Since he would need officers to assist him when dictating the terms of peace after the enemy surrendered, he asked the governor of Jamaica for any likely candidates, and John Pembroke’s recent heroics commended him. In the capacity of an arbiter he sailed south on 26 January 1742, and shortly found himself facing that formidable collection of islands, fortified headlands, fortress-lined narrows and inland harbor rimmed with cannon that comprised Cartagena. The story was that when King Philip II learned that the equivalent of fifty million dollars had been spent on these fortifications, he went out onto the terrace of his Escorial and looked in the direction of Cartagena: ‘With that much money spent, I should be able to see the fortifications from here.’
The siege and battle, one of the most crucial in the Western Hemisphere, was an unfair struggle. Admiral Vernon had collected 170 ships in all, 28,000 men, including large forced levies from ten different American colonies, and innumerable cannon. The Spaniards had only a few small ships—quickly immobilized—and perhaps 3,000 men. But they also had on their side a man known as ‘two-thirds of an admiral.’
Don Blas de Lezo, one of the great fighting men of history, had spent a long life battling the British navy, and always losing more than just the battle. At Gibraltar in 1704 he had lost his left leg to an English cannonball; at Toulouse, his left eye to an English sharpshooter; and in a fight off Spain, his right arm. Now, when yet one more battle against the ancient enemy loomed, he jumped about the forts without the assistance of an aide, inspecting defenses, and he lay awake at night trying to guess what Admiral Vernon with his tremendous superiority might try next. And as he tossed sleepless he sometimes chuckled as if laughing at the extremity in which he found himself: At Gibraltar, years ago when we were both young, Admiral Vernon and I faced each other in battle, and that time he won. But this is another day, another battleground, and this time I have a powerful ally, General Yellow Fever.
Even before the battle started, the fever struck, killing the valiant British general who was to have led the ground forces as they left Vernon’s ships. In the dead man’s place the admiral received one of the most inept generals in history: Brigadier General Thomas Wentworth, a flunky and a totally inept vacillator propelled into a command he did not want and could not exercise. The consequence was reported by Pembroke:
I was liaison aboard Admiral Vernon’s flagship, and each morning it was the same. ‘Has General Wentworth started to attack the fort?’ he would ask me, and I would reply ‘No,’ and he would turn to ask the others: ‘Why not?’ and they would reply ‘Nobody knows.’
Time was wasted. Rains began. Fever struck our men with terrible force, and still Wentworth did not move forward. In the end, our great armada, more powerful than the one which attacked England from Spain, had to withdraw, having accomplished nothing. Not even a major battle. Not a single wall thrown down. Nothing.
And why did we fail? Because at every turn that damned one-leg Spanish admiral outguessed us. He proved a genius.
If the combined British navy and army achieved nothing but disaster, John Pembroke did somewhat better, for he attained what the English fighting man always aspired to, ‘a mention in dispatches,’ as Admiral Vernon reported to London:
When we sought to lay the small ship Galicia close to the Spanish fort to test the range and ability of our guns, we asked for volunteers, for the task was extremely dangerous. John Pembroke, civilian guide, sprang forward, and when the ship got into trouble, in the teeth of enemy batteries and rifle fire, he leaped into the water among the bullets to break her loose. His was an act of heroism of the highest order.
It accomplished nothing, because when General Wentworth still refused to attack, his inescapable enemy General Yellow Fever, aided by Admiral Cholera, struck his huddled troops, and the almost instantaneous loss of life was fearful. Men would fall sick as if with a mere cold, catch at their throats, and strangle. A soldier would be cleaning his rifle; the weapon would fall from his hands; he would look up in horror and fall to the ground atop it. Fifty-percent deaths in a unit was common, with the levies from the American colonies suffering up to seventy.
The sad, disgraceful day came when Admiral Vernon, still unable to budge Wentworth, who now had justification in not attacking, had to pass the order: ‘All troops back aboard ships. All ships back to Jamaica.’ England’s mighty thrust to drive Spain from the Caribbean had been frustrated by a courageous admiral who was only two-thirds of a man.
On the mournful sail back to Port Royal, John Pembroke moved among officers and men, gathering the firsthand information which he would later include in his well-regarded pamphlet True Account of Admiral Vernon’s Conduct at Cartagena, whose most often quoted paragraphs were these:
By honest count we lost 18,000 men dead, and according to a Spanish soldier we captured, they lost at most 200. Admiral One-Leg with his excellent leadership and fire killed 9,000 of our men, General Fever killed a like number. When I last saw the harbor of Cartagena its surface was gray with the rotting bodies of our men, who died so rapidly that we could not bury them. The poor, weak farmers from our North American colonies died four men in five.
But the greater loss was that had we won we would have brought all the Caribbean under English rule. It would have become a unified world, with all the opportunity for growth that unity provides. One rule, one language, one religion. Now that chance is gone and it may never come again.
The reward that John Pembroke received for his heroism at Cartagena was unexpected; it came in the form of a letter from his father in London:
We are all proud of your heroic deportment. I wish I could tell my friends: ‘It’s how we Pembrokes have always responded when our nation calls.’ Alas, we Pembrokes have no such record of gallantry in battle, so I congratulate you on starting the tradition. I trust that you and Elzabet will hurry over, putting aside any obligations at Trevelyan, as I have three surprises for you, and I assure you they are worthy of your attention.
So the youngest Pembrokes left Trevelyan in the late summer of 1743, taking their two children with them, and as they sailed past the remnants of Port Royal, John could not even begin to know that he would not see Jamaica again until the turbulent 1790s. For when they reached London, Sir Hugh met them at the dock with the first of his three surprises: ‘John, you’ve behaved manfully these past few years. The entire Jamaica contingent is proud of you, especially the Sugar Interest. We agreed unanimously on your reward.’ He paused dramatically to allow the young couple to try to guess what he would say next, but the blank look on their faces assured him that they had not probed his secret.
‘I’ve bought you a seat in Parliament!’ Yes, at the age of thirty-four, with no previous experience in politics, John Pembroke would take up a seat purchased by his father from one of the rotten boroughs; after three years of holding the seat he rode far into the country west of London to see where it was, and found three cottages comprising the ruins of what had once been an important trading town. He met the two old men, the only voters left in his entire district, who would henceforth cast the votes that would elect him unanimously, year after year. ‘I hope I can continue to be a representative worthy of our district,’ he said, and the men replied: ‘Aye.’
The Pembroke family now controlled three seats in Parliament, and John, as something of a military hero, added considerable force to his persuasiveness in cloakroom debate. His responsibilities were simple, as explained by his father: ‘Don’t allow the French an inch. Remember, they’re our perpetual enemy. And keep those fools in the American colonies in line. And lift the price of sugar.’
The Pembrokes were by no means the outstanding Jamaican family in Parliament. In fact, they ranked only third in public esteem, for the Dawkins family also had three of its members in Parliament, while the notable Beckford family of a plantation not far from Trevelyan had three outstanding brothers. William Beckford was twice Lord Mayor of London and won his election to Parliament from that city. Richard Beckford sat for
Bristol, while Julius represented Salisbury. Thus three rural families in Jamaica controlled nine seats in Parliament, while eight other Jamaican planters each owned one. Counting those purchased by wealthy planters from the smaller islands like Antigua and St. Kitts, the power of the Sugar Interest was formidable, with one critic claiming: ‘Those damned islanders will have in this session twenty-four of their own seats plus twenty-six held by men indebted to them.’
The pejorative word islanders was not entirely justified when describing this phenomenon, because throughout England voters saw the rich West Indian contingent merely as local men who had gone to the islands temporarily to make their fortunes. Indeed, of the seventy island members who would hold seats over the span of years, more than half had never visited the Caribbean, nor would they ever. They were the famous absentee land-holders whose forebears had made the adventurous trip to Jamaica, arranged for their fortunes, and sailed back home to stay. Now their homes were in England, but they remembered that their wealth still came from Jamaica and voted accordingly.
At the moment John and Elzabet were concerned with what their father’s second surprise was going to be, but Sir Hugh remained silent with growing nervousness as they approached his house on Cavendish Square. But the carriage did not stop there, for the driver had been previously directed to deliver the young people to a fine, handsomely proportioned house on the far side of the square, close to Roger’s residence. When they stepped down, Sir Hugh said, almost as if embarrassed: ‘Your new home,’ and he led them into rooms that had been tastefully decorated.
‘Father Hugh!’ Elzabet cried. ‘What a thoughtful gift,’ and John echoed her approval: ‘What possibly could you have hiding as our third gift?’
At the word hiding Sir Hugh blushed furiously, coughed, and said in a voice hardly stronger than a whisper: ‘You can come out now,’ and from an inner room where she had been waiting, a woman slammed open a door, rushed in like a Jamaican hurricane, and cried in a joyous voice: ‘John! Elzabet! I’m your new mother!’
It was Hester Croome Pembroke, tall, big, redheaded, and almost splitting her stays with merriment. Rushing across the entrance foyer, she clasped John in her powerful arms and cried: ‘John, dear boy! I’m a Pembroke at last!’ Then, moving to Sir Hugh’s side, she stood with him and looked benignly at John and Elzabet. ‘My God!’ she cried. ‘Are we not a handsome foursome?’
The next two decades represented the apex of West Indian power in London. When Lord Mayor Beckford was not giving a huge party to encourage his supporters, Pentheny Croome was offering an entertainment of staggering munificence, with Italian opera singers and German fiddlers. Occasionally, Sir Hugh, Lady Hester and his two sons would open their houses to a more restrained kind of reception: quiet conversation and music by Handel, who sometimes put in an appearance to lead a small orchestra himself. The three big families—Beckford, Dawkins, Pembroke—had between them nineteen children and grandchildren at good English schools like Eton, Rugby and Winchester, so the Englishness of the Caribbean grew more pronounced each decade.
In these years Sir Hugh seemed to escalate to a new level of enjoyment in living, and the younger Pembrokes were pleased that he had remarried. They saw that his step was lighter, his smile more ready, as if he were quietly amused by his new wife’s bubbling vitality. As John told Elzabet: ‘Best thing he’s done in years is marry that Jamaican hurricane.’
Things were never allowed to remain sober when Lady Hester was in charge, and the once stately quality of Sir Hugh’s big reception room with its sedate Rembrandt and Raphael was somewhat altered by the insertion of a gigantic marble sculpture that Hester brought back from a trip on which she had met the artist in Florence. The lovely Raphael was now partly obscured by Venus Resisting the Advances of Mars, a white tangle of flailing arms and legs. When her husband first saw it he growled: ‘Hester, I’m goin’ to bring over four cans of paint. His arms red, hers blue. His legs purple, hers yellow. Then we’ll know who’s doin’ what to who.’
The Rembrandt was also overshadowed by a larger painting she had brought over from her father’s mansion, the one which had been sold to the Croomes by an enthusiastic dealer, who told them: ‘One of the most famous works of art in the world. Look at the pope’s eyes. No matter where you move in the room, he follows you. If you’ve done wrong, you can’t hide.’
Bit by bit Hester’s dinners became more rambunctious, until parliamentary members from all parties grew to prefer her entertainments to any other. She developed a kind of rough Jamaican acceptance of both defeat and victory, and if a group of members tried to force the Board of Trade to lower the price of sugar and failed, she jollied them along just as she did when her own three Pembrokes lost a battle. And this aptitude helped both her and the Sugar Interest in the turbulent years following 1756, when all the nations of Europe seemed at war with one another, first in this alignment then in that; Prussia, Germany, Austria, Russia, France, Spain, Portugal and England were involved at one time or another in various alliances, and Europe quaked.
With the cleverness that powers sometimes exhibit, France and England restricted their major land battles to remote North America, and their sea battles to the Caribbean. In 1760, General Louis Joseph Montcalm, leading the French, and General James Wolfe, the British, both died on the same day in the great battle on the Plains of Abraham at Québec, mournful climax of the British conquest of Canada.
At sea Admiral Rodney confused things in 1762 by conquering the French islands of Martinique, St. Vincent, Grenada and All Saints, adding them to the big island of Guadeloupe, which the British already possessed. Rodney’s victories were so important to the safety of the empire that when word reached London, bonfires were lit and people danced in the streets, but not the members of the Sugar Interest. They clustered in muted groups and whispered: ‘My God! What a disaster! How can we neutralize this dreadful mistake?’
The danger was real. If England retained as spoils of war the big French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, not to mention the little ones, so much new sugar-producing acreage would become available to compete for the British market that established islands like Jamaica and Barbados would be sorely damaged. ‘Hell,’ Pentheny Croome said with keen foresight, ‘sugar in England could then be as cheap as it now is in France, and that would destroy us.’
He was correct, and in the latter part of 1762 and the beginning of 1763 the Sugar Interest, led by Sir Hugh Pembroke, the powerful Beckfords and the very wealthy Pentheny Croome, pulled every secret string it commanded to achieve one purpose: the English negotiators at the peace conference in Paris must be forced to accept Canada in place of the French islands in the Caribbean. If France didn’t want them, give them to Spain or set them adrift, but under no circumstances let them join the British union.
Obviously, powerful forces were arranged against the West Indians, who were lampooned in the press and in pamphlets for being concerned only with their selfish interests. Strong French leaders wanted to keep Canada and get rid of the islands, which had been a constant financial burden. British military geniuses, especially the admirals, agreed; they were willing to give Canada away if they could hold on to Martinique and All Saints, two islands which commanded the eastern entrances to the Caribbean: ‘In any future naval battles in this sea, the nation that commands those islands will have the advantage. Canada? What worth is it except to beavers and Indians?’
But the strongest voice was that of the English housewife, who pled with her government: ‘Please, please give us the French islands so that we can have sugar at a reasonable price.’
In recent years a new factor had entered this debate: the growing popularity of tea, both in the home and in the public tearooms. But to enjoy their tea properly, the English had to add sugar, and plenty of it, so as the demand for tea rose spectacularly, the need for cheaper sugar rose commensurately, and the West Indian sugar planters realized they were threatened by the new French islands.
Meetings in London
were continuous, with political leaders dropping in on the Beckfords, members of Parliament who could use a few pounds of his wealth stopping by to consult with Pentheny Croome, while the molders of public opinion, the quiet manipulators of Parliament, convened in hushed tones with Sir Hugh Pembroke and his sons. The meetings were apt to be tense, with men of the Sugar Interest applying strong pressure to win their basic point: ‘Take Canada. It has a future. Give the islands back to France. For Britain to keep them would be a terrible mistake.’
When any member of Parliament countered with the popular refrain ‘But the public needs sugar at lower prices,’ the canny sugar men refrained from saying ‘To hell with the public,’ which was what men like Pentheny said when they were behind closed doors; instead, they argued with honeyed words: ‘But, Sir Benjamin, don’t you realize that Jamaica is enormous? We have untold fields on which we can grow more sugar … twice as much … three times as much. Leave this matter to us.’ Of course, for the last quarter-century they had owned thousands of arable acres which they had stubbornly refused to develop. As Pentheny said, with that profound intuitive knowledge he commanded: ‘Why should my slaves labor to cultivate a thousand acres, when on five hundred with half the work we can make twice the money … if we keep the price of sugar high?’
In 1760 the sugar people suffered a serious blow when a knowledgeable economist named Joseph Massie published at his own expense a pamphlet with the intriguing title: A computation of the money that hath been exorbitantly raised upon the people of Great Britain by the sugar planters in one year, from January 1759 to January 1760; shewing how much money a family of each rank, degree or class hath lost by that rapacious monopoly having continued so long, after I laid it open, in my State of the British Sugar-Colony Trade, which was published last winter. With impeccable reasoning and such data as he had available, Massie proved that the West Indian planters had milked the British public, during a stretch of twenty years, of the prodigious sum of ‘EIGHT MILLIONS OF POUNDS sterling, over and above very good profits.’