The Sugar Barons (20 page)

The performance of the English army in Jamaica over these three years was impressive, especially considering they were underfed, had still not been paid, and many did not even have shoes. D’Oyley continued to plead with London, describing a state of ‘extreme want and necesitie’ on the island. He wrote home that he feared ‘sickness will reduce’ the population ‘to a small number; supposes it proceeds from excessive drunkenness.’ He complained ‘of merchants bringing strong liquors from all parts.’ He was also vexed by the large numbers of men who, instead of planting, were joining the evergrowing privateering fleet operating out of Port Royal. Immigrants were not arriving in sufficient numbers to replace those dying of sickness. For one thing, settlement was discouraged by the widely held view that, after all their struggles, the restored King of England, Charles II, would hand the island back to his friends the Spanish without a shot being fired.

On 26 July 1660, D’Oyley wrote to London: ‘All the frigates are gone, and neither money in the treasury, victuals in the storehouses, nor anything belonging to the State is left … the island has a sense of being deserted by their own country, which fills the minds of the people with sad and serious thoughts.’

PART TWO
The Grandees

10
THE RESTORATION

‘Riches enlarge rather than satisfy appetites.’

Thomas Fuller, 1608–61

After his lavish send-off from Barbados in the spring of 1654, James Drax was given a warm welcome back in England from his friends in politics and business. He was soon involved in a partnership with his old friend and Barbados neighbour, Thomas Middleton, also in England, in a lucrative deal to deliver muskets to the island to replace those shipped out with Penn and Venables’ ill-fated force. Other trading ventures – including slaves – almost certainly followed. For at least two years after his departure from Barbados, Drax remained in London, becoming a prominent member of the prototype committee of West India merchants and planters who met at the Jamaica Coffee House in St Michael’s Walk near the Exchange in London. His bust shows a solid Puritan grandee in his later years, strikingly resembling well-known portraits of Cromwell, with shoulder-length hair below a short fringe, a prominent nose and fleshy lips. Evidence of his famous dinners can be seen in his large double chin; his expression is one of authority, but not without humour and kindness.

In gratitude for his partisanship during the Cavalier–Roundhead face-off in Barbados, and in recognition of his new but spectacular wealth and influence, James Drax was called in for an audience with the Protector in December 1657. Cromwell took the opportunity to bestow on him a knighthood. A contemporary account reporting the event described Drax as ‘a Gentleman of much worth, and of great Interest in Plantations at the Barbadoes, where he formerly lived for some years’. Sir James, as he now was, took the chance to plead with Cromwell to prevent interference in Barbados from London, for free trade, the right to choose their own
governor and to be allowed to spend their revenue as they saw fit – effective independence.

The death of Oliver Cromwell in late 1658 left a power vacuum and lack of direction to the colonies from the metropolitan centre, and Barbados and the other islands went about their business unmolested. In the meantime, Sir James seems to have worked hard on his new portfolio of English properties, all purchased thanks to the extraordinary profits from his Barbados plantations. A manor house and acreage were snapped up near Boston in Lincolnshire; property was purchased in Coventry and in Kent; while in Yorkshire, Ellerton Priory in Swaledale came under his control, along with adjoining lands.

It seems likely that this last purchase, and possibly some of the others, consisted of James Drax taking over the ownership from another part of the family – a Gabriel Drax is listed as the owner of Ellerton at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and Drax’s family had originated from the Coventry area. Such a transaction was, of course, all about demonstrating that a new branch of the family was now dominant. Other
nouveau riche
sugar planters would follow this pattern.

Nevertheless, the centre of gravity for James Drax remained London, particularly the City and north-eastwards towards the smart merchant suburb of Hackney, where he must have had a residence, or at least some land. His local church, though, was St John of Zachary, which stood on the north side of Gresham Street, Aldersgate, and included the leading West India merchant Martin Noell in its congregation (it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and not rebuilt). At least one of Drax’s sisters married there. He gave money for wine for the sacrament and for the ‘ministers that precht for the Parson’. He also buried there three small boys – Bamfield, Joseph and Alexander – given him by his second wife, Margaret. At last, in 1658, a healthier child, Jacob, was born.

In 1656, Drax’s eldest son was apprenticed to his cousin Abraham Jackson, a goldsmith. It was normal for the sons of gentry to be split between university, the Inns of Court and apprenticeships. In established families, the younger sons learnt a trade, while the eldest would go to university; in the newly rich Drax family, only the youngest two sons later matriculated, at Oxford. For reasons unknown, James the younger did not complete his apprenticeship. Instead, soon afterwards, his father sent him, aged about 18, to Barbados to run the plantations, for which he would receive an eighth share of the profits. He does not seem to have stuck at this either (or might have taken ill), as he was back in London by April 1659. This was when Sir James Drax, aged 50, made his will.

‘It hath pleased the Lord of his mercy and goodnesse’, he wrote, ‘to bestow upon me … Lands, Tenements, Goods chattels … both in England and in the Island of the Barbadoes and else where.’ His wife Margaret and her sole surviving son Jacob were to get his estate in Yorkshire, while the Barbados plantations were to be divided between the two eldest sons, James and Henry, the latter of whom had just turned 18. Clearly the sugar business was far and away the most important asset. All the annuities were to be paid from its profits: £100 a year each to seven younger children (a sizeable sum: the average annual wage at the time was about £8), and the same sum to his brother William and his wife Ursula. Other bequests bring the total up to more than £1,000 a year coming out of the sugar profits. (The poor of the parish of St John of Zachary were given £100, and there was £150 to buy cows for the poor of Coventry.)

The Restoration, though, presented Drax, and many others who had supported and prospered under the Protectorate, with a serious threat. Charles II returned to England in May 1660. As in Jamaica, in Barbados there were rumours of a deal done in exile in Spain – that the island would be allowed to fall into Spanish hands and the enslaved Africans taken as payment. In fact, Charles had no intention of handing over either valuable island. Instead, he wanted them under tighter central control and working harder for the benefit of the mother country.

Charles came to an agreement with the planters. Their sometimes makeshift land purchases of the turbulent previous 30 years were recognised, proprietory dues ended, and their sugar was given protected status. Foreign sugars were to be taxed to the point of unprofitability, thus delivering to the English sugar islands a monopoly of the home market. In return, Charles would receive customs revenue from the island at 4½ per cent of the value of all exports, and he insisted that the colonists buy manufactured goods only from England. Everything had to be transported in English or English colonial ships and tropical produce such as sugar could only be carried to England or another English colony, even if it was to be subsequently re-exported to the Continent. The Interregnum Navigation Act was therefore reapplied with stricter terms, subordinating the interests of the colonies to the idea of a self-sufficient empire engined by a mercantile marine, protected by a powerful well-manned navy. Just like Cromwell, Charles believed that the key to creating ‘the greatest Dominion in the World’ was to ‘win and keepe the Soveraignty of the Seas’.

These Navigation Acts would determine policy for a century, and were, in fact, similar to the Spanish model, which sought to exclude foreigners from trade. The French, whose imperial policy was now led by Louis XIV’s
Controller General of Finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, created a similar protectionist system shortly afterwards, setting the scene for confrontation to come.

Along with these new rules came a return to Barbados of a number of its former Royalist leaders, expelled after the descent on the island of Ayscue. Francis Lord Willoughby was appointed Governor of ‘Barbados, St Christopher’s, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, and the several islands of the province of Cariola’ (which presumably included St Vincent and Dominica). While Willoughby delayed in London, he appointed Humphrey Walrond acting governor. The Royalists now went after Thomas Mody-ford, hated above all others for his treachery in 1651. Modyford, who had very briefly been governor at the end of the Protectorate, was tried for treason, but saved in the end by his kinship with the influential General Monk, Duke of Albermarle. When Willoughby at last reached the island in August 1663, he arrested Walrond for corruption. Walrond fled the island, but on reaching England was thrown into the notorious Fleet prison.

In England, Sir James Drax also had to face the events of 10 years earlier. Sir Guy Molesworth had barely survived his forced expulsion, and now blamed the ‘malice and false suggestion’ of Drax for his ordeal. The case came before the Lords, with Drax pleading the Act of Indemnity. But no one really wanted to open the can of worms of the plots and counterplots in Barbados at the end of the 1640s and beginning of the 1650s. The Lords decided they could not establish what had really happened, and Molesworth’s petition was ordered to be ‘laid aside’. Drax’s friendship with Modyford and Popham, both related to General Monk, may have also assisted his cause.

It might also have been helpful that Drax himself seems to have borne no grudges from that bitterly divisive time, or held less firm political views than his Royalist detractors had alleged back in the days of the pamphlet war. In his will from 1659 he even left money to his wife’s brother, Warwick Bamfield, an extreme Royalist. And now he was happy to work with the new authorities. In January 1661 he was appointed a member of a committee to meet at Grocers’ Hall ‘and inform themselves of the true state of the Plantations in Jamaica and New England’. Part of his role was to organise the shipment of £1,000 worth of brandy to Jamaica, and he was soon working in partnership with merchants Martin Noell and Thomas Kendall, sending tools and provisions also to Jamaica. On 18 February, along with a handful of other sugar and West India merchant grandees, he was given an audience with the King, and his knighthood was upgraded to a baronetcy.

He was still energetically going about West Indian business through the
spring months, but then, sometime in the summer of 1661, he sickened and died of causes now unknown. He was about 52 years old, a good age for the time, especially for a man who had subjected himself to dangerous travel and disease-ridden climes. It was the end of a life characterised by energy, perseverance and wide-ranging talent, which, aided by good fortune and excellent contacts, had transformed not only Barbados, but the entire Atlantic world. The funeral was from the very grand Noell-owned Camden House in Chislehurst, and Drax’s body was buried in St John of Zachary. Four shillings was paid, for the ‘ringin ye Great Bell for Sr James Drax’.

Drax’s eldest son, James, then aged 22, inherited the baronetcy as well as the half-share of the Barbados plantations, along with his 20-year-old brother, Henry. But the new Sir James styled himself not ‘of Barbados’, but ‘of Hackney’. So while Henry held the reins in Barbados in the months after their father’s death, his elder brother stayed in London.

Now a seriously eligible bachelor, the new Sir James didn’t stay single for long. In March 1662 he married a rich heiress from a good family. But there was to be no heir. Twelve months later, James died.

The nomination of Henry Drax, the original Sir James’s second son, as co-heir may have been insurance against poor health in the eldest son, James, or a reflection on James’s performance at managing the estates or on his general conduct. Or it might have been testament to the high opinion that Sir James held of the ability and appetite for hard work of his second son. Either way, it was a sound move. Although he lacked some of the noisy flair of his father (no awestruck accounts have been passed down of any of his dinners), Henry would prove to be intelligent, industrious, and, on the whole, a good judge of character. Now 22, he found himself the sole inheritor of the Drax sugar business and was determined not to let down the family name.

Twenty years later, Henry would write down a series of instructions on how to run a sugar plantation. These have survived because they were copied by later generations, who saw them as the definitive model of good plantation management. Clearly, Henry was prepared to get his hands dirty: the ‘Instructions’ show that he involved himself in every aspect of sugar growing and processing and the challenge of managing a plantation workforce, down to the smallest details of spare parts for the machinery, and the supervision of key personnel such as the distiller, boiler and curer.

In the mid-eighteenth century, in a much-respected tract, an Antiguan called Samuel Martin laid out the qualities needed to be a successful planter: as well as an expert sugar boiler and distiller and an astute manager of both white servants and black slaves, you had to be ‘adept at figures, and
all the arts of economy, something of an architect, and well-skilled in mechanics’, as well as ‘a very skilled husbandman’. Henry Drax’s ‘Instructions’ demonstrate that he had all of these qualities.