Sir Hugh, a good man with a pencil, figured his costs carefully: ‘Each slave, two hundred and five American dollars; each mule a hundred and eighty; total cost of replacing the stone buildings and the windmills, two hundred thousand American; out-of-pocket expenses each year, about thirty thousand dollars; average income per year, fifty-five thousand; average profit per year, twenty-five thousand American.’ He also kept his accounts in pounds sterling and Spanish currencies, but however he calculated his profits, they were immense in the money values of that time and enabled him and his family to live in what was called ‘the grand style of a Jamaican planter.’ This meant that Golden Hall had some dozen house servants, six yard boys, grooms for the horses, a plantation doctor, a clergyman for the little church beyond the bridge, and numerous other helpers.
As Sir Hugh studied the excellence of his plantation he reflected on what a superior island his Jamaica was. The last rough census had shown some 2,200 whites of the master-mistress category, about 4,000 whites of lower category, and 79,000 slaves. As he had told a recent visitor from England: ‘We never forget that we whites, counting every one, are outnumbered six to seventy-nine. It makes us careful how we act, very careful how we manage our slaves, who could rise up and slay us all if so minded.’ But he also confessed that he himself earned substantial profits from the slave trade: ‘Last year in Jamaica we were able to import some seven thousand slaves from Africa, and we could have sold twice that many: we immediately forwarded more than five thousand of the newcomers on to Cuba and South Carolina, and on their sale we made a tremendous profit.’
He told every stranger who asked, either in Jamaica or England, that his island was a haven of refuge for all kinds of people: ‘We accept Spaniards who flee harsh governments in South America, slaves who escape cruel masters in Georgia, artisans from New England who want to start a new life, and last year the governor issued a proclamation that henceforth he would admit even Catholics and Jews if they promised not to create public scandals.’
But the life of the Pembrokes was not limited to Golden Hall by any means, because each of the three boys had been educated in England at Rugby School in Warwickshire and had spent much of his youth at either the Pembroke townhouse on Cavendish Square near London’s Hyde Park, or in the small and lovely Cotswold cottage in Upper Swathling, Gloucestershire, some fifty miles west of London, where Lady Pembroke—known to all as Lady Beth—had supervised the creation of one of the finer small flower gardens in the south of England.
The Pembrokes were like most of the West Indies sugar planters, legally domiciled on the island where their plantation lay but emotionally always tied to England. Their sons were educated in England; they maintained family homes in England; and they served in Parliament so as to protect what was recognized throughout the empire as ‘the Sugar Interest.’ In these years, some two dozen planters like Sir Hugh held seats in the House of Commons, where they formed an ironclad bloc monitoring all legislation to ensure that sugar received the protection they felt it deserved.
But how did an almost illiterate planter like Pentheny Croome in remote Jamaica gain a seat in Parliament? Simple. He, like the others, bought it. There were in those years in England a handful of what were called ‘rotten boroughs,’ the remnants of towns which had been of some importance when seats in Parliament were originally distributed but which had declined or in some cases actually disappeared. Still, each of those shadowy areas retained the right to send a man to Parliament and it became the custom for a landowner who held title to a rotten borough to sell his seat to the highest bidder. Pentheny had paid £1,100 for his borough; Sir Hugh, £1,500 each for his two, one for himself and one for his oldest son, Roger. The other West Indians had made their own deals, and all agreed with Pentheny: ‘Some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Helps protect us against the rascals,’ a rascal being anyone who wanted a fair price on sugar.
And that was the significant difference between Great Britain’s West Indian colonies and her North American ones. Maturing colonies like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia controlled not a single seat in Parliament; they were unprotected against the taxes and rules so arbitrarily imposed; they kept their politicians at home, where they mastered those intricacies of rural American politics that would carry them to freedom. The West Indies islands, infinitely more favored in those decades, would never master the local lessons, for their best men were always absent in London.
Of equal importance, when bright young lads from Jamaica and Barbados were away at school in England, their contemporaries from Boston and New York were attending Harvard and King’s College in their hometowns and forming the intercolonial friendships that would be so important when their colonies decided to strike for freedom. In retrospect, it would become clear that the West Indies paid a frightful penalty for the ephemeral advantages they enjoyed in the period from 1710 through the 1770s.
But now, in 1731, Sir Hugh was quite content to be in residence at Golden Hall prior to returning to London for the coming session of Parliament, when matters of grave concern to the sugar planters would be discussed. It was pleasant to have his three sons at home. Roger at twenty-six would one day inherit the baronetcy and become Sir Roger; for the present he owned the second rotten borough that the Pembrokes controlled and was making his way slowly and quietly in Parliament, in accordance with the instructions handed down by his father: ‘For the first two sessions, say nothing, attract no attention, but be there to vote whenever a sugar item comes up.’ Roger gave strong promise of becoming, with maturity, a leader of the sugar delegation.
But in many ways it was the second son who made the exalted position of the Pembrokes secure, because Greville stayed in Jamaica and ran the plantation. At twenty-four he had proved himself a genius in scheduling work for the slaves in such a way as to keep them reasonably happy and more than reasonably productive. He was also good at figures and had a sharp judgment as to whether it was more profitable to ship his surplus molasses to England or to Boston. As the Jamaica planters said: ‘Massachusetts citizens must drink more rum per person than people anywhere else in the world. They have seven distilleries up there and their appetite for our molasses is insatiable.’ He had engineered a profitable deal with Pentheny Croome’s brother Marcus, who operated two small ships carrying cargo out of Jamaica, and it seemed that whatever Greville turned his hand to earned money for the Pembrokes.
To have a son occupy the position of plantation manager was a boon that most families missed. Because many of the owners preferred to spend most of their time in England, they had to leave the running of their plantations to untested young Scotsmen or Irishmen who came to Jamaica for that purpose. Or, if lucky, they found a trusted local lawyer who would serve as manager; if unlucky, they fell into the clutches of some dishonest man who stole half their profits while they were not looking. Of the two dozen West Indian planters who formed the Sugar Interest in Parliament in the year 1731, only two had been fortunate enough to find honest members of their own families to run their plantations, whereas an appalling thirteen had gone to England as young men and had never once returned to their home island to supervise the on-site production of sugar. They were concerned only when they had to defend the islands against competing interests in England, in France, and especially in North America.
Sir Hugh’s third son was something of a problem. A young man of twenty-two, John Pembroke was as fine a fellow as Jamaica produced and had he been firstborn, he would have been a worthy inheritor of his father’s title and his seat in Parliament. Had he been the second son, he might well have filled Greville’s place as manager of the plantation, but there was no opening in that direction, and John himself told his father one night: ‘I doubt I could ever do the job that Greville does.’ So the question kept arising: ‘What are we going to do about John?’ and no one had an answer. He had done well at Rugby, and traditionally third sons either went into the army or clergy, but John showed no disposition for either. John assured his f
ather nevertheless: ‘I’m all right. I’ll find something.’
In the meantime, he was engaged in a battle which his two brothers had waged successfully. Pentheny Croome’s daughter Hester was a big, brassy young woman with prospects of inheriting an income of not less than twenty thousand pounds a year, a prodigious sum in the England of those days and certainly enough to ensure her a choice of husbands. But early in life she had set her cap for a Pembroke and had jammed it down so securely on her red head that only one of the famous island hurricanes would have been able to dislodge it. At sixteen she had made strong overtures to the future Sir Roger, but he had eluded her by marrying a planter’s daughter from Barbados. At eighteen, bereft at her loss of Roger, she had settled on Greville, and would have brought him to the altar had not a lively lass from a plantation near Spanish Town ensnared him.
She was now, at age twenty, much attracted to John Pembroke, whom she described to her father as ‘probably the best of the Golden Hall lot.’ Brazen in her attempts to allure him, she rode her gray mare to his home to invite him to dances, and insisted that he attend the play the local young people were putting on for the officers of the British warship stationed at Kingston: ‘It’s a French farce, John. Very naughty. And I’m the leading lady, you might say, in the role of the maid.’
Reluctantly, he agreed, and found that he enjoyed himself immensely. The young officers were such fun to talk with that he wondered briefly whether he might not try to join the navy; and during the play his attention was fixed on Hester, who was more than satisfactory as the rowdy maid. She displayed a robust sense of humor, a capacity for laughing at herself, and a surprising tenderness in the love scenes.
In that two-and-a-half-hour period she promoted herself from rather objectionable to almost acceptable, and when he drove her home, the plaudits of her audience still ringing in his ears, he came close to expressing his interest, for he had seen that several of the navy men had been attracted to her lively ways. But the next day he participated in a strategy meeting attended by Hester’s fat father, a crude and overbearing man, and John, seeing the daughter in the father, shied away.
The meeting was attended by Sir Hugh Pembroke and his two sons, Roger and John, Pentheny Croome and a big planter from Spanish Town who was almost as gross as Hester’s father. The topic for debate was crucial to the welfare of the Sugar Interest, as Sir Hugh explained: ‘Already they’re calling it the Molasses Act, as if it were already passed. It’s bound to determine our profits for the next twenty years, so firm action is obligatory. If we let them have their way, our income plummets. If we force them to write it our way, unlimited profits.’
He explained that the West Indies planters faced three determined enemies: ‘Those pitiful rascals in Boston and New York who will want to buy our molasses at bottom price so they can earn fortunes with the sorry rum they make.’ Here the meeting diverted for a frosty assault on the British colonies on the North American mainland, with special opprobrium for Boston and Philadelphia, two trading centers whose rapacious Puritans and Quakers sought to steal their trading partners blind. All present agreed that in the long run, the natural enemy of the West Indian planters was that collection of ill-mannered American colonies, but the Jamaican members of Parliament knew tricks with which to frustrate them.
‘Our second enemy is closer at hand,’ Sir Hugh warned. ‘I mean the French Islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. The problem’s this. Our sugar plantations of Jamaica are blessed with reliable winds. The French islands have none. And since they’re denied windmills, they must use horses and mules. And where do they get them? From Massachusetts and New York. Hundreds of little ships a year load up with animals in Boston and run down to Martinique and sell at a fantastic profit.’
‘How does that hurt us?’ the planter from Spanish Town asked, and Croome growled: ‘Because when they unload at Martinique, they fill their ship with French molasses and run it as contraband back to Boston. Totally illegal both ways, but very profitable.’
‘Croome should know,’ Sir Hugh said caustically, ‘because there’s rumor that his brother Marcus is engaged in the trade,’ and the big man replied harshly: ‘He better not be.’
‘And if we discipline Boston and Martinique,’ Sir Hugh continued, ‘we then face our permanent enemy, the housewife in England who screams constantly for a lower price on sugar.’ He made a distasteful grimace as he visualized the unfair pressures brought by these women who were so eager to buy sugar at a slightly reduced price that they would imperil the wealth of the Sugar Interest.
His son Roger introduced the ugly fact they had to face: ‘Word circulates. In France the best grade of clayed white sugar is eight pence a pound. In England the housewife has to pay ten a pound. The outcry is becoming stentorian.’
‘What’s that mean?’ Pentheny asked, and Roger explained: ‘Very loud. Named after the loud-voiced herald in the Iliad.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘The poem by Homer. Greece at war with Troy.’
‘I’ve heard of them. But Greece and Troy have nothing to do with the price of sugar in England.’ It was his opinion that the controlled monopoly price should be raised, not lowered, and as for the complaints of English homemakers who knew nothing of the problems of a plantation—‘the niggers and the Maroons up the hills and French competition’—the women could go to hell.
Sir Hugh advised his friend not to make that speech in public, at least not in England, and the conspirators planned to meet six weeks hence in London with a rigid plan, to which all planters would be bound, to attain three ends as Sir Hugh summarized them: ‘Make Boston buy her molasses from us at our price. Halt the shipment of mules and horses into Martinique. And raise the sale price of West Indian sugar in England while rigorously keeping out foreign supplies which would sell at half our price if allowed entry.’ The men felt hopeful that if they could get the island members of Parliament to stick together, they could attain those desirable ends.
As the meeting broke up, Pentheny asked where John Pembroke, who had left the room, went, and his brother, who could guess what was coming, said: ‘I don’t really know,’ but Sir Hugh, wanting always to have Pentheny on his side, said: ‘I think he’s in the library,’ and when Pentheny found John, he said: ‘Hester wondered if you’d be free for dinner tonight,’ and John was about to say ‘No,’ when his father broke in: ‘He’d be delighted.’
• • •
An observer who was acquainted with the powerful sugar planters of the Caribbean only in their rather rude country homes on Jamaica or Antigua or St. Kitts might catch an occasional hint as to how the planters spent their huge fortunes, but to appreciate how they used their wealth to achieve their political and social power, the onlooker would have had to visit England, and see how members of the Sugar Interest lived. Each maintained year-round a luxurious mansion in one of the popular London squares, plus a beautifully appointed country place in some rural village not too far from the capital. If a planter controlled three seats in Parliament, as several did, that family would probably have six English homes, three in London, three outside. As one witty observer remarked: ‘In Jamaica these men are insufferable boors; in London, polished gentlemen who invite the Prince of Wales to tea.’
In London, Sir Hugh and his son Roger had houses on opposite sides of Cavendish Square, the father’s being somewhat larger but not more ostentatious than the son’s. It was four stories high, with a handsome entryway and sets of three carefully matched windows on each floor. Protected by a modest iron railing low enough to be stepped over by a gentleman, it showed no outward display of wealth except for the heavily carved door. Inside, the rooms were spacious and handsomely furnished with an abundance of paintings in heavy gilt frames. If one looked at them casually, one had the impression that the owner displayed good taste and a nice sense of which painting went well on what wall, but upon closer inspection, one was startled by the artists represented, each name being displayed on a small, neatly engra
ved brass plate.
The landscape that one saw first was a Rembrandt, selected by Sir Hugh himself in Dresden. The mother and child in beautiful red and gold and green was a Raphael, the personal purchase of Lady Beth just before she died. The man on horseback was a Van Dyck and the scene with wood nymphs a Rubens. But the canvas that Sir Hugh loved above all others was a landscape, not overly large, by the Dutch painter Meindert Hobbema. It showed a country scene in Holland, with a bridge much like the one at Trevelyan, and whenever Sir Hugh chanced to come upon it by accident, as it were, he felt the presence of his plantation in Jamaica.
There were nine other paintings, including a Bellini Madonna and an attractive portrait of Lady Beth Pembroke by a fashionable court painter. In a back room there was a matched set of six English paintings, but they were of such scandalous character that Sir Hugh displayed them only to close friends who were known to have a ribald sense of humor.
The upper floors were decorated in a restrained style reflecting the taste of Lady Beth Pembroke, née Trevelyan. One knowledgeable visitor, seeking to flatter Sir Hugh, said: ‘I can see that whereas your wife had good judgment in art, it must have been you who encouraged her to make the purchases.’
‘Not so,’ snapped Sir Hugh. ‘It was her money. Her good taste.’ And if pressed, he would confess that on his own he had bought only the two landscapes, the Rembrandt and the Hobbema.