, p i. Cadw/ICOMOS, Register of Parks and Landscapes of Historic Interest, HMSO.

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curves of the River Wye, the west by the new Chepstow-to-Monmouth turnpike road. From this road, a sweeping drive leads through parkland towards the mansion house, stables and walled garden located on the northern banks of a great horseshoe-shaped river meander.

With a copy of this map, once you have found the village of St Arvan’s just outside Chepstow, it is possible to orientate yourself with relative ease. The ‘slopes and waving lawns’ now form part of Chepstow’s well-known racecourse. A little way from the stands, toilet blocks and car parks is a footpath leading beyond the racetrack to the handsome façade of the house, at the point where parkland and wooded cliffs meet. The ‘prospect’ from this spot has evidently hardly changed in the last 250 years. There is, first, the wonderful contrast of walking from sun-lit open parkland into the cool of the wooded cliff face. Then the combination of the leafy gloom of the woods and the sudden, terrifying realisation that you are standing on the edge of a drop of several hundred feet makes the view of the river and the Welsh border farm below quite extraordinary.

6.4 View from the River Wye up towards the cliffs

After the initial excitement of this view, however, trying to recapture the experience of eighteenth century visitors becomes more difficult. For example, one visitor described how, after looking at this prospect you then ‘proceed to the temple, a small neat building on the highest part of these grounds and imagination cannot form an idea of anything more 135

beautiful than what appears to your ravished sight from this amazing point of view’.18 But the temple has long since disappeared and the ‘amazing’ aspect is obscured by foliage. Attempts to follow further descriptions of that time are equally disappointing. Indeed, rather than part of a once-famous landscape garden, Piercefield Park nowadays seems little different from the woods and paths that line the cliffs and yellow-arrowed footpaths of the officially designated ‘Wye Valley Walk’.

6.5 Piercefield’s walks and cave in 2004

But then you realise: that is exactly the point. In twenty-first century Britain, and indeed many ‘Western‘ cultures, following a footpath to admire a renowned ‘beauty spot’ is regarded as a completely normal thing to do. Indeed, large areas of upland in England, Wales and Scotland are designated National Parks or, like the Wye Valley near Piercefield, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. In one of the most highly urbanised and densely populated 18

Arthur Young, A Six week Tour though the Southern Counties of England and Wales, London, 1768, p.133.

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countries in the world, the aesthetic contemplation of large tracts of ‘nature’ is seen as an individual’s right and is protected by law. But, before the early 1750s or -60s, few British people would have chosen to walk along a wooded cliff face simply as a leisure activity. As clergyman John Wesley reflected in his diary following his visit to Piercefield in 1769, Morris’ woods would have instead been valued very differently:19

Through these woods an abundance of serpentine walks are cut, wherein many seats and alcoves are placed; most of which command a surprising prospect of rocks and fields on the other side of the river. And must all these be burned up? What will become of us then, if we set our hearts on them?’20 Clearly the cliffside woods had once, like most of the valley, been a commercial crop used to make charcoal to fuel the local ironworks. Now, however, they were living picture frames for carefully selected ‘scenes’ of rural life. ‘Nature so cultivated surrounded by nature so wild, compose a lovely landskip together,’ 21 mused Thomas Whately, while the views clearly entranced the agricultural reformer Arthur Young. ‘The eyes of your imagination are not keen enough to take in this point, he exclaimed, ‘which the united talents of a Claud, (sic) a Poussin, a Vernet and a Smith would scarcely be able to sketch.’22

It was high praise from a man chiefly remembered for his advice to landowners on how to improve crop yields.23 For Morris’ Caribbean wealth had not only allowed him to convert acres of agricultural land into ornamental lawns, but also to transform woods that had once, too, been an income-generating part of the Piercefield estate, into a gallery of landscape art.

Morris’ cliffside walks and 23 ‘prospects’ at Piercefield were a consummate example of the aesthetic of the ‘picturesque’, the British fashion for appreciating the rural environment according to an ideal found in seventeenth century Italianate landscape paintings Indeed, this picturesque aesthetic was so prevalent during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - influencing the growth of tourism in the Wye Valley, upland Scotland and Wales, as well as the design of landscapes, buildings, tourist resorts and even railway infrastructure - that it has been labelled the ‘nation’s principal contribution to the arts…and European aesthetics’.24

19

Five years after his visit to Piercefield, Wesley produced a pamphlet Thoughts Upon Slavery, criticising the viciousness of plantation life. See David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Black British History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 514. 20 John Wesley: Journal, 25 August, 1769, quoted in Ivor Waters, The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, op.cit. p.17. 21 Thomas Whateley, op.cit., p.241. 22 Arthur Young, op.cit., p.136. 23 Young’s tour was principally made to examine agriculture in Britain following riots and food shortages in 1766. 24 David Watkin, The English Vision; The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design, London: Murray, 1982, p. vii.

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The pioneering account of the growth and influence of the picturesque aesthetic is Christopher Hussey’s The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (1927) and, despite its age, it remains a definitive survey. According to Hussey, it is the Italianate landscapes by Nicholas Poussin, Salvador Rosa or Claude Lorraine - which European tourists like John Boyd, for instance, bought as souvenirs - that first awoke the interest in British natural scenery.25 It is worth pausing for a moment, therefore, to examine one of these landscape paintings carefully, to understand more precisely the aesthetic ideals to which Piercefield’s ‘prospects’ were being compared.

Arguably, eighteenth century British collectors regarded landscapes by Claude, the commonly-used name of the French painter Claude Gelee, in the highest esteem. It is, therefore, one of his works that I shall look at in detail: Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia (1682), which now hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

6.6 Claude Gelee (Lorraine): Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the stag of Sylvia.

Contrary to the suggestion made in the title, the painting’s main subject is not the actual shooting of the stag. Indeed, the group of hunters in the bottom left of the picture form a small and relatively insignificant part of the composition. Instead, the focus is the physical 25

Hussey, The Picturesque, op.cit., p.7. Boyd owned at least five paintings by Poussin and one by Rosa. See David Hancock, Citizens of the World, op.cit., appendix.

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topography: a rocky, heavily wooded bay, scattered with classical ruins looking out to sea and a mountainous island in the distance beyond. Like many of Claude’s paintings, the picture has a high, but semi-enclosed view-point; indeed, it demonstrates the way Claude typically structured his compositions.

Each side of the painting is formed from a series of overlapping elements: a ruin, a group of trees, a tower-topped, rocky promontory. These elements are known as ‘coulisses’, a term derived from the French name for the scenery wings found either side of a stage. Indeed, like renaissance stage sets, they use false perspective to achieve the effect of distance. However, Claude’s particular skill is that he achieves the effect of perspective not by a gradual diminution of the scale of the objects within the landscape, but a series of leaps down from one scale to another, reconciled by only the eye’s constant diagonal movement across the picture as attention is drawn to each object by the sloping lines of the hills. This ‘pictoral depth’ created by the composition is further aided by Claude’s use of colour: ruins and hunters in the bottom and sides of the painting, or ‘foreground’, are rendered in strong earthy tones, making them seem closer towards you, while the sea and mountain beyond are in pale cooler tints which helps them recede into the background.

Like many of Claude’s paintings, Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia has a haunting, dream-like quality. Indeed, having examined it closely, the ease with which one of his works can be picked out in a gallery reminds you of his extraordinary technical skills. For Claude’s paintings, like those of Poussin and Rosa, were of imaginary landscapes. While elements would have been sketched from buildings and views Claude had seen during his time spent in Italy, the painting itself would have been carefully composed in his studio. And if his landscapes seem vaguely familiar to anybody who has stayed in a nineteenth century hotel on the coast of north Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland, that is a measure of the extent to which Claude’s paintings influenced the growth of eighteenth and nineteenth century British ‘picturesque’ tourism.

At Piercefield, the Antiguan slave-owner Valentine Morris was clearly a remarkable artistic patron. While Boyd’s house at Danson is an elegant exemplar of eighteenth century Palladian design, and Lascelles’ parkland succeeded in producing a glorious setting for Harewood House, it is difficult to argue that they were so very different from other grand villas, landscape gardens and country houses of the period. Indeed, they could be said to typify the patronage of eighteenth century Britain’s merchant landowning elite. But Morris’ creation at Piercefield was different.

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Rather than merely creating a magnificent house or landscape garden, Morris used the topography of his estate to change the way that people perceived the places and activities – the farms, the ferry crossing, the ruined castle, the cliffs and woods - found along an eighteenth century trading route. Appropriating the natural ‘amphitheatre’ created by a semicircle of cliffs, and judiciously felling trees to form high ‘viewpoints’, he created ‘prospects’ that reminded educated eighteenth century visitors of the fashionable landscape paintings of Italian landscapes (or at least prints of the landscape paintings) that they had previously seen.

As Arthur Young commented after his visit in 1767: ‘In point of striking picturesque views …Persfield (sic) is exquisite’.26 While in Observations of Modern Gardening (1770), where he argued that landscape gardening was ‘superior to landskip (sic) painting as reality to representation’,27 Thomas Whately admired how Morris’ paths and views extended the ‘boundary of the place … beyond the scenes which are thus appropriated to it … (affording) a greater variety than can generally be found in any garden, the scenery of which is confined to the enclosure’.28 By creating ‘prospects’ of distant shipping on the Bristol Channel, the workings of a Welsh border farm, or the near views of a cliff face, Morris’ 23 carefully framed views transformed the ordinary into art.

But what could have prompted a young absentee creole to create the cliffside walks that so captivated eighteenth century British ‘polite’ society? Unfortunately, the break-up of the Piercefield estate means that there are few contemporary records left. And, of these sources, nothing provides any evidence of Morris’ aesthetic ambitions. It is the accounts, therefore, of contemporary visitors that provide the source of much recent scholarship.29 Two of the most detailed studies of Piercefield are by a local historian, Ivor Waters.30 Frustratingly, however, many of the of original papers at the Institute of Geneologists, on which he based his work, have since been mislaid.31 But fragments of information in contemporary newspapers and magazines, together with official records (Morris was later to be Governor of the Caribbean island of St Vincent) help to give some idea of his background and, indeed, corroborate Waters’ work.

26

Arthur Young, Tour, op.cit, p.137. Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, p.1. Observations, ibid, p.236. 29 Elizabeth Whittle: ‘All these enchanting Scenes,’ Journal of Garden History, Vol. 24: Issue 1, pp.148 –161, Cadw/Icomos: Register of Landscapes of Special Historic Interest , HMSO, 1994. See also Stephen Spending: ‘One Among the Many: Popular Aesthetics, Polite Culture and the Country House Landscape’, Dana Arnold (ed.) The Georgian Country House , Stroud: Sutton, 2003. pp. 61-78 and Seymour, Daniels and Watkins: ‘Estate and Empire’, Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 1998, pp.313-351. 30 Ivor Waters: Piercefield on the Banks of the Wye, 1975 and The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, 1964. 31 Society of Geneologists, London, Acc. no. 22138 ‘Morris of Antigua’. 27 28

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According to Waters, Valentine’s great grandfather, John Morris, had emigrated to Barbados from the village of Tintern32 soon after the English Civil War, to join his uncles Richard and Lewis who had left as indentured servants for the American colonies in the 1630s.33 It is not clear whether earlier generations of the Morris family had invested sugar profits in British land, but their Caribbean connections may well explain the Barbados Woods in the hills above Tintern Abbey – one of the curiosities of name which, as I have explained, led me towards exploring this thesis.

By the time Valentine was born in 1727, his father, also named Valentine, had moved to Antigua, where he owned several sugar estates.34 Like many other prosperous West Indian families, they left the Caribbean for Britain at the start of the war in 173935 and, a year later, Morris’ father used the equity from his Antiguan plantations to purchase Piercefield a few miles downstream from his family roots in Tintern. However, Morris’ father had little time to enjoy retirement in the Wye valley, for less than two years later he was dead. 36

It was soon obvious that his 15 year-old heir Valentine was a strong-willed youth, much indulged by his mother and elder sisters. Rejecting his father’s instructions that ‘he be sent to Leiden (a Dutch university popular with London merchants) for his education’ or ‘study the common law at one of our inns of court’ and that Piercefield to be sold to pay legacies,37 he read Classics at Cambridge instead. Contrary to his father’s stipulations against early matrimony, too, he then married Mary Mordaunt, a niece of the Earl of Peterborough but with ‘no fortune other than beauty, virtue and good sense’38 and, aided by his lawyer brother-inlaw, retained the Piercefield estate in trust. Clearly, Valentine aimed not to be a City lawyer, nor London merchant, but a ‘gentleman’.

In the first years of their marriage, the couple spent little time at Piercefield. Instead, they preferred the urban delights of Bath, where Valentine was notorious for his passion for ‘the gaming tables’ – his card skills, apparently, acquired during his childhood in the Caribbean.39 Nevertheless, it also seems that he was interested in more ‘genteel’ cultural pursuits. For it was, according to Waters, on their return from a trip to Antigua in 1753 to inspect their sugar plantations, that Morris and his wife turned their attention to landscaping their Welsh country 32

Society of Geneologists: family tree of the Morris family, drawn up by JR Thompson in 1928. John Hotten: The Original Lists of Persons of Quality who went from Great Britain to the American plantations, New York, 1931. 34 Ivor Waters: The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, Chepstow: Chepstow Society, 1975, p.2. 35 Ivor Waters, ibid, p.2. 36 Extracts from will of Colonel Valentine Morris in Vere Oliver, The History of Antigua, 1894, Vol. II. 37 Obituary of Valentine Morris: The Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1789, pp.862-864. 38 Ibid. 39 The Gentleman’s Magazine, op.cit, p.864. 33

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estate. Clearly, turning fields into a large lawn would have established Morris and his wife as fashionable landowners, but what could have prompted them to create the cliffside walks and prospects that so appealed to eighteenth century visitors?

Inspiration may have lain close to hand. For Morris was not the first to notice the aesthetic qualities of the buildings and topography of the lower Wye Valley. Alexander Pope’s influential poem on ‘taste’, Epistle to Lord Bathurst (1731) had celebrated the public walks and clifftop ‘prospect’ created by a local benefactor, John Kyrle, in the late seventeenth century at Ross, a small market town thirty miles or so upstream. Indeed, in the poem Pope had praised Kyrle for spending his ‘modest fortune’ on public works, contrasting him with the boorish figure of a ‘dissenting merchant’ Sir Balaam. The creation of 23 different cliffside prospects at Piercefield therefore, had an illustrious precedent.

Nor were Miss M and her party the first ‘polite’ visitors to take boat trips down the River Wye. According to Charles Heath, in the late 1740s, when Colonel Morris was in the process of purchasing Piercefield, the new rector of Ross, John Egerton, had built a pleasure boat to enable his friends see the local landscapes. 40 Indeed, in a poem of 1742, a Gloucestershire clergyman, the Reverend Sneyd Davies, had described a ‘voyage to Tintern Abbey where he viewed the ‘pleasurable sadness’ of its ‘ruins’ and ‘follies’.41 Morris’ patronage at Piercefield, therefore, should be seen as part of a cultural change in attitudes to the lower Wye Valley. While the river was clearly still an important trading route transporting the produce of the Welsh borders to Bristol and beyond, it was also becoming a site of aesthetic pleasure.

Morris’ more extensive and imaginative use of the natural geology of his estate to create a series of framed views, however, was dependent on the substantial wealth that he inherited from his father’s Antiguan plantations. True, the wooded cliffs near the ironworks were already covered with small footpaths formed by charcoal burners as they went about their toil. But Morris’ wide, stone-paved ‘walks’ were entirely different.42 While Arthur Young could regard them ‘merely as an assistance to view the beauties of nature’, the creation of properly-made paths along the sides of the steep, wooded precipice would have been a demanding feat of construction.

Indeed, according to Charles Heath, Morris had employed a huge team of ‘upwards of one hundred men‘43 to achieve his aesthetic aims. However, Heath’s aside ‘the rubbish they 40

Heath, op.cit. Also see David Jacques, Georgian Gardens: The Reign of Nature, London: Batsford, 1993, p.63. See Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, pp.89-92. 42 See Roland Trafford-Roberts, An Assessment of the Historic and Picturesque Viewpoints in the Wye Valley, unpublished report commissioned for the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, February, 2001. 43 Charles Heath, quoted in Ivor Waters, The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, op.cit., p.8. 41

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threw into the River Wye and what was useful they spread over the adjoining grounds’ 44 conceals the complexities of working on such a steep slope,. The ‘useful’ - topsoil and leaf mould - would have had to been taken uphill in heavy buckets or awkward wooden barrows through the woods to the edge of the parkland. Large rocks, gravel and other ‘rubbish’ could not have been randomly ‘thrown’ into the river, as it would have disfigured the views or indeed caught in the trees below; it would have to have been taken to a particularly discreet and steep spot - before tipping it over the 400 foot precipice. The wonders of Piercefield’s famous views, like the ‘natural’ sweeping lawns, were only ‘revealed’ by the exertions of a huge team of men.

Clearly, it was a particular combination of wealth, striking geology and ‘gentlemanly’ aesthetic aspirations that allowed Morris and his wife to create their cliffside walks. John Boyd, for instance, despite his extensive patronage of architecture and landscape, could not have created a living Poussin or Claude at Danson: there simply were no rocks or cliff faces in north Kent to provide the appropriate high, enclosed viewpoints: Boyd’s modern Italianate landscape was in the form of a painting - designed to feature ‘a large waterfall’ and some ‘distant views’ - commissioned from the French painter Vernet to hang on the walls of his salon45.

As Miss M’s friend, William Shenstone, wrote after his visit: ‘(I) could not help reflecting on the singular happiness of Mr Morrice, to be possessed at once of a large fortune, one of the finest situations in England and a wife whose taste for rural improvements appears even superior to his own.’46 However, these circumstances alone do not explain the extent of Piercefield’s influence at the time. To understand why it captured the collective imagination of British eighteenth century ‘polite’ society, it is necessary to look further than Morris’ own ambitions and examine the wider historical reasons why Piercefield appealed to so many people.

Two of the notable features of elite culture in Britain during this period were its increasing mobility, due to the construction of good toll or turnpike roads, and an attitude to domestic privacy that is somewhat different to that of today.47 For example, while the letters of John Boyd’s son show Danson to have been purely a family home, the publication of a printed guide to Harewood, shows how it was visited by many people who were neither friends, nor

44

Heath quoted in Ivor Waters, op.cit. Richard Lea, Danson, The Saloon Paintings: works by Claude Joseph Vernet, George Barret and Elias Martin, English Heritage Historical Analysis & Research Team, Reports and Papers 64, 2003, p.8. 46 Quoted in Ivor Waters, The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, op.cit., p.17. 47 .See Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (eds.), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private Space in the Eighteenth Century, Exeter, 1995. 45

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servants nor indeed business colleagues, but strangers unknown to the Lascelles.48 Indeed, as the number of country house guides published in the eighteenth century attests, these visitors were not coming to see the wealthy owner. They would instead be admiring, or indeed criticising, the architecture of the house, the design of a landscape garden or the provenance and breadth of an art collection.49

Part of Piercefield’s extraordinary popularity and influence was undoubtedly due to the estate’s accessibility from the fashionable resorts of Bath and Bristol Hotwells. Indeed, not only were ‘polite’ visitors - and their coaches - able to use an established ferry crossing over the Bristol Channel, from the mid-1750s they could also ride along the new turnpike road that Morris had been instrumental in building, linking the ferry port to Chepstow and thence from the town past the entrance to his grounds.50

6.6 ‘The Giant’s Cave’ Drawing by George Cumberland from his manuscript Tour in North Wales (1784)

Miss M. and her party were certainly not the only visitors to have received refreshments from Piercefield’s owner, as well. As a writer in The Gentleman’s Magazine noted: ‘The noble manner at which these extensive gardens (always open to the public) were kept, favoured of princely rather than private hospitality…nay the very ale-wife at Chepstow had

48

See John Jewell: A Guide to the Antiquities of Harewood, op.cit. John Harris: ‘English Country House Guides 1740-1840’ in John Summerson (ed): Concerning Architecture, 1968, pp.58-74. 50 See Ivor Waters, op.cit. pp.11-15. 49

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the command of Mr Morris’ Garden, and even hot-houses, to entertain those who were strangers to him.’51 Like a visit to the lavish country house Blaise Castle, near Bath, built by the West India merchant, slave trader and one-time Mayor of Bristol, Roger Farr,52 or the gardens and the grotto of Goldney House, a coach trip to Piercefield was an attractive option for Bath visitors who wearied of the resort’s urban delights. A ‘wild and whimsical journey abroad’ could be undertaken with ease and comfort.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, indeed, Bath’s genteel visitors were not only to be found parading in formal public squares and circuses, nor but looking for ‘prospects’ along the precipitous wooded cliffs of the lower Wye Valley. Indeed, trips along the Wye played a key role in the extraordinary growth and popularity of the phenomenon of the landscape ‘tour’.53 In the summer of 1759, a year before Miss M’s trip, London publisher Robert Dodsley 54 had also travelled ‘with a polite Party of Gentlemen and ladies’55 from Bath to Piercefield. Like Miss M, he too, had described his visit in some detail in a letter a friend, concluding that ‘the place is certainly of the great and sublime kind’. 56 Dodsley’s use of the term ‘sublime’ is one of its earliest recorded uses to describe the aesthetic qualities of a British landscape; moreover, it hints at another reason why Piercefield became such a popular destination.

Two years prior to his trip, namely, Dodsley had published a philosophical treatise by a young, Irish émigré writer named Edmund Burke, An Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and The Beautiful. Written just three years after Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, An Enquiry was to become one of the most influential treatises on aesthetics in the Englishspeaking world. Burke’s originality lay in the importance he placed on the subject’s response, rather than the object itself. Beauty was not an innate quality; instead, in Burke’s view, it occurred in the eyes and brain of the beholder: Moreover, the sights or objects that generated emotional responses such as fear and awe in the observer - that is, ‘the sublime’ were as important as the pleasurable qualities engendered by the ‘beautiful’. But for ‘polite’ eighteenth century readers, the most revolutionary of Burke’s tenets was that the aesthetic of the natural environment equalled or even surpassed that of the man-made. The delight inspired by the sight of great architectural monuments of the past, for example, was more 51

Obituary of Valentine Morris, The Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1789, pp.862-864. See Madge Dresser: Slavery Obscured, op.cit, pp.109-18. See Malcolm Andrew: The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain 1760-1800. 54 Dodsley himself had strong links with the Caribbean, having served as a footman to Robert Lowther, the former Governor of Barbados. 55 Hull, op.cit, Dodsley to Shenstone, letter LXVII, October 12, 1759, p.265. 56 Ibid. 52 53

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than rivalled by the awe engendered by the experience of viewing a majestic mountain - or indeed the thrilling, but uncomfortable, sensation of standing at the top of Piercefield’s cliffs.

Almost a decade after the publication of Burke’s treatise, in his account of his tour Arthur Young commented that Piercefield was ‘superiorly sublime ‘57 and that it was ‘evident that Mr Morris, meant (the walks) …as a means of seeing what nature had already done without any decoration or ornament’. 58 It was an aesthetic accolade of the highest order, indeed.

Burke’s treatise was largely about abstract aesthetic ideas, not specifically landscape, but it was widely interpreted as referring to the natural environment. The opposing categories of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘beautiful’, indeed, became integral to eighteenth century discussions about landscape. By the late part of the century, a true connoisseur of art might be not just be found examining paintings and prints in London’s fashionable new galleries or the ruins of ancient Rome, but travelling, too, among the poor uplands of north Wales, Scotland or Westmoreland.

The emphasis that Burke’s theory placed on the grandeur and nobility of ‘sublime’ places of nature, would indeed have been particularly important for the aspiring colonial venturers of the Atlantic west. As I examine in more detail in the following chapter, the fashion for celebrating the aesthetics of untamed nature not only dignified the hilly, remote hinterlands of rapidly expanding Atlantic ports such as Whitehaven, Lancaster and Glasgow, it also allowed new Atlantic colonies, too, to partake in polite culture. While Britain’s overseas territories had no magnificent buildings or fine art to match the riches of European civilisation, they could, however, boast of rivers, cliffs, waterfalls and mountains, as ‘beautiful’ or ‘sublime’ as any in Europe. . Indeed, while Burke was writing An Enquiry, he was spending time in Bath working on another more obviously commercial project: An Account of the European Settlements in the Americas. Co-authored with a friend William Burke (who later became Secretary and Registrar of Guadeloupe), An Account was also published by Dodsley in 1757, the same year as An Enquiry. The section on The West Indies is particularly detailed59 and it is here, when discussing the advantages of the sugar islands ‘for tempers prejudicial at home’, 60 that Burke’s personal connections with the Caribbean are revealed: his notoriously wayward, 57

Hull, op,cit., p.192. Arthur Young, op.cit., p.143. As well as descriptions of the differing British islands, climate and weather, there are technical descriptions of sugar cultivation and processing, and political commentary, with chapters entitled ‘Observations on taxing the colonies’ and ‘State of the Negros in the West Indies, Danger from them’. 60 William and Edmund Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in Americas, London: Dodsley, 1757, Vol II, Chapter VII. 58 59

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younger brother Richard was a successful Atlantic merchant, Caribbean land speculator and had held the position of collector of customs in Grenada.61

‘Those who love risk and hazard,’ Burke writes, ‘while dangerous to a ‘regular and settled community’ can, in the Caribbean, be transformed into men of ‘opulence and credit’.62 Indeed, ‘the rashness of hot and visionary men’, he argues, contributes to ‘the great source of our wealth, our strength, our power’. 63

The vivid descriptions of the transforming power of a sojourn in the West Indies for men of ‘fiery and restless tempers’ suggests that - through his brother’s adventures - Burke had close experience of these ‘tempers’ himself. Indeed, in 1764 when Burke and his wife (the daughter of a prominent Irish-born Bath doctor) bought a 600 acre country estate and Palladian mansion near Beaconsfield, it was a joint financial investment with Richard and his fellow author William. A decade later, Edmund Burke became a Member of Parliament for Bristol. While Burke’s name was established by the success of The Enquiry, it was profits from Britain’s Atlantic colonies that funded his transformation from struggling essayist into a landed gentleman.

Burke’s treatise provided a theoretical background to the growing interest in the aesthetics of Western landscapes that occurred in late eighteenth century Britain. However, the most widely read landscape critique of the period was William Gilpin’s short book Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, published in 1782. Like Burke, Gilpin, too, had close personal connections with the Atlantic trade: his family were prominent sugar, rum and tobacco traders in the rapidly expanding Cumbrian port of Whitehaven. And, though the propensity of the Gilpins to marry their cousins and namesakes makes links difficult to untangle, it seems that William’s father, a talented amateur artist named Captain John Gilpin, was part-owner of a sugar works near the port.64

By the 1780s, the ‘polite’ fashion for touring the meandering reaches of the lower Wye was already well-established. Indeed, its very popularity attracted Gilpin to publish the notes and sketches that he made during his own visit 12 years before, in 1770, in book form. As he explained in the introduction, he had originally envisaged publishing his records of a ‘trip made to the lakes and mountains of northern England’ - the landscapes of his childhood

61

William and Edmund Burke, op.cit. Vol II, p.107. Ibid, p.108. Ibid. 64 William Gilpin does not seem to have taken an active part in the family business; however, his position as Rector of Boldre in Hampshire may well have been obtained through trading connections with the owners of the Boldre estate, the Morants, who were also Jamaican plantation owners. See Appendix. 62 63

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home in Cumbria - but the ‘hazard and expense had rather a formidable appearance’.65 Observations on the River Wye, 66 therefore, was a trial of ‘a smaller work of the same kind which may enable me the better to ascertain the expenses of a larger’.67

The book was an immediate success and a second edition was published later that year. Indeed, on examining a facsimile reprint, it is not difficult to see why Gilpin’s ‘little work’ proposing a new way of ‘examining the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty’68 should have appealed to Britain’s polite public. The book was an illustrated manual providing a set of rules for the ‘appreciation’ of landscape topography. Armed with a copy of Gilpin’s ‘picturesque’ rules, any traveller could be a connoisseur of ‘natural scenery’.

While Gilpin drew on Burke’s ideas of the aesthetic importance of directly observing topography and landscape form, Observations was a far less complex and demanding book than The Enquiry. As Gilpin himself noted: ’observations of this kind, through the vehicle of description, have a better chance of being founded in the truth: as they are not the offspring of theory; but are taken immediately from the scenes of nature as they arise’.69

Rather than being a dense theoretical treatise, Observations, therefore, used a descriptive account of a three-day trip along the Wye and the compositional principles of seventeenth century Italianate landscape painting - with its use of side-screens, dark, detailed foregrounds, and paler backgrounds - to set out precisely how travelling through the borders of south Wales could become an aesthetic experience.

For example, as Miss M had done more than 20 years beforehand, Gilpin visited the Abbey and the ironworks at Tintern. Rather than remarking on the practical techniques of iron production, as she had done, however, Gilpin notes how the ‘lofty banks and mazy course’ of the meandering river helped to compose the image and how the ‘pleasing’ smoke of the iron furnaces ‘spread a thin veil over the hills … which beautifully breaks their lines and unites them with the sky’. The coal-loading quay at nearby Lydbrook, too, met with his approval: ‘the contrast of all this business, the engines used in lading and unlading, together with the solemnity of the scene, produce altogether a picturesque assemblage’.70

65

William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye and Several parts of South Wales, London, 1782 (facsimile reprint of 1800 edition, The Burren, Ireland 1973). 66 Gilpin was a friend of Thomas Whately and the pioneering British landscape artist Alexander Cozens (drawing master at Eton and private tutor to Jamaican absentee William Beckford); the title of Gilpin’s work had a patent resemblance to Thomas Whately’s earlier book Observations on Modern Gardening (1772). 67 Gilpin, op.cit., p.13. 68 Gilpin, ibid. p.17. 69 Gilpin, ibid. p 17. 70 Gilpin, op.cit, p.36.

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6.8 William Gilpin; Aquatint of Tintern Abbey in Observations on The River Wye (1783)

Like the ruined Abbey, the ironworks and coal quay were admired not for their history or as evidence of health of the local economy, but for their formal aesthetic qualities alone. For Gilpin, it is clear any physical topography, building or industrial development, indeed, that satisfied the principles outlined in Observations could itself be construed as ‘art’.

Ironically, though, it seems that for Gilpin, Valentine Morris’ famous ‘prospects’ proved a disappointment. ‘The situation of Persfield is noble’, 71 he commented, noting that ‘little indeed was left for improvement, but to open walks and views through the woods, to the various objects around them’. ‘We cannot however call these views picturesque,’ he complained, ‘They are either presented from too high a point or they have little to mark them out as characteristic; or they do not fall into such composition, as would appear to advantage on canvas.’72

Despite Gilpin’s dismissive remarks, however, Observations’ publication only increased the popularity of trips to Piercefield, as well as the Wye Valley. As one sightseer mused on his second visit to the estate five years later in 1787: ‘it is a very fine thing to see, but not a desirable place to inhabit …it is not a station of retirement or for a man of small fortune;

71 72

Gilpin, ibid, p.55. Gilpin, op.cit. p.57.

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being for ever on an exhibition, and in a glare; and so famed that an owner and his servants become show-men’.73

Moreover, the book’s success encouraged Gilpin and his publisher to follow through his original, larger idea. In 1786, to equal popular acclaim, Gilpin published his Observations relative chiefly to picturesque Beauty made in 1772 on several parts of England particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland - and three years later Observations relative to Picturesque Beauty made in 1776 on several parts of Great Britain; particularly the Highlands of Scotland was released.

Gilpin’s printed guides to ‘picturesque’ touring provided a useful accessory for what was to become one of late eighteenth century Britain’s most popular ‘polite’ leisure activities.74 Indeed by the end of the century at least eight pleasure boats - with coverings against the sun and the rain, and tables for drawing or writing - were carrying tourists back and forth from Ross to Chepstow.75

Gilpin’s writings, like Burke’s, provided an intellectual aesthetic basis to the fashion for landscape tourism in the uplands of the West. Indeed, their popularity played a part in forming new, aesthetic, way of thinking about the ‘natural environment:’ an eighteenth and nineteenth century British ‘bourgouis public sphere.’ As Piercefield exempliflies, however, investment from fortunes founded in Britain’s Atlantic slave colonies was also instrumental in opening up the western landscape for such appreciation.76 In the next chapter, I, too, journey along the western seaboard, first to north Wales then beyond, to examine how Valentine Morris’ colonial contemporaries channelled wealth from slavery and the Atlantic trade to open up the hinterlands of Britain’s expanding Atlantic ports, including the creation of the turnpike roads to carry their new, genteel visitors.

73

th

C Bruyn Andrews (ed): The Torrington Diaries, London, 1934, Vol. 1, ‘Tour to the West’, Sunday 29 July, 1787, p.274. 74 The fashion for picturesque touring in the West was satirized by William Combe in Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque, London, 1812. 75 Malcolm Andrews, op.cit, p.89. 76 Cockermouth-born William Wordsworth, too, had intimate family connections with the Atlantic trade through his father and his brother, while prominent picturesque theorist Richard Payne-Knight came from a Shropshire family with trading interests in Bristol and also the Caribbean island of St Kitts.

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Chapter Seven Cultivating the Remote ‘What, have the provincials a relish for turtle?’ Sir, it is amazing how this country improves in turtles and turnpikes; to which (give me leave to say) we, from our part of the world, have not a little contributed. Samuel Foote, The Patron (1764)

The first signs of Penrhyn Castle are the crenellated towers through the belts of trees that surround the grounds. Through a stone, arched gateway, a sinuous drive leads up a gentle hill to the entrance. From this spot, there is an extraordinary view. On the left are glimpses of the ruins of thirteenth century Beaumaris Castle and, across the Menai Straits, the island of Anglesey, while on the right rise the mountains of Snowdonia. In the distance stand the once notorious cliffs of Penmaenmawr and Conwy Bay, and the Irish Sea, all framed by trees and lawns which sweep from the castle walls down to the water. It is clear that Penrhyn Castle was designed as the centrepiece of an artistic composition, the focus of a vast, three-dimensional Welsh version of a Claude Lorrain painting.

By the early nineteenth century, when the crenellated country house was built for Jamaican plantation heir, Henry Dawkins Douglas-Pennant, it was not only the rugged cliffs at Piercefield or the ruined Abbey at Tintern that attracted travellers in search of ‘natural scenery’; the hilly uplands of north Wales, too, had become a tourist destination. For, during the eighteenth century Wales – and the mountainous uplands of north Wales, in particular became sites of aesthetic fulfilment: a Welsh version of a classical Arcadia, a Celtic vision of the ‘sublime’.1 Indeed, by the 1790s the visual delights of ‘sublime’ and ‘picturesque’ landscapes - coupled with a growing ‘polite’ interest in the history and antiquities of ‘Celtic’ Wales - attracted so many visitors that one frustrated tourist, Viscount Torrington, exclaimed in his diary:

‘These laced jackets make me sick! And the French Maid!!! And the trunks!!! and the Dressing Gowns!!!! Why if Owen Glandowr could see all this and come amongst us looking as grimly as he is painted over the door he would shake the powder from our ears.’2

1

See, for example, David Solkin’s biography of north Wales-born painter Richard Wilson and the Landscape of Reaction, London, 1982 2 A tour to North Wales, 1793, in The Torrington Diaries, 1936, Vol. 3, p.250. John Byng, Viscount Torrington, was the son-in-law of a notoriously extravagant Jamaican heiress named Juliana Lynch.

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Torrington was not the only visitor to record his experience for posterity. The influence of Burke’s ideas about the importance of direct emotional engagement led many travellers to north Wales to keep diaries and journals of their ‘ tours’, either for circulation to friends and colleagues or for wider publication.

In The Seach for the Picturesque (1989), Malcolm Andrews uses such travel records to map out the exact routes taken by ‘polite’ eighteenth century tourists; his sketches serve, too, as convenient guides to anyone wishing to recreate the experience. If you travel to Penrhyn today, via the A5 from Shrewsbury, you follow the route taken by most eighteenth century visitors. Indeed, you almost feel that you are travelling back in time. The road winds through the gentle hills near Llangollen (passing a pub called the Ancient Briton), until you reach the steep valleys, cliffs and mountains of Snowdonia. During the week, at least, there are few other vehicles and you can still sense the isolation, awe and wonder that seduced so many late eighteenth century tourists to the area. Indeed, the words of one ‘gentleman in Wales’ writing in 1767 still capture the feeling: ‘by its situation and the great distance that it is from the metropolis (north Wales) is almost entirely excluded from the advantages of commerce…an asylum among those impregnable fortresses, built by the hand of nature.’3

But, as the logo of a coach and horses on brown ‘leisure’ signs marking the route reminds, most eighteenth century ‘polite’ tourists were not following sheep paths or drovers’ tracks through the ‘impregnable fortresses’; they were travelling instead on well-built ‘carriage ways’. For instance, William Watkins-Wynne’s Tour in Wales (published in 1771 and frequently credited with establishing north Wales as a place for polite ‘tourism’) reveals that his party, including five ‘gentlemen’, nine servants and the topographic artist Paul Sandby, spent most of their journey following the routes of the new turnpike roads built in the area over the previous 20 years.4 As visitors to Piercefield’s ‘natural’ views had depended on the creation of stone-flagged paths along the cliff face, in north Wales too, access to ‘prospects’ required substantial investment. Indeed, to experience the ‘impregnable fortresses’ built by the ‘hand of nature’, it was necessary to travel on roads built with the labour of hundreds of men.

It is no coincidence, therefore, that the late eighteenth century popularity of landscape tourism in north Wales accompanied the construction of a network of well-built and well-maintained

3 4

‘A Gentleman in Wales 1767’, quoted in David Solkin, Richard Wilson op.cit, p.265. From Wynnstay, they went west to Bala, then turned north to Caernarvon, crossed to Anglesey, and returned via Conway and Holywell. See Richard Moore-Colyer: Roads and Trackways of Wales, Landmark Publishing, Ashbourne, 2001, p.139.

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turnpike roads.5 In order to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of wild and untamed ’scenery’, naturally, one had to get there first.

However, turnpikes were toll roads, where travellers paid fees to cover the costs of building and repair. How could a turnpike in a remote and unpopulated area ‘removed from the advantages of commerce’ generate, therefore, sufficient traffic to make a return on capital and cover the costs of upkeep? The projected revenue from touring landscape aesthetes would hardly have provided a sufficient impetus for investors in major construction projects. Moreover, each stretch of turnpike required a special Act of Parliament and a board of trustees to administer it. Who, in a remote, sparsely populated area would have had the skills and contacts to organise such venture? A late eighteenth century portrait of Douglas Pennant’s grandfather, Richard Pennant, hanging in Penrhyn Castle, gives a clue.

7.1 Henry Thomson, Richard Pennant 5

See Alexander McCreery, Turnpike Roads and the Spatial Culture of London, 1756-1830, Ph.D. thesis, University College London, 2004, esp. Ch. 4.3, Turnpikes and the Development of Picturesque Aesthetics, pp. 200 -216.

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Pennant, a Jamaican absentee planter and prominent Liverpool merchant, poses in front of a red silk curtain, beyond which is a background of a steep and rocky mountainside. In one hand he holds a cane and top hat, while the other is pointing to a map, on which is marked a rough triangle in black and red. The red, shorter side of the triangle is the route of the new road which he built from Penrhyn up the slopes of Nant Ffrancon to the mountains beyond. Pennant’s road, of course, was not principally designed for the benefit of landscape tourists: It was a means to allow the efficient exploitation of the slate quarries that lay in the hills of his country estate.

But Pennant’s new road was not built just to haul slate down to the coast. It was also designed to be the key link in a new system of turnpikes linking London via Shrewsbury to Anglesea and Ireland beyond. Indeed, it is this road, later improved by Telford and others, that still forms the A5’s descent from the mountains of Snowdonia to the sea.

The portrait, therefore, prompted a further question. Was there a connection between the growth of landscape tourism in eighteenth century north Wales and of Liverpool’s Atlantic trade during the same period? Pennant was not the only absentee planter and merchant to become involved in road building. Valentine Morris, as we have already seen, was instrumental in the creation of several turnpike roads near Chepstow; John Boyd and William Young both built new roads near their newly acquired estates; and Edwin Lascelles played a large part in creating a section of the London-bound turnpike in Yorkshire. Indeed, in the play The Patron - written at the height of the 1750-1770 turnpike boom - the principal character, absentee West Indian Sir Peter Pepperpot, quips: ‘it is amazing how this country improves in turtles and turnpikes; to which (give me leave to say) we, from our part of the world, have not a little contributed’.6

In Pennant’s case the motives were clearly commercial; but why should other West Indian plantation owners have been quite so keen to invest their sugar profits into the construction of broken stone and tamped gravel carriageways? In an era of frequent bank collapses, the physical, material nature of roads was undoubtedly attractive. Indeed, some small investors in turnpike roads used them effectively as savings accounts: records show that it was possible to achieve respectable returns of 4% per annum.7 But West Indian absentees generally had larger amounts of capital and therefore a far wider choice of investment options. These, as we have seen, ranged from risky but potentially highly rewarding colonial enterprises, to the safer, but lower returns of British land. And while the purchase of British farmland conferred social 6 7

Samuel Foote: The Patron, 1764, Act I Scene I. See B. Buchanan, ‘The Evolution of the English Turnpike Trusts’, Economic History Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, 1986 pp. 223-243.

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status, roads brought no such cachet. Nevertheless, David Hancock’s study of London-based Atlantic merchants shows that many did, indeed, invest their profits into road construction.8

An examination of the growth of turnpike road networks during the eighteenth century suggests that the economics of Britain’s expanding Atlantic trade had a strong effect on turnpike formation. While the earliest turnpikes were around London and in the east of the country, by mid-century there is a noticeable concentration of road-building in the region bordering the River Severn, the economic hinterland of Bristol.9

During the eighteenth century, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire had the highest density of population in Britain outside the capital, so it is hardly surprising that there would have been investment into transport infrastructure on these areas. But could the growing needs of the expanding Atlantic trade have also stimulated the construction of turnpikes in other less populated regions? Valentine Morris’ enthusiasm for constructing roads, both public turnpikes and private ‘drives’ at Piercefield, coupled with its proximity to Bath and Bristol, had clearly played an important part in the popularisation of the Wye Valley as a tourist destination.10 Pennant’s road-building organisation in north Wales, clearly also played a role in opening up access to the Welsh mountains for the benefit of landscape tourists. Was the creation of eighteenth century Snowdonia, too, therefore, also connected with the rewards of sugar and slavery?

If you take the alternative approach to Penrhyn Castle, along the dual carriageway from Chester to Bangor, you gain a very different impression of north Wales to that from the winding valleys of the A5. You are still intimately aware of the mountains to the south, but also of the wide flat landscape to the north, with the caravan parks and chemical works along the Dee Estuary and the sprawling suburbs of the Wirral peninsular beyond. From this perspective, rather than remote, mysterious and otherworldly, Penrhyn Castle and Snowdonia itself seem intimately connected to the industries of the Mersey, the Dee and the metropolis of Liverpool.

Just as the rise of Bristol to prominence in the early eighteenth century had been the catalyst for development in the south west and along the Severn, the rapid expansion of Liverpool provided the impetus for much of the economic growth of the time along the coast of north

8

David Hancock, Citizens of the World, op.cit, Ch.9, ‘The urge to improve’, pp. 279-319. See Eric Pawson, Transport and Economy: The Turnpike Roads of Eighteenth Century Britain, London, 1977, ch.6,‘The Spatial Diffusion of the Turnpike System’. 10 Valentine Morris promoted the first Turnpike Bill in Monmouthshire in 1754 and was trustee for the construction of several turnpike roads in the area, directing the construction of new routes and a toll house. See Ivor Waters, Turnpike Roads, the Chepstow and New Passage Turnpike Districts, Chepstow: Moss Rose Press, 1985. 9

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Wales. Like Bristol, the port was well-placed for the growing trade with Britain’s American colonies, located both at the mouth of a major inland river and facing west towards the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. As early as 1723, the town had ‘an opulent, flourishing and increasing trade’, which, as Daniel Defoe noted, not only rivalled Bristol ‘in the trade to Virginia and the English island colonies in America’, but was poised ‘in a fair way to increase and eclipse it’.11

Indeed, when sugar planter John Pennant, his wife and young son Richard moved to England from Jamaica in 1739, rather than joining his brothers Samuel and Henry in their London West India House or becoming a merchant in Bristol, he chose Liverpool as his base.12 It was a shrewd move. By the time Richard had reached adulthood, Defoe’s prophecy of Liverpool overtaking Bristol as an Atlantic port had indeed been realised. Indeed, by 1777 one American visitor counted more than 1,200 ships in the harbour and another 30 or 40 in the channel beyond, describing a ‘Forest of Masts in the Docks like an American pine-swamp’ and noting that ‘The trade to Africa is very large & it is ye 3rd if not 2nd place in England.’13

Like their southern compatriots, Liverpool’s Atlantic merchants were also anxious to be regarded as ‘gentlemen’, investing profits in British land, educating their sons and commissioning art to adorn their houses. Indeed, the city’s growing wealth in the late eighteenth century allowed Liverpool briefly to become, like Bath, a provincial centre for aspiring British artists.14

Richard Watt of Speke Hall and Nicholas Ashton of Woolton Hall were just two of the wealthy West India merchants to buy estates near the expanding port. As a successful West India trader, Pennant was no exception in subscribing to this ‘gentlemanly’ ethos. Following studies at Cambridge - and with aid from fellow Jamaican absentee William Beckford - Richard became the Member of Parliament for Petersfield in Hampshire and his father started the search for a country estate on which to ‘settle’ his son. Indeed, it seems that they first considered purchasing Witham, an estate in Wiltshire not far from William Beckford’s newlyacquired Fonthill.15 However, in 1765, at the age of 26, Richard married the heiress to one portion of the once substantial Penrhyn estate, just a few miles along the coast from his great-

11

Daniel Defoe, Tour Through Great Britain, London, 1723, p. 202. Jean Lindsay, ‘The Pennants and Jamaica 1665-1808: The Growth and Organisation of the Pennant Estates’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, No. 43, 1982. 13 Peter Oliver, Journey of a Voyage to England, British Library, Egerton Manuscripts 2,673, Vol. I f. 18, Summer 1777. 14 See Pat Starkey (ed), Riches into Art, Liverpool collectors 1770-1880, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993. 15 Witham was eventually bought by William Beckford, who erected a house designed by Robert Adam. See Robert Wilson-North and Stephen Porter, ‘Witham, Somerset: From Carthusian Monastery to Country House to Gothic Folly,’ Architectural History, Vol. 40, 1997, p.93. 12

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grandfather’s ancestral home.16 Two years later, his father and uncle Henry jointly purchased a further part of the estate and Richard became one of the MPs for Liverpool.

The Pennants were not alone among the Atlantic merchants to invest in land in north Wales or to marry into an existing Welsh land-owning family. For example, fellow Liverpool merchant and Caribbean estate owner John Gladstone, the grandfather of the future British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, bought an estate a few miles to the east of Penrhyn at Gydir, the Bamford Heskeths one further east at Gwych, while Foster Cuncliffe, grandson of a successful Lancaster slave-trader and son of a prominent Liverpool merchant, bought Pant-yr-Ochain Hall, an estate near Wrexham.

As early as 1760, the Anglesey-based scholar of Welsh history and Holyhead customs controller Lewis Morris complained that many estates in the vicinity were no longer owned by native Welsh, but were now in the possession of English and Irish ‘foreigners’.17 Indeed, by the latter half of the eighteenth century, coastal north Wales was an integral part of Liverpool’s economic hinterland - and part of web of trade across the Irish Sea which linked ports including Whitehaven, Lancaster, Douglas (on the Isle of Man), Chester and Dublin to British colonies on the far side of the Atlantic.

Raw linen, for example, was imported from Ireland and bleached in the hills near Denbigh before being shipped to Liverpool - together with cargoes of leather shoes produced in the town - then finally loaded on to ocean-going vessels for export to the West Indies.18 Copper mines on Anglesey provided protective cladding for the hulls of oak ships against the ravages of the Toledo worm found in the warm seas of the tropics,19 while the flatter land further east along the Dee estuary supplied bricks, lead and wheat to the rapidly expanding port.20 Far from being excluded from the ‘advantages of commerce’, north Wales was intimately connected with the expansion of Britain’s Atlantic empire.

This influx of new wealth had a profound effect on north Wales, particularly the western extremity towards Caernarvon and Anglesey. The profits of the Pennant family’s Jamaican plantations and West India trade, for example, transformed the once neglected lands around Penrhyn. Soon after he inherited the estate in 1768, Richard Pennant invested extensively in the improvement of his coastal agricultural lands by planting hedges and fertilising them. He 16

His wife was Ann Warburton, whose grandfather had been a Liverpool MP. See Penrhyn Castle, The National Trust, 2001 p.11. Lewis Morris, ‘Letters‘, 1760, quoted in Jenkins and Gamage, op.cit. p.17. 18 Samuel Lewis, A Topographical History of Wales, Denbighshire, 1849. Irish landowner Thomas Fitzmaurice built a classical style, crescent-shaped bleachery at Lleweni with a pavilion at either end and fountains in front. 19 Madge Dresser identifies the importance of copper to West India merchants in Slavery Obscured, op.cit. 20 See Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Wales, London, 1784, Vol. 1, p 1. 17

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also turned the small-scale slate quarries in the mountainous part of his estate into a major industrial enterprise, shipping slates via Liverpool to ports around the country.21

It is also clear that Pennant wanted not just to maximise the potential revenue from his new estate, however, but use his lands to proclaim his social status as a ‘gentleman’. An estate map from 1768, the year he inherited Penrhyn, shows the mediaeval house set in a patchwork of fields, hop yards, woods and wooded pasture; a map from 1804, however, shows that this landscape had been swept away in favour of sweeping belts of grass and trees. Indeed a late eighteenth century water-colour shows the mediaeval house - reconfigured as a ‘picturesque’ castle with turrets and crenellations in its new parkland setting, complete with majestic arched entrance gateway - with a distant background of a rocky bay. Within a generation, therefore, Pennant’s investments had transformed a remote and old-fashioned estate into a magnificent ‘polite’ landscape that few gentlemen landowners could surpass.

7.2 Water-colour of Penryhn, c.1785

Like Piercefield, it is the appropriation of the rugged topography beyond the fashionable new parkland that makes the landscape at Penrhyn extraordinary. While Morris had used his cliff top location to create ‘prospects’ of the Wye Valley, at Penrhyn the ‘scenery’ was of the mountains and cliffs of coastal north Wales. Indeed, in the early eighteenth century, Penmaenmawr, the rocky promontory featured in the middle distance of the water-colour, had featured in one of the best-known literary texts of eighteenth century Britain: the Georgic poem 21

1801 agreement with Samuel Worthington, Michael Humble and Samuel Holland of Liverpool to supply slates from Penrhyn Quarry, Penrhyn MSS. 2034.

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The Seasons (1726), written by young Scottish poet George Thompson. In a passage evoking Milton’s Paradise Lost, Thompson describes a storm in this specific, Welsh location:

Amid Carnervon’s mountain ranges loud The repercussive roar: with mighty crush, Into the flashing deep, from the rude rocks Of Penmanmaur heaped hideous to the sky. In Thompson’s poem, the ‘rude rocks’ that are ‘heaped hideous to the sky’ are far above the beholder, the view from a boat sailing in Conway Bay, or indeed transatlantic ships risking a short-cut through the Menai Straits to Liverpool. It was, indeed, the residents of the north west, rather than tourists, who first began drawing attention to the area’s natural ‘scenery’ and ‘native’ Welsh culture. David Solkin, for example, describes how when the renowned Welsh painter Richard Wilson first exhibited his paintings publicly in London in 1761- showing north Wales transformed into Welsh Poussins or Claudes. - few people from the capital had actually been to the region. 22 For north Wales was an area that looked north to Liverpool and west across the sea to Ireland, America and the Caribbean. Indeed, Liverpool ship owner Henry Blundell of Ince Hall in Lancashire commissioned one of Wilson’s best known Italianate visions of north Wales: The Lake of Nemi: or Speculum Dianae with Dolbardan Castle (which is now in the Bristol Art Gallery).

7.3 Richard Wilson; The Lake of Nemi:Speculum Dianae with Dolbardan Castle, c.1764-5

22

David Solkin, op.cit. p. 225

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While the economic growth provided by the Atlantic trade allowed wealthy residents of the north Wales littoral to view the inhospitable mountains as a glorious ‘scenic’ background to their estates, it was the new turnpike roads that connected to Wales to England that permitted tourists access to the sights enjoyed by Richard Pennant and other coastal landowners.

As we have seen, Deeside estate owner William Watkin Wynne’s (another of Wilson’s patrons) Tour of Wales (1771) helped popularise the idea of polite leisure travel in north Wales. His description, too, of his terror when one of the horses bolted on a narrow ledge of above the sheer cliff face at Penmaenmawr23 is noteworthy, for he had not only undergone a petrifying, ‘sublime’ experience, but it had happened in a spot that already had cultural significance for a ‘polite’ British public. However, the year after Watkin Wynne’s Tour was published, the coast road along the Dee estuary was improved and turnpiked. At the point where the route traversed Penmaenmawr, the vertiginous ledge was widened and a low wall built at the top of the cliff face under the aegis of Richard Pennant.

In 1784, one tourist described how he had a great wish to pass again over the imposing peak: ‘within my memory the dread of all travelers’. When arriving at the celebrated site, however, he found that the narrow precipice had been transformed ‘into a road to cross with surprise, transport and wonder’.24 Indeed, the headland at Penmaenmawr was to become one of the most popular sights on the north Wales tour: in 1790, moreover, a play called Penmaenmawr or the Wonders of Wales was staged in the fashionable north London spa area of Sadler’s Wells. One visitor’s description, in 1810, shows how much-anticipated the view from the promontory had become: ‘We had looked forward to it with much expectation from the accounts of it …though I doubt much if half of those who mention it have ever seen it.’25 Like Piercefield’s cliffs, Penmaenmawr, too, had been raised into an icon of the ‘sublime’.

Indeed, while a visit down the Wye could be comfortably accomplished in a three day excursion from the fashionable urban resorts of Bath and Clifton, the mountains of north Wales were a more challenging prospect. The tourists who did venture there, however, could not only now travel in safety, but also in the comfort of a horse-drawn coach. And comfort was no small matter. For the mountains of north Wales are the first high ground met by the prevailing, moisture-laden, south westerly winds which blow across the Atlantic and the Irish Sea. Even in high summer, Snowdonia is often cold and drenched. Moreover, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, unlike the relatively densely populated Wye Valley, the shelter

23 24 25

Malcolm Andrews: The Search for the Picturesque, op.cit, p.131. Tour quoted in Malcolm Andrews, op.cit, p.131. John Fischer (ed): Tours in Wales by John Fenton 1804-1813, July 23, 1810, London, 1917, p.201.

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and warmth afforded by an inn would have been hard to come by. Coach travel meant that the ability to appreciate ‘natural scenery’ in the dry, through a glazed window, was not confined to the wealthy new residents of north Wales. It could be the experience of any ‘polite’ traveller to the region. 26

Richard Pennant completed his father’s road up Nant Ffrancon past his slate quarries, transforming ‘the most dreadful horse-path in Wales worked in the rudest manner into steps along a great length’ 27 into a well built carriage-way. Moreover, as John Pennant’s portrait reveals, in the 1790s he also constructed a large hotel at each end of the road for the benefit of travellers to Ireland (England and Ireland were unified in 1801) and landscape tourists. Indeed, the location of The Royal Hotel at Capel Curig, at the intersection of Pennant’s road and the valley track leading to Snowdon and the Llanberis pass, rather than the junction with the main turnpike at Betws-y-Coed, suggests that tourist’s requirements were now paramount.

Profits from Jamaican and the West Indian sugar isles were instrumental, therefore, in developing the popularity of the north Wales coast as a picturesque tourist destination. In 1810, one traveller described staying at Pennant’s coastal hotel, the Penrhyn Arms, located not far from the castle itself. ‘we occupied a sitting room with a bow projection, having three windows commanding the most enchanting prospect... the whole bay of Beaumaris, Penmaen Mawr, Orme’s Head and the Promontory of Llandudno …too much can’t be said in praise of it.’ 28 Having examined south Wales and the Wye in the previous chapter, and presently north Wales, I intend now to proceed further north to Lancashire, Westmoreland and Cumbria. Like north Wales, these upland parts of western Britain had benefited, too, from the expanding Atlantic trade. Indeed, it is clear that trade in slaves, sugar and tobacco was instrumental in transforming Westmoreland and Cumberland - a region once perceived as ‘poor and barren, neither good to man nor beast’29 - into ‘The Lakes’, a landscape worthy of ‘polite’ attention.

Whitehaven’s elegant Georgian town houses and majestic warehouses attest to the Cumbrian port’s former prosperity. And, though its heyday as an Atlantic centre for the tobacco and rum trade (rum, a by-product of sugar production was a valuable, secondary export from the 26

Coach access would have been particularly advantageous to women tourists: riding side-saddle, as required by the social mores of polite eighteenth century British society, would have been uncomfortable on a long journey. 27 Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Wales, London, 1784, Vol II, p.153. Pennant’s work is illustrated by the renowned Welsh artist Moses Griffiths, whom Pennant describes as having ‘this year recently received his manumission’ (ibid, p.v), suggesting that Griffiths was once enslaved. I have, however, been unable to corroborate this. (Thomas Pennant, heir to an estate near Holywell, was a distant cousin of Richard) 28 John Fischer (ed), Tours in Wales by John Fenton, op.cit, p.209. 29 Daniel Defoe, Tour, 1723, Vol. 3, p.223.

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Caribbean) was short, Whitehaven’s trading wealth was to have a profound affect on the surrounding area.30 Successful merchants there, namely, shared the approach of the Atlantic traders in London, Liverpool and Bristol, investing their profits in land and coastal businesses to give their fortunes a secure base and their families a refined status. As early as 1755, indeed, Dr John Dalton – on re-visiting the county of his childhood after a thirty year absence remarked that the area near Keswick demonstrated an ‘advantageous comparison of its present state with that in which he had left it’, with ‘rich improvements’ in a formerly ‘wild and uncultivated soil’.31

7.4 Keswick Lake (Derwentwater) c.1755: West Cumberland transformed into a ‘polite landscape’

The merchants were certainly anxious, too, for their sons to be regarded as gentlemen. It was at the new grammar school at St Bees, about three miles south of Whitehaven and just along the coast from his family’s sugar works, that the ‘picturesque’ theorist William Gilpin received academic preparation for entrance to Oxford and his first drawing lessons. Indeed, Gilpin’s Cumberland-raised drawing master, John Brown, enthusiastically compared local hills to Italianate landscape paintings. 32 30

See J.V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland 16601760, Cambridge, New York, 1981 for the background to Whitehaven’s growth from coal port to a provincial Atlantic trading centre. 31 Rev. John Dalton, December, 1754, quoted in Malcolm Andrews, op. cit, p.176. 32 See Malcolm Andrews, op.cit, p.177 and John Brown, A Description of the Lake at Keswick (And the adjacent Country) In Cumberland Communicated in a Letter to a Friend, by a late popular Writer. Kendal: J Hodgson, 1771.

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Almost uniquely among British seaports, however, Whitehaven was not located on the mouth of a river. This was not a issue for incoming commodities as the tobacco and rum was largely re-exported on ships to other ports. However, it did pose difficulties in assembling manufactured goods for outward bound cargoes for the American colonies.

The routes through the port’s hilly, sparsely populated hinterland were, as in north Wales, poor. A petition presented to the House of Commons in 1740 to promote a new turnpike pleaded that there was ‘such increase in carts and wheel carriages as well as loaden horses passing with goods to and from Whitehaven, that the said roads are become ruinous and almost impassable in winter’.33 Two decades later, eight of Whitehaven’s most successful merchants (Peter How, Thomas and Walter Lutwige, William Hicks , Robert Gilpin, Thomas Hartley, Richard Kelsick and Thomas Patrickson - together with Sir James Lowther the landowner and overall developer of Whitehaven) had funded and organised the construction of a network of turnpikes linking Whitehaven to the nearby towns of Furness, Cockermouth, Penrith, Keswick, Kendal and Ulverston.34

The creation of these well-built roads through the previously remote and inaccessible hills meant that Whitehaven was not only linked by shipping routes to Liverpool, Douglas, Dublin, Virginia and the islands of the Caribbean, but to the rest of Britain, too. Moreover, like ‘Snowdonia’, the new turnpike roads allowed visitors to travel through Cumberland and Westmoreland in comfort. Arthur Young, for example visited ‘the Lakes’ in 1768 (as part of his job surveying ‘the state of agricultures, manufactures and population’ in the North of England) and remarked on ‘the glory of Keswick Lake…so famous all over England.’35 However, unlike Piercefield’s cliffs, which he had visited the previous year, the ‘wild romantic spots which command the most delicious scenes’ could not be reached ‘without the most perilous difficulty.’36 And he advised that ‘to such points of view, winding paths should be cut in the rock and resting places made for the weary traveler.’37

Tourists today - from the south, at least - generally enter the Lake District National Park from the M6 motorway or mainline railway via Kendal. During the eighteenth century, however, 33

Commons Journal, xxiii, 433, quoted in J.V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland 1660-1760, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, 1981 , p.172. For Lowther’s Barbadan links see J.V. Beckett ‘Inheritance and Fortune in the eighteenth century: the rise of Sir James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale’ in Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian Society, 87 (1987,) pp. 171-78. 34 J.V. Becket, Coal and Tobacco, op.cit., pp.173 -77. 35 Arthur Young, A Six Months Tour through the North of England, London: W. Strahan, 1770. p.155. His remarks on the manufacture of fabrics ‘chiefly from West Indian cotton’ in Manchester and the importance of fabric exports in ‘low priced goods’ to North America and ‘fine ones to the West Indies’ are also of interest, ibid, p.244. 36 Young, ibid, p 155. 37 Young, ibid, p 155.

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according to the first commercial guide book to the region published in 1778 38, visitors would start their tour on the coast at Hest Bank, three miles west of Lancaster. They would then cross Morecambe Bay – then known as Lancaster Sands - to Cartmel or Ulverston by boat or on foot. ‘On a fine day there is no more pleasant sea-side journey in the kingdom. On the right a bold shore deeply indented in some places and opening into bays on others, valleys that stretch far into the country bounded on each side by hanging grounds,’ exclaimed the author, Ulverston resident Thomas West.39

A local guide was recommended to traverse the shifting, treacherous channels and sandbars around the bay. As Jamaican absentee William Beckford noted during his visit made the following year ‘horrible were the stories told of accidents that had occurred from venturing across at the wrong time of tide’.40 Indeed he and his companion reached Ulverston only shortly before the sea ‘converted the vast plain of sand we had just passed before into an ocean.’41 Although popular with tourists, Ulverston was far from a genteel resort; it was, instead, a small port - supplying ‘iron, oats, barley, beans, bark and limestone’ to the expanding city of Lancaster.

Unlike Whitehaven, it is not obvious to the casual visitor that Lancaster, too, was once a prominent Atlantic port. But, if you walk down the hill from the castle, you reach the mideighteenth century warehouses which line St George’s Quay alongside the River Lune. Here, the former Customs House has been converted into a museum, exhibiting how merchants transformed Lancaster from a ‘town without trade’42 to a thriving West Indian port. Indeed, as West noted in the first chapter of his guide: ‘The houses are peculiarly neat and handsome, the streets well paved and thronged with inhabitants busied in a prosperous trade to Guinea and the West Indies.’43

Boat-builders turned furniture manufacturers, the Gillows, were an obvious beneficiary of the imports of Caribbean mahogany. One visitor to the region remarked how ‘some very ingenious cabinet makers settle here who fabricate the most excellent and neat goods at remarkably cheap rates which they export to London and the plantations’.44

38

Thomas West, Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, 1778. West, Ibid, p.23. 40 William Beckford, 1779 quoted in Boyd Alexander: England’s Wealthiest Son, London: Centaur, 1962 p. 72. 41 Ibid. 42 Defoe: Tour, op.cit, 1725. 43 Thomas West, op.cit, p.23. 44 Thomas Pennant, Tour of Scotland 1772, quoted in Melinda Elder: The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Eighteenth Century Lancaster, 1992, Halifax, England, p.122. 39

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By the mid-eighteenth century, Lancaster’s thriving slave-trading industry provided the main economic foundation for the whole area.45 Beans grown near Ulveston, for instance, supplied ‘food for negroes’ during the transatlantic crossing and - while late eighteenth century tourists enjoyed the picturesque sights of the ruined Furness Abbey and the nearby ironworks on the far side of Morecambe Bay - the ferry also transported the iron cooking pots or ‘Guinea Kettles’ made in the foundry, which were essential cargoes for Lancaster’s slave traders.46

The close links between the transatlantic plantation trade in sugar and tobacco and the growth of the Lake District as a picturesque tourist destination are still visible today. For it is clear that by the latter part of the eighteenth century not all roads were built for practical, purely commercial purposes. In the 1784 edition of West’s guide, for example – after noting that the state of the roads had improved greatly since the 1760s - the editor remarks that ‘the gentlemen of this county have set a precedent worthy of imitation in the politest part of the kingdom, by opening, at private expense carriage roads for the ease and safety of such that as visit the country.’47

Indeed, around Lake Windermere – one of the most accessible and frequently visited of all the lakes – landowners had followed Young’s advice and had constructed routes between viewpoints, or ‘stations’, which provided them with the best ‘prospects’.48 One such station was named Rawlinson’s Nab after one of Lancaster’s most successful merchant families; and, on the opposite shore, the focus of a picturesque composition is Storr’s Hall, a late eighteenth century classical villa built by Ulverston-born slave trader turned Liverpool West India merchant Sir John Bolton. Further north moreover, near Ullswater, still surrounded by parkland, are the ruins of the Lowther Castle built in the nineteenth century by the Lowther family - heirs to profits made from the development of Whitehaven and also Barbadan sugar plantations.49 ‘To live in such a country seems almost like a continual turtle feast,’50 exclaimed William Wilberforce in 1797 following a visit to Eusemere, the lake-side farm just a few miles away at Pooley Bridge which had been purchased by fellow anti-slave trade campaigner Thomas Clarkson. It was indeed an apt metaphor.

45

See Melinda Elder, above, for more details of the economic importance of the slave industry to the whole area. See The Oxford Companion to Black British History - ‘Guinea kettles’. The West India and Africa trade declined sharply towards the end of the eighteenth century, in part because of new laws governing slave–trading. Many merchants, however, continued their trade from Liverpool. 47 Thomas West, op.cit, p.2. 48 See Malcolm Andrews: The Search for the Picturesque, op.cit, pp.157-160. 49 JV Beckett: ‘Inheritance and fortune in the eighteenth century: the rise of Sir James Lowther, Earl of Londsdale’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland History Society Vol. 87, 1987, p.174. 50 Duke University, Special Collections. Papers of William Wilberforce, William Smith etc. William Wilberforce Letters 1796-99, Box 1, Folder 5, William Wilberforce to William Smith. 46

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7.5 Keswick Lake, ink and wash sketch by William Gilpin, c.1772

Despite the decline of Lancaster’s and Whitehaven’s tobacco and sugar trade in the face of competition from the ‘deep water’ ports of Liverpool and Glasgow, the ‘Lakes’ close financial connections with Atlantic commerce remained until well into the nineteenth century. Indeed Cockermouth-born William Wordsworth (son of James Lowther’s agent and nephew of a Whitehaven custom collector) alludes to this link in his poem The Brothers (1800), where a ‘son of the Lakes’ attempts to ‘try his fortune on the sea’ eventually returning to ‘his paternal home’ with ‘some small wealth Acquir’d by traffic in the Indian Isles.’ 51 Moreover, while the growing transatlantic trade concentrated in Liverpool, wealthy merchants still invested in the area. In Tennyson’s poem Edwin Morris (1835), for example, he complains about ‘Newcomers from the Mersey, millionaires’ and their ‘craving for prospects’ in ‘an ancient hold.’52 Travellers in Scotland would, too, have noticed the effects of Atlantic wealth on the country. Indeed, as I have already set out at length in Chapter Four, Painted Memorandums, the relationship between the expanding plantation colonies and leading Scottish landowners was particularly strong. By the mid-eighteenth century, Glasgow had developed into a prominent Atlantic port – outstripping Whitehaven as a tobacco entreport - and was also becoming an important centre for the Caribbean trade.

51

See Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Space, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998. pp.99 –101. Quoted in Andrews: The Search for the Picturesque, op,cit, p.3. See also discussion in John Murdoch ‘A Villa in Arcadia’ in Simon Pugh (ed): Country, City, Capital, Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp.122-142 for nineteenth century West Indian investment into the area.

52

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Douglas Hamilton has described eighteenth century Scotland’s West Indian links and transatlantic business networks extensively in his PhD thesis Patronage and Profit (2001) and his subsequent book Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World (Manchester, 2005). He shows how West Indian profits were particularly important in the improvement of estates in the Western uplands ‘either through mercantile investments or the purchase of plantations (the Caribbean) offered a means of raising income to finance the changes in their estates and lifestyles’.53 Hamilton also remarks on the eagerness of Scots landowners to obtain lucrative positions in colonial Government – in 1795, for example, each of the ‘Ceded Isles’, Jamaica and St Lucia had a Scottish Governor: Lord Balcarres (Jamaica), Henry Hamilton (Dominica), Ninian Home (Grenada), William Lindsay (Tobago) and James Seton (St Vincent).54 At a different social level, his work also notes how Glasgow’s Gaelic Club, founded in 1780 ‘to remind (Highlanders) of Ossian, the melodious and noble prince of poets as well as to converse as friends in the bold and expressive language of heroes in ages past’, was primarily a business forum for Glasgow’s Atlantic merchants, where members drank rum punch and enjoyed regular turtle feasts.55

Like north Wales and Cumberland and Westmoreland, the profits made from the transatlantic trade in sugar and tobacco - and the supply of goods to the colonists - brought new wealth to an upland region of Britain that was relatively poor and remote. Indeed, while colonial profits were invested into agricultural improvements, Scotland’s new gentleman landowners, like those in England, also funded and organised the construction of new roads. West India merchant Richard Oswald, for example, was instrumental in the construction of a network of turnpikes near his Ayrshire estate to the south west of Glasgow56, an activity shared by other newly landed merchants in the area.57 As the authors of a survey of the Scottish road system in 1775 commented: ‘In this country where the making of roads is attended with so much labour and expense…(they) honour the nobility and gentry, who have so judiciously attended to the directing as well as executing.58

Like north Wales and the Lakes, new investment in roads, principally made for commercial motives and to allow access to rural estates, proved advantageous to tourists in search of sublime and beautiful ‘scenery’. Malcolm Andrews shows that eighteenth century landscape 53

Douglas Hamilton: Patronage and Profit: Scottish Networks in the West Indies, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2001, p.39. He also identifies John Grant of Glen Brown, Archibald Grant of Monymusk, George Barclay of Cairness near Peterhead, together with the Malcolms of Potalloch as four notable Scottish estate ‘improvers’ whose work was funded from Jamaican profits. 54 Hamilton, ibid, p. 235. 55 Hamilton, op.cit, p.301. 56 David Hancock: Citizens of the World, op.cit, p.300. 57 TM Devine: ‘Glasgow Colonial Merchants and Land 1770-1815’ in JT.Ward and RG Wilson (eds): Land and Industry, 1971. 58 George Taylor and Andrew Skinner: The Traveller’s Pocket Book or Abstract of Taylor and Skinners Survey of the Roads of Scotland, 1775, p.6.

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tourists began their journeys in Edinburgh (a Baltic seaport which had expanded rapidly in the years after the end of the Seven Years War under the leadership of George Drummond, scion of the banking family who held much of John Boyd of Danson’s wealth59). Travellers would follow the road west along the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, passing Lord Dunmore’s conspicuous pineapple folly, until they reached Stirling Castle.

After travelling north to visit the newly built ‘hermitage’ on the rugged Highland estate of Zoffany’s patron the Duke of Atholl, tourists then continued south west down the valleys of Loch Tay and Loch Lomond. Here, at the Tayside estate of Kenmore, they could visit Maxwell’s Temple and use the moveable ‘prospect glass’ to frame picturesque views of the surrounding landscape.60 But on the grassy meadows adjoining Loch Lomond they would have seen barefoot women and children laying out sheets of linen to be bleached before export to customers in the West Indies.61 The last major sight on the tour were the ‘falls of the Clyde’, a spot just a few miles from Glasgow and the new cotton mills of New Lanark.62

The eighteenth century fashion for landscape tourism provided a means of dignifying the hinterlands of Britain’s rapidly expanding Atlantic ports. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, The Lakes, Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands were no longer considered as poor, remote and barren. They were, instead, regions where discerning ‘gentlemen or ladies of taste’ might choose to live or visit. Indeed, a philosophy which valued upland landscapes for their aesthetic qualities, rather than agricultural productivity, together with investment in road construction transformed poor and inaccessible areas of western Britain into ‘polite landscapes’. The riches from slave-grown products were instrumental in this transformation. As Adam Smith remarked in the Wealth of Nations, (1776) Britain’s expanding eighteenth century Atlantic trade had, indeed, succeeded in ‘cultivating the remote’.63

59

See Boyd’s accounts, Drummonds Bank Archives held in the Royal Bank of Scotland, Islington, London. Malcolm Andrews, op.cit. pp. 215-217. Tom Devine, Scotland’s Empire, op.cit. 62 By the 1770s , cotton was imported to Glasgow from Scottish-owned plantations in Grenada, Tobago and St Croix, Carricou, Mustique and Demerera. See Douglas Hamilton: Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, Manchester, 2005, pp.202-204. 63 Adam Smith: An Enquiry into …..The Wealth of Nations, op.cit., Vol. II p. 265 –269. 60 61

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Chapter Eight Bitter-sweet Edens But now far distant from my native soil; Whose fertile vale ne’er with the Muses rung, Whose fruits no bard, whose dames no poet sung Savannahs open, hills rife, floods glide along…. The’ ungrateful task a British muse disdains, Lo! Tortures, racks, whip, famine, gibbets, chains, Rise on my mind, appall my tear-stain’d eye Attract my rage, and draw a soul-felt sigh. Jamaica; a poem in three parts, Anon. (1777)

In the spring of 1775, a 17 year old British boy set sail for Jamaica in the hope of creating ‘a fortune’ in the Caribbean sugar colonies. But it was not only the lure of potential riches that attracted him to the West Indies; as he explained in his poem Jamaica, his ambition was also ‘to scan the works of Nature’.1 He was not disappointed. ‘How blessed is he, who ‘midst th’ Atlantic main Hath rov’d three moons the sugar-isles to gain,’ he enthused:

Here glow the plains, cloth’d in eternal green Here rise the hills, the valleys intervene While gay plantations on the fancy gain And tow’ring forests terminate the scene.2 Nor was the youthful poet the only visitor to remark upon the picturesque qualities of the Caribbean landscape. In 1774, a genteel Scottish lady named Janet Schaw described her first impressions of Antigua in her own journal: ‘When we got into the bay we had the island on both sides of us …hills, dales and groves, and not a tree, plant or shrub that I had ever seen before; the ground is vastly uneven, but not very high; the sugar canes cover the hills almost to the top and bear a resemblance in colour at least to a rich field of green wheat; the hills are skirted by the Palmetto or Cabbage tree, which even from this distance makes a noble appearance. The houses are generally placed in the Valleys between the hills and all front to the sea. We saw many fine ones. Will you not smile, if after this description, I add that its principal beauty to me is the resemblance it has to Scotland, yes to Scotland, and not only to Scotland in general, but to the Highlands in particular.’3 Clearly, by the early 1770s, the concept of the picturesque tour had arrived in the Caribbean. Indeed, an etching dating from 1769 - A view of the Town and Harbour of Montego Bay in

1

Anon: Jamaica: a poem in three parts, London, 1777. Ibid. Janet Schaw,Journal of a Lady of Quality, op.cit., p.74. Schaw’s manuscript journal describing the transatlantic voyage she made with her brother on the Jamaica Packet from the Firth of Forth to the West Indies was donated to the British Museum in the late nineteenth century. The edited version was published in 1921. However, the original manuscript went missing in 1963 and the editors do not mention precisely why Schaw chose to travel to the Caribbean. Indeed, the impression given by Schaw’s descriptions is that she travelled to the West Indies for no other purpose than to see what the colonies were like for herself. She was, in effect, a tourist.

2 3

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the Parish of St James’ Jamaica, taken from the road leading to St Anne’s - features a young artist sketching amongst the lush undergrowth of the foreground.4 Moreover, in his History of Jamaica (1774), Edward Long, scion of one of Jamaica’s established families, incorporated a picturesque view of rocky cascades. His family archives, held in the British Library and dating from a similar period, contain sketches of a ‘prospect of the upper side of a bridge formed by nature’ and a couple in riding habits gesturing at a waterfall beyond.5

In the previous two chapters, I have examined how the late eighteenth century fashion for picturesque landscape tourism in western Britain was intimately connected with the expansion of Atlantic ports such as Bristol, Liverpool, Lancaster, Whitehaven and Glasgow. In this penultimate chapter, I turn full circle and explore how the concept of the ‘picturesque tour’ and the record of tours in journals and drawings was also used to depict the distant Caribbean sugar colonies.

I am not the first person to address the concept, in itself, of the ‘colonial picturesque’. In The Road to Botany Bay, (1988) for instance, Paul Carter argues that picturesque travel played a key cultural role in the early nineteenth century colonisation of Australia. He describes how the picturesque tour ‘presented society as a community of objects… an interplay between space and time, between present loneliness and future sociability, between visible Nature and invisible Culture.’6 The picturesque tour provided ‘a landscape where traveller and poet, colonist and critic might feel equally at home. It looked forward to a cultivated society.’7

Sarah Suleri has also examined how creating picturesque water colour images of landscapes allowed wives of British colonial officials to ‘understand and order an alien surroundings’ in imperial India; 8 while Sue Rainey has shown how picturesque images of ‘natural wonders’ were used to create cultural icons in the independent United States.9 However, the origins of the colonial ‘landscape tour’ began more than half a century before these nineteenth century examples. Indeed, I will proceed to show that the concept can not only be linked directly to the landscapes of Wye Valley and Snowdonia, but the patronage of absentee planters and merchants of Britain’s Atlantic West.

4

The image is one of a series of four anonymous ‘scenes’ of Jamaican harbours published in London by Spilsbury between 1769 and 1770. British Library, Maps, K Top.123.53.2 British Library, Additional Manuscripts, Long family papers 27, 968. 6 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an exploration of Landscape and History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988, p.244. 7 Ibid, p. 255. 8 Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1984. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. 9 Sue Rainey, Creating Picturesque America: monument to the natural and cultural landscape, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 1994. 5

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In a bedroom corridor of Penrhyn Castle hangs a series of water colour paintings of the owner’s Jamaican sugar estates. One picture shows the sugar harvest in progress: the cane field is already half-cleared and a team of oxen waits patiently to transport the next load of cane to the steam-powered sugar mill. It is an image of the West Indies as an efficient wealth-producing machine. However, the other five paintings could not be more different. There are no views of the cane harvest here. Instead, enslaved workers are fishing, carrying baskets of fruit or herding cattle. In these paintings, Jamaica is not a slave colony producing cash crops in the harshest conditions for export, but an idyllic land of ease and plenty: a picturesque landscape of lush foliage, fast flowing mountain streams, rocky cliffs and palms. Although unsigned and undated, the origins of three of the five paintings can be accurately ascertained from a set of etchings published in 1778.10 They identify the water colours as ‘drawn on the spot and painted’ by George Robertson for pIantation owner William Beckford in 1774. Indeed, although they hang in obscurity today, the images would have been wellknown among eighteenth century Britain’s artistic ‘cognoscenti’.

8.1 George Robertson: watercolour study of A View of the River Cobre (1774)

The etchings were published by John Boydell of Cheapside, at the time the largest and most prestigious print publisher in Britain and continental Europe, and the original water colours

10

th

th

British Library, Topographic Works, West Indies 17 and 18 Century, Maps CXX111, 54 a-e.

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were also exhibited at the Society of Artists in London between 1775 and 1776. Robertson’s paintings were not merely family records of an absentee family’s West India estates, they were clearly intended for a far wider audience. Indeed, the set of prints made from them, now housed in the British Library were also once in the topographic collection of King George III.

8.2 George Robertson: watercolour study of A View of the Bridge Crossing the Caberitta River

Robertson’s patron, William Beckford, was a member of one of Jamaica’s wealthiest absentee planter families. However (unlike his cousin and namesake, the builder of Fonthill Abbey, to which I turn in the next chapter), he was the illegitimate offspring of a fourth son. And when, in 1757, at the age of just 13, Beckford inherited several Jamaican sugar estates, they were heavily indebted. Nevertheless, he received a gentleman’s education: Westminster, Oxford and an extensive Grand Tour of Europe. But in 1774, soon after his marriage to his cousin Charlotte Hay, he returned to his childhood home in Jamaica. It is not recorded whether the newly married Beckfords’ return to the West Indies was by choice, or out of financial necessity. Given his debt-ridden sugar estates, however, and Beckford’s comments that Jamaica was ‘Not a place for long term residence’ for those who have had a liberal education’11, there is good reason to suggest it was the latter. But why,

11

William Beckford: A Description of the Island of Jamaica 1790, p.44.

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therefore, were the couple accompanied on their transatlantic voyage by two artists, Robertson and one of Zoffany’s former pupils, Philip Wickstead?12

8.3 George Robertson: pen and wash study for A View of the River Cobre

8. 4 George Robertson: water-colour study, 1774 12

Biographical Information from The Dictionary of National Biography: William Beckford of Somerly.

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It is a question that has intrigued several other historians. Since I began my work, studies have been published by Kay Dian Kriz, Tim Barringer and Geoff Quilley, which mention images from the earlier set of prints made from Robertson’s paintings. They do not, however, address the original water-colours, the 1800 series of aquatints, nor other late eighteenth century drawings, paintings and prints of Caribbean landscapes held in British archives. Indeed, in his discussion on the ‘representation of British colonial landscapes’, Quilley notes that the Boydell prints are particularly important because of the ‘paucity of visual (eighteenth century) material treating the Caribbean colonies,’13 arguing that West Indians generally chose ‘to dissociate their display of cultural refinement from the source of their prosperity’.14 But, as we have seen, during most of the eighteenth century, the sugar isles were seen - from Britain at least - merely as a place to make money. The slave colonies of the Caribbean were not a place for polite culture. Rather than remarking on the paucity of depictions of Caribbean landscapes, it is more noteworthy that there are any at all.

8.5 George Robertson: water-colour study (c 1774 this is possibly Jamaica’s hot springs or Baths)

13

Tim Barringer, ‘Picturesque prospects and the labour of the enslaved’ in Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (eds.), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Belisario and His Worlds, New Haven and London: Yale, 2007. See also Geoff Quilley, ‘Pastoral plantations: the slave trade and the representation of British colonial landscape in the late eighteenth century’ in Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (eds.), An Economy of Colour: Visual culture and the Atlantic World, Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp.106-128. 14 Quilley, ibid., p.107.

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Contrary to Quilley’s assertions, many historic images of the Caribbean islands do survive. In the seventeenth century, ‘sea-men going into the West Indies’ were officially advised to make plots and draughts of prospects of Coasts, Prominatories, Islands and Ports marking the bearing and Distances as near as they can’.15 And, from the late eighteenth century onwards, this type of information - collated, cross-checked and then finely engraved - formed the basis of the printed British Admiralty Charts and Pilot Books of the Caribbean. Indeed, the wide coastal panoramas and detailed charts of anchorage points and coastal hazards are still – albeit in updated editions – used by sailors today. Maps, too, whether hand-drawn plantation plans for absentee proprietors or printed copies of government-sponsored surveys, were important means of depicting the Caribbean colonies.16

But Robertson’s images are very different from these imperial topographic records. The water-colours, etchings and aquatints are not aids to commercial coastal navigation. They do not provide accurate information for British naval or military commanders. Nor do they even record the form and management of a colonial agricultural holding. They are, instead, images of the financially marginal parts of a Jamaican plantation, carefully composed to delight a connoisseur of landscape art.

Robertson and Wickstead (who died in the Caribbean) were not the only professional artists to travel from Britain to paint Caribbean landscapes. In 1771, the new Captain General and Governor in Chief of the Leewards, Ralph Payne, commissioned the young Thomas Hearne (who was to become one of Britain’s most renowned landscape artists) to make 20 watercolour views of the Leewards, for instance. But why should there have been this unprecedented interest in the landscapes of Britain’s West Indian slave colonies in the late 1760s and early 1770s? As we saw in an earlier chapter, Augustino Brunius’ portraits of Dominica’s ‘happy slaves’ had played a useful propaganda role in William Young’s attempts to colonise the Windwards. However, Governor Payne had no need attract new investors to the well-established Leewards and William Beckford held no public position at all. To understand their motives, we must instead examine how the late eighteenth century fashion for picturesque landscape touring crossed the Atlantic.

In America: the picturesque,(1983) Albert Moritz argues that the first picturesque images of Britain’s Atlantic colonies were not of the wealthy Caribbean sugar isles but of landscapes

15

16

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1660, Vol. 1, quoted in Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, London, 1965, p.8. See B.W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Kingston, University of the West Indies Press, 2001.

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on the mainland.17 Indeed, a series of prints of the Great Cohoes Falls (in what is now New York State) were produced in 1761 from paintings made by the British topological artist Paul Sandby. However, Sandby - who was to accompany and illustrate William Watkins-Wynne’s celebrated Tour of north Wales - had not actually travelled to America himself. The paintings were instead based on sketches made by Thomas Pownell, a former Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, just prior to his return to England in 1759. Beckford and Payne’s decision to commission artists to make a transatlantic crossing to the West Indies was an entirely different level of commitment towards recording colonial landscapes.

Of course, images of the Caribbean sugar isles also had a large potential market among wealthy absentee plantation owners. Patrons and artists alike, therefore, had a high chance of recouping their investment by selling prints made from their work. But commercial interests alone are insufficient to explain their motives. We must instead look at the growing popularity of landscape touring in Western Britain and, in particular, to a visit to Piercefield and the Wye Valley made in May 1767 by Joseph Banks, a wealthy young botanist and later companion of Captain Cook.

Like many eighteenth century visitors, Banks recorded his visit in his journal. As Miss M had done seven years before, Banks crossed from Bristol via the Aust ferry to Chepstow. He, too, admired the abrupt contrast between the ‘very fine lawn’ and ‘naked rocks’18 while on the top of Windcliff and the ‘immensely extensive view of the country’.19 On the second day of his visit, he viewed the ‘noble ruins’ of Tintern Abbey, too - where he noted ‘plenty of Brassica oleracea growing everywhere among the rocks.’20 He then took a boat trip down the Wye remarking that ‘the banks of the River everywhere most Beautifull,(sic) especially under Pearcefield (sic) where you look up upon Mr Morris’ improvements’.21 ‘I am more and more convinced that it is far the most beautiful place I ever saw.’ 22 the young botanist concluded.

Indeed Banks’ brief visit to the Wye Valley seems to have given him a taste for picturesque travel: he spent the later summer and autumn touring north Wales.23 And a few months later, when he joined Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour on his exploratory voyage to the South

17

th

Albert Moritz, America: the Picturesque in 19 century Engraving, Toronto, New York, 1983. Joseph Banks, ‘Journal of an Excursion to Eastbury and Bristol etc May, June 1767’, Proceedings of the Bristol Naturalists Society, New Series, Vol. IX (1899), pp.8-25. 19 Banks, ibid, p.15. 20 Banks, ibid, p.17. 21 Banks, ibid, p.15. 22 Banks, ibid, p.25. 23 th th Joseph Banks, Journal of an Excursion to Wales, August 13 – January 29 ,1768, Cambridge University Library GB 0012 MS. Add. 6294. 18

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Seas, Banks’ retinue included artists charged with recording ‘scenes’ to ‘entertain (Banks’) friends in England’.24 Sponsored by The Royal Society, the primary, although then unpublicised, purpose of the voyage was to prospect for new colonial territories. Sugar planters and West India merchants, therefore, took a particular interest. Not only were they Britain’s most successful and prominent colonists, they were also hoping to find a suitable base to supply the sugar islands with provisions.25

Banks had, indeed, dined with Valentine Morris during his initial trip to Piercefield and visited again soon after his return from the Pacific.26 Unfortunately, there are no records to let us know if Banks entertained Morris with his tropical ‘scenes’.27 The following year, however, etchings of rocky bays and waterfalls were used to illustrate the printed accounts of the expedition. Indeed, if you examine the illustrations, you can see how useful the concept of a landscape tour - of travelling through living Poussins and Claudes - was as a means to engage a wider public.

For ‘picturesque’ landscape images capture the imagination in ways that topographic surveys and maps cannot. While the wide horizontal panoramas of Admiralty Coastal and Harbour charts, for example, assist sailors approaching land, they are little help in describing the actual experience of travel to someone else. But picturesque images describe incidents and dramas on the course of a journey; they are visual punctuation points in a narrative. Picturesque views celebrate the heightened emotions and encompass all the contrasting feelings of fear and pleasure. Indeed, the picturesque is a way to come to terms with these experiences, by imaginatively ‘reorganizing a shapeless, infinitely expansive, landscape into a sequence of frameable views’.28

However, like imperial maps and charts, picturesque views, too, contained a political message. For an image composed in a picturesque manner records a means of appreciating and understanding topography and vegetation that exists in the mind of the beholder. It is a cultural attitude to land that, in the mid-eighteenth century, still belonged to a certain group of people: those with a knowledge of seventeenth century French visions of classical Italian landscapes - in short, educated British ‘gentlemen’. Indeed, in 1772, a year after 24

Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks (ed. Hooker), p.79.The artists were Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan. Joseph Banks also took two ‘blacks’ named Dalton and Richmond - quoted in Bernard Smith, op.cit, p.19. 25 See discussion in David Mackay, In the wake of Cook Exploration, Science and Empire 1780-1801, p.29. 26 th Banks, P.R.O, C.O, 101/17 30 April 1773, quoted in Ivor Waters: The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, op.cit, p.34. 27 Tahiti and Terra Australias Incognita were never to become supply bases for the sugar islands. Ambitions to transplant the breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies as food for enslaved workers, however, were to lead to the infamous mutiny on the Bounty on its voyage from the Pacific to the Caribbean. See Waters, ibid, pp.34-5. 28 Malcolm Andrews: ‘A Picturesque Template: The Tourists and their Guidebooks’ in The Picturesque in Late Georgian England, Georgian Group, 1995.

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Endeavour’s return, the artist William Hodges, a pupil of Richard Wilson, was sent on Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific under the patronage of the British Admiralty. The picturesque tour had become a state-sanctioned means of ‘cultivating the remote’.

Creating picturesque ‘scenes’ to give a cultural polish to colonial prospecting expeditions, whether in the Pacific or in mainland America, however, was rather different from choosing to transform 100-year-old Caribbean slave colonies into living landscape art. As writers such as David Worrall, Peter Garside and Anne Janowitz have shown, the late eighteenth century fashion for picturesque landscape tourism in the poor uplands of Western Britain highlighted the country’s growing wealth differences. Janowitz discusses, for instance, how Wordsworth’s Lakeland poems erased ‘the local culture of poverty for the sake of a culture of meditative poetry’29, while John Wale describes fashionable picturesque tourists as ‘looking at certain parts of Britain with the imperial eyes of a leisured aesthetic’.30

But nowhere in the nascent British Empire would the divisions between tourist and the objects of their gaze be more sharply pronounced than in the slave colonies of the Caribbean. Indeed, in an era of growing anti-slavery sentiment in Britain, the ‘natural scenery’ of the Caribbean proved an ambiguous attraction. The author of Jamaica, for instance, recalls how he was ‘captivated by the beauty of the island (and) the verdure of the country’, but ‘disgusted with the severity of the inhabitants, the cruelty of the planters and the miseries of the slaves’. And, as he explained in a preface to his poem, ‘the first I endeavour(ed) to celebrate, the last to condemn’.31 Not all visitors, however, were so torn between the delights of Jamaican landscapes and the deprivations suffered by the majority of the island’s inhabitants. Indeed, the aesthetic of the picturesque proved a useful tool for the wealthy, slave-owning, white minority.

Robertson’s water colours are among the first ‘polite’ images of a British colony to be painted en plein air (out of doors, or in the field). Until the late eighteenth century, landscape paintings, like portraits, namely, were made in oils: a thin paste of ground up, solid pigments mixed with various volatile bases that, over days, evaporated to leave a coloured residue. This, clearly, was difficult to do out of doors – indeed, Hodges’ attempts to do so on board the Resolution ended in a sticky failure.

29

Anne Janowitz, ‘The Chartist Picturesque’ in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (eds.), The politics of the Picturesque, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.62. 30 John Wale, ‘Romantics, Explorers and Picturesque Travellers’, in The politics of the Picturesque, op.cit., p.177. 31 Preface, Jamaica, a poem in three parts, written in that island in the year MDCCLXXVI. London: William Nichol, 1777.

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Formal landscape paintings, therefore, were painted in the studio from preparatory sketches made in pen and ink or chalk. However, in 1766, a former artist’s ‘colourman’ (the assistant who prepared the paint) named William Reeves opened a shop near St Paul’s Cathedral selling a revolutionary product: boxes of solid pigment bound with a water soluble gum. Not only did this eliminate the need for tedious grinding and mixing of pigments, but like ink the paint dried in minutes rather than hours or days. Reeves’ convenient ‘paintboxes’ were ideal for colonial surveyors indeed, the British Army and the East India Company were among their first customers.32 But they were also a boon for tourists and artists. Water-colours allowed a landscape tour to be captured on paper in visual as well as written form.

Indeed, although the coloured prints suggest that the originals may have faded, it is clear that Robertson was revelling in the new medium’s ability to record light and colour. He uses a tonal contrast between the yellow ambers of features in sunlight and the blue greys of shade to capture the unrelenting intensity of the strong sun and vivid colours of Jamaica. However, a comparison of the paintings with the etchings shows that the sense of tropical heat, of the real difference of place which Robertson created, is lost. For example, in ‘A view in the Island of Jamaica of the Bridge crossing the River Cobre near Spanish Town,’ the cliffs and boulders in the original painting are thinly covered by spikey aloes and trailing plants, while in the print they are covered in lush foliage.

8.6 Thomas Vivares: Etching of A view of the crossing of the River Cobre near Spanish Town 32

Victoria Finlay: Colour, London:Sceptre, 2002, introduction, p.19.

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The wooded hillside in the background has, too, grown bigger, and the placid river waters have turned into choppy waves. Indeed, the image looks more like the tree-covered cliffs of Piercefield and the Wye Valley than the hot arid rocks in the original painting.

The other black and white etchings also show a similar process of subtle manipulation. In View of the River Cobre, for instance, an unusual looking tree is replaced with formulaic massed foliage, and the distant mountain looms larger. The strange alien plants (to a British audience) are placed within a familiar convention of European landscape painting. They are exotic ‘specimens’ under British control. Rather than depictions of a distant Caribbean colony, with strong heat and sun, instead they almost become wooded Welsh border landscapes.

And it is not only the topography that has changed, but the people, too. The original of Bridge over the River Cobre, for instance, shows three enslaved workers, all clad in matching white breeches and cream shirts. Two holding hoes are striding purposely away from the viewer, while a third has laid his down and is sitting on a rock. The figures are spaced apart, and there is a suggestion of an overseer’s unseen control. In the etched black and white print, however, two convivial groups have been added; a man mounted on a mule pauses to talk to a man and women, while the solitary man resting is replaced by two men in animated conversation. There is still an air of purpose - the woman is carrying a bucket and basket on her head, while one man carries a hoe - but it now suggests, rather, that they are akin to peasants or smallholders going about their daily work, rather than plantation slaves.

It is unlikely that the engravers, Thomas Vivares and Daniel Lepiniere, and the publisher Boydell were creating conscious political statements. It is probable, instead, that Vivares and Lepiniere were simply ‘improving’ the composition of Robertson’s originals to appeal to customers, whose taste in landscape had been formed by the examination of engravings of paintings by Poussin and Claude Lorraine. 33 Nevertheless, the prints show how the European conventions of picturesque landscape painting could create subtle political propaganda.

Only three of Hearne’s formal paintings for Governor Payne are known to have survived; and here the propaganda is more explicit. Indeed, rather than landscapes, they focus on the military barracks and the court house, reassuring symbols of British authority. However, in the National Museum of Wales is a pair of pen-and-ink landscape panoramas of eighteenth33

In the late eighteenth century prints - such as those like Gainsborough’s and Moreland’ s landscape paintings depicting the English rural poor - were often manipulated to appeal to a wider market. See John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

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century Antiguan sugar plantations, which, although unsigned, display Hearne’s characteristic style.34 Indeed, their wide panoramic format - like that used by naval surveyors - suggest that these sketches were made as preparatory works for paintings commissioned by Payne as Captain General or by absentee plantation owners. But though they, too, date from the early 1770s, unlike Robertson’s carefully framed views of Jamaica’s lush, forested interior, these panoramas give a very different impression of Britain’s sugar colonies

West Aspect of St John’s Town Antigua shows the island’s capital with its stone cathedral, frigates anchored in the bay and the military fortifications against a ‘backdrop’ of rolling hills. However, the title is misleading, as the town is in the far distance. It is, rather, the sugar harvest that is the focus of the artist’s interest. On the extreme right is a windmill, but despite the distant flags fluttering in the breeze, it is not in use; instead, a primitive cattle mill is being used to crush the canes. Three black women feed canes into a mechanism of three vertical rollers set on a raised circular platform at the edge of the cane fields. Though they are stripped to the waist, they are sheltered from the sun by a thatched roof, unlike the two men who drive the four oxen

8.7

34

Detail of West Aspect of St John’s Antigua, c.1772

See David Morris, Thomas Hearne and his Landscapes, London: Reaction,1989, particularly chapter 2, ‘A colonial Commission: Antigua and the Leeward Isles’, pp.9-22.

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Another group of five women emerges from the fields to the left, with bundles of canes on their heads. One appears to be questioning the male overseer - dressed in shirt and breeches and carrying a staff or whip - and he gestures towards the mill. It is a reminder that much of the most demanding, and least regarded, plantation work was done by women.

8.8 Detail of West Aspect of St John’s Antigua, c.1772

Further to the right of the picture, beyond some ponds, several more black figures emerge from the canes. However, they do not appear to be involved in the cane harvest. Indeed, one of the women is clearly a nurse, carrying a white toddler under the shade of a parasol.

8.9 Detail of West Aspect of St John’s, Antigua.

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The other panorama is identified as Jolly Hill Estate Antigua belonging to Govn. Morris. Valentine Morris had leased out Piercefield and returned to the Caribbean as Governor of the island of St Vincent in 1772, following an expensive and unsuccessful campaign to become a Member of Parliament. It is possible, therefore, that this was a preparatory work for a subsequent commission. But, though composed in a similar format to the West aspect of St Johns, this image is quite different. It is very calm, very still; there are no signs of work, no oxen, no ships, no people. Groups of birds are used to identify distant landmarks such as Nevis Isle, Gingery Hill and Rotunda Isle. But the most intriguing feature, framed by two flowering aloes, is not labelled at all. It is a collection of small grassed-roofed roof huts: the village where Morris’ enslaved workers would have lived.

8.10 Detail of Jolly Hill Estate Antigua belonging to Govn. Morris.

No such ‘slave village’ appears, however, in Hearne’s formal painting of another plantation: Parnham Hill House and Sugar plantation, Antigua. The picture was painted in 1779 – following Hearne’s return to Britain - for the Tudways, absentees who lived in the small cathedral city of Wells, south of Bristol. Unlike the initial sketches, this image is composed in the typical rectangle of polite eighteenth century landscape paintings. Indeed, 183

the rolling hills of Antigua have grown into a ‘sublime’ mountainous backdrop more akin to the cliffs of St Kitts’ Mount Misery.35

8.11 Thomas Hearne: Parnham Hill House and Estate, Antigua , Watercolour on paper (1779)

But it is not just the landscape composition that has changed. In this image men not women work in the fields and, while the nurse re-appears, she is now accompanied by a welldressed partner. Here the truth of domestic slavery was deftly transformed into a reassuring family group. Like the prints of Robertson’s Jamaican landscapes this picturesque pastoral, too, was subtle pro-slavery propaganda.

8.10 Detail Parnham Hill House and Estate, Antigua 35

See also the discussion in Seymour, Daniels, Watkins, ‘Estate and Empire’, op.cit., p.316-7.

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When Robertson’s water colours were painted in 1774, Jamaica was the wealthiest of the 26 colonies that made up Britain’s transatlantic American Empire. However, five years later when Hearne painted his ‘picturesque’ image of Antigua, the Atlantic colonial empire was in the process of splitting, painfully, in two.36 The 13 Caribbean island colonies were to remain loyal to Britain, while the 13 mainland ‘rebel’ colonies were to form the new, independent United States of America. And although the concepts of natural scenery and wilderness touring were to become a fundamental part of American cultural identity, it was to be more than a generation before tourists and artists alike celebrated the picturesque landscapes of the Hudson River.

In Britain, however, the War of Independence only encouraged the fashion for landscape touring at home. France – intent on disrupting a rival colonial power – had sided with American ‘rebel’ colonies. It was thus difficult for wealthy young British gentleman to make their coming-of-age tour to see the remains of Imperial Rome.37 The uplands of the West proved an attractive alternative. The publication of Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye in 1782 found a ready market among aspiring ‘grand tourists’, as well as those of more modest means. 38 Indeed, the end of the war the following year did not diminish the growing appeal of British landscape tourism. As we have seen, Gilpin published his treatise on picturesque touring in Cumberland and Westmoreland’ in 1786 and his Observations relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty ….in the Highlands of Scotland was published in 1789.39 And the following year London publishers T. & J. Egerton produced the first commercial guide to picturesque landscape touring in the Caribbean.

‘I wish indeed that I had been possessed of the descriptive pencil and the recording pen of that Elegant Enthusiast who has immortalized the beauties of the Wye and the magnificent variety of the Lakes,‘40 reflected the guide’s author, Robertson’s former patron William Beckford. Indeed - and oddly given Beckford’s previous patronage - the lack of illustrations in ‘A Descriptive Account of The Island of Jamaica…chiefly considered in a picturesque point of view’ were rather a hindrance to Beckford’s attempts to portray ‘the most grand and lively scenes that the creating hand of nature can possibly exhibit’. 41 Readers of Beckford’s guide 36

See Andrew O’Shaughnessy: An Empire Divided, Philadelphia, 2000. Some intrepid travellers such as Richard Payne Knight and William Beckford of Fonthill (both from families with interests in the Americas) took the northern Alpine route to Italy. Their trips followed the route of an earlier Alpine tourist, the poet Thomas Gray. However, Payne, Knight and Beckford took the artist John Robert Cuzons who produced his extraordinary sublime water colours of the Alps. 38 See comments in Charles Heath: Descriptive Accounts of Persfield and Chepstow, Monmouth, 1793. 39 William Gilpin: Observations relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty made in …1776 on several parts of Great Britain: particularly the High-Lands of Scotland, London: R. Blamire, 1789. 40 William Beckford: A Description of the island of Jamaica, London, 1790, p.42. 41 Ibid, p.7. 37

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had to imagine landscapes instead: ‘no less romantic than the most wild and beautiful situations of Frascati, Tivoli and Albano.’42 They had to picture for themselves an island colony where the ‘enchanting hues’ and ‘picturesque and fantastic clouds’ of sunsets rivalled those of the Campania of Rome and the environs of Naples,43 a place where ‘the hand of Nature alone’44 could excel the works of Claude Lorraine, Poussin and Salvator Rosa. ‘He who can view this romantic variety without preserving a record of it in his mind, must be deemed a frigid observer indeed, where he ought to be an admirer of the beautiful, and an enthusiast of the sublime,’ Beckford exclaimed.45

Beckford’s treatise (written while he was bankrupt in a British debtor’s prison following a destructive hurricane) however, failed to emulate Gilpin’s commercial success. And the reasons for its failure were not solely its lack of illustrative material. 46 In the early 1790s the British Parliament was in the midst of debating a bill to abolish the slave trade. Absentee proprietors had more pressing concerns than the aesthetics of picturesque landscapes.

Nevertheless, Beckford’s attempt to present Jamaica as a picturesque tourist destination was not an unmitigated failure. A year after his death in 1799, an unknown patron employed the French engraver Merigot to produce set of six enticing, vividly coloured aquatint etchings of Robertson’s water colours.47 Two years later Maria Nugent, the wife of Jamaica’s new Governor, described rising early, dressing by candlelight and setting of ‘with immense party and calvacade’48 to visit ‘the Walks’ - the six mile long mountain side track near Spanish Town described by Beckford as ‘the most romantic, beautiful and picturesque road that I ever saw or could imagine.’49

Indeed, Daniel McKinnen describes in his Tour Through the British West Indies (1804), how the trip had become a tourist attraction: ‘the ride through the file of the mountains near Spanish Town...is shown as one of the first objects of curiousity to a stranger who visits this part of the country.’50 Fifteen years later in 1820, moreover, the British topographical artist James Hakewill - newly returned from a speculative ‘picturesque tour’ of Italy - embarked on

42

Beckford, op.cit, p.7. Ibid, p.7. 44 Ibid, p.11. 45 Ibid, p.22. 46 Joseph Banks was one of the few purchasers of the first - and only - edition. 47 British Library, Maps K. Top CXXIII 55 a-f (they have been misattributed to the French artist Belanger). 48 th Maria Nugent, 24 February 1802 in Philip Wright (ed.), Lady Nugent’s Journal , Barbados, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2002. p 60. 49 ibid, p 60. 50 Daniel Mckinnen, Tour through the British West Indies, London, 1804, p.108. 43

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a painting tour of the Caribbean where he produced seven folios of aquatints illustrating his Picturesque tour of the island of Jamaica.51

Nor was Jamaica the only island celebrated for its natural scenery. The previous year, in 1819, at the age of 18, Lancashire-born Thomas Cole (who was to become one of America’s most renowned landscape artists) had visited the Leewards, where he had been overwhelmed by the sight of the neighbouring island ‘Statia’. ‘There are spots on this earth where the sublime and the beautiful are united - where the heart of man feels its own nothingness or rises with the most ecstatic emotions - where the lips are sealed in reverence, but the soul feels unutterable. Such a spot is St Eustatia,’ he wrote after his arrival in New York in 1825.52

Thirty years later - almost two decades after the abolition of slavery in the British islands the author of The Wonders of the West Indies - a book which, like Beckford’s, was designed to celebrate the natural scenery of the Caribbean, was more circumspect. ‘ If the history of the Antilles is associated with no classical reminiscences - if the ideas which that history suggests are still darkened by the deep shadows of a great though not wholly unexpiated national crime …It cannot be denied that the natural endowments of these magnificent islands are of a character to command the admiration of every beholder.’53 Today the Caribbean’s ‘natural scenery’ plays a major role in the islands’ tourist industries.54 Cruise ships and yachts sail the azure waters, Jamaica’s lush mountains are now national parks and you can take ‘scenic’ raft trips down rivers where mahogany logs were once floated to the sea for export. Indeed, the photographs of palm-fringed sandy bays that adorn travel brochures (composed in the same manner as 17th century landscape paintings, with background, foreground and framing foliage) are reminders of how modern tourism is rooted in the eighteenth century British fashion for picturesque travel.

In the final chapter of Citizens of the World, David Hancock examines the legacy of the absentee planters and Atlantic merchants of eighteenth century London. He concludes that their ‘most durable legacy’ was not personal riches, nor political power (although many achieved both), but their part in the creation of a ‘British Atlantic community’55 spanning an entire ocean. He argues, indeed, that their investments in the communications infrastructure 51

See Tim Barringer, ‘Art and Emancipation in Jamaica’ op.cit for more detail. th Thomas Cole, Saturday Evening Post, May 14 ,1825, quoted in Ron Wetterworth, ‘Thomas Cole, American Landscape Painter visited Statia in 1819’, Newsletter of the St Eustatius Historical Foundation, Winter 2009. 53 Lynch Theodora, The Wonders of the West Indies, London, 1856, p.ii. 54 See Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and the Framing of the Caribbean Picturesque, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 55 David Hancock, Citizens of the World, op.cit. p. 385. 52

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of ‘a far-flung empire’ - ranging from the construction of harbours, lighthouses and roads to the creation of regular postal services between Britain and the Caribbean - ‘incorporated relatively inaccessible parts of America and Britain into a global world’. 56

But it was not just economic investment by Atlantic merchants that joined up Britain’s remote hinterlands whether here or across the ocean, and ‘connected them to the centre’,57 as Hancock terms it. Nor did such investment, in any event, derive solely from business in the capital; as we have seen, merchants, investors and ‘gentlemen of fortune’ in Bristol, Bath, Liverpool, Whitehaven, Lancaster and Glasgow, too, were instrumental in the creation of this transatlantic, colonial community.

The late eighteenth century fashion for celebrating the aesthetics of ‘natural scenery’ also became a means of connecting Britain’s further reaches in the colonial era - from the lush forests of Jamaica to the rainswept hills of north Wales, Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands - to the cultural mainstream of the country’s, and indeed Europe’s, privileged elite.

The picturesque landscape tour transformed the traditional means of acquiring cultural education and status – the Grand Tour of European art and architecture - into a broader aesthetic of travel. The direct, first hand experience of raw nature – waterfalls, mountains and cliffs - was an aesthetic experience that could equal the pleasure felt viewing the finest Renaissance paintings or the awe inspired by Rome’s magnificent ruins. The sights of the colonial new world could rival, or even surpass, the sites of classical Europe.

56 57

Hancock, Citizens of the World, op..cit., p. 387. Hancock, ibid. p. 386.

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Conclusion The Mock Turtle’s story The Queen said to Alice ‘Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet? ‘No’ said Alice. ‘I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.’ It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,’ said the Queen. ‘I never saw one, or heard of one,’ said Alice. ‘Come on then,’ said the Queen, ‘and he shall tell you his history.’ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

If, on a visit to Bath, you leave the Georgian urbanity of the city behind and walk up into the surrounding hills, you will be well rewarded. For these gentle heights provide sweeping panoramas of the city below. Some of best views are to be had from the municipal playing fields that lie on the ridge of downland at the top of Lansdowne Hill. And, here, between the cemetery and the football pitches, partly concealed behind a thick hedge, is Beckford’s Tower. Designed in 1825 as a library and retreat for Jamaican absentee William Beckford (the cousin of Robertson’s patron William Beckford of Somerly), the tower once marked the summit of a vast, walled garden known as Beckford’s Ride.

The Ride began at the rear of Beckford’s house in Lansdowne Crescent at the northern extremity of eighteenth century Bath. It stretched for more than a mile up the slope of the hill through a series of different picturesque landscape gardens. A gloomy water-colour of 1829 – a year or so after the building was occupied – shows a lone horse and rider approaching the tower through a plantation of fir trees: the focal point of Beckford’s private picturesque landscape tour.

While you can still glimpse the rough Gothick entrance gateway to the rear of Lansdowne Crescent, most of the old landscape is now covered by housing estates. The graves of Lansdowne Cemetery have taken the place of the formal lawns that once surrounded the tower. Indeed, the stone-winged angels and granite crosses of the adjacent burial ground emphasise the tower’s severe, almost funereal exterior. Shallow steps lead up to an entrance loggia of a stern, two storey, stone-faced block pierced with small, lattice-covered windows. To the left is another similar, but single storey block, while to the right the tower rises almost 150 feet. Plain stone, with narrow slit windows at the base, it becomes progressively more ornate as it gets higher towards the richly ornamented viewing gallery, or Belvidere.

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9.1 Beckford’s Tower: Belvidere

To reach the Belvidere, you must climb the winding stone staircase that spirals up inside. A combination of deep pink walls and no central newel gives an extraordinary sensation of shifting and distorting space. You clutch hold of the iron handrail in an attempt to keep hold of reality. It is a relief when, after 154 steps, you at last reach the top. Here, the vista from twelve, arched, ebony-framed windows provides a spectacular panorama, described by Beckford as ‘the finest prospect in Europe’.1 Indeed, with no sign of the nearby motorway, and modern houses concealed by trees or blurred by distance, the view could be seen as an allegory of British power, wealth and cultural identity during the Georgian era.

To the south lie the outskirts of Aqua Sulis, Britain’s eighteenth century Roman playground; to the west, the dull glint of the Bristol Channel leading to the riches of the south Atlantic; to the north, rolling fields of wheat carpet the Wiltshire downs; while to the south east, King Alfred’s Tower marks out the landscape gardens of Stourhead, created by the Hoares, one of the foremost banking families of eighteenth century Britain.

1

William Beckford, quoted in Jon Millington, Beckford’s Tower: An Illustrated Guide , Bath: Bath Preservation Trust, 1994.

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Yet, if this panorama were intended as a visual metaphor, it had already been overtaken by time. In 1789, Philip Thicknesse could envisage Bath as the cultural hub of Britain’s worldwide empire, transporting the fruits of the colonies from Bristol’s quays along the river Avon. But by 1827, when Beckford’s Tower was completed, this was far from the case. The axis of new wealth between London and the Atlantic West had rotated firmly northwards. Bristol’s constricted inland moorings had long been eclipsed by the deep-water ports of Liverpool and Glasgow and genteel colonial venturers no longer flocked to Bath and Hotwells. Rather than the ‘stone-clad sides’ of the Avon, it was the newly canalised Mersey and Irwell Navigation between Liverpool and Manchester that now epitomised the wealth created by Britain’s transatlantic trade.2 But Manchester, like the other expanding cities of the north west, was a town of production not consumption, a place to make money from cotton grown in the slave plantations of the American south. No tourists went to Manchester to bathe, sip mineral waters and parade in formal garden squares. The north west’s ‘bourgeois public sphere’ was manifest instead in the hills, valleys, lakes and mountains of north Wales and Cumberland.

No longer the glittering pleasure resort of its mid-eighteenth century heyday, Bath was now a place for invalids and genteel retirement. But, as the as the stone memorials in the Abbey and other church graveyards attest, the town continued to attract many West Indians. And of all the absentee sugar planters who spent their twilight years in Bath, none was more notorious than the builder of the tower, the reclusive William Beckford.

The only legitimate son of the powerful Jamaican-born City merchant Alderman Beckford, William had eschewed business and politics. Instead, like Robertson’s patron (his cousin and namesake), Beckford played the role of a cultivated English gentleman. Indeed, the extent of Beckford’s inheritance - the poet Byron described him as ‘England’s wealthiest son’3 - allowed him to take this role to an audacious extreme. Beckford’s lavish patronage of art, architecture and landscapes, in particular, the construction of his vast country house Fonthill Abbey, has made him a popular subject for biographers. To date, Beckford has been the subject of no fewer than 15 books and seven major exhibitions, making him, arguably, the best-known of all eighteenth century West Indian absentees.4

2

See Robin Blackburn: The Making of New World Slavery, op.cit. pp.545–7 for a discussion of ‘West Indian’ investment in the construction of British canals. Quoted in Jon Millington, Beckford’s Tower, op. cit, p 2. 4 See the Bibliography in Millington, Beckford’s Tower, ibid. 3

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Indeed, the level of interest in Beckford is such that in the early 1990s, after several decades of dereliction, the tower was restored and converted into a small museum, illustrating the life of ‘one of the nation’s most accomplished and interesting characters’5.

The interiors have been carefully recreated to the original designs: vivid crimson and scarlet walls and thick red carpets provide a sumptuous background to a display of paintings, intricately carved furniture, decorated ceramics and silverware, designed to ‘illustrate Beckford’s life as a writer, collector and patron of the arts.’6 But, despite the warmth of the colours, the richness of the contents and far-reaching views, visiting the tower is an oddly claustrophobic experience. It is like being imprisoned inside a colossal, velvet-lined jewellrybox. In a tangible sense, the relationship between the lavish display of material possessions and the human captivity of slavery has been caught within the building’s very form.

Indeed, though by no means the last building or landscape to be funded from the proceeds of Caribbean slavery, the introspective interior, bleak exterior and West Country panoramas make the tower highly symbolic. For when architect Henry Goodridge began his designs in 1825, the era of West Indian power and influence in Britain was starting to draw to a close. Beckford’s Tower is not only a memorial to the reclusive son of a Caribbean sugar magnate, it is a melancholic shrine to the decline of the British West India interest.

For more than 150 years, the combination of protectionist trading policies enshrined in the Navigation Acts, slave labour and the British consumer’s desire for sugar had meant that investment in the Caribbean colonies was synonymous with great wealth. But during the course of the nineteenth century, the politics and economics of sugar production were to change dramatically as slave labour and protectionist tariffs were abolished in favour of ‘free trade’. ‘Woe betide the man nowadays who has a West Indian Estate!,’ sighed absentee Alfred Desant in Annals of an Eventful life, his fictionalised memoirs of planter life on St Saccharissa published - anonymously - in 1870.

Other British writers, however, regarded the complaints made by absentees like Desant, who looked to the ‘good old times before emancipation,’7 with less sympathy. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (1865), a disconsolate turtle-shelled, cow-hoofed mockturtle, who ‘once was a real turtle’, sighs as he remembers the delights of former days. ‘Beautiful Soup, so rich and Green, Waiting in a hot tureen!,’ the mock-turtle sings in a voice ‘choked with sobs’, as he remembers the exotic delicacies of his youth. ‘Who for such dainties 5 6 7

See www.bath-preservation-trust.org.uk/BeckfordsTower. Ibid. Alfred Desant, Annals of an Eventful life, Edinburgh, 1870, p.36.

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would not stoop? Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup.’8 The insinuation is that the declining fortunes of British West Indians meant that they were no longer able to afford imported turtles to make their favourite delicacy. Instead, absentees had to make do with mock-turtle soup, made with a stock of boiled cows’ feet. Expensive tropical luxuries had been replaced by offal.

9.2 The Mock Turtle, the Gryphon and Alice

The decline in West Indian fortunes during the nineteenth century was, nevertheless, slow. For it is now clear that the abolition of the transatlantic British slave trade in 1807 had little immediate impact on the profitability of Caribbean sugar plantations. It was, after all, not difficult to purchase enslaved labour from neighbouring French, Spanish or Dutch traders. Moreover, contrary to Eric William’s arguments in Capitalism in Slavery, the growth in abolitionist sentiment in Britain during the early years of the century did not disguise an economic collapse in the West India trade. As Desant admitted: ‘It was not so bad then when brown sugar was eighteen pence a pound …and my father was thought to be a lucky man when it was noised through the Forest of Arden that Old Colonel Ratoon had died in the West Indies and made Squire Halfacre his heir.’9 Indeed, historian Robin Blackburn argues that high sugar prices in the wartime period between 1793 and 1816 provided a ‘golden age’ for British

8 9

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland, London, Bell & Hyman, 1985, p.107. Desant, op.cit, p.10.

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Caribbean estate owners and West India traders.10 Moreover, he contends, the ban on the slave trade and nervousness about investing in plantations brought about a bonanza of spending within Britain itself. Sugar profits were invested into private houses, agricultural estates, roads, lighthouses and docks, in Blackburn’s words the British West Indian ‘Dance of the Millions’.11

London’s vast West India Docks, built between 1798 and 1807, were one example of this wartime building boom; the most visually spectacular monument to inflated sugar profits, however, was Beckford’s previous foray into architecture, the extraordinary Fonthill Abbey. Built between 1797 and 1822 on the Wiltshire country estate he inherited from his father, the lavish country house replaced the Palladian mansion that had been Beckford’s childhood home. Today, the building has almost entirely disappeared; however, images and written descriptions portray a dwelling of astonishing scale. The entrance was through 35 feet high, pointedarched double doors. Inside, hammer-beam oak trusses and stained glass windows of the 78 feet tall hall echoed the architecture of a mediaeval cathedral, while at the centre of the building rose a 280 feet tower, adorned with intricately carved stone tracery windows and fleches. It is difficult to imagine that it was intended as a private residence. As one overwhelmed visitor remarked, when the house was first opened to the public in 1822: ‘the architecture conveyed ‘to the mind of every beholder ideas both of mind and purse, which (Beckford) must have possessed: the first to conceive, and the latter to find means to pay for the execution of so grand a conception.’12

It was a pertinent comment. The end of the Napoleonic wars in 1816 had seen a dramatic fall in sugar prices; even Beckford had found it necessary to curtail his extravagant expenditure. Indeed, as a three shilling New Guide to Fonthill made clear, Beckford’s decision to ‘suddenly throw open’ 13 the vast doors of a still unfinished Fonthill to the ‘intrusive inspection both of the virtuoso and the tourist’14 was not made out of aesthetic pride. ‘The finest effort, which modern art has been able to produce’15 was to be sold to the highest bidder. The ‘dance of the millions’ had, clearly, come to an end.

10

Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, op.cit., pp. 522-523. Blackburn, ibid, p.543. 12 Anon, A New Guide to Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, London, 1822, p.11. 13 Ibid, preface. 14 Ibid, preface. 15 Ibid, p.III. 11

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9.3 Fonthill Abbey following the collapse of the tower in December, 1825

The subsequent collapse of Fonthill’s tower in 1825, just a few months after its eventual sale, was, indeed, a prescient symbol of the coming changes in the fortunes of West Indian absentees. After a period of almost 30 years of record profits, the very edifice of the British Caribbean sugar planter’s economy was being shaken. As we have seen, the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade in 1807 had little major economic effect on the plantations themselves. However, news of the debates together with the formal establishment of the (free) republic of Haiti in 1804 had led many enslaved workers in the British sugar colonies to believe that planters would grant them their own liberty. It was a belief that was cruelly misplaced.

An early nineteenth century Caribbean song expresses the frustrations at the failure of the Act to deliver the anticipated freedoms, frustrations that erupted in Barbados in 1816 into a revolt that destroyed much of the Lascelles’ sugar crop.16

Oh me good friend, Mr.Wilberforce, make me free! God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty thank ye! Buckra in this country no make we free: What Negro for to do? What Negro for to do? Take by force! Take by force!17 16

st

th

Richard Cobham (Barbados) to John Wood Nelson (London) 1 & 20 Sept 1816, W.Y.R.O., HAR/WI/Bundle 2 Accounts and miscellaneous papers,1790-1848. 17 Noted down in Jamaica in 1816 by Mathew Monk Lewis. Quoted in Claypole and Robottom, Caribbean Story, op.cit., (Book 1), p.165.

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Rebellions had occurred with regularity throughout the islands’ history. However, they now were now beginning to viewed differently in Britain itself. No longer were revolts in the sugar colonies always seen as threats to the nation’s imperial prosperity, they had instead a profound moral purpose. And nine years later, in 1823, the death of a British missionary accused of inciting a rebellion at Demerara in British Guyana was the catalyst for a new British campaign to abolish slavery entirely.18

During the following few years, more than 100 anti-slavery campaigning groups were set up – mostly by women of the ‘middling sort’. Amelie Opie’s illustrated children’s poem The Black Mans Lament or How to make sugar (1826) is a reminder how the ‘polite’ British ritual of afternoon tea became a political battleground in the process.19 There is a beauteous plant that grows In western India’s sultry clime, Which make, alas! The Black man’s woes, And also makes the White man’s crime For know, its tall gold stems contain A sweet rich juice, which White men prize; That they may this sugar gain The Negro toils, and bleeds, and dies20 After almost a decade of campaigning by anti-slavery groups, a prolonged and violent insurrection in Jamaica in 1831 began to change the attitudes of Britain’s ruling political elite.21 Indeed, this rebellion proved to be the political turning point.22 The possibility of Britain losing its most valuable sugar colony to enslaved rebels, as France had Haiti, was a haunting threat to Caribbean planters and ministers in Britain’s imperial government. And in August 1833, the newly reformed British Parliament voted to abolish slavery throughout British Empire.

The daughter of a Jamaican absentee and Herefordshire estate owner, Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett (the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning) reflected in a letter, written to a friend a few weeks after the Bill was passed: ‘Of course you know that the late bill has ruined the West Indians. That is settled. The consternation here is very great. Nevertheless, I am glad, and always shall be, that the

18

See Mike Kaye ‘The Development of the Anti-Slavery Movement after 1807’ in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People pp. 238-240. British women then did not have a vote; however, married women would be responsible for daily household expenditure. 20 Amelia Alderson Opie, The Black Man’s Lament: or How to make sugar, London, 1826. 21 William Young’s son William, the Governor of Tobago, was among the several members of the West Indian Interest in the British Parliament who argued against slavery’s abolition. 22 See Robin Blackburn: The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, pp. 419-468, op.cit, and Mike Kaye, op.cit. 19

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Negroes are - virtually free’. 23 However, Barrett Browning could well afford to take the moral high ground. The formidable lobbying power of the parliamentary West India Committee had ensured that most absentee West Indians were far from ruined. The Bill required British taxpayers to compensate plantation owners for the loss of their valuable human ‘stock’.

Elizabeth’s father, for example, received £7,800 for the 397 enslaved men, women and children on his Jamaican estates;24 while in 1836, the heir to Harewood, Henry Lascelles - while assuring his workers that ‘his lordship will continue to feel the greatest anxiety and solicitude for their happiness and welfare’25 - claimed 26,177 pounds, four shillings and four pence for the ‘1,276 negroes’ on his two Jamaican and four Barbadan estates.26 In total, Caribbean slave owners received £20 million in compensation, almost 40% of the British government’s annual national budget.27 Former slaves, however, received no compensation; indeed, they had to work another four years as unpaid ‘apprentices’, before they were allowed to receive their liberty.

The emancipation of enslaved workers was, nevertheless, considered a propaganda coup for the reformed British parliament. Linda Colley argues, for example, that the abolition of slavery within the British Empire played an important part in creating a sense of nationhood, of the British as the worthy arbiters of the civilised and the uncivilised world.28 But the self-congratulation was misplaced. Only a decade after abolition, the adoption of Adam Smith’s ideas of ‘free markets’ meant that slavegrown sugar was still found on British tea tables. The Sugar Duties Equalisation Act of 1846 began the seven year process of gradually dismantling protective tariffs. British sugar refiners and merchants were no longer required by law to buy sugar grown in British colonies: they could look elsewhere to find the cheapest price. Heavily subsidised German beet sugar and Spanish sugar from vast new estates in Cuba grown (until 1886) by an enslaved workforce provided alternative sources.29

Even with new investment in efficient steam-powered mills, planters in the small British Caribbean sugar islands could not compete. Within a year of the 1847 Act, 13 West Indian trading companies and two West Indian banks had collapsed.30 By the time sugar duties were finally equalised in 1852, more than 470 Jamaican plantations had gone out of business.31 Though sugar

23

Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett to Lady Margaret Cocks, 14th September 1834, quoted in R.A .Barrett,The Barretts of Jamaica, op.cit., p. 90. Ibid, p.12. 25 F. Clarke to Henry Gicklow and Samuel Hinkson, Barbados, September,1836, W.Y.R.O. HAR/ACC/Box1/37. 26 W.Y.R.O., HAR/ACC/Box1/37:1836 Accounts: ‘Account for compensation for Negros’. 27 See Mike Kaye, ‘The development of the British Anti-slavery movement,’ op.cit. 28 See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, op.cit. 29 Between 1792 - the year of the slave revolt on St Domingue - and 1859, annual production of sugar in Cuba grew from 14,600 tonnes to 610,300 tonnes. 30 Claypole and Robottom, Caribbean Story, Vol 2, ‘The Changing Sugar Plantation’, Longman, 1990, p.15. 31 Claypole and Robottom, op.cit., p.15. 24

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consumption in Britain had increased by a third, it was not from the British West Indies. Green cane fields promised riches no more. No longer was the Caribbean a place for a young gentleman to ‘raise a fortune or create a name’.32 Two centuries of West Indian wealth, power and influence in Britain had come to an end. Lewis Carroll’s portrait of the Mock Turtle ‘sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock’33 was a sign of the times.

Yet the unsympathetic protest of Alice’ s companion the Gryphon to the Mock Turtle’s sighs and sobs ‘It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow you know’34 was a reminder that, for all their complaints, many West Indian absentees had not only survived the structural changes in the British sugar industry, but had done immensely well indeed. Sugar merchants and British-based sugar refiners, for example, had gained from the increase in trade. Compensation grants to former slave owners had not always been reinvested in plantations, but in more lucrative opportunities in Britain and elsewhere in the Empire.35

Indeed, the agricultural, trading and industrial investments - and marriages - made by many absentee families meant that the now morally suspect Caribbean origins of their wealth were well-concealed from public view. And for more than 150 years, in spite of Eric William’s assertions in Capitalism and Slavery, it stayed that way.

A Bitter-sweet Heritage

In the East End of London, the vast basin of the former West India Docks forms a dark, still, watery centrepiece to London’s new financial centre, Canary Wharf. Amid the towering stacks of glass-faced offices, the sole remaining blocks of original early nineteenth century sugar warehouses are of a reassuringly human scale. Now housing expensive apartments, champagne bars, a caviar restaurant and the Museum of London in Docklands, it is easy to forget that these muscular brick buildings were once fortresses designed to protect their valuable contents.

32

Anon, Jamaica: A poem in three parts, London, 1777. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, op.cit., p.95. Ibid. 35 These investments are beyond the scope of this study. However, given the West Indians’ predilection to invest in transport infrastructure in the west of Britain, it is possible that slave compensation money helped to fund the magnificent railway engineering of Thomas Telford and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. See Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, op.cit., pp.522 - 523 for further discussion. 33 34

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9.4 London’s West India Docks

In the autumn of 2007 a new gallery opened in the museum showing how eighteenth and nineteenth century London had benefited from the profits of West Indian sugar production. In spaces that had once been stacked to the rafters with oak barrels of sugar and rum, the history of British Caribbean slavery of the time was told. Yet, although the warehouses and the vast, nearly empty waters of the dock are poignant reminders of London’s former status as Britain’s largest West India port, it is not in the capital that we can see the most profound cultural effects of the wealth derived from sugar and slavery.

In Bristol Art Galley hangs a nineteenth century painting titled View of the Avon George at Bristol Hotwells. Dating from the 1830s, it features Isambard Brunel’s competition-winning proposal for an iron suspension bridge over the Avon Gorge, a design that transformed the former lime quarry of St Vincent’s Rocks into a landscape ‘scene’.36 To the right, at the top of the gorge, is the Royal York Crescent - where wealthy residents had sweeping panoramas of the city below; and at the base of the cliff, a paddle steamer The Wye takes visitors on a river tour, while in the foreground a cargo of turtles is unloaded onto the quayside. It is a bitter-

36

Construction began in 1831, but was abandoned following riots and a general collapse in Bristol’s economy after the 1831 Jamaican rebellion and the bridge was not completed until 1864.

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sweet celebration of the intimate relationship between the city’s West India trade and the fashion for picturesque landscape tourism in the West.

9.6 Samuel Jackson: View of the Avon George at Bristol Hotwells, c. 1836

Indeed, the most important cultural legacy of the two centuries of wealth from sugar and slavery is not to be found in magnificent buildings, sculptures, paintings or even landscape gardens. It is instead to be found in our minds and the way we view our own country, and indeed those overseas. For the concept of ‘natural scenery’ is intimately entwined with the eighteenth century ‘predatory economy’ of transatlantic slavery.

It was the merchants and planters of the Atlantic West who popularised the idea that cliffs and mountains, coves and valleys could be viewed as living landscape art. Valentine Morris’ plantation wealth allowed him to transform the cliffs at Piercefield into ‘Poussins’ and ‘Claudes’. Edmund Burke drew on his brother’s transatlantic experiences to codify his theories of the beautiful and the sublime. The sugar and tobacco merchants of Whitehaven set up the school where William Gilpin and his brothers learned to draw. And it was the turtle-loving, turnpike road building merchants and planters of the Atlantic west who opened up Snowdonia, the western Scottish Highlands and the Lakes to genteel tourists. 200

But what does this mean for us today? Is it possible to celebrate the wonders of Wye Valley, the Lake District, Snowdonia and Scottish Highlands, while also acknowledging their origins? The answer might be found in the Caribbean.37 On the penultimate day of my visit to the Leeward Islands, our group went to visit a derelict eighteenth century sugar works in Nevis upland interior. Here, the steeply sloping cane fields had been abandoned years before and we trudged our way up a dirt track in the shade of the forest canopy. After we had inspected the remains of the boiling houses and water reservoirs, we retraced our steps by a hundred metres or so to the spot where we were to have our lunch. There, at the top of a high bluff, on a small piece of land that had once been his grandmother’s provision ground, a retired Nevisian man (having spent his adult life building motorways in Britain) had created a picturesque picnic site.

On the right, carefully framed by lush foliage, was a small timber shack: a replica of his grandmother’s modest home. In the centre, the four-armed mechanism of an old cattlepowered sugar mill had been transformed into a merry-go-round: a ‘scenic’ folly creating a whirling panorama of untamed rainforest and distant cane fields. Like the painting of the Avon Gorge, this composition, too, poignantly linked picturesque landscape tourism with the wealth from Caribbean sugar cultivation. But here the patron was the descendant of the enslaved African workers who once toiled unpaid in the cane fields below. He had appropriated a polite, eighteenth century British colonial landscape aesthetic and made it his own.

And do British landscapes such as the Wye Valley, Snowdonia, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands, too, display traces of the ‘predatory economy’ of transatlantic sugar and slavery? If you look carefully, indeed, they are certainly there; the nineteenth century bronze plaque marking the grave of a Caribbean boy at Sunderland Point on the edge of the Lakes, for example; the dark slate gravestone of West Indian born Jac Ddu, or Black Jack, at Ystymillan in Snowdonia; and Nathaniel Well’s memorial in St Arvan’s Church in the Wye Valley.

They all attest to the historic link between the Caribbean and the creation of Britain’s rich landscape aesthetic. Other, sensitively-designed and situated, memorials might also enhance the experience of visitors to these nationally renowned areas of ‘natural scenery’. They might also attract a new generation of landscape tourists from Britain’s multi-cultural inner cities. Indeed, perhaps the very experience of urban British Caribbean people, too, enjoying the ‘right to roam’ freely over mountains, moors and fells would be the best way of acknowledging Britain’s historic bitter-sweet heritage.

37

A shift in attitudes to Caribbean buildings constructed during the era of slavery can be seen in David Buckley, The Right to Be Proud: Selected Jamaican Heritage Sites, Jamaica and London: Lewis Hanson, 2007.

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Appendix British estates with historic connections to the former Caribbean colonies Historical Manuscripts Commission: National Register of Archives (NRA) This list was generated from a cross-category database search of the NRA Family Index and the West Indies Index. It was made in 2002, so there may have been subsequent deposits. I have included family names and the names of principal estates in Britain and, if possible, the names of Caribbean estates. More detailed information on the contents and locations of archives can be obtained via http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/searches Alleyne family, baronets of Barbados and Derbyshire. Berney family of Morton Hall, Norfolk and Barbados. Brydges family, Dukes of Chandos Estates include Eyam, Derbyshire; Canons, Middlesex, Wilton, Herefordshire; Boughrood, Radnorshire; Hope, Jamaica and Middleton, Jamaica. Chisolm family of Chisholm and Erchless Castle, Inverness and North Hall, Jamaica. Codrington family, baronets of Dodington, Gloucestershire; Codrington, Gloucestershire etc. Clare Hall, Antigua; Barbuda. Conyers family of Copped Hall, Essex; Bishopsgate, London; Antigua: St Kitts. Cooper family of Gogar, Midlothian, Isleworth Middlesex; Chilton Foliat, Wiltshire; Grenada; Jamaica. Crawley family of Stockwood, Bedfordshire: Luton, Bedfordshire; Keysoe, Bedfordshire; Grenada. Crosse family of Cullompton, Devon; Halberton, Devon; St Thomas, Jamaica. Dalrymple family of Tullos, Kincardineshire; Nigg, Kincardineshire; Dominica. Dickinson family of Kingweston, Somerset; Glastonbury, Somerset; St Elizabeth, Jamaica. Elbridge family of Portbury, Somerset; St Andrew, Jamaica. Forrest family of Binfield, Berkshire; St Elizabeth, Jamaica; Westmoreland, Jamaica. Gordon family, Dukes of Gordon Glenfiddich, Banffshire, Gordon Castle, Moray: Lochaber Inverness-shire; Harmony Hall, Trinidad. Gordon-Macpherson-Grant family of Aberlour Banffshire; Jamaica. Gordon-Lennox family, Dukes of Richmond and Gordon Goodwood, Sussex; Harmony Hall, Trinidad. Greg family of Coles Park, Hertfordshire; Hillsborough, Dominica. 202

Hamlyn family of Leawood Paschoe, Devon: Jamaica. Hibbert family of Chalfont Park, Buckinghamshire; St Mary’s Jamaica. Hippisley family, baronets of Wartfield Grove, Berkshire; Clarendon, Jamaica. Hodge family of Antigua and British Guiana. Honywood family, baronets of Evington, Kent, Lyminge, Kent Chilton Foliat, Wiltshire; Grenada: Jamaica. Long family of Hurts Hall, Suffolk; Saxmundham Suffolk; Longville, Jamaica. Macloed family of Macloed Dunvegan, Inverness-shire; West Indies. Marsham family, Earls of Romney Kempsford, Gloucestershire; Birling, Kent, Maidstone, Kent; The Mote, Kent; Wingfield, St Kitts. Moore family of Chaldfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire; Antigua. Morant family of Brockenhurst Park, Hampshire: Boldre, Hampshire; Ringwood, Hampshire; Jamaica. Ogilvy family, Earls of Airlie. Airlie, Angus; Auchterhouse, Angus, Banff, Banffshire; Ferry Pen, Jamaica. Palmer family, baronets, of Wanlip Hall, Leicestershire, Appelby Magna Leicestershire; Jamaica; Surinam. Payne family of Wootton, Bedfordshire, Roxton, Bedfordshire; St Kitts. Pretor-Pinney family of Somerton Erleigh, Somerset; Bettiscombe, Dorset; Nevis; St Vincent. Pleydell family of Coleshill, Berkshire, Ampnrey Crucis, Gloucestershire, Barbados. Pratt family, Marquesses Camden, Bayham Abbey, Kent; St Pancras, London; Lamberhurst, Kent; St Michael, Barbados. Scarlett family of Jamaica. Seaton family of Twickenham, Middlesex; St Kitts. Shand family of The Burn, Kincardineshire; Fettercairn, Kincardineshire; Jamaica. Smith family of Jordanhill; Jamaica. Smyth family of Ashton Court, Somerset; Pucklexhuch, Gloucestershire; Foxcote Somerset; Stapleton, Somerset; Nailsea, Somerset; St Andrew, Jamaica. Snell family of Chingford Essex; Brill, Buckinghamshire; Piddington, Oxfordshire; Grenada. Stansfield family of Dunninal, Angus; Field House, Yorkshire; Port of Spain, Trinidad. Stapleton family of Oxfordshire; Kent; Nevis; Montserrat. 203

Stothert family of Cargen, Kirkcudbrightshire; Montego Bay, Jamaiaca. Thellusson family of Rendelsham, Suffolk; Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire; Campsea Ash, Suffolk, Las Cuevas, Grenada. Tollmache family (Barons Tollmache), Helmingham, Suffolk, Beeston, Cheshire; Acton, Cheshire; Peckforton, Cheshire, Ham, Surrey; Petersham, Surrey; Antigua; St Kitts. Tudway family of Wells; Somerset; Wookey Somerset; Parham, Antigua. Vane family (Barons Barnard) Barnard Castle, Minsull Vernon, Cheshire, Loders, Dorset: High Ercall, Shropshire, Lopington, Shropshire; Osbaston, Shropshire, Battle Abbey, Sussex Bathwick Somerset, Barbados. Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby family, Earls of Ancaster (Welsh and Scottish estates including Burrell and Wynn family papers) Bettwys-y-coed, Caernarfonshire; Gwydir Castle, Caernarfonshire; Llanrhchwyn, Caernarfonshire; Llanrwst, Denbighshire, Eglwysfach, Denbighshire; Crogen, Merionthshire, Llandrillo, Merionthshire; Drummond Castle, Perthshire; and Jamaica.

Rhodes House Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford. West Indies Collections Family papers Barham family: papers relating to their Jamaica estates 1747-1835 B MSS clar Dep b 33-38 c 357-360. Coutts family: Correspondence about St Vincent and Domenica MSS W Ind s.39. Greg family: John and Thomas 1765-1834 MSS W Ind t.2. Hodge family: letters and estate papers relating to Antigua 1753-1887. Lucie Smith/McLaurin family: Correpondence certificates and papers form family from 1698 relating to Barbados estates MSS W. Ind s 16 (2). Lavington family: Letter book relating to Fancy, Keypond and Carlisle estates. Other papers of related interest Senhouse William Diary of W. Senhouse of Barbadoes and the Leewards 1750-1800 MSS W Ind r.5,6. Frederick North (Second Earl of Guilford) Accounts and lists concerning trade with the West Indies 1760-76 B MSS North a, 5, f 100: a 12 ff 4,12: b.78, ff 9-18. List of H.M. Customs officials in the West Indies 1770 B MS North b 31, ff. 173-181. 204

North Papers, Transcripts of documents relating to colonial policy chiefly With reference to the West Indies 1670-1779 MSS Brit Empire s.1. Dalton, Journal to the West Indies on HMS Swallow 1712-14 MS Rawl. A 335 ff 1-47.

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Bibliography Unpublished Sources Manuscripts Bexley Local Studies Centre, Bexley Danson Deeds The British Library, London Long family papers Additional Manuscripts 27, 968 Pollard Family papers Additional Manuscripts, Hardwicke Papers, Vol. CCCV11 35,655. Letters of James Knight, C. Long and planters and merchants of Jamaica 1725 –1789 Additional Manuscripts 12, 402 – 12, 421 Young family papers Stowe Manuscript collection No. 921 Egerton Manuscripts 2,673, Vol. I Peter Oliver, Journal of a Voyage to England, summer 1777 Letters from the Boyd’s of Danson to Sir Robert Murray Keith, British Ambassador in Vienna (see also undated typed transcript held in Bexley Local Studies Centre) Additional Manuscripts 35, 516. The Huntington Library, Pasedena, California. Pulteney Papers, Box 8, Bath Spa The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London 18/ 19th Century maps and water colour images of Tobago WIC103 The National Archives: Public Record Office, Kew Correspondence of William Young E219/105 The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth West Indies Collections: Ottley (West Indies) Additional papers GB 0210 OTWINDIES George Cumberland, A Tour in North and South Wales in the Year 1784 H.J. Lloyd-Johnes collection (1976 deposit) 206

Monmouthshire Record Office, Newport Piercefield Estate Archives Oxford University: Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and Africa Studies at Rhodes House West Indies Collections MSS W Ind t 1 Young Family Papers and Correspondence 1768-1835 William Young 1st Baronet, Governor of Dominica William Young 2nd Baronet, Governor of Tobago Oxford University: The Bodleian Library James Brydges Copies of papers presented to him relating to a scheme for the West Indies C 1723 B MS Gough Somersetshire William Pulteney Copy of resolutions on complaint of merchants trading in the West Indies 1738 B MS DD Dashwood Bucks D.1/3 The Society of Geneologists Archives, London Papers of Morris family of Antigua Ac. no. 22138 Royal Bank of Scotland Archives, London. Boyd family accounts (formerly Drummonds Bank) GM1018, DR/382, DR/284/9/S, DR427 (No’s 88 – 255). West Yorkshire Record Office, Leeds Harewood Archives Harewood West Indies papers The University of York, York Letterbook of Lascelles and Maxwell, 1743-5 (cd. rom format of original in the archives of Wilkinson and Gavillier)

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Roland Trafford-Roberts, An Assessment of the Historic and Picturesque Viewpoints in the Wye Valley. Report commissioned for the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, February 2001 Register of Parks and Gardens in Wales, (Conwy, Gwynedd and the Isle of Anglesey) Cadw Icomos, UK

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