The Sugar Barons (32 page)

But there was another side to the story. Like so many victorious armies, the English quickly fell out over the division of the spoils, with Codrington himself earning the greatest criticism. Certainly, he was careful to lay out for himself a lavish St Kitts plantation of nearly 800 acres, manned by slaves taken from the French, as his ‘share’ of the plunder. For some, this was just reward for his vigorous and effective leadership during the campaign. But as Codrington pressed the islands to provide forces and provisions for his planned, and strategically sound, campaign to drive the French for ever from the Leewards, he encountered increasing resistance – no planter wanted the production of the French islands to swamp the English sugar market – and growing criticism of his own behaviour. As early as August 1690, he was referring in letters to ‘mutinous practices’ and ‘lies’ being told about him on Nevis. He had been too kind to the French, it was alleged, and had defrauded the army for his own profit.

Codrington’s response was to write to London that he was being unjustly slandered. Rather than personally profiting, he said, the campaign had led to the neglect of his own interests, and great expense from his own pocket. He had found it impossible to please everyone, and his best efforts had been ‘repaid only by murmuring and discontent’.

In spite of his fading popularity, Codrington did manage to raise a substantial force to attack the French in the spring of 1691. On 21 April, with Codrington himself in the vanguard, the English descended on Guadeloupe, supported by a naval force under Commodore Lawrence Wright. Carrying all before them, the English soon had the remnants of the French forces holed up in the island’s principal fort. Codrington called
for reinforcements from Barbados to complete the conquest, but while waiting for their arrival, news came that a French fleet had appeared nearby. At this point the naval commander Wright took fright and withdrew his supporting fleet. Codrington was incensed, but had no option than to abandon the conquest of the island. Part of the failure was caused by the perennial problem of combined operations, that of mixed command of naval and land forces, but also to blame was the frank cowardice of Wright, for which he was arrested on his return to England.

After the Guadeloupe debacle, the trickle of complaints against Codrington became a flood. Before the start of the war, Codrington was already the richest and most influential planter in the Leewards. Clearly this wealth and power, rather than satisfying him, instead increased his greed and his feeling that he was above the law of which he himself was now supposed to be the guardian. Even his right-hand man in the conquest of St Kitts now turned against him. In July 1691, Sir Timothy Thornhill, who had commanded the Barbados contingent of the army on St Kitts (and fought with great bravery), made a series of detailed charges against his commander-in-chief. ‘At the taking of St Christophers’, wrote Thorn-hill, Codrington had seized all stocks of sugar and promptly dispatched them for sale at the Dutch islands of St Thomas and Curaçao. Thornhill reminded him of the rules of the Navigation Acts and was told to ‘mind his own business’. The army was charged by Codrington for clothing that he then sold privately in Antigua. He also employed an agent (who subsequently denounced him) to round up runaway slaves, brand them with his mark, and secretly ship them, as well as further plunder, to his Antigua plantations. Even more shameless was the fact that all this was carried on in sloops for whose use in the national interest Codrington promptly charged the English government nearly £5,000. Anyone on the islands who stood up to him faced arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Now, wrote Thornhill, the soldiers of the Barbados regiment ‘would die sooner than serve under his command’. The failure at Guadeloupe, Thornhill alleged, was not just Wright’s fault; Codrington had ‘run off in distraction at midnight, leaving his mortar, shells and wounded men behind him’ and his ‘grasping and avaricious disposition [had] alienated officers and men’.

Thornhill had his own agenda, of course. He wanted the post of governor for himself. And few of the most powerful Englishmen in the West Indies did not indulge in illegal trade. Thornhill accused Codrington also of ‘unseasonable devotion to the French ladies’. Certainly this licentiousness had become a great weakness of the Lieutenant-Governor, but, again, few restrained themselves who had the power to satisfy their appetites at will.
Nonetheless, even disinterested English leaders in the Caribbean were now predicting that Codrington would have to go, ‘in consequence of the heavy complaint against him’. The 25-year-old conscientious idealist had, at 51, become utterly corrupted, crooked and tyrannical. But somehow he held on, bribing and bullying his way round his accusers (even, ironically, prosecuting people for violating the Navigation Acts), while writing self-congratulatory epistles to London.

All the time, anxiety in the islands about the French threat was increasing. As Codrington himself wrote: ‘All turns on mastery of the sea.’ In January 1692, alarming reports were received in Antigua that a powerful French fleet had arrived at Martinique. In the same month an English fleet turned up at Barbados, and there was a brief skirmish between the two forces. Both then were forced to retreat from the Caribbean theatre, as was the pattern, when disease decimated their crews, who, fresh from Europe, had no immunity to yellow fever.

For the rest of the year it was a stalemate, with the opposing naval forces effectively cancelling each other out. But in early 1693, what looked like a decisively superior English force of 13 men-of-war, three fire ships and 28 transports, capable of carrying 2,000 troops, dropped anchor at Barbados. In command was Sir Francis Wheeler. Using 1,500 English regulars and as many local men as could be raised, the orders were to conquer Martinique, Guadeloupe and the French settlements in Hispaniola – thereby wiping out the French in the Caribbean – before proceeding to New England to drive the enemy from Canada. With the fleet was a returner to the land of his birth for almost certainly the first time since leaving as a 12-year-old: Codrington’s son and heir, who would become the most famous of all the Codringtons, Christopher the third.

Christopher Codrington the third was later described by Edmund Burke as ‘far the richest production and most shining ornament [Barbados] ever had’. An intelligent child, particularly in contrast to his unfortunate ‘idiot’ younger brother, he would from the moment he could speak have had the family’s slaves do his every bidding. ‘Children, in these West India Islands are, from their infancy, waited upon by Numbers of Slaves, who … are obliged to pay them unlimited Obedience’, reported a later writer on Barbados. Their ‘favourite Passions’, he went on, were ‘nourished with such indulgent Care’.

There are hints, too, that he was indulged by his schoolmasters once he left Barbados to attend Dr Weadle’s private school at Enfield. (He was probably looked after in the holidays by the Gloucestershire Codringtons.)
Nevertheless, he clearly had great academic ability, and finishing school, excelled himself at Christ Church, Oxford, at the time famous for its brilliant and exclusive circle of wits, into whose company Codrington was welcomed. At the university he studied the classics, philosophy, early Church history and contemporary European literature, while at the same time becoming an accomplished horseman and dancer and fluent in French, Spanish and Italian.

He was not only very rich and handsome, but also extremely clever, and he knew it. ‘No spark had walk’d up High Street bolder’, wrote a contemporary. According to an otherwise admiring biographer, ‘So early and so continued a pre-eminence bred in him a certain arrogance and contempt for men less gifted than himself … subsequently this defect of his was the cause of much suffering and humiliation.’

While still at Oxford he was in July 1687 admitted a member of the Middle Temple, where he befriended the most eminent lawyers of the day, and acquired what would be very valuable legal knowledge. In 1690 he was elected to All Souls, Oxford, the elite of the elite in English academia, where he established friendships with such luminaries of the age as Joseph Addison and Charles Boyle. He also started collecting books in large numbers, and moving in circles that included the philosopher John Locke. The rough-and-ready life of his father in the West Indies must have seemed a long way away.

But in late 1692, he heard of a new expedition preparing for battle against the French in the Caribbean, and persuaded the college authorities to hold open his fellowship while he returned to the land of his birth. When in early January 1693 Sir Francis Wheeler’s powerful fleet started out from England, the younger Codrington was on board, attached to one of the two regiments.

Some seven weeks later, Wheeler’s force weighed anchor in Carlisle Bay, where they were met by a well-armed and well-equipped Barbados troop of nearly 1,000 men, as well as numerous ships, and word was sent to Governor Codrington in the Leewards to prepare to join the campaign. Codrington had been busy, pressing men into service and repairing forts, and had 1,300 troops ready to rendezvous with Wheeler’s force at Martinique. The armada from Barbados arrived first, now some 45 sail, a frightening prospect for the French defenders watching from Fort Royal (present-day Fort de France). But rather than attack the well-defended capital, Wheeler sailed to the south of the island, where he put ashore a party of three to reconnoitre: the commander of the English regulars, Colonel Foulke, another local officer, and the younger Codrington. They came under fire, with Foulke
being wounded, but they found a convenient landing place, and the next day, 12 April, almost unopposed, 2,500 men were landed and started marching northwards, to take the enemy’s strong forts from their weaker landward side. Along the way, churches and other buildings were burned, plunder, including slaves, collected, and crops destroyed.

Eight days later, the army of Codrington senior arrived, landed, and joined in the marauding. (It must have been at this point, on the battlefield or on a man-of-war off the coast, that the two Codringtons met for the first time in 11 years.) But the key defences of Fort Royal and St Pierre proved much harder nuts to crack. A fierce French counter-attack by cavalry stopped a landing near the latter, and with losses and exhaustion among the men mounting – from the scorching sun, the harsh terrain and fever – and the Irish contingent of the force growing restless, the invasion was abandoned on 29 April, in favour of an assault on weaker Guadeloupe. But before this was undertaken, the English, with nearly 1,000 men killed, wounded or incapacitated by sickness, lost heart, and split up to return to Barbados or the Leewards. Most of the army ended up at St Kitts, where it was soon impossible to find accommodation for the sick, who now numbered something like half the army’s original number.

At the end of May, the remnants of Wheeler’s force sailed north, reaching Boston two weeks later. (It would leave in September, its numbers further thinned, having achieved precisely nothing.) In the meantime, Codrington took his son on an extensive tour of his domain, visiting Antigua, Nevis and St Kitts, inspecting fortifications, meeting people, getting a feel for the place. What made the greatest impression on the younger Christopher, however, was the treatment of the enslaved Africans, half starved and brutalised. ‘I have always thought it very barbarous that so little care should be taken of the bodies and so much less of the souls of our slaves’, he wrote before his return to the West Indies seven years later. Back in England, this caused him, he said, ‘many a mortifying reflection’. He determined, should he have the opportunity, to do something about the unhappy situation.

His father also seems to have apprised his son of the identities of his growing number of bitter enemies, and also inducted him into his own freewheeling sexual behaviour. It was during this visit that the 24-year-old Codrington the Younger met the mother of his illegitimate son, William. All that is known of her is from the two men’s wills: Codrington senior in his will of 1698 called her Maudlin Marianus, and bequeathed her her freedom – indicating that she was a black slave – and her son ‘his freedom & £500 at 21, he to be sent to school in England & to have £50 a year’.
Christopher the Younger in his will of 1703 called her Maudline Morange, and repeated the bequest of £500 for William, but stipulated ‘he is to be brought up for the sea’. In fact, William, having started in Antigua, ended up a plantation- and slave-owner in Jamaica.

Whatever the attractions of his relationship with Maudline Morange or of his father’s lifestyle, and in spite of his obvious admiration for him, Codrington the Younger did not linger in the West Indies with his father. Instead, he returned to Oxford, taking his Master of Arts in January 1694. Clearly he had acquired a taste for the martial, for that spring he joined King William’s army in Flanders as a captain. There he gained what would prove useful experience in siege warfare. A year later, having distinguished himself during the siege of Namur, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, commanding the second battalion of the First Foot Guards – a brilliant achievement for a man of 27 – and caught the eye of King William. Codrington’s friend Addison wrote a poem about the heroic episode, deducing that it was the ‘fierce sun’ of the land of his birth that had created ‘This heart ablaze, this spirit’s surging foam’.

For the next four years, Codrington the Younger divided his time between campaigning in Europe and studying at Oxford, where his star continued to rise. At the same time, he became a London society wit, writing verses for the theatre and enjoying in coffee shops and clubs the company of the likes of Richard Steele and John Dryden. When the war ended, he visited Paris with the rest of London’s most fashionable young men.

In the West Indies, in contrast, his father was struggling. After 1693, the English government, inefficient, corrupt and nearing bankruptcy, could ill support sending fleets and armies to the West Indies. In the six months after the departure of Wheeler’s fleet, the French captured no fewer than 30 vessels bound for the Leewards. Its regiment of regulars, without pay and almost starving, were soon on the verge of mutiny. Codrington toured the islands, urging the repair of forts and trying to restore morale, but nerves remained stretched. (Codrington’s own pay stopped arriving the following year.)