Andrew Davidson

MR ATKINSON’S RUM CONTRACT

The Story of a Tangled Inheritance
Richard Atkinson

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Richard Atkinson 2020

Richard Atkinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Illustrated maps by David Atkinson: handmademaps.com

Family tree diagram by Martin Brown

Cover illustration © Andrew Davidson / The Artworks

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007509249

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780007509256

Version: 2020-03-03

Dedication

In memory of my father,

and with love to my sister

Epigraph

‘England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message … it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income.’

– George Orwell, Why I Write

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Family Tree

Maps

PART I: The Temperate Zone

1. A Tangled Inheritance

2. The Tanner’s Wife

3. Atlantic Empire

4. Four Dice

5. All the Tea in Boston

6. The Rum Contracts

7. Jamaica Imperilled

8. A Heartbreaking Letter

9. Mortal Thoughts

10. A Royal Coup

11. Secret Influence

12. A Dose of Vitriol

PART II: The Torrid Zone

13. The Newcastle Attorney

14. Taking Possession

15. Fevered Isle

16. Maroon War

17. Black Pioneers

18. The Nabob’s Return

19. End of an Era

20. Settling Scores

21. Human Relics

22. A Spice of the Devil

23. Farewell to Jamaica

24. Distant Cousins

Picture Section

Appendices

Appendix I

Appendix II

A Note on Language

A Note on Money and Measurements

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

The Atkinson family of Temple Sowerby

Maps

PART I

The Temperate Zone

ONE

A Tangled Inheritance

SOME OF MY earliest memories are of Temple Sowerby House. I remember the line of tarnished servants’ bells in the passage outside the kitchen door, the tap tap tap of buckets catching rainwater that dripped through the ceiling, the mint-green porcelain of my grandmother’s 1930s bathroom suite; but most vividly of all, I remember the gallery. This was the light-filled corridor up narrow stairs at the back of the house, with three windows looking down on to the overgrown walled garden below. As a small child, on wet days – not unusual in this part of north-west England – I would run up and down the gallery, stomping on the floorboards, pausing only to examine the zoological specimens on display, which included two stuffed crocodiles, a rhinoceros horn and a narwhal tusk. I was particularly drawn to the glass domes filled with birds, their feathers all the colours of the rainbow, although I had no idea where they might have flown from.

This was the early 1970s, by which time dry rot was consuming the Georgian part of the house. In the entrance hall, burnt-orange brackets of fungus bloomed like a ghoulish botanical wallpaper; in the drawing room, many of the floorboards had been pulled up, and much of the ceiling plasterwork had fallen down. My grandparents, Jack and Evelyn Atkinson, had long since retreated to the rear of the building, the original seventeenth-century farmhouse on to which the handsome front wing had been added during more affluent times. Here the parlour, with its low oak beams and red sandstone chimneypiece, and the kitchen, with its blue enamel range cooker, were the only rooms where they managed to keep the damp remotely at bay.

Jack was quite unfit to be the custodian of such a property. When he moved up to Westmorland from London in the late 1940s, having inherited the 200-acre family farm, he was nearly sixty. Too old and impractical to take the land in hand himself, instead he let it out, and was too soft-hearted to put up the rent for twenty years. As a result, my grandparents were always strapped for cash and invariably in arrears with local tradesmen, who made the classic mistake of confusing gentility with liquidity. They reckoned themselves too poor to have slates replaced or gutters cleared – which is how it came to be that water was coursing through the roof and walls. Even so, every Christmas they ordered a hamper from Fortnum & Mason, London’s most exclusive grocer, to make sure they were adequately provisioned during the festive season.

Jack exuded old-fashioned charm; at eighty, as he ambled about the village, tipping his hat to the neighbours, his handsome features were still apparent. Evelyn, on the other hand, had the air of someone constantly disappointed by life, and there was little that did not provide the raw material for complaint. The pair of them rattled around the house, which was largely empty, since most of the contents – beds, tables, sofas, pictures, carpets – had been sold off long ago. They kept strange nocturnal hours, rarely going to bed before three in the morning, and rising in the early afternoon. Sometimes, after breakfast, Jack would wander down to the village shop, only to find that it had already closed for the day. Evelyn, who was obsessed by security – not that there was much worth stealing – roamed the corridors with a big bunch of keys, locking up behind her wherever she went.

My father John, their adored only child, used to dread visiting Temple Sowerby; as the next in a long line of Atkinsons who had inhabited the village for at least four hundred years, he was all too conscious that the house would one day pass to him. Already his parents had started offloading their money problems on to him, often sending begging letters that made him feel guilty and miserable. His salary as a book editor living in London barely met his own needs.

In October 1966 John married my mother, Jane Chaytor, who provided a much-needed burst of energy and hope. She took control of her in-laws’ chaotic finances and arranged for a review of the farm rent, which at a stroke doubled their income. She paid their bills – they were amazed to find that the butcher would look them in the eye again. It was she who had the range cooker installed in the kitchen. Jack was captivated by his pretty, practical daughter-in-law, making it all too clear to Evelyn that she was exactly the sort of woman he wished he’d had the good fortune to marry.

A few weeks after I was born, in June 1968, Jack wrote to my father: ‘Dear Old Boy, we were delighted with the photos; please thank Jane very much for them. Richard, understandably, didn’t show much interest in the proceedings, but you looked, also understandably, as if you were holding the most precious bundle in the world. Quite right too.’[1] Two months later my parents took me up to Westmorland to be baptized in the church at Temple Sowerby.

AROUND THIS TIME, my father started waking in the night with a dull ache in his gut, and hospital tests revealed a tumour; but following surgery his prognosis seemed quite positive. My sister, Harriet, was born in the spring of 1972. That autumn, after four years of good health, my father developed jaundice; the cancer was back. Soon he was too weak to climb the stairs, and a bed was made up for him on the ground floor of our terraced house in Pimlico. He was a sociable man, and over the following weeks a succession of friends and colleagues came to say goodbye. He died at home on 24 February 1973. He was thirty-eight. His funeral took place a few days later, on Harriet’s first birthday.

Three months later, Jack too was dead, and buried alongside his son in the graveyard at Temple Sowerby. Suddenly, following the custom of primogeniture, Temple Sowerby House was mine – not that I knew it. As for the farm, the line of succession was not so clear. Under the terms of my great-grandfather’s will, written in the 1920s, Jack had been left a life interest in the property, which allowed him to enjoy the income it generated but prevented him from putting it up for sale. This same document stipulated that on Jack’s death, the farm would pass to his eldest son or, failing that, his eldest daughter – but no such person now existed. What the will did not anticipate was the possibility that Jack might leave grandchildren who could inherit the farm. So instead the estate was split equally between the principal heirs of each of my great-grandfather’s three children: the niece of Jack’s elder brother George’s late widow; the son of Jack’s younger sister Biddy in South Africa; and me. In short, the premature death of my father, and the restrictive language of my great-grandfather’s will, meant that the farm passed out of the family’s hands.

The bleak practicalities of probate fell to my poor mother. Her first instinct was to hold on to the house, so I might one day have a chance of living there; but given that she had no money for repairs, the idea presented formidable difficulties. The most obvious solution was to pull down the rotten eighteenth-century wing and retain the relatively habitable oldest part. Following the local council’s rejection of her planning application, however, my mother realized that only one viable option remained. After moving my grandmother into sheltered accommodation, and suffering many sleepless nights, she called in the estate agents. It was a conclusion for which I will always be grateful.

Temple Sowerby House was by no means an easy sell. Quite aside from its state of semi-dereliction, it had another major drawback. The busy A66 trunk road that crosses the Pennines, linking Penrith and the M6 motorway in the west to Scotch Corner and the A1 in the east, cut straight through the village, not twenty yards from the façade of the house. Just the thought of a thousand lorries thundering past every day was enough to deter most buyers. But finally, in the summer of 1977, the Atkinson family home was sold to a developer who envisioned for it a future as a hotel – the passing trade, for once, counting in its favour.

Apart from the crocodiles, which she banished to a Penrith saleroom, my mother put the contents of the old house into storage; in particular, the three oak court cupboards in the gallery, each carved with the year of its making (1627, 1658 and 1729), which were far too bulky to fit into our small London home. The Atkinson chattels also included two large blanket chests, two broken-down longcase clocks, a well-worn rocking cradle, a spinning wheel and a set of Chippendale mahogany dining chairs, as well as a bookcase full of well-thumbed eighteenth-century volumes on a variety of practical subjects, and heaps of Chinese blue and white porcelain plates, bowls and soup tureens, many of them chipped. Just as I am relieved that my mother got rid of Temple Sowerby House, I’m thankful she kept this motley assortment of objects – baggage they may be, but they are still my most treasured possessions.

My dad’s death was the defining event of my childhood; not a day went by when I didn’t somehow sense his absence. Because he had been an only child, there were no aunts or uncles to pass on Atkinson stories to my sister and me. (In fact, except for our elderly bachelor cousin in South Africa, who sent us a large, oozingly sticky box of crystallized fruits every Christmas, we were unaware of having any relatives at all on our paternal side of the family.) After the house at Temple Sowerby was sold, the only reason we had to stop off at the village – passing through in the car en route to holidays in the Lake District – was to place flowers on my father’s and grandparents’ graves. Although these visits lasted a matter of minutes, they loom large in my memory. Every time, as we approached, I would feel fluttering excitement; and every time, as we drove away, I would feel sadder and emptier than before. Temple Sowerby came to represent all that I had lost during my early years; it was a place where it seemed I would always have unfinished business.

WHILE I WAS growing up, people who had known my dad often told me how much I resembled him, so it was perhaps inevitable that I would follow him into a career in book publishing. In many ways I felt blessed to be like him, since it meant I always carried him around with me; occasionally it felt like a curse. In my thirties, I suffered from digestive problems that caused me much discomfort. Bowel cancer can run in families, and for several years I was sure that I was destined to follow my father to an early grave. When I finally celebrated my thirty-ninth birthday, in 2007, it felt as though a weight had lifted, even as another pressed down; for that year Sue and I finally grasped, after seven years of marriage, that we would never have children of our own. This was a fate I had not imagined, and I felt rudderless, as though robbed of my purpose. My emotions turned raw and unpredictable; for no clear reason, I would break down crying in the street. I now realize I was mourning the sons and daughters I would never know.

While my contemporaries looked to the future, and threw themselves into the all-consuming business of raising families, I turned towards the past, and decided that perhaps it was time I found out about those who had preceded me. One day, while rummaging around in my mother’s house, I discovered, gathering dust on top of a cupboard, a scruffy old cardboard box which contained several hundred letters tied up in tight bundles with pink legal ribbon. Most of them were addressed to a ‘Matthew Atkinson, Esq.’ at Temple Sowerby and dated from the first decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time I came across a family tree, mapped out on a roll of graph paper about twenty feet long, which traced the Atkinsons back to the late sixteenth century. It was in my father’s handwriting – I guessed he must have compiled it some time before his marriage, since right at the bottom I noticed he had added my mother’s name, and then mine and Harriet’s, in slightly different shades of blue-black ink. Looking over past generations, I soon realized how presumptuous I had been to assume that I would have children; while some branches of the family tree were ripe with offspring, others withered to nothing. Below the names of all those whose marriages had not borne fruit, my dad had written the sad little genealogical acronym ‘d.s.p.’ – decessit sine prole, the Latin for ‘died without issue’.

I found the prospect of delving into the box of letters quite daunting, but one evening I took a deep breath and started reading. Instantly I felt the exhilarating rush of throwing open a window to the past. Even so, my progress was slow while I got used to the handwriting. For every letter penned in an impeccable copperplate, another resembled a spidery scrawl. Sometimes the ink had faded to a ghostly sepia. Occasionally, to save the cost of a second sheet of paper, the correspondent had simply rotated the page ninety degrees and carried on writing, creating a dense lattice of words. No envelopes were used; sheets were simply folded, addressed on the front, sealed with wax and dispatched, often in evident haste.

I had observed on the family tree that my ancestors were quite unimaginative when it came to Christian names. George, John, Matthew and Richard had been standard issue for Atkinson boys since the seventeenth century. Right from the start, this small pool of names threw me into confusion, for I made the mistake of assuming that the Matthew Atkinson to whom most of the letters were addressed was my three-times great-grandfather, who had died in 1830. Only some months later did I gather that they related to another Matthew Atkinson, his first cousin, who had died in 1852; it would be several years before I discovered how these papers from a collateral branch of the family had ended up in my hands.

Matthew’s correspondence mostly concerned business local to Temple Sowerby, and offered tantalizing glimpses of various trades – banking, farming, mining – which the family had been engaged in. Until then, I had always imagined my forebears as head-in-the-clouds types, rather like my ineffectual grandfather, but these Atkinsons were worldly folk. For the first time I was able to piece together the patchy outline of a family narrative. It appeared that something had occurred during the late eighteenth century to disrupt the fortunes of the entire family. Plenty of letters touched on legal matters, with frequent references to the labyrinthine affairs of a late uncle. And then I unfolded a document that made my jaw drop – it was a ‘List of Negroes’ giving the name, age, employment and value, in pounds sterling, of each of the 196 enslaved workers on a sugar plantation in Jamaica in the year 1801.

GENEALOGY IS ADDICTIVE, and I was soon hooked. I signed up to Ancestry, the online portal to an infinitude of parish records, electoral rolls, census lists and telephone directories, all just the wave of a credit card and the click of a mouse away. I spent countless hours googling ‘atkinson’ and ‘temple sowerby’ and ‘jamaica’, and any other combination of words that might summon up evidence of my ancestors. One day I typed ‘atkinson’ into the search engine of the National Portrait Gallery website (doubtful though I was that anyone to whom I was related would have earned a place in that august institution), and a result popped up for ‘Richard Atkinson, Merchant’, whose dates matched those of someone on the family tree – my five-times great-uncle.

I clicked through to this namesake’s portrait. Instead of the conventional oil painting that I was expecting, what came up on screen was an engraving titled Westminster School, dated 4 February 1785, by James Gillray, the most savage cartoonist of his age. In the foreground, portrayed in the role of headmaster, sits the famous politician Charles James Fox, unmistakable with his bushy black eyebrows. William Pitt the Younger, the 25-year-old prime minister, is shown bent over Fox’s knee, where he is being given a sound thrashing. Meanwhile a cohort of Pitt’s ‘playmates’, held in place on the backs of prominent opposition figures, line up to await the same punishment, their buttocks bared. Poking out from the pocket of one of these miscreants is a piece of paper bearing two words, ‘Rum Contract’ – the detail which identifies him as Richard Atkinson. My head was spinning at the thought not only that a relative of mine should find himself in such rarefied company – but that our first encounter should take place at a moment when his breeches were hanging around his knees.

An internet search soon yielded a potted biography of this Richard Atkinson. He had been a West India merchant, director of the East India Company, Member of Parliament, alderman of the City of London, prominent early supporter of Pitt the Younger – and a major government contractor during the American War of Independence. His nickname, ‘Rum’ Atkinson, apparently originated from a notorious contract to supply a vast quantity of Jamaican rum to the British army headquarters at New York in 1776. He had died relatively young, in May 1785, unmarried, leaving behind an immense, self-made fortune.

BY NOW I WAS in the grip of an obsession, spending all my spare time online in pursuit of my ancestors. One evening during the autumn of 2010, I was browsing the website of Temple Sowerby House Hotel, which included a short page dedicated to the history of the place; and although it was a fairly unexciting account, one paragraph leapt out at me. This was a description of a ‘fascinating Recipe or Receipt Book’, written by Bridget Atkinson for her daughter Dorothy Clayton in 1806, which gave instructions, among other dishes, for collared eels, roasted tench and a sauce to serve with larks. I knew that this Bridget Atkinson was my four-times great-grandmother, as well as ‘Rum’ Atkinson’s sister-in-law. My sister and I had inherited a number of her books – we knew they were hers because she always signed her name on the title page – including Domestic Medicine: or, a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines, by William Buchan, MD; The Scots Gardiners Director, containing Instructions to those Gardiners, who make a Kitchen Garden, and the Culture of Flowers, their Business, by ‘A Gentleman, one of the Members of the Royal Society’; An Account of the Culture and Use of the Mangel Wurzel, or Root of Scarcity, translated from the French of the Abbé de Commerell; and The British Housewife: or, the Cook, Housekeeper’s and Gardiner’s Companion, by Mrs Martha Bradley. But this was the first I’d heard of Bridget having written a recipe book of her own. I publish cookbooks for a living; suffice to say my interest was piqued.

So I did something I’d never thought of doing – I stayed a night at the hotel. Arriving at Temple Sowerby around teatime, I parked near the maypole, beside the large stone from which John Wesley was said to have preached in 1782. It was a crisp November day. Across the road, the curtains of the hotel had not yet been drawn, and its brightly lit reception rooms radiated hospitality. Before checking in, I went for a short stroll, as far as the old tannery buildings at the other end of the village. Walking round the green, I found myself appraising Temple Sowerby as if visiting for the first time; with its handsome Georgian houses, coaching inn and red sandstone church, it seemed a delightful place. Much more peaceful than I remembered, too, since a new bypass had diverted all the lorries which had once rumbled through the village.

The frontispiece of Bridget’s copy of The British Housewife.

Over at the hotel, Julie Evans, one of the owners, greeted me warmly. She already knew about my connection to the house, and had reserved a room for me at the back, with a view down the garden. It was nice and cosy, in a chintzy kind of way, and the ensuite bathroom, with its Jacuzzi tub, was a definite upgrade from the spartan facilities of the Atkinson era. Even so, a small, churlish part of me resented the fitted carpets and double glazing, and yearned for the house of my grandparents. As a child, my favourite place had been the gallery, with its clattery floorboards and oak furniture, some of which now dominated my living room in south London. But it seemed that when Temple Sowerby House was turned into a hotel, in the late 1970s, the gallery had been carved up to make bedrooms, including the one I would be sleeping in. To describe my emotions as agitated would be an understatement; as I sat down to dinner, the only guest that night, I had never felt more lonely.

I had almost finished eating when Julie appeared, clutching a scrap of paper. ‘I’ve just remembered something,’ she said. ‘A few years ago, this person came to stay, and she told me her ancestors used to live here. Perhaps you should get in touch?’ She handed me the slip, on which was written an unfamiliar name – Phillipa Scott – along with a telephone number. I was intrigued.

Julie took pity on me after my solitary meal, and we chatted in the parlour. She and her husband Paul had owned the hotel for ten years, and she was clearly so fond of the place that I found myself letting go of the last of my proprietorial feelings. I’d brought a shoebox full of old family papers up from London with me, and we leafed through them together. Then I asked Julie the question I’d been burning to put to her since arriving – what could she tell me about this ‘receipt book’ that was mentioned on the hotel website? She left the room and returned a couple of minutes later, cradling an old quarter-bound book. She handed it to me; I opened it cautiously, not knowing what might be inside, and was amazed to find almost eight hundred recipes, handwritten in highly legible script.

It was evident from the sheer variety of meat, fish and game dishes in her repertoire that Bridget Atkinson had kept an excellent table. Many of her recipes included spices and flavourings that to this day carry a whiff of the exotic, such as cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, curry powder, candied lemons and orange flower water. Although the instructions she gave were cursory at best, and her methods on the antiquated side – she was, after all, cooking over an open fire – many of the recipes, especially the puddings and preserves, seemed perfectly relatable to the present. I could imagine trying to make them at home.

Not so the recipes in the last third of the book, where Bridget offered remedies for every conceivable domestic situation or ailment: ‘For Berry Bushes infested with Caterpillers’; ‘To distroy Moths’; ‘To prevent Milk from having a taste of Turneps’; ‘A Pomatum for the Face after the Small Pox’; ‘To draw away a Humor from the Eyes’; ‘For worms in Children’; ‘Against Spitting of Blood’; ‘To prevent bad effects of a Fall from a high place’; ‘To cure the Bite of a Mad Dog’; ‘For Insanity’. Some of her preparations sounded downright lethal. On a loose piece of paper tucked into the book I found ‘Mrs. Atkinson’s Receipt’, a concoction of rhubarb, laudanum and gin, all mixed into a pint of milk; it was not clear what condition it was intended for, but it seemed as though it may have been a case of kill or cure.

Bridget would have been in her seventies when she started compiling this volume for her daughter – it was odd to think she might well have written it in the same room in which I was at that moment sitting. For so long, I had associated Temple Sowerby House with death and decay; only now could I sense it as a bustling family home. In all my life, I had never coveted a single object so much as this wondrous book – so I felt crushed when Julie explained that it belonged to a private collector from Newcastle, and would soon have to be returned. I must have looked so downcast that Julie insisted I should immediately write to the owner, Miss Dunn, to ask whether I might buy the book; indeed, she thrust pen, paper and envelope at me, and promised to post my letter.

WHEN I OPENED the curtains the next morning, the sky was a brilliant blue; overnight had seen a heavy frost. After breakfast I walked across the road to the churchyard, crunching through glittery grass in search of Atkinson graves; then I set off for Northumberland, to spend a couple of nights with my godmother near Corbridge. My route over the Pennines took me on a zigzag road up the steep side of the Eden valley, through the ancient lead-mining town of Alston and across an ocean of bronze heather, dropping down alongside the South Tyne – a spectacular drive. That afternoon I had a couple of hours to spare, so I visited Chesters Fort, one of several Roman garrisons along Hadrian’s Wall, now maintained by English Heritage. I knew from my family research that some cousins, the Claytons, had once lived in the big house near the ruins, and had been responsible for their excavation – Bridget’s daughter, Dorothy, had married Nathaniel Clayton, the Newcastle lawyer who purchased the property.

Wandering around the neat stone footings, I struggled to imagine five hundred Roman cavalry ever having occupied such a peaceful spot. As drizzle hardened into rain, I took refuge in the small museum attached to the site. Near the entrance was a glass case devoted to the life of John Clayton, owner of Chesters for much of the nineteenth century. Among the objects on display was an old book which had belonged to his grandmother, Bridget Atkinson – as usual, her name was inscribed on the title page. Then something even more extraordinary caught my eye. It was the facsimile of a letter written by Bridget in January 1758, when she would have been in her mid-twenties, in which she was begging her sister to placate their mother, who was furious that she’d got married the previous Saturday without telling anyone. My heart pounded as I processed this – did it mean Bridget had eloped? And how had the museum come by this letter?

On my return to London, I wasted no time chasing up my leads – within minutes of arriving home, I had dug out the family tree and unfurled it on the kitchen table. First of all, I needed to locate Phillipa Scott, the mysterious woman whose details Julie Evans had given me. There she was, my fourth cousin – our last mutual ancestor was Bridget’s son Matthew Atkinson, the one who died in 1830. I googled her, and soon landed on the website of a needlework expert living in Appleby, six miles from Temple Sowerby – with the same distinctive spelling of her first name, this was surely the right person. It was almost midnight on a Sunday, but the urge to make contact with this complete stranger was too powerful to resist. In a short email, I explained who I was and where I’d just been. About three minutes later, Phillipa’s reply announced itself in my inbox. Hello! And, yes, she had stayed at Temple Sowerby House some years earlier, but also remembered visiting in the 1960s, as a child. ‘Is it my imagination,’ she wrote, ‘or was there a crocodile on the top landing?’

Phillipa and I spoke on the telephone the following day, and for me it was a cathartic experience. We hit it off immediately, and discovered how much we had in common; although we belonged to different branches of the tree, we shared the same deep roots. We chatted for an hour, and afterwards I felt so overwhelmed with joy that I burst into tears. A few weeks later, Phillipa put me in touch with David Atkinson, her first cousin – my fourth cousin – who invited me to stay at his house in Cheshire so that I could search through his collection of family papers. He was trusting enough to let me carry away a suitcase full of them.

I also made contact with the curator of the museum at Chesters, Georgina Plowright, who delivered a surprising piece of news. She had recently unearthed a treasure trove of correspondence between the Atkinson and Clayton families, six large boxes spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the Northumberland Archives, buried among the papers of another family, the Allgoods of Nunwick Hall. (Apparently one of Bridget Atkinson’s great-great-granddaughters, Isabella Clayton, had married an Allgood.)

And then there was Bridget’s ‘receipt book’, the scent of which had lured me north in the first place. Two days after my return, I received a call from Irene Dunn in response to the letter I had written from Temple Sowerby. She told me she was a retired librarian with a special interest in books about food; she had found Bridget’s manuscript at an antiquarian bookseller’s in Bath about fifteen years earlier. It so happened that I had approached Irene at the perfect moment. She was now looking to downsize, and was tickled by the thought of selling the book to me, a descendant of Bridget. One bright Saturday in January I travelled by train up to Newcastle to meet Irene for lunch in a restaurant on the Quayside, and to carry my prize home.

SO THIS IS THE STORY of how I found my eighteenth-century family. It was as though Bridget’s cookbook was the key I had been searching for, since doors immediately began to open. The thousands of old letters that fell into my lap as a result of my miraculous trip to Temple Sowerby – they were just the start. Within a few months I had located significant quantities of Atkinson correspondence in more than a dozen public archives and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. My ancestors, it emerged, had occupied ringside seats at some of the most momentous episodes in British imperial history, most notably the loss of the American colonies, then the economic collapse of the West Indies. When they first sailed to Jamaica, in the 1780s, it was the most valuable possession in the empire; when they left, in the 1850s, it was a neglected backwater. Moreover, through the copious correspondence they left behind, I learnt the intimate details of their lives. Richard ‘Rum’ Atkinson, in particular, emerged as a brilliant but flawed man who amassed a fabled fortune as well as considerable power, but would have given it up in a heartbeat for the woman he loved.

It became obvious that I had stumbled upon the material for a book. Although I had edited a great many books written by other people, I had never planned to inflict one of my own on the world, being more than happy to remain on the other side of the publishing fence. But I found I couldn’t ignore this story which kept me awake at night, so I started rising at six, to spend a couple of hours writing before leaving for the office. It was hard going, and on dark winter mornings it took every ounce of willpower to drag myself out of bed. I soon discovered – perhaps surprisingly, given my professional background – that I had little idea how to go about actually writing a book. So I signed up for an evening class in ‘Writing Family History’, and it was here that I had another stroke of luck – for the teacher turned out to be the acclaimed biographer Andrea Stuart, who was then at work on Sugar in the Blood, the story of her ancestors in Barbados, black and white. One Saturday morning, she took us on a tour of the National Archives at Kew, a vast concrete behemoth where we were inducted into the practicalities of archival research; it was time well spent, for I would become a frequent visitor over the next few years. Andrea encouraged me, at a stage when I really needed it, to pursue my own embryonic Jamaican story.

I look back on this as a strange, transitional period in my life; I felt like a kind of time-travelling commuter, secretly shuttling back and forth between the present day and the world of my eighteenth-century family. It was exciting, certainly, but also emotionally challenging, as I struggled to reconcile my inborn sympathy for these people, my ancestors, with their activities in Jamaica. I was never so naive as to imagine that those activities might be unconnected with slavery, but nor was I fully prepared for the degree to which they were involved. It was not a pleasant discovery.

My eyes were opened, too, to the nature of Britain’s culpability. I learned that there were thousands of well-to-do Georgian families, like mine, whose wealth and prestige had derived from the blood, sweat and lives of enslaved Africans. Moreover, individuals from every rank of society had played their part in propping up slavery, from the royal personages who sanctioned the slave trade with West Africa in the first place, to the sailors who crewed the slave ships – even the ordinary working people who consumed the tainted sugar. Here in Britain, we have tended to keep this disturbing aspect of our national story at arm’s length; unlike the United States, where its divisive consequences are plain to see, slavery was not commonplace on these shores. We proudly celebrate our great abolitionists, of course, but we would rather not know too much about what they were campaigning to abolish.

Sometimes, after yet another grim discovery in the archives, I wondered what kind of fool would knowingly implicate his own family by writing them into this shocking chapter of history. Yet my instinct told me to press on; in fact, I felt a powerful responsibility to do so. Clearly I could make no amends for my ancestors’ misdeeds – but I could certainly attempt to make something positive out of what they had left behind. Since this mostly consisted of old letters, to tell their story made perfect sense to me. But it was essential that I should write it warts-and-all. ‘Do not try and make all the ancestors goody two shoes when some were plainly not,’ advised David Atkinson, whose messages were a tonic for my sometimes flagging spirits. ‘Detach yourself – you have every right to portray some as villains, some as “not sures”, some as feckless and some as the heroes. I suspect you might be torn on this – don’t be. You have my blessing to treat some of them hard.’

To have my newfound cousins cheering me on was just what I needed as I embarked on a long voyage into our ancestors’ past – one that took me all the way from London to the abandoned sugar plantations of Jamaica. But all roads ultimately led to Temple Sowerby, where so many Atkinsons were born and so many are buried. Their tangled inheritance may have scattered them around the world, but the evidence made its way back to that weather-beaten house in the shadow of the Pennines and, eventually, in the form of the curious miscellany of relics and papers that were my inheritance, into my hands.

TWO

The Tanner’s Wife

THE RIVER EDEN carves a sinuous line down the valley that bears its name, past ruined castles and ruminating cows, swelling from the countless becks that drain off steep fells; by the time it flows under the red sandstone bridge at Temple Sowerby, it has completed almost half its ninety-mile journey. Cross Fell, highest of the Pennine hills, dominates the skyline at this point; it enjoys the rare distinction of harbouring a breeze with so much bluster that it has its own name. ‘A violent roaring hurricane comes tumbling down the mountain, ready to tear up all before it,’ was how one eighteenth-century traveller described the ‘Helm’ wind.[1]

From the summit of Cross Fell – assuming the absence of its usual cloud cap – you can see the hills of Galloway in southern Scotland. Two thousand years ago, the Romans built a wall to keep out the Caledonian people to the north, and legions of soldiers marched through Temple Sowerby on their way to forts along its route; a Roman milestone can be found in a layby just outside the village, although its inscription weathered away aeons ago. Scandinavian immigrants settled in the area during the ninth century. These hardy people left their linguistic imprint across northern England, not just in the words that evoke its landscape – beck and fell are of Norse origin – but also in its place names. Sauerbi is old Norse for ‘farmstead on sour ground’. Even the Vikings, it seems, saw Temple Sowerby as a hardship post.

The first tangible evidence of the Atkinsons of Temple Sowerby can be found in the basement of the county offices at Kendal – this is where the records are kept for the historic county of Westmorland, which was absorbed into Cumbria in 1974. William Atkinson – my nine-times great-grandfather – was one of seventeen yeomen who in 1577 were granted thousand-year leases on their land in the village, along with ‘reasonable common for the pasturing of their cattle’, by the lord of the manor, Christopher Dalston.[2] It feels only fitting that I should examine the legal document in which my ancestors’ earliest property rights were enshrined, but the large sheet of vellum is a brute to unfold, so defiantly springy that it resists my attempts to flatten it out. I must be firm with it, I realize, but not too firm, since the archivist is watching me like a hawk.

Eventually, after wrestling with it for a minute or two, I have it spreadeagled on the desk, its corners pinned down with iron weights. I now appreciate why calfskin has always been the material upon which parliamentary laws are recorded, for the document remains in superb condition, apart from two holes caused either by rodents or fire – it’s hard to tell which. Next comes a still greater challenge – deciphering the script. At first I hold out little hope of being able to read the spiky Elizabethan handwriting. But soon I find that if I stare at them in an abstract way, shapes start to turn into words.

This lease marks the culmination of a conflict that simmered in Temple Sowerby for twenty years. Until the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, the manor was held by the religious orders of the Knights Templar (who gave it their name), and then by the Knights Hospitaller, both of whom interfered little in the lives of the villagers. That all changed in 1543 when the Dalston family acquired the manor from the Crown. It was inevitable the tenants of Temple Sowerby would resent their first resident landlords in nearly four centuries, especially given that both Thomas Dalston and his son, Christopher, made it plain that they intended to claim the common land for themselves. William Atkinson was one of eight villagers who filed a writ against Christopher Dalston in 1559. Their case was rejected by the Lord President of the North at York; next, they took it to Court of Chancery in London.

The 1577 lease was the upshot of this litigation. Dalston gained exclusive use of half the common, and was ordered to grant his tenants possession of the other half. For their part, the villagers undertook to use Dalston’s mill at Acorn Bank to grind their flour, and to pay for half of any necessary repairs. Although it was technically a compromise, they nonetheless saw the agreement as a victory against their overbearing lord. Christopher Dalston only conceded to these terms ‘because he would be of quietness with the plaintiffs and no further be molested as he by a long time hath been’.[3] He never forgave his tenants their insolence; and they in turn fully reciprocated his ill feelings.

The first mention of the leather-tanning business that kept the Atkinson family busy for at least five generations is found in the will of William Atkinson, second son of William who signed the 1577 agreement. This William never married, and on his death in 1645 he left his elder brother John ‘all my leather tubbes and barke and my apparel the bedstead I lye in and one feather bed and one nagge’.[4]

Temple Sowerby was well positioned for the trade in animal skins, being on a major cattle-droving route. Every year, between April and October, thousands of black cows funnelled through the village on their way from the breeding grounds of south-west Scotland to Smithfield market in London; plenty failed to last the distance, falling by the wayside due to lameness or sickness. The ‘drovers’ who herded cattle were tough individuals, and Westmorland was the harshest terrain they would cross – Daniel Defoe in 1724 described the county as ‘eminent only for being the wildest, most barren, and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or in Wales’.[5] At Temple Sowerby the drovers found a range of services, including a farrier for shoeing horses and cows, two inns and ample pasturage.

Two tanyards lay at a slight remove from the centre of the village – necessarily so, given the stench arising from the tanning process. First, any decaying flesh was cleaned off the raw hides, and any hair removed; next came the stage known as bating, during which the skins were softened in an ammoniac brew of watered-down pigeon shit shovelled from a large dovecote on site. They were then immersed in a succession of clay-lined pits filled with tanning liquor of increasing strength, the active ingredient being the tannin released by ground-up dried oak bark steeped in water. The overall length of the soak determined the toughness of the finished product, but generally lasted a year or more. Finally the cured skins were trimmed, shaved, greased, dyed, rolled, buffed and prepared for market. So many of life’s necessities – belts, boots, buckets, harnesses, pouches, saddles, straps and trunks – were fashioned from leather. Its manufacture was by no means a noble activity; but it was a vital one.

THE HEARTH TAX return of my seven-times great-grandfather John Atkinson for 1670 declares just one fireplace – compared to Squire Dalston’s nine at Acorn Bank.[6] John died in 1680, and what little I know of him comes from his will, a document noteworthy as the first (but by no means the last) record of friction within the Atkinson family.

The declarative language of John’s will suggests it was dictated on his deathbed, the rather melodramatic custom of the day. So close to his final breath, you would hope that John might be making his peace with the world, but it seems he felt the need to mediate between his squabbling offspring. Thus, having apportioned his earthly possessions – he left forty shillings a year to his daughter Barbara, and the bulk of any ‘goods and lands moveable and unmoveable’ to his son George – John went on to specify some conditions. As long as she remained unmarried, Barbara was to be housed by her brother. ‘If the sayd Barbry and Geordge cannot agre,’ John went on, ‘Geordge is to builde hir a chimley in the backe chamber and she is to live theire and if the sade chamber doe fall to decay then Geordge is to repare the same of his owne cost.’[7] Barbara never did marry, and I haven’t been able to discover whether that extra chimney was ever needed. But when George died more than forty years later he left his sister £5 – so perhaps they managed to agree after all.

As I write, George’s Latin textbook sits on the desk before me – it’s the oldest object I own. Bound in scuffed calfskin, it contains almost five hundred handwritten pages of Latin grammar and syntax. Like the thousand-year lease, the script is in a distinctively Elizabethan hand, which is confirmed by the date: ‘anno domini 1595’. For George, too, the book was a hand-me-down, as it predates his schooldays by several generations. Born in 1657, he was a pupil in the early 1670s, by which time the writing style had become rounder and, to modern eyes, much more legible. So how do I know that the book once belonged to him? The impulse to deface textbooks is hard-wired into every small boy’s brain. George was no exception, and he wrote his name a few times on the flyleaf, along with this enjoyable doggerel:

Hic liber pertinet, deny it who can

Ad Georgeum Atkinson, ye honest young man

In opido Temple Sowerbie he is to be founde

Si non mortuus est, if not laide in ye grounde

The book is a yardstick of the Atkinson family’s social mobility during the seventeenth century. George’s grandfather John, who died in 1647, had signed his will with the rudimentary ‘mark’ of an illiterate man; John’s grandson George, on the other hand, could read and write Latin.

History records neither how George met his wife Jane Hodgson, nor when or where they were married, but it must have been relatively late for both of them, since their first child was born in 1701, when he was forty-four and she was thirty-one. Jane came from Threlkeld, near Keswick, in the heart of the Lake District. Perhaps George encountered her on his way to take delivery of a consignment of raw hides at the port of Whitehaven; or maybe he knew her from expeditions to purchase oak bark, a commodity in which the coppiced woods of the Lakeland dales were rich.

The sandy incline known as Whinfell, just across the river from Temple Sowerby, was the most convenient source of the bark that was essential to the tanning process. Around thirty families, including the Atkinsons, cultivated a large open expanse of the fell, although the land was too scrubby – ‘whin’ being another word for gorse – to be much good. Beyond the villagers’ strips, up the hill, lay Whinfell Forest, the domain of the Earl of Thanet. Since medieval times the forest had been renowned for the aristocratic sport of deer hunting, and for its ‘prodigious oaks’, including a trio known as the Three Brothers.[8]

Sadly, these giants would soon be slain. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Whinfell’s oaks had been earmarked for the shipyards of the Royal Navy, which, having consumed vast tracts of ancient woodland in the south, was now sourcing its timber from further afield. Accounts kept by Lord Thanet’s steward, Thomas Carleton, record the felling of fifty-four oaks at Whinfell during the winter of 1701, and twenty-three more the following spring. After being peeled and sawn on the spot, the timber was loaded on to sixty waggons that were dragged thirty miles up the old Roman road to Rockcliffe, at the mouth of the River Eden, where it was transferred to two barges and ferried round the coast to Whitehaven, to be warehoused ‘till the Queen’s Shipp Come for it’.[9] Meanwhile, the bark from these ancient trees was sold to a syndicate of five tanners, one of whom was George Atkinson.

Little went to waste in the rural economy. Animal hair, a by-product of the tanning process, was a commodity in its own right, used to add bulk to the mixture of lime, sand and water that made up plaster. Hair recycled from the tannery at Temple Sowerby found its way into the fabric of some of the area’s finest properties; half a ton of the stuff was used in 1718 in the walls and ceilings of the Red House, Thomas Carleton’s residence in Appleby.[10]

Over the course of his relatively long life, George’s tanning business prospered, and he was able to buy two farms, one at Hilton Bacon, ten miles up the valley, the other at Hesket Newmarket, twenty miles in the other direction. By the time he was ready to be ‘laide in ye grounde’, when he was sixty-six, he had acquired sufficient property to provide for both his sons.

George’s funeral was held on Whitsunday in 1723, and the parish record throws up a curiously intimate detail about his interment. A law had been passed in 1666 requiring corpses to be buried in woollen shrouds, rather than the linen sheets in which they had previously been wrapped; only victims of the plague were exempt. This was a protectionist measure, aimed at reducing linen imports from abroad, with a harsh £5 fine for non-compliance, payable out of the estate of the deceased. (Half the fine went to the informer, the rest to the poor of the parish.) Even so, some fancy folk were prepared to flout the law so that they could be interred in finer fabric. But the Atkinsons were plain people and thus – as the register certifies – George was buried ‘in woollen only’.[11]

Following George’s wishes, control of the tannery passed to John, his elder son. Matthew, the younger son, inherited the property beyond Temple Sowerby as well as bonds representing money owed to his father. A few years later, after his brother’s premature death, Matthew took over the tannery.

SOMETIME IN THE mid-1720s, Matthew bought the farmhouse in Temple Sowerby that would be home to the Atkinson family for the next 250 years, and he immediately embarked upon a programme of building works that included the addition of the upstairs corridor which became known, rather grandly, as the gallery. He married Margaret Sutton of Kirkby Lonsdale in April 1727; as though declaring his intention to establish a vigorous new branch of the family, Matthew ordered his and his bride’s initials, and the year of their wedding, to be chiselled into the red sandstone lintel above the front door.

Through this entrance, a narrow passage opened into low rooms on either side. To the left was the main living space, with mullioned windows and a large fireplace, and a ladder leading to a loft. To the right, a cosy parlour led through to the smoky kitchen, where hams and other hunks of curing meat dangled from hooks in the ceiling, and peat smouldered in the hearth; also off the parlour, a creaking staircase led up to the gallery and the sleeping quarters. Matthew and Margaret’s five children soon filled the house with noise: Jane, who was born in 1728, followed by George, Margaret, Matthew and last, but emphatically not least, Richard in 1739.

The oak cradle in which the Atkinson children spent their first years.

Andrew Davidson

Details of their childhood must remain blurry, since the paper trail from this period is non-existent. Much of their growing up would have taken place outdoors, as there were always chores to be performed – cows to milk, pigs to feed, fields to dig, fruit to pick, wood to gather, peat to cut. Certainly, the boys fished in the nearby river; the shooting in the fields and woods around the village was off limits, however, since their father, not being a freeholder, did not have the right to kill game. Likely they played ‘Scotch and English’, a game in which the players of two teams launched raids into the territory of their opponents in order to steal their coats, meanwhile running the risk of being captured and taken prisoner. This ‘active and violent recreation’, which was popular in the border country, would have gained further significance for the village lads after 15 December 1745, when a Jacobite force passed through Temple Sowerby – one Atkinson legend tells of family members being forced to give up their pocket watches by the Scots rebels.[12]

What the Atkinson children received by way of education is a matter of conjecture. It’s very possible the boys attended the excellent free grammar school at Appleby, but their names are nowhere to be found in the school’s (extremely patchy) historical records. The Rev. Carleton Atkinson – no relation – who was a graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, and rector at Temple Sowerby for forty years, may have tutored them at some point. They were all bright, but the youngest boy, Richard, was exceptionally so. It must have been obvious that his talents transcended the confines of the Eden valley, since somehow – I have no idea what chain of connections might have led to this – he landed a position as a clerk at the house of Samuel Touchet, a merchant of considerable influence based at Aldermanbury in the City of London.

Few traces remain of Richard’s earliest years in London. The first evidence I have unearthed of his existence there comes at the end of a legal document relating to the transfer of some land in Temple Sowerby, which he witnessed in London on 14 September 1755.[13] This is also the first sample of his handwriting that I have come across. At sixteen, his signature had not yet developed its ultimate panache, but it already showed considerable self-confidence, underscored by a succession of delightfully superfluous loops – and only slightly undermined by a few blotches, which reveal its author not to be in full command of his ink.

The most conclusive proof of Richard’s association with Samuel Touchet would be his contract of apprenticeship. Because stamp duty was imposed on the premium charged by a master, such contracts were registered by the authorities; details of all the apprenticeships entered into between 1710 and 1811 can be found in the National Archives at Kew, contained within seventy-nine bulky volumes that are also, mercifully, searchable online. But here’s a puzzle. There’s no evidence that Richard was ever apprenticed to anyone. Yet it was while they were both working for Touchet that Richard forged a lifelong friendship with a young man who definitely was an apprentice: Francis Baring, the son of a prosperous Exeter wool merchant. (Baring’s widowed mother paid £800 for his seven-year apprenticeship, which started on 20 November 1755, when he was fifteen; the hefty premium reflected Touchet’s prestige in the City.)[14] So how did Richard manage to get his foot in the door?

In his will, dated 6 March 1755, Matthew Atkinson bequeathed £200 to each of his two elder sons, George and Matthew, and £100 to Richard, which suggests previous expenditure on the latter’s behalf. Matthew would die ‘of a Jaundice’ on 15 April 1756. ‘He was not only one of the largest Dealers in his Way in the North,’ noted the Public Advertiser, ‘but also one of the most honourable.’[15]

THE MOTTO ENGRAVED on the face of the longcase clock in the gallery at Temple Sowerby was an hourly reminder of life’s brevity – ‘Remember Man / That Dye thou must / And after that to / Judgment Just’ – and perhaps its message had rubbed off on George Atkinson, who was eager to enter the state of matrimony. He had been visiting his neighbour Biddy Shepard one day in 1756 when he first encountered Bridget Maughan, and was so taken with her that he soon found it convenient to call on her at home in Wolsingham, fifty miles away in County Durham. Theirs would not be a smooth courtship.

Bridget’s father, Michael Maughan, had been a mining agent, prospecting for lead and copper on the Duke of Queensberry’s estates in Lanarkshire, but died when he was twenty-six. His widow, Dorothy, who hailed from old Cumberland gentry, raised Bridget and her younger daughter Jenny at Kirkoswald, a village twelve miles down the valley from Temple Sowerby, in an extended family surrounded by cousins. Dorothy was a controlling mother who would resort to tears when other methods of coercion failed; as a result, perhaps, both girls were notably secretive when it came to matters of the heart. Apart from a stint at Mrs Paxton’s academy in Durham, where they were schooled in the wifely arts of sewing and linen-dressing, the Maughan girls received no formal education. I would guess it was Dorothy who taught them to read and write, for Bridget’s writing was almost identical to her mother’s; furthermore, her spelling was wildly erratic, and she would remain more or less a stranger to punctuation her entire life.

In October 1755, when Jenny Maughan was nineteen and staying with friends in Newcastle, she fell in love with James Graham, and the couple were hastily engaged. Their idyll lasted a fortnight before Dorothy heard about it, pronounced Graham unsuitable, and commanded her daughter to sever the connection. Jenny’s broken heart cast a long shadow over the family during the following months, and it was under its lingering influence that George Atkinson started courting Bridget, a compliment which she rewarded with a robust brush-off:

Sir, I had your Letter and do remember what you said when you were at Wolsingham but you’ll excuse me when I tell you I know your Sex a Little better than belive one word of it. When I was Last at Temple Sowerby I was told you courted Miss Thomson of Bowes and I belive it is so. I have the greatest reason to respect you for your great civility both to my Sister and myself. I shall always esteem you as a friend but no pitty for I am very sure your Heart is as safe as ever it was at Least for me.[16]

As a matter of fact, Bridget liked George more than she let on, but was afraid to encourage him, foreseeing her mother’s disapproval. Dorothy, who was proud of her pedigree – which included a smidgen of Plantagenet blood – would no doubt say the Atkinsons smelled of trade, and an odoriferous one at that. Gentry they most definitely were not. There was, however, another reason for Bridget’s guardedness during the summer of 1756 – for her heart was already under siege.

Earlier that year, Dorothy had moved to Wolsingham, the home of her parents-in-law, perhaps after falling out with one or more of her sisters. In these new surroundings, she might have felt that two unmarried daughters reflected badly on her; in any case, when a local gentleman started courting Bridget, Dorothy pressed her to accept his hand. So far as the daughter was concerned, though, the match was unthinkable. In the ensuing battle of wills, Bridget’s friends feared she would be the one to give way first.

In August 1756, Bridget received a diverting parcel of books from her cousin James Tinkler, a merchant in London, accompanied by a letter full of family gossip and news of the opening salvos of a war with France. James was clearly worried about Bridget, for the letter to his ‘Dear Coz’ opened with the admission that he had been ‘perplexed with a Thousand Fears’ for her welfare. With regard to an ongoing commission, he could report only modest success: ‘I have Collected a Few more Shells which I shall Send with the Other Things, and I Promise you I Lett nothing of that kind Slipp that I Can Procure. But it’s now Fashionable for the Ladies to decorate their Rural apartments with Them, which makes them Both Scarse and Dear.’[17]

James Tinkler was not the only one with concerns about Bridget’s beleaguered state of mind. By September, she had still not decisively turned down her suitor’s proposal, and her standoff with her mother was now the subject of local tittle-tattle. ‘How hard it is to think that people might be quite happy and there own parents make them quite miserable,’ wrote Biddy Shepard, who knew that Bridget was soft on George Atkinson, and was keen to promote his suit:

If you can only try for a littel bitt of More Spirit and Resolve to fight throw it and not Sink under the weight of what Some people would only Look on as trifels and who knows but you may yet make that worthy fellow happy that would be willing to be seven times hanged and let down agane for you, and if not him Some body else that disarves you. Never however throw your Self away on a munkey that all the World agrees is not worthy of you.[18]

TEA ARRIVED IN England in the 1650s, and was initially a luxury enjoyed only by the very rich. Over the following century, however, tea drinking turned into a British obsession, so much so that high-minded individuals began preaching against the moral consequences of the habit. One forthright critic of the beverage was the reformer Jonas Hanway, whose Essay on Tea, published in 1756, pinned many social ills on it, including rotten teeth, a soaring suicide rate and a loss of bloom in chambermaids. (He had a point about the teeth; the growth of tea drinking went hand-in-hand with a boom in the consumption of the sugar used to sweeten it.) The East India Company, as the holder of the monopoly on trade with the Orient, ought to have entirely fulfilled the nation’s demand for tea; but the commodity was so exorbitantly taxed that around half of the leaves landing on British shores were imported illegally from the continent. James Corbet, a merchant and shipowner from Dumfries, is known to have smuggled tea from the Swedish city of Gothenburg via the Isle of Man. His business ledgers record that George Atkinson – a regular visitor to Dumfries – purchased a pound of ‘Singlo green tea’ from him for 8s 6d on 30 September 1756.[19]

For George, the following winter was purgatorial, for he heard not a word from the object of his affection. On 4 March 1757, after months of silence, he could stand it no longer, and decided to enlist Bridget’s sister Jenny to his cause, placing a small package addressed to her on a cart to Wolsingham. ‘Good Tea I know is a thing not very common in your country, yet an article which I think Ladies ought always to be Indulged in,’ George wrote in his accompanying letter. ‘I have lately met with a parcell which takes my fancy vastly, yet knowing my Deficiency of Judgement in those things, I have sent a sample which I hope you’ll give me your opinion of the first time I see you. I have every week since Christmas been expecting News from your Place of some Conquest this Winter,’ he continued, a note of despondency creeping in, ‘but I find you keep these things too closely amongst yourselves. Oh Jenny (as the Scotchman says) keep a good gripp of your heart, for after that’s gone I now find (by Experience) uneasyness, Jealousy &c follows, and always assure yourself of this, that it’s much easier for a person not in Love to persuade his Mistress he has a Passion for her, than for those who Loves with the greatest Sincerity.’[20]

Poor, lovelorn George – such an appeal carried its risks, but perhaps he felt he had little to lose. Certainly, his petition appears to have done him no harm. Over the following months, Bridget made it clear that one way or another, whether her mother liked it or not, she would marry George Atkinson.

On the morning of 7 January 1758, George rode out from Temple Sowerby, following the Eden ten miles downstream, past the ancient standing stones known as Long Meg and her Daughters, to St Michael’s Church at Addingham. The village itself no longer existed, having been washed away when the river changed course in the fourteenth century; only the parish church remained. There he met Bridget, who was staying with her Tinkler relations in Kirkoswald and had stolen away for a few hours. Their wedding ceremony could not have been more discreet. At this solemn, lonely place, in the low midwinter light, they must have believed their secret to be safe.

They had hoped to keep it under wraps until Whitsunday, but news of their marriage somehow reached Wolsingham a few days later. Bridget, in palpable distress, dashed off a note to her sister: ‘I beg Dear Jenny you will use your intrest to paceffy my Mother and to prevaill with her to alow me to come home a Little whille indeed my happyness depends upon it. I beg you’ll write soon and tell me the worst.’[21] Her aunt Barbara Tinkler also wrote to Dorothy: ‘Dear sister, Whether the News of your Daughter Bridget’s being married to Mr. George Atkinson may be so Gratefull to you, as I could wish, I cannot Conjecture. But as I understand, She formerly acquainted you with her intentions I hope it will not be so Surprising to you. The man has a very good Character, and we all hope will make a kind and indulgent husband.’ On the reverse, Bridget added a mournful paragraph of her own. ‘Dear Mother,’ she implored, ‘till I have a Line from you I can never be easy. Alowe me once more to desire your Blessing and Leave to come over which if you do not grant will make me very unhappy perhaps to my Lives end.’[22]

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER made their peace. The Gentleman’s Magazine recorded the match in the mercenary language of the day:

Mr. Atkinson, tanner, near Appleby – to Miss Maughan of Wolsingham, Durham £3000.[23]

Bridget brought a tidy dowry to the marriage. George immediately set about enlarging the house at Temple Sowerby, which must have felt gloomy and old-fashioned. If his aspirations or his budget had been greater, he might have opted to pull the whole thing down and start again from scratch; instead he tacked on a symmetrical front extension built of brick, two storeys high and five bays wide. The new front door opened into a double-height hall; to either side was a well-proportioned reception room, and on the floor above were two commodious bedrooms. The old and new parts of the house connected to each other via a narrow corridor. The extra living space would soon prove its worth, but from an architectural point of view the overall effect was clumsy. It was as though two very different houses were huddled too close together, each treading on the other’s toes.

While George supervised a succession of bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and painters at Temple Sowerby over the spring and summer of 1758, Bridget stayed at Wolsingham, where she greatly missed her warm-hearted husband. George soon made a favourable impression among the Maughans’ circle in Wolsingham by sending over some leather to help a struggling cobbler. ‘He was stunned and could not tell how to express his gratitude and I hear says he never had so much given in his Life,’ Bridget reported back. ‘In short my Dear George has made a poor Family happy which is to me a greater pleasure than I can express, much more so than when you tell me you have Wainscoted the parlour to Oblidge me.’[24]

By the autumn, the house at Temple Sowerby was habitable. Newly installed as its mistress, Bridget duly received and then returned social calls from all the neighbours, which necessitated much sipping of tea. Such proprieties were especially tiring for her now that she was in the early stages of pregnancy. In mid-November, George wrote to sister-in-law Jenny at Wolsingham to say that while Bridget was well and cheerful, she was so busy completing her local visits before winter set in that she hoped her mother would forgive the lack of a letter that week.

In January 1759, the entire Atkinson family converged on Temple Sowerby to celebrate the feast of Twelfth Night. Matthew, who was George’s partner at the tannery, had picked up a cask of West Indian tamarinds for Bridget at Whitehaven on his way back from a business trip to Dublin. Richard had come up from London, stopping off to meet sister Margaret (a woman of almost suffocating piety) and her husband George Taylor at Bowes in County Durham; the three of them had travelled together the last thirty miles over the desolate pass at Stainmore and down into the Eden valley. Two hours after the arrival of the Bowes contingent, Bridget wrote to Jenny with a pithy assessment of her youngest brother-in-law, whom she was meeting for the first time: ‘Dicky is a very Smart Youth.’[25]

Over the winter Bridget kept Jenny occupied making baby clothes. ‘As I knew you were very busy working for me,’ Bridget wrote in late January, ‘I shall say nothing about your not answering my Letter. I fancy you will be at a Loss for directions about the Little things. The Long Lawn I intend for skirts and some ordinary caps which you may border with what Leaves of the Cambrick of which you may make six caps, four Laced ones of the fine and two plain ones of the coarse. You need be in no hurry as I hope if all be well we shan’t want them before May.’[26]

A boy was born in June 1759, but would die in infancy. A second child followed in February 1761, a girl called Dorothy. Two weeks after his daughter’s arrival, George sent off a bulletin to Jenny, reporting on the happy progress of Bridget and ‘her little Dolly’.[27] Alas, at this point in the narrative, the family correspondence dries up, a drought that would last more than a decade. To state the obvious: for old letters to provide the basis for a story, they need not only to have been written, but also to have been preserved. Now that George and Bridget were living under the same roof, they no longer had reason to write to one another; meanwhile most of the extended Atkinson family were in regular contact with each other in or around Temple Sowerby. Richard’s communications from London were rare and wondrous happenings. ‘I am glad that you have heard from Brother Richard,’ wrote Margaret to eldest sister Jane on such an occasion. ‘I think you are highly favoured.’[28]

As for the Maughan side of the family, they were touched by tragedy. Jenny never got over her forced separation from James Graham, and his death three years later – he left her his gold watch – further lowered her spirits. She died at Temple Sowerby in January 1762, at the age of twenty-five – a melancholy event that deprived Bridget of her only sibling and closest correspondent.

THREE

Atlantic Empire

LONDON IN THE 1760s. From the ashes of the great fire a century earlier had risen a sprawling metropolis of three-quarters of a million people; the gabled timber houses which kindled the devastation had been replaced by flat-fronted terraces of fireproof brick, while stone edifices such as the Mansion House trumpeted mercantile prestige on an imperial scale. The Lord Mayor was chosen each year from among the twenty-six aldermen of the City of London, an ancient office held in 1762 by William Beckford, the inconceivably wealthy owner of three thousand slaves in Jamaica.

London was a filthy place, notable for its pall of coal smoke that smeared the sky and caught in the back of the throat. Pedestrians took care to avoid treading in the contents of chamber pots strewn across the cobbles. ‘Except in the two or three streets which have very lately been well paved,’ observed a Frenchman visiting in 1765, ‘the best hung and richest coaches are in point of ease as bad as carts; whether this be owing to the tossing occasioned at every step by the inequality of the pavement, or to the continual danger of being splashed if all the windows are not kept constantly up.’[1] The back alleys of the city clanked and clattered with the workshops of craftsmen – bootmakers, cabinet-makers, confectioners, cutlers, gunsmiths, haberdashers, hatters, mercers, milliners, perfumers, printers, saddlers, silversmiths, sword-cutters, tailors, watchmakers, wigmakers – while glass-fronted emporia lined its main thoroughfares. ‘The shops in the Strand, Fleet-street, Cheapside, &c. are the most striking objects that London can offer to the eye of a stranger,’ wrote the same Frenchman. ‘They make a most splendid show, greatly superior to any thing of the kind at Paris.’[2]

Driving London’s prosperity was trade, underpinned by the Navigation Acts. The first of these laws had been passed during the 1650s, to challenge Dutch commercial dominance, but they had since grown into the regulatory system that governed Britain’s trade with the rest of the world. The guiding purpose of the Navigation Acts was to keep the benefits of trade within the empire, and they enshrined the basic principle that raw materials produced in the colonies, such as sugar, cotton and tobacco, could only be conveyed to Britain or another of her colonies in a British ship, while all foreign-produced goods bound for America or the West Indies had to be shipped first to Britain to be taxed, then carried onwards in a British ship. It was axiomatic that the role of the colonies was to generate wealth for the mother country.

The privileged status conferred upon British shipping by the Navigation Acts gave rise to a mighty merchant fleet; and nowhere was its strength more visible than on the four-mile stretch of the River Thames from London Bridge downstream as far as Deptford. In summer months the ‘Upper Pool’ near the Tower of London resembled a dense forest of masts, and it was often remarked that you might walk from one side of the river to the other, stepping from deck to deck.

On the north bank of the Thames stood the Custom House, the portal through which so much of the nation’s taxable wealth passed in the form of sugar, coffee and indigo from the West Indies; tobacco, rice and cotton from America; timber, hemp and iron from the Baltic; and tea, silk and porcelain from China. The busiest period, from May to September, was marked by the arrival of hundreds of West Indiaman ships, heavy with muscovado sugar that would first be processed in one of the capital’s eighty refineries, then stirred into the tea on which everyone was so hooked; there was often such a backlog that a cargo might sit around for two months before clearing customs. Meanwhile, in the maze of streets behind the quays, hundreds of clerks sat hunched over ledgers in the dim light of their masters’ counting houses, totting everything up.

The crowded quays fronting the Custom House.

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Which is where young Richard Atkinson, albeit tentatively, enters the frame. Even by the standards of the day, his employer Samuel Touchet was a ruthless capitalist – not that this word had yet entered the lexicon. The eldest son of Manchester’s wealthiest manufacturer of linen and cotton goods, Touchet had moved to London in the 1730s to gain better access to the market for the commodities needed by his family firm. The Touchets were early investors in Lewis Paul’s roller-spinning machine, whose operation required so little skill that anyone would be capable of spinning ‘after a few minutes’ teaching’, as the 1738 patent application boasted – ‘even children of five or six years of age’.[3] During the late 1740s, Samuel Touchet was responsible for importing more than a tenth of England’s raw cotton, and rivals suspected him of attempting to create a monopoly; by 1751, he and his three brothers together owned about twenty ships, some of which plied the infamous ‘triangular’ trade.

THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY had been established under charter from Charles II in 1672, with the purpose of setting up trading posts and factories along the Gold Coast – modern-day Ghana – and exploiting the continent’s ready supply of gold and slaves. By the 1750s, Britain had eclipsed Portugal to secure dominance in the slave trade; every year during that decade, British ships carried about 25,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, destined for the colonies of the West Indies and the American mainland. The ‘African trade’ was largely accepted as a necessary evil; the economist Malachy Postlethwayt declared it to be of ‘such essential and allowed Concernment to the Wealth and Naval Power of Great Britain, that it would be as impertinent to take up your Time in expatiating on that Subject as in declaiming on the common Benefits of Air and Sun-shine’.[4]

Brightly dyed, striped and checked cotton textiles, like those made by the Touchets in Manchester, were in great demand in West Africa. Indian fabrics were the benchmark against which all others were judged, but knock-off versions were fast gaining market share, and the Touchets’ were among the best. (British manufacturers continued to use the Indian names – calico and chintz would enter the English language.) As Thomas Melvil, the governor of Cape Coast Castle, the principal British slave trading post on the Gold Coast, informed the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa in August 1754: ‘If the Ashantee Paths open the Goods wanted will be Guns, Gunpowder, Pewter Basons, Brass Pans, Knives, Iron, Cowries, Silks. The Bejutapauts will go out. Of these Touchet’s are here preferred to India.’[5]

At the same time, while merchants in Liverpool, Bristol or elsewhere packed their vessels with goods to be bartered for human cargo, West African men, women and children snatched from inland villages were marched to European forts on the coast, to be sold by their captors on to a Danish, Dutch, French, Portuguese or (most likely) British slave ship. It might take a ship’s captain weeks, or even months, to purchase enough human cargo to fill its hold; two Africans per ton (bearing in mind that in shipping terms, tonnage is a measure of volume) was considered the ‘right’ load. The transatlantic leg of the voyage – known as the ‘middle passage’ – lasted around two months, and never was so much suffering crammed into so little space. Shackled and naked in the stifling heat of the ship’s belly, unable to relieve themselves except on the bare boards where they lay, rolling in blood, vomit, excrement and urine, occupying less space than a coffin, it is hardly surprising that many captives sought to end their own lives. Some tried drowning themselves, others refusing food; but it was dehydration, caused by a water ration of just one pint a day, hastened by sickness and dysentery, that would prove most deadly of all. The crew simply tossed the corpses over the side without giving them a second thought. Roughly one in ten Africans died during the middle passage.

Cape Coast Castle, the main British slave trading fort on the Gold Coast.

The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

On arrival in the Americas, the survivors were prepared for sale. Their dark skin was slathered with a mixture of gunpowder, lemon juice and palm oil, then polished with a brush, to create the illusion of glistening good health. Grey hair was either shaved off or dyed black. The backsides of those suffering from dysentery were bunged with oakum, the tarred fibre used for filling gaps between timbers in wooden ships. Human cargoes were often sold by the method known as a ‘scramble’, in which the Africans were taken to a merchant’s yard, the gates were suddenly thrown open, and the buyers rushed in, grabbing hold of their prey ‘with all the ferocity of brutes’.[6] At this point, families were often separated for ever. Afterwards, the newly purchased men, women and children were branded with the initials of their master or estate, and assigned ‘slave names’ to strip them of their previous identities; the men were often given names of generals or gods from classical antiquity, such as Apollo, Brutus, Cupid, Hannibal, Jupiter and Ulysses, as if to mock their degraded state.

Once the ship’s decks had been swabbed, then loaded up with sugar, coffee, tobacco and other commodities, it was ready to make the third side of the triangle, and return to Britain, to start this appalling cycle all over again. A triangular slave voyage typically lasted around eighteen months. The export of manufactured goods to West Africa, then the purchase of the labour with which to produce the raw materials, then the import of those raw materials from the Americas – as a business model, the diabolical logic of the triangular trade could hardly be faulted. Archive records indicate that ships owned by Samuel Touchet and his brothers took part in at least four triangular slave voyages. The first three vessels sailed to the Gold Coast between 1753 and 1757; there they embarked a total of 541 Africans, subsequently disembarking 455 in Jamaica.[7] The statistics of the Touchets’ fourth voyage mark it out as a catastrophic venture. The Favourite sailed from Liverpool in January 1760, taking on board seven hundred Africans at Malembo in what is now Angola; by the time of its arrival at the sugar island of Guadeloupe the following January, only four hundred were still alive.[8]

TRADE AND WAR have always been energetic bedfellows. During the global conflicts of the eighteenth century, ministers regularly consulted merchants for their superior knowledge of distant lands, as well as their practical experience of shipping and finance. Meanwhile, for the business community, war represented opportunity. One manifestation of this murky symbiosis between merchants and ministers was privateering, an activity considered by some to be ‘but one remove from pirates’.[9] At least two of Samuel Touchet’s vessels carried ‘letters of marque’ – the licences granted by the Admiralty to British merchant ships, permitting them to seize vessels belonging to enemy subjects. One of Touchet’s ships, the Friendship, was about to sail to the West Indies when it received its letter of marque in October 1756, shortly after the start of the Seven Years’ War; the weaponry allocated to its crew of forty men included ‘sixteen Carriage Guns, thirty six Small Arms, thirty six Cutlaus, twenty five Barrels of Powder, thirty Pounds of great shot and about fifteen hundred weight of small shot’.[10]

But Touchet had his eye on altogether greater spoils. He and a fellow merchant, Thomas Cumming, cooked up an audacious, secret scheme to invade the French colony of Senegal, fitting out and arming five ships at a personal cost of more than £10,000. Touchet’s ships sailed from separate English ports on 23 February 1758 and rendezvoused at the Canaries; from here, by previous arrangement with his friend Admiral Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, they continued in convoy with three warships. A bar at the mouth of the Senegal River proved impassable to the naval vessels, but Touchet’s merchant flotilla landed two hundred marines and covered their march eleven miles upriver to Fort Saint-Louis. The French capitulated on 1 May. The adventurers returned laden with booty, including 400 tons of gum arabic – the sap of the acacia tree – a product essential in the printing of linens and calicoes, for which British textile manufacturers had previously been forced to pay premium rates.

So where, you might be wondering, has Richard Atkinson been all this time? There he is in the background, absorbing the rudiments of his trade; conversing with brokers and dealers at the Royal Exchange, or ’Change, the most cosmopolitan spot on earth; frequenting coffee houses, chiefly the Jamaica for West Indian business, Jonathan’s for stocks and commodities, and Lloyd’s for shipbroking and insurance; supervising the unloading of cargoes down at the quays; and generating reams of correspondence. Sadly, little evidence of Richard’s personal life has survived from his twenties. I imagine he was less raffish than his contemporary, James Boswell, who left behind a journal of his first extended stint in London that is replete with tales of encounters with writers and prostitutes – yet this is pure supposition on my part. It’s ironic and not a little frustrating that Richard, whose professional life was taken up with the meticulous recording of the smallest details, should have proved so mysterious in his private affairs – but happily, this would soon change.

Some places well known to the young Richard Atkinson.

We might infer that Richard attempted to smooth off the rough edges of his northern diction, for in May 1761 he attended a series of talks given by the Irish actor Thomas Sheridan, held at Hickford’s Concert Room on Brewer Street, on the subject of elocution. Sheridan, who was the godson of Jonathan Swift, not only advocated the ‘polite pronunciation’ of the court, but believed that regional dialects carried ‘some degree of disgrace’ about them.[11] ‘The letter R,’ he declared, ‘is very indistinctly pronounced by many; nay in several of the Northern counties of England, there are scarce any of the inhabitants, who can pronounce it at all. Yet it would be strange to suppose, that all those people, should be so unfortunately distinguished, from the rest of the natives of this island, as to be born with any peculiar defect in their organs.’[12] The price of admission – one guinea – included an ‘elegant Edition’ of the lectures in a single quarto volume, and Richard’s name is listed (as are those of ‘Mr. Francis Baring’ and ‘James Boswall, Esq’) among the book’s six hundred or so subscribers.[13]

At the general election in the spring of 1761, Samuel Touchet was elected MP for Shaftesbury. Weeks later, a financial crisis almost engulfed him. As the merchant Joseph Watkins wrote to the prime minister, the Duke of Newcastle, on 28 May 1761: ‘Private credit is at an entire stand in the City, and the great houses are tumbling down one after the other, poor Touchet stopped yesterday & God knows where this will end.’[14] Touchet’s merchant house ultimately came crashing down in October 1763, with debts of more than £300,000.

After Francis Baring’s apprenticeship expired in November 1762, he went on to set up a London office for his family firm. Business was precarious at first, and his mother Elizabeth, alarmed by his speculations, counselled him to ‘let Mr. Touchet’s example of grasping at too much and not being contented with a very handsome profit which he might have had without running such enormous risks, be a warning to you’.[15] Richard Atkinson, on the other hand, helped wind up Touchet’s affairs – a task he was said to have performed ‘with great ability’ – before taking up a position as a clerk to the West India merchant Hutchison Mure, who was based at Nicholas Lane, off Lombard Street.[16]

SAMUEL FOOTE’S COMEDY, The Patron, opened at London’s Haymarket Theatre in June 1764. It featured Sir Peter Pepperpot, a West Indian plantation owner with an ‘over-grown fortune’, drooling at the thought of a ‘glorious cargo of turtle’ and dreaming of a girl as ‘sweet as sugar-cane, strait as a bamboo, and her teeth as white as a negro’s’.[17] Such men were ripe targets for satire – although they usually had the last laugh, for their money bought them land, status and power.

Richard Atkinson’s new boss, Hutchison Mure, was one of those men who sought to convert the base metal of their West Indian fortunes into the gilded trappings of the landed aristocracy. Hailing from the younger branch of a well-connected Renfrewshire family, Mure had come to London in the 1730s. After a short spell as a cabinet-maker, he entered the West India trade, having acquired some Jamaican property through his marriage. Soon, by his mid-thirties, he had made enough money to purchase the Great Saxham estate in Suffolk. His growing portfolio of Jamaican properties, meanwhile, included one called Saxham, after his English country seat, and another called Caldwell, after the Mure ancestral home in Scotland.

It seems that Mure, who is listed in the Register of Ships for 1764 as the owner of eighteen vessels, was an enthusiastic participant in the slave trade. Between 1762 and 1766, over the course of eight voyages, 2,959 Africans embarked on the middle passage aboard his ships, and 2,527 disembarked in the West Indies, all but 521 of them landing in Jamaica.[18]

The first of these voyages was the anomaly, in that it diverted at the last moment to Cuba, which on 14 August 1762 had fallen temporarily into British hands; Mure’s ship, the Africa, landed its human cargo at Havana on 18 October. Two months later, presumably feeling flush from the profits that would follow, Mure commissioned Robert Adam to design a new house for him at Great Saxham. Adam dreamt up a vast Palladian villa with a piano nobile featuring a suite of rectangular, square, circular and octagonal state rooms – the plans are kept at Sir John Soane’s Museum, and they are magnificent. For reasons unknown, however, Mure’s palazzo never made it off the drawing board; instead he settled for the lesser option of incorporating some Adam interior designs into the old Jacobean house.

Now in his mid-fifties, Mure hoped to retire from active trade and live out the rest of his days in rusticated splendour. He was a practical man, and fascinated by agriculture; the philosopher David Hume, an old family friend, described Mure as ‘a Gentleman of a very mechanical Head’, as well as ‘one of the most judicious Farmers and Improvers’ to be found in the eastern counties.[19] And so his West India merchant house required a succession plan. Although one of Mure’s three sons, Robert, was already a partner, he lacked the flair to head such an operation; but Richard Atkinson might just be the man for the job. In 1766, aged twenty-seven, Richard became Hutchison and Robert Mure’s junior partner.

Mure, Son & Atkinson, as the new partnership would be known, began in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, when Britain was for the first time the truly dominant global power. An almost indecent number of colonial territories had been seized from France and Spain during that conflict – to the extent that Lord Bute, the prime minister, realized that concessions would be necessary to avoid a peace so humiliating to the losers that they would soon be spoiling for another fight. The question was, which of the captured colonies should Britain keep, and which ones should be given back? The debate – on which much journalistic ink was expended – focused mainly on the relative merits of Canada versus the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.

The argument for holding on to the tiny West Indian territories and ditching Canada was obvious to most people – Guadeloupe’s exports alone were worth twenty times more than the fur trade of ‘barren’ Canada. ‘What does a few hats signify, compared with that article of luxury, sugar,’ sniffed one gentleman.[20] But the West India lobby, not enjoying the competition provided by the former French islands – the wholesale sugar price had fallen 20 per cent since their capture – pushed hard for their restoration to their previous owners. The American colonists favoured the same outcome, albeit for different reasons. Benjamin Franklin, the agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly in London, wrote:

By subduing and retaining Canada, our present possessions in America, are secured; our planters will no longer be massacred by the Indians, who depending absolutely on us for what are now become the necessaries of life to them, guns, powder, hatchets, knives, and cloathing; and having no other Europeans near, that can either supply them, or instigate them against us; there is no doubt of their being always disposed, if we treat them with common justice, to live in perpetual peace with us.[21]

In the end, the colonists prevailed. Under the Treaty of Paris, which came into effect on 10 February 1763, Guadeloupe and Martinique went back to France, while Cuba was returned to Spain; Britain held on to Canada, Florida and the sugar islands of Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominica and Tobago.

The Seven Years’ War had started in America, escalating out of all imaginable proportions from skirmishes in the Ohio valley between colonists loyal to the British flag and an alliance of French settlers and Native American tribes. Victorious Britain now found itself mired in a national debt of historic proportions, and unable to afford adequate protection for its newly acquired American territory, as was soon proved by a series of Native American attacks on British forts and settlements to the south of the Great Lakes. As a result, in October 1763, George III issued a proclamation forbidding colonial settlement beyond a line drawn along the Appalachian watershed – much to the fury of land speculators who were intent on expropriating Indian territory.

Lord Bute resigned from the premiership after less than a year; George Grenville, who was said by the king to have the ‘mind of a clerk in a counting-house’, took over as prime minister and set about putting the nation’s finances in order.[22] It would only be fair, he argued, for American colonists to help pay for the troops needed to defend the newly enlarged empire; while each Briton contributed about twenty-six shillings to the imperial coffers every year, each American gave about a shilling.

But American colonists always made a point of challenging the mother country’s efforts to squeeze money out of them. The only revenue-raising taxes to which they would readily agree were those voted by their local assembly, while the only ‘external’ taxes remotely palatable to them were those used to regulate the trade of the British empire in its entirety, such as the import duties that fell within the Navigation Acts. Yet the Americans had signally failed to enforce the Molasses Act of 1733, which aimed through a duty of six pence per gallon to make molasses from the French West Indies prohibitively expensive, and thus tie the rum distillers of New England to the produce of the British sugar islands.

Grenville reckoned that if this duty were cut, making it cheaper to import French molasses legally than to pay the bribes and run the risks that attended smuggling, it would have the counter-intuitive effect of raising revenue; and so parliament voted to halve the tax on foreign molasses, to three pence per gallon, from April 1764. The Sugar Act sparked outrage in America. ‘There is not a man on the continent of America,’ fumed Nathaniel Weare, the comptroller of customs in Massachusetts, ‘who does not consider the Sugar Act, as far as it concerns molasses, as a sacrifice made of the northern Colonies, to the superior interest in Parliament of the West Indies.’[23] A writer in Rhode Island’s Providence Gazette ranted that American interests had been trampled by a ‘few dirty specks, the sugar islands’.[24] Their common hatred of the Sugar Act united the New England colonies for perhaps the first time, and set them on a collision course with the mother country.

BRITANNIA RULED the waves, for the time being, and her navy patrolled the waters of the North Atlantic and Caribbean, watching for French and Spanish attempts to violate her citizens’ interests. To give one trivial example, tensions had long festered over British loggers’ claims to the timber in the Spanish-held territory of Honduras. It is amid such rumblings that Richard Atkinson makes a fleeting appearance, in the earliest letter that I have found in his hand, dated 29 June 1764. He writes to the Secretary to the Treasury, Charles Jenkinson, with information from the merchant grapevine: ‘As any Intelligence concerning the Bay of Honduras will I presume be acceptable I take the Liberty to send you an Extract of a Letter from the Same Hand as the former …’[25] The letter may not make for stirring reading, but it proves that Richard was already cultivating contacts at the very highest political level.

Meanwhile, George Grenville announced a new tax on the American and West Indian colonies. A stamp duty – such as had existed in the mother country since 1694 – would be payable on a range of paper items, from almanacs, newspapers and playing cards to conveyances, diplomas, leases, licences and wills. Each colony would appoint its own stamp distributor, who would take a small cut of the proceeds, but otherwise the tax would be largely self-regulating, since without its stamp any official document would be null and void. The bill passed through the House of Commons ‘almost without debate’. Only Colonel Isaac Barré, a fearless orator whose left eye had been shot out during the capture of Quebec five years earlier, punctured the chamber’s complacency with a ‘vehement harangue’ in which he argued that the very reason the colonists had emigrated to America was to flee such measures.[26] The king gave his assent to the Stamp Act on 22 March 1765. No one could have predicted its consequences.

Resistance erupted in Boston on 14 August, when the newly appointed stamp distributor for Massachusetts was hanged in effigy from the ‘Liberty Tree’. It was unsurprising that the Bostonians should be foremost among the ‘Sons of Liberty’ – who took their name from a phrase used by Colonel Barré – since theirs was a literate and litigious mercantile community upon which the duty would weigh heavily.

By the time the Stamp Act came into force on 1 November, it was clear that the Americans’ refusal to accept the duty would have a disastrous effect on trade, since without legally stamped port clearance papers their merchant ships might be seized at any time. Relations between the American and West Indian merchant communities were already frayed; now the mainland contingent resolved to cut off trade with all those sugar islands that submitted to the Stamp Act. The Jamaicans were the most acquiescent of all – they paid more stamp duty than all the other colonies put together. One Canadian newspaper, reporting an outbreak of yellow fever in Jamaica towards the end of 1765, quipped that ‘the Inhabitants of the Town of Kingston fed so voraciously on the stamps, that not less than 300 of them alone died in the Month of November’.[27]

Although the Jamaicans certainly disliked the Stamp Act, pragmatism deterred them from rejecting it. Whereas the mainland assemblies resented being asked to pay for their own defence, the Jamaican Assembly actively volunteered a financial contribution, at the same time lobbying for an enhanced military presence on their island. The British sugar islands were surrounded by French and Spanish territories, and common sense dictated that these old enemies would soon seek to avenge their humiliation in the Seven Years’ War. Most of all, however, the planters feared attacks from within. As the ratio of blacks to whites increased on the islands – in Jamaica it was roughly ten to one – so did the danger of slave insurrections. In November 1765, as the Stamp Act started to bite, an uprising broke out in the parish of St Mary, on the north side of the island; although it was soon quashed, it must have concentrated the colonists’ minds.

Six prime ministers would hold office during the 1760s. The Marquess of Rockingham, replacing Grenville, adopted a more conciliatory tone towards the Americans – but it would be William Pitt’s denunciation of the Stamp Act which finally persuaded Rockingham that repeal was the only way out of the crisis. Over three weeks, from 28 January 1766, a committee of the whole House considered the proposed repeal bill, with a succession of merchants coming forward to describe the negative impact of the Stamp Act on both sides of the Atlantic. The star witness was the ‘celebrated electric philosopher’ Benjamin Franklin, as the minutes describe him – his experiments concerning the nature of lightning had made him one of the scientific establishment’s most venerated figures. Before 1763, Franklin testified, there had always been ‘affection’ among Americans for the mother country; but recently he had begun to be ‘Doubtfull of their Temper’.[28]

Early on the morning of 21 February, MPs started bagging seats in the House of Commons in anticipation of the afternoon’s debate. Pitt warned that parliament’s failure to repeal the Stamp Act would lead to civil war, and cause the king ‘to dip the royal ermine in the blood of his British subjects in America’.[29] For the time being, His Majesty’s robes remained snowy-white; for both houses passed the repeal bill, along with a face-saving ‘declaratory bill’ that asserted parliament’s right in principle to tax the colonies, and the king gave his assent on 18 March. American and West Indian merchant ships moored on the River Thames marked the news by hoisting their colours and blasting off their guns.

THE AMERICANS HAD MANAGED to overturn one piece of hated legislation; now they took aim at the Sugar Act. On 10 March 1766, at a gathering of colonial merchants held at the King’s Arms Tavern in Westminster, the West Indian contingent agreed that the three pence duty that Americans paid on foreign-produced molasses could drop to a single penny. This was a massive climbdown on the West Indians’ part; and yet, to their great dismay, when the American Duties Act passed into law in June 1766, it imposed a penny per gallon duty on all molasses imported into the mainland colonies, thus eliminating any advantage possessed by the British sugar islands over the French. These reforms were too technical to be of much public interest, but they marked a further cooling in relations between the colonial merchant lobbies. By now the West Indians wholly distrusted the Americans, believing them to be motivated by treacherous ambitions to trade freely with the French.

At its ‘funeral’, the Stamp Act is taken in a tiny coffin to a burial vault reserved for especially detested laws.

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

Until the 1760s, the West Indian interest in the City of London had been informally managed. The Society of West India Merchants emerged as a lobbying organization sometime during this decade; its precise origins are obscure, since the minutes taken at its meetings before 1769 no longer exist. Under its chairman, Beeston Long, the society usually met on the first Tuesday of the month at the London Tavern, a dining establishment on Bishopsgate Street; attendance ranged from three (a quorum) to many more when feelings about some issue were running high. As the merchants tucked into turtle flesh – these gentle beasts lived in the cellars, in tanks painted with tropical scenes to make them feel at home – they chewed over the concerns of their trade. According to parliamentary records, Richard Atkinson was among a delegation from the society summoned by Alderman William Beckford to the House of Commons in May 1766 in a last-ditch attempt to steer the arguments around the American Duties Act in the West Indians’ favour.[30] The society’s records show that during the 1770s Richard attended around six meetings every year; unfortunately the minutes are so cursory, and so devoid of descriptive colour, that it is impossible to gain much sense of his contribution.

The association between a merchant house such as Mure, Son & Atkinson, and the West Indian planters it served, rested on mutual confidence – not least because an exchange of letters between London and Jamaica often took four months or more. The merchant conveyed a planter’s sugar crop back to England and brokered its sale, taking a 2½ per cent cut of the proceeds. It also sourced and shipped out any tools, provisions and other items required for the smooth operation of the planter’s estates, subject to a mark-up; it recruited his overseers and book-keepers, and arranged their outward passage; it acted as his banker, paying bills of exchange drawn on his account, and advancing credit whenever necessary; it even oversaw the education of his children and ran his shopping errands. In short, it took care of his every need in the mother country.

But it was not quite a relationship of equals. So long as his account remained in credit, the planter maintained a degree of control; as soon as his expenses exceeded his remittances, however, the merchant gained the upper hand. The sheer precariousness of the sugar business – where hurricane, drought or rebellion could wipe out the year’s produce at a stroke – drove many proprietors deep into debt, as what started out as modest loans ballooned into unsustainable mortgages secured against their property. The merchant could foreclose whenever he chose, and many men, including Hutchison Mure, were guilty of seizing clients’ estates by this means.

John Tharp, who owned a number of estates in north-west Jamaica, retained Mure, Son & Atkinson as his London agents from 1765 to 1772. A cache of the firm’s letters sent to Tharp’s plantation house in St James Parish has survived, heavily watermarked and discoloured from years of storage in the tropics. Most of the correspondence is in Richard’s handwriting, and it is illuminating about the seasonal rhythm of the West India trade and the volatility of the sugar market. The cane crop was cut and processed during the early months of the year. Gradually, over the summer, merchant ships returning from the West Indies appeared in the Thames, weighed down with their sticky cargo; if too many ships came at once, the glut drove down the price of sugar, while a scarcity early or late in the season pushed it upwards. The letters stamped on the large hogshead barrels in which the sugar was transported identified the estate on which it had been produced; its quality could be highly variable. ‘Those of the Mark PP were much better than those of the same Mark last Year,’ Richard wrote to Tharp on 13 July 1767, ‘for these were only very brown, those of last Year were black.’[31] (‘PP’ signified Pantre Pant, a plantation that was managed by Tharp in the parish of Trelawny.)

Each autumn, Mure, Son & Atkinson sourced John Tharp’s plantation ‘necessaries’ and other domestic goods, which were shipped out to Jamaica once the hurricane season had safely passed. In December 1767, in time for Christmas, the enslaved population of Tharp’s estates were lucky enough to receive 1,107 yards of coarse Osnaburg linen and the needles with which to stitch the cloth into garments; meanwhile, for the master and his wife, there were tailored frock coats with gold buttons and braid, kid mittens, a ‘very Neat Demi peak Sadle with red morrocco Skirts and doe Skin Seat neatly stitched stirups Leathers & Girths’, a pair of brass pistols, a ‘Copper Tea Kitchin with 2 heaters’, twelve canisters of hyson tea, a ‘Gadroon’d Cruit frame’, a case of pickles containing ‘Capers Girkins Olives Mangoes Mustard Oil Soy Wallnutt French beans Colly flower Anchovies’, a hogshead of claret, casks of lavender and rose water, a selection of wallpapers, fine grey hair powder, guitar strings and the score of the Beggar’s Opera.[32]

NO CENSUS EXISTS to permit more than a guess at how many black people were living in London at this time. ‘The practice of importing Negroe servants into these kingdoms is said to be already a grievance that requires a remedy,’ reported the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1764, ‘and yet it is every day encouraged, insomuch that the number in this metropolis only, is supposed to be near 20,000.’[33] This figure seems likely to have been an overestimate, but not wildly so. Among the wealthy, black servants had cachet, while black children were often treated as toys, to be returned to the colonies once they grew up or their owners tired of them. Samuel Johnson – who was more enlightened about these matters than most – famously employed a black manservant, Francis Barber, to whom he would leave the residue of his estate.

In clarification of the Navigation Acts’ requirement that all merchandise must be transported to and from the colonies in British ships, the Solicitor General had ruled in 1677 that ‘negroes ought to be esteemed goods and commodities’ under the law.[34] But while the institution of slavery was woven into the fabric of colonial law, its status was not so certain in the mother country. According to one famous Elizabethan ruling, England was ‘too pure an Air for Slaves to breath in’, and many contradictory opinions had since been offered up.[35] In 1749, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke pronounced that a slave in England was ‘as much property as any other thing’; whereas in 1762, Lord Chancellor Henley declared that ‘as soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free’.[36] It seems baffling that such men, the greatest legal minds of their time, could be so changeable in their judgements on a question that could surely be seen as none other than the choice between right and wrong.

In September 1767, David Laird, the captain of one of Mure, Son & Atkinson’s ships, the Thames, was caught up in a dispute arising from the ambiguous status of a human ‘commodity’ destined for Jamaica. The episode had its origins two years earlier, however, when Granville Sharp, a clerk in the ordnance department based at Tower Hill, found a young black man of about sixteen injured outside the Mincing Lane premises of his brother William Sharp, a surgeon well known for treating the poor. It seemed that David Lisle, a lawyer who had brought the youth – whose name was Jonathan Strong – from Barbados, had beaten him with a pistol so repeatedly that he had almost lost his sight and could hardly walk. William Sharp had Strong admitted to St Bartholomew’s Hospital; Granville Sharp later found work for him as the delivery boy for an apothecary on Fenchurch Street.

One day during the summer of 1767, Lisle spotted Strong by accident and tricked him into entering a public house. There, backed up by two burly officials, he sold him to James Kerr, a sugar planter who was one of Mure, Son & Atkinson’s clients. Kerr insisted he would only pay the £30 purchase price once Strong was securely on board the Thames, which was then preparing to sail for Jamaica. In the meantime the young man was thrown into the Poultry Compter, one of several small prisons dotted about the City. It was from here that, on 12 September, Granville Sharp received Jonathan Strong’s letter begging for help.

Sharp called upon Sir Robert Kite, the Lord Mayor, in his capacity as London’s chief magistrate, and requested that all those with an interest in Strong should argue their claims in open court. At the hearing on 18 September, Captain Laird and James Kerr’s lawyer both insisted that the young man belonged to Kerr by virtue of a signed bill of sale. After heated debate, Kite stated that ‘the lad had not stolen any thing, and was not guilty of any offence, and was therefore at liberty to go away’. Laird immediately grabbed Strong by the arm, saying that ‘he took him as the property of Mr. Kerr’, whereupon Sharp threatened to have him arrested for assault. Laird released Strong’s arm, and all parties left the courtroom, including Strong, ‘no one daring to touch him’.[37] Kerr subsequently pursued a court action against Sharp, seeking damages for the loss of his property; he persevered with the suit through eight legal terms before it was dismissed.

The thought that right here, on the streets of London, black people could have been lawfully snatched, sold and transported against their will to the colonies, seems almost unfathomable today; but such was the reality of the Atlantic empire. This particular incident was noteworthy only in that it galvanized the man who would come to be seen as the father of the anti-slavery campaign, twenty years before Wilberforce and Clarkson took up the cause. Granville Sharp subsequently became a formidable expert in habeas corpus, and his book, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, would be the first major work of its kind by a British author. Which is how, in a blink-and-you-missed-it kind of way, Richard Atkinson came to be a bystander at the dawn of the abolition movement.

FOUR

Four Dice

THIS WAS AN AGE of polymaths, a time when gifted amateurs made strides in the fields of astronomy, botany, chemistry, mechanics and physics. Two of Richard Atkinson’s closest friends in the early 1770s were George Fordyce and John Bentinck, both Fellows of the Royal Society, founded in 1660 for the purpose of ‘improving natural knowledge’. Fordyce, a physician and lecturer in chemistry at St Thomas’s Hospital, was also a member of Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club, where his shambolic manner inspired various anecdotes. On one occasion, following a bibulous dinner, Fordyce was supposedly called out to attend to a fine lady. Unable to locate her pulse, he muttered under his breath ‘Drunk, by God!’; the next day he received a letter from his patient containing £100, begging him not to disclose the intoxicated state in which he had found her. Bentinck, a naval captain, was also a skilled engineer, best known for developing a ship’s pump that became standard issue throughout the Royal Navy. Some believed him underrated; Benjamin Franklin thought his ‘ingenious Inventions’ had not always ‘met with the Countenance they merited’.[1] Captain Bentinck would die in his thirties, in 1775 – Richard was his executor.

Robert Erskine was another engineer who was much in Richard’s orbit around this time. He had moved to London from Edinburgh in the mid-1750s, and for six years had used Hutchison Mure’s premises as his postal address in the capital. Erskine’s talents as an inventor seem to have been offset by bad luck in his financial dealings; in 1762 he was briefly committed to the debtors’ prison. Soon afterwards he began work on a new pump, calling it the ‘Centrifugal Hydraulic Engine’.[2] Only two were ever sold – one to the Venetian ambassador and the other for use in a salt mine belonging to the King of Prussia – and when Erskine fell out with an investor over their losses, Richard and his friend Captain Bentinck stepped in as arbitrators. Subsequently Erskine set up as a surveyor with a particular expertise in hydraulics, and established a practice at Scotland Yard in Westminster. By 1770, the year that he published ‘A Dissertation on the Rivers and Tides, to Demonstrate in General the Effects of Bridges, Cuttings, or Imbankments, and particularly to Investigate the Consequence of such Works, on the River Thames’, he had acquired some impressive clients, and his luck – like the tide – seemed to be turning.

Richard, however, had other plans for Erskine. Since 1765, Mure, Son & Atkinson had been part-owners of an ironworks at Ringwood, New Jersey, about forty miles north-west of New York. This enterprise had started at great tilt a few years earlier under its founder, Peter Hasenclever; by the summer of 1766 its assets included four blast furnaces, seven forges, ten bridges, thirteen mill ponds and more than two hundred workers’ dwellings. Before long, Hasenclever had run through the £54,000 capital he had raised in England to fund the venture. He returned to London in November 1766 after learning that one of his partners had declared bankruptcy. In May 1767 Richard Atkinson was appointed a trustee of the business; Hasenclever was demoted to the position of agent, and soon resigned in disgust.

Following Hasenclever’s departure, the ironworks struggled. The trustees’ monthly letters of instruction to Reade & Yates of Wall Street, their New York agents, carrying Richard’s signature as the managing partner in London, are a sorry catalogue of setbacks. Disobeyed instructions, delayed shipments, impatient creditors and accounting discrepancies – such are the perennial frustrations of long-distance business relationships. By January 1770 the trustees distrusted both the ironworks’ managers, one of whom had been caught embezzling their money, and the other squandering it. ‘An honest & a capable man is what we want,’ they told Reade & Yates.[3] Robert Erskine answered such a description – but it is something of a mystery why he accepted Richard’s invitation to cross the ocean to run a failing ironworks. Perhaps he perceived the American colonies as a place where he and his wife, who had recently lost their only child, might start again; maybe the salary of two hundred guineas, plus 5 per cent of the profits, was after years of financial troubles too powerful a lure to resist.

To remedy his lack of experience in the iron trade, Erskine gave himself a crash course in its practicalities during the autumn of 1770, when he spent two sodden months touring Britain’s most prominent ironworks, including Coalbrookdale in Shropshire and the Carron Company in Stirlingshire. Often he turned up at sites unannounced, finding workmen more than happy to show him round in return for a few shillings. (‘A very agreeable present to men who with families of 6 or 7 Children earned only 12s. a Week,’ he would observe.)[4] Along the way, Erskine gathered dozens of lumps of iron ore which he boxed up and sent back to London for chemical analysis by George Fordyce.

Every few nights, by the guttering candlelight of his lodgings, he wrote a long letter to Richard in London, describing all he had seen; thirteen of these dispatches have survived, and they paint a vivid picture of iron production at the start of the industrial revolution, as the charcoal furnaces producing soft, malleable iron suitable for the blacksmith’s forge were superseded by the hotter coke-burning furnaces of the coalfields. At Bersham in Denbighshire, for example, Erskine watched white-hot iron flowing from a furnace into the sand mould for one of fifty cannons ordered by the King of Morocco, protecting his eyes from the glare by ‘Cutting a small hole in a letter and looking through it’, and observed the barrel of another cannon being bored by a drill bit fixed to the axis of a water wheel, a procedure that ‘made a very disagreeable noise which at a distance was much like that of Geese’.[5]

In late October, en route to Scotland, Erskine broke his journey at Temple Sowerby. During his stay, perhaps seeking respite from George and Bridget Atkinson’s noisy brood, he worked out the height of Cross Fell, using his quadrant and a dish of mercury to provide a reflective ‘false horizon’. It was a rare cloudless day. ‘The Old Gentleman was so civil as to remain uncovered,’ he told Richard, referring to the mountain, ‘which was the more polite, as he had not been so long bare headed for many days before.’ By Erskine’s reckoning, Cross Fell stood 3,731 feet above the meadow by the bridge over the River Eden; while a benchmark chiselled into one of the quoins of Temple Sowerby church states the village itself to be 348¾ feet above sea level. He believed his measurement to be ‘pritty accurate’, but it turns out he was off by more than a thousand feet, for Cross Fell in fact stands 2,930 feet tall.[6]

During his final weeks in London, Erskine must have wondered whether he had made an error in accepting Richard’s offer of employment, especially when turning down a commission from the Dean and Chapter of Westminster to survey their estates. In January 1771 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; one of his nominees was Benjamin Franklin. Before sailing to America, Erskine wrote Richard a heartfelt note: ‘I cannot have forgot the abject state to which I was reduced some years ago, nor can I ever fail calling to mind your kindness in suffering me to be a burthen to you. I am thus free in acknowledging my sentiments & obligations to prevent the most distant suspicion of ingratitude, which were it to rise in the bosom of such a friend would hurt me as much as anything I ever met with.’[7]

ALEXANDER FORDYCE was a banker well on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest men in the land; he was also the uncle of Richard’s physician friend George Fordyce, although just six years separated the older man from his nephew. It was Alexander who, having witnessed the deft way in which Richard dealt with Samuel Touchet’s unravelling affairs, had urged his associate Hutchison Mure to take on this impressive young clerk. Richard repaid the favour by offering Fordyce his unswerving loyalty.

Perhaps Fordyce saw something of himself in his protégé, for both men were the youngest children of provincial middle-class families. Fordyce had started out as the apprentice to an Aberdeen hosier, but soon leapt over the haberdasher’s counter and moved to London, where he found work as the outdoor clerk to a well-known banker. He started gambling in the public funds and stocks, and made a small fortune in 1762, towards the end of the Seven Years’ War, ‘at the time of signing the preliminaries of the late peace, of which he gained intelligence before the generality of the bulls and bears at Jonathans’.[8] He was less risk-averse than his peers and, for a while, a good deal luckier.

By 1768, Fordyce was managing partner of Neale, James, Fordyce & Down of Threadneedle Street. It was said that his ‘pride kept pace with the increase of his fortune’, and when the firm moved to premises opposite the Bank of England, he insisted that his name should be listed first on the brass plate, even making hollow threats to terminate the partnership if his senior partners did not comply.[9] Fordyce stood for Colchester in the general election that year, and Richard canvassed alongside him for several weeks. After spending £14,000 on wooing the townsfolk – a lavish sum, even by the venal standards of the day – Fordyce lost by twenty-four votes, an outcome he attempted fruitlessly to reverse by raining down charges of bribery and corruption on his opponents. ‘I really think we shall force the Mayor to return Mr. Fordyce,’ wrote Richard from the battlefield, with characteristic vim.[10]

At the height of his pomp, Fordyce purchased a princely country house at Roehampton, nine miles south-west of London, filling it with fine furniture and works of art – Raphael cartoons and suchlike – that gave every appearance of riches and sophistication. He landscaped its spacious grounds, which adjoined Richmond Park, in the naturalistic style promoted by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, felling an avenue of sixty mature elms using a contraption of Captain Bentinck’s devising ‘for drawing up trees by the roots’ – after wrapping a long chain around the trunk, it took four men about twenty minutes to prise each tree from the earth.[11]

Now, to complete his ascent to the pinnacle of society, Fordyce was on the hunt for a suitably dazzling wife. His brother James, a Presbyterian minister, was courting the governess to the children of the newly widowed Countess of Balcarres. (James Fordyce’s ponderous Sermons to Young Women, published in 1766, would later achieve dubious fame when Jane Austen had Mr Collins read them to the less-than-enthralled Bennet sisters.) Shortly after his brother’s engagement, Alexander Fordyce called upon Lady Balcarres while passing through Edinburgh, and was struck by her second daughter, Lady Margaret Lindsay, an auburn-haired girl of fifteen. The countess, at first appalled by the thought of such a vulgar connection, was soon won round – the Lindsays were poor by aristocratic standards, and the pecuniary advantages of the match were obvious. (By supporting the Jacobite uprising of 1715, the third Earl of Balcarres had ended his days under house arrest, leaving his estates deep in debt.) Fordyce married his noble bride in June 1770 at her ancestral home on the Fifeshire coast; he was forty, she was seventeen. They set off for London the next day.

IT IS AT THIS POINT in the story that Richard Atkinson comes at last into sharper focus; because Lady Anne Lindsay, the elder sister of his patron’s wife, was a dedicated lady of letters, and would go on to write about him at great length.

Anne Lindsay was a defiantly independent young woman who refused to conform to many of the conventions of submissive female behaviour. During her early years in Edinburgh, she had acquired a keen interest in literature and the arts, and a reputation as an accomplished conversationalist; she had also turned down a fair few proposals of marriage. She was thought very pretty, although perhaps not quite as arrestingly so as Margaret, from whom she had hitherto been inseparable. (The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan would call them ‘Beauty’s twin-sisters’.)[12]

Anne would later describe how, during the lonely months after Margaret’s marriage, she daily climbed up to her little closet where, with pen in hand, she scribbled away ‘poetically and in prose’ in pursuit of ‘artificial happiness’.[13] That winter Anne wrote a ballad that may have reflected her own ambivalent feelings about the state of matrimony. ‘Auld Robin Grey’ told the story of a simple country girl who, believing her true love to be dead at sea, marries an old man out of duty; a few weeks later her sweetheart returns from his unexpectedly long voyage. This bitter-sweet song would become famous – William Wordsworth called it one of the ‘two best ballads, perhaps, of modern times’ – although Anne was always reticent about revealing herself as its author.[14]

During the spring of 1771, when she was twenty, Anne left Scotland to take up residence with the Fordyces in London. After five days on the road, her carriage pulled up at a small door in Holywell Lane, a narrow street off Shoreditch. The Fordyces were away at the time, at their country house, and Anne was ushered into the drab apartment by servants. As first impressions go, this did not augur well; had she not known that her brother-in-law was in the midst of building a splendid mansion in Grosvenor Square, she later commented, she would have been mortified by these surroundings, which offered no clues of elegance, apart from a pair of beeswax candles on the table ‘instead of the mutton-fats’ she was accustomed to.[15] At noon the following day, Anne spied the Fordyces’ coach with ‘three well-powdered footmen behind it’ pulling up outside the house; she ran downstairs, and the sisters tearfully embraced.[16]

She soon noticed a young man standing nearby, ‘his arms crossed, and with an expression of benevolence, admiration, and what the French call bonté in his countenance’. From this moment on, Anne Lindsay and Richard Atkinson – who, at thirty-two, was twelve years her senior – would get along famously. She immediately felt him to be a ‘sort of family friend’, with whom she was on the same ‘footing of ease’ as if she had always known him: ‘I was convinced I had done so, his countenance assured me of it; it was hearty, open, intelligent to the greatest degree, and it was impossible not to forgive the familiarity of his manners when ineffable good-humour and zeal was the basis.’ Social deference was not one of Richard’s habits. ‘Zooks,’ she recalled him saying, ‘life is too short for bowing and scraping. When people esteem one another beforehand, it should make short work of the business of introduction.’[17]

Even so, an earl’s daughter, arriving in London for the first time, was expected to observe certain formalities, foremost among them her presentation at court – it being reckoned ‘improper’ to be seen out in public until ‘their Majesties had had the first glance’.[18] Until then, Anne had been quite innocent of the distinction drawn by fashionable people between ‘the Man of the World and the Man of Business’, but she now perceived the gulf dividing ‘even the plain Country Gentleman’ from the ‘inhabitant of Cheapside’.[19] She also realized that her brother-in-law was a bore, and that the reason they did not receive many dinner invitations was because those who would have been delighted to welcome the sisters ‘would not consent to pay the tax of his company for the agrément of ours’. The dinners hosted by the Fordyces were dreary affairs, generally attended by a ‘few unpleasant men relieved only by the excellent Atkinson’. At one such gathering, Anne caught Richard gazing at her and Margaret with ‘an expression that had an esteem and reverence in it, that I thought was almost accompanied with a sad feeling that such a pair should be no better associated’.[20]

DURING THE SPRING of 1772, Richard began to notice that Fordyce was preoccupied; on top of the ‘hard bravery of manner and false spirits’ that he habitually projected, a certain wildness in his behaviour suggested something was wrong.[21] When Richard voiced his concerns, Fordyce burst into tears and confessed to business problems, then tried to laugh them off. Pressed further, Fordyce revealed that only a miracle would prevent his bankruptcy.

Early on the morning of 9 June, Fordyce, without warning, told Margaret and Anne that they must leave town immediately; he then bundled them into the coach ‘like frightened hares’, slammed the door and ordered the coachman to deliver them to the country house at Roehampton.[22] That evening, he returned to Holywell Lane and packed up his papers. Richard stayed with him through the night. Fordyce left shortly after dawn, instructing his clerk to inform his partners that it was ‘impracticable to carry on business’.[23] At noon on 10 June, the bank of Neale, James, Fordyce & Down stopped making payments.

While Fordyce lay low in an obscure corner of the city, Richard rushed to Roehampton. At about six o’clock he entered the parlour, finding Anne busy with her needles and silk; his face, she saw, was ‘pale and haggard’.[24] He took her hand and was silent for a moment, before revealing that Fordyce was ruined, and that bailiffs would soon be arriving to take possession of the house. The sisters hurriedly stuffed their clothes into bed sheets and set out for London in two coaches, the second of which was full of dresses. Richard did his best to buoy their spirits, but Anne soon realized he was masking his own fears. When she asked whether he had been caught up in Fordyce’s misfortunes, he replied ‘no’ with an agony that pierced her soul: ‘I saw that ruin hung impending over his own head, and that he spared to Margaret at that moment the knowledge of what would have added to her distress.’[25] Fordyce’s bachelor brother William, an eminent doctor, had offered the sisters sanctuary at his house in Sackville Street, off Piccadilly. In the gloaming of the physician’s parlour, Richard at last explained what had led to this catastrophe.

During the Falklands crisis of 1770, when it had briefly seemed that a diplomatic standoff between Britain and Spain over those remote South Atlantic islands might lead to war, Fordyce had gambled heavily on the stock market, paying handsomely for inside information from secret negotiations that were taking place on the continent. The news with which his spy had set sail ought to have made him a fortune; but a thick fog descended at sea, forcing the ship into port for twenty-four hours. Fordyce lost his advantage, and instead incurred large losses. More recently, Fordyce had received letters from India, sent by the faster but less reliable overland route via Basra, Aleppo and Constantinople, describing events that were almost guaranteed to bring down the East India Company’s stock price. He had quickly ‘borrowed’ an enormous quantity of stock and sold it short, intending to buy it back at a lower price and pocket the difference. But the stock price stubbornly refused to drop – instead it rose – so that when the day of settlement for Fordyce’s transaction arrived, he had a ‘difference of ten per cent to pay on half a million, some say, a million and a half, of India stock’.[26]

At the beginning of June 1772, the Bank of England, alarmed by a sudden decline in its gold reserves due to excessive demand from Scotland, announced that it would no longer accept many Scottish bills of exchange. These were the indispensable tools of credit of the time, pieces of paper on which one merchant made a promise to pay another a certain sum on a fixed date several months down the line. Bills of exchange were entirely transferable – they could be used by the recipient to pay a third party, or could be cashed sooner than the stated deadline, at a small discount, by a banker acting as a ‘bill broker’. They kept the wheels of commerce turning; the economist Adam Smith would vividly describe the role of paper bills, in providing a substitute for gold and silver coin, as ‘a sort of waggon-way through the air’.[27] Since much of the business of Neale, James, Fordyce & Down was with Scottish accounts, Fordyce could no longer obtain funds to cover his liabilities, and his opulent façade crumbled to dust.

RICHARD VISITED THE SISTERS the next morning, bringing the latest news from the City; so far there had been five major bankruptcies, and many more were expected. For now, Mure, Son & Atkinson held firm – but so closely intertwined were the affairs of the mercantile community that it was impossible to say whether it would survive. Later that day the wife of one of Fordyce’s partners, unhinged by her nine children’s reduced prospects, cut her own throat with a razor.

By now Fordyce was universally reviled, especially since it was rumoured he had hidden large sums from his creditors. With many bailiffs out to take him into custody, it was decided that the following Sunday, 14 June, by the light of the full moon, he would ride down to a port on the south coast and slip away to France; for his ledgers were in such disarray that to open them up to scrutiny at this point would only further blacken his name. On the continent he would have time to smooth out any irregularities within his accounts; and then, within the three months’ deadline imposed by the bankruptcy laws, he could return to London and face justice.

Fordyce had not seen his wife since before the crisis began, and a last visit was fixed for ten o’clock on the night of his departure. Margaret begged Richard to be present – both sisters had come to rely upon his support – but asked him to delay his arrival by half an hour so that Fordyce, who would doubtless be in great distress, might have time to compose himself. When Richard turned up at Sackville Street – tactfully late as requested – he found the sisters, as well as William and George Fordyce, anxiously waiting in the parlour. At last there was a hammering at the front door, and Alexander entered in a mood of such exuberance that ‘had a cannon-ball swept us all low, the company would not have had their powers more annihilated than by his manner’. Watching Fordyce drain great bumpers of port, as though celebrating some triumph, Anne wondered whether he had been ‘deranged by his misfortunes’, but on balance thought not, for she could detect ‘no phrenzy in his eyes’. Richard had noticed some ‘ugly fellows’ lurking on the street corner as he was arriving, and he went home just before midnight, wearing Fordyce’s clothes to act as a decoy.[28] Fordyce himself departed several hours later, after arguing violently with his wife. Later that morning all were relieved to hear that he had left for Dover, taking £100 advanced by Richard to cover his expenses.

The crisis came to a head in London on 22 June. ‘It is beyond the power of words to describe the general consternation of the metropolis at this instant,’ reported the Gentleman’s Magazine. ‘The whole city was in an uproar; many of the first families in tears.’[29] The day started with the news that one of the City’s greatest banks had stopped payment, having rashly accepted £100,000 worth of Scottish bills, and a false rumour was circulating that the Bank of England would soon follow suit. At the Adam brothers’ ambitious Adelphi housing development near Charing Cross, where the largely Scots workforce were entertained by perambulating bagpipers, two thousand men were laid off.

Horace Walpole, the wittiest commentator of his day, offered a characteristically lively appraisal. ‘Will you believe,’ he wrote, ‘that one rascally and extravagant banker had brought Britannia, Queen of the Indies, to the precipice of bankruptcy!’ A story, repeated by Walpole, did the rounds that Fordyce had visited a Quaker banker, begging for a loan. ‘I have known several persons ruined by two dice,’ the old man was said to have replied, ‘but I will not be ruined by Four dice.’[30]

Relative calm only returned to the London markets later in the week, after the Bank of England stepped in to offer credit to some of the City’s most reputable merchants and financiers. But it would not prop up the Ayr Bank, a splashy new operation underwritten by two dukes – Queensberry and Buccleuch – which had over the previous three years pumped out some £200,000 in paper notes. The Ayr Bank stopped payments of coin for their notes on 25 June. ‘We are here in a very melancholy Situation,’ wrote David Hume, in Edinburgh, to Adam Smith, who was hard at work on The Wealth of Nations. ‘The Carron Company is reeling, which is one of the greatest Calamities of the whole, as they gave Employment to near 10,000 People. Do these Events any-wise affect your Theory? Or will it occasion the revisal of any chapters?’[31]

Alexander Fordyce, clutching a purse full of gold and a ‘Scotch Bill’ for £10,000.

© The Trustees of the British Museum

LADY ERSKINE, a young widow with a highly developed sense of social decorum, took pity on the Lindsay sisters in the last week of June, and invited them to stay with her in Hanover Square. After breakfast on their first morning there, a ‘visitor of considerable fashion’ called on their hostess; a few minutes later, Richard’s arrival was announced. The sisters squirmed with embarrassment. He clearly had no idea that an invitation from Lady Erskine might be necessary, or that he should at least have asked them to pave the way for his call by mentioning that he might wish to see them – such delicacies as these ‘his heart would have scouted as the frippery of politeness’. As he strode across the drawing room to greet them, Anne noticed the reaction of their hostess. ‘The chill of Lady Erskine’s regard, I might say the contempt,’ she recalled, ‘might have driven all the warm blood of Atkinson’s body into his heart, like the drop of brandy which is above all proof, had he perceived it; but he was not thinking about her, and was blind as a beetle.’[32]

Richard had come with the latest news from the City. Now that the worst was over, he said, it was time ‘to bury the dead, and support those who have survived it’. Soon the first visitor left, and since Lady Erskine’s frostiness had been ‘only to mark to the other that he was not one of her set, being a citizen, and one of the people employed to stop if possible the fall of the Stocks’, she was now perfectly civil towards him. ‘Your Mr. Atkinson,’ she remarked to the sisters after he had taken his leave, ‘I really take to be a good creature.’ Her loftiness vexed them; as Anne later wrote:

To have been angry would have placed us in the wrong; was he not a good creature? And the best of all good creatures? He was not a man of fashion. Why then be angry at Lady Erskine for calling him what he was? Because we wished her to respect him both on our account and his own, and she would not give a particle more than was barely due to him whom she esteemed mauvais ton, which was with her the greatest nuisance it was possible to bring into society. His smile, his bow, his method of walking straight down the throat of the person he talked to, all put her more out of temper than I thought her collected manner would have condescended to be.[33]

Soon afterwards, the Countess of Balcarres arrived to take her daughters home to Scotland. ‘It was the kind Atkinson who had our last sorrowful look on departing,’ Anne recalled. ‘He stood at the door of the carriage as if he was losing his all for the first time.’[34] Before heading north, the sisters spent a month with their uncle in Hertfordshire. The summer had been hot and dry, and a haze of dust lingered over the fields. One day, as her stay was drawing to a close, Anne was taking a ‘little melancholy walk’ in a shrubbery that opened on to the road, when a carriage stopped and Richard jumped out: ‘I screamed for joy, and ran up to him as to our good Angel, could one be supposed stepping out of a Post-chaise.’ So busy had Richard been salvaging his own affairs that he had barely left his desk during the intervening weeks. Anne asked him how much the partnership of Mure, Son & Atkinson had lost. ‘By everything I can guess,’ he replied, ‘the sum will be above two & forty thousand pounds.’ When she wondered what proportion of this amount he was personally liable for, he grasped her hand. ‘Such a part,’ he said, ‘as sweeps bare every foundation on which presumption might have dared to build her castle.’[35]

AFTER A SUMMER of speculation about the whereabouts of the rogue banker – ‘Mr. Fordyce must be a most compleat Ubiquarian,’ observed one newspaper, ‘since he possesses the strange power, if we credit what the public prints assert, of his being almost at the same instant in Holland, Italy, France and England’ – he returned on 6 September.[36] He was lucky to be alive. A mile off the coast at Rye, the cutter on which Fordyce was crossing had snagged a wreck, gouging a hole in its bottom; the leak was temporarily plugged by a barrel of salt beef, and he and his fellow passengers had been rescued by a passing boat.

At midday on 12 September, passing with difficulty through the crowd gathered to jeer at him, Fordyce entered Guildhall. For the first two hours of his bankruptcy hearing, a succession of debts were proved before the commissioners, including £16,000 to the Bank of England and £35,000 to Mure, Son & Atkinson. Then the creditors began to interrogate Fordyce, first wishing to know how much of their money he had absconded with – to which Fordyce tearfully responded that, far from this being true, he had been obliged ‘to borrow a small trifle from a friend, to pay for a few pair of stockings which he had occasion for on his journey’.[37] Some of the creditors were suspicious of Richard’s role, observing that Fordyce had transferred large sums of money into his account during the week leading up to 9 June; but Fordyce accounted for this, explaining that Richard was a ‘particular friend’ who had ‘on emergencies, given him bills on the Bank, which he gave in payment to the Bank Clerks in the morning and refunded the money to Mr. Atkinson in the afternoon’.[38]

The commissioners proved compassionate; they even returned Fordyce’s pocket watch and Margaret’s jewellery. ‘The benevolent temper of the English nation never appeared more strongly than at Mr. Fordyce’s examination last Saturday,’ reported the London Chronicle. ‘Calumniated as he had been in all the public prints, the moment he shewed himself only intentionally upright, resentment gave way to commiseration; his misfortunes even added dignity to his character, and the very rabble grumbled pity.’[39]

After the trial, the contents of the Fordyce residences were sold off at auction. Richard purchased a pair of horses, which he presented to Margaret; another kind creditor bought back her carriage. The playwright Samuel Foote acquired a single pillow; on being asked what possible use he could have for such an item, he was said to have answered: ‘Why, to tell you the truth, I do not sleep very well at night, and I am sure this must give me many a good nap, when the proprietor of it (though he owed so much) could sleep upon it.’[40] Foote’s next production, a satire called The Bankrupt, would draw heavily on Fordyce’s woes.

THE BANKING CRISIS of 1772 was short-lived, but its ill effects would soon ripple around the empire, bringing a spell of optimism in the Atlantic economy to a close. Many American merchants found themselves with warehouses full of goods imported from Britain, and debts they could no longer discharge. This, in turn, ruined many businesses in the mother country. One British politician would later observe that the long credit terms allowed to merchants in the colonies, and the difficulty of recovering debts from them, had ‘made bankrupts of almost three-fourths of the merchants of London trading to America’.[41]

Despite Robert Erskine’s best efforts, the ironworks at Ringwood continued to test Richard and his fellow trustees’ patience, and they finally resolved to put it up for sale. Advertisements appeared in the New-York Gazette in September 1772, but there were no takers. Meanwhile they instructed their American agents to sell off their pig iron warehoused in New York ‘as fast & as far’ as possible, only to find that Reade & Yates, themselves in deep financial trouble, had been stockpiling it for use as a currency with which to settle their own bills. ‘Had your object been to destroy us as a Company,’ the trustees wrote in December 1772, ‘you could not have held a Conduct more likely to effect your Purpose.’[42]

Richard would with hindsight look back on 1772 as a year of ‘horrors’. On a personal level, he had been working towards a larger share of the partnership, which he had hoped might assist a cause as yet unarticulated, but extremely close to his heart. Alexander Fordyce’s bankruptcy not only demolished Richard’s ‘castles in the air’. It also had consequences that would ultimately lead to a great diminution of the Atlantic empire.

FIVE

All the Tea in Boston

TWICE A YEAR, great auctions of tea and other luxurious goods took place at the headquarters of the East India Company in London. The Bank of England invariably granted the Company a short-term loan before each sale, to ease its cash flow as it waited for accounts to be settled – £300,000 was the sum advanced in the spring of 1772. But with many merchants unexpectedly strapped for funds that summer and unable to pay their bills, even the almighty East India Company was snared in the financial crisis. When the Company defaulted on a payment to the Treasury in August, its wobbling finances became public knowledge and its stock price started to slide; within weeks it had tumbled from £225 to £140. The collapse, of course, came too late for Alexander Fordyce; had he been able to hold out till then, as one journalist pointed out in late September, he would have made as much money ‘as not only would have settled all his affairs, but have left an handsome fortune for life’.[1]

The East India Company’s problems stemmed partly from the American public’s widespread reluctance to consume its tea. Back in 1767, after the repeal of the Stamp Act, parliament had introduced taxes on various items – glass, paint, lead, paper and tea – imported into the colonies. While bearing a superficial resemblance to the taxes used to regulate the flow of trade throughout the British empire, the purpose of these so-called ‘Townshend duties’ (named after Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend, their originator) was to raise money for the Treasury, which made them quite as unpalatable to many colonists as the Stamp Act.

The Americans had retaliated against the duties with the powerful weapon of non-importation, which kept out around 40 per cent of British imports. Their tactic worked. In April 1770, shortly after Lord North became prime minister, all the duties were repealed, apart from the one on tea – which was kept in order to assert parliament’s authority to raise tax from the colonies. After the subsequent collapse of the non-importation movement, goods from the mother country flooded the colonies. Even so, contraband Dutch tea continued to dominate the American market; less than a quarter of the tea consumed there came through legal British channels. By the end of 1772, there were said to be seventeen million pounds of surplus leaves rotting in the East India Company’s warehouses around the City of London.

The British government had for some time wished to rein in the overbearing East India Company, and its financial woes provided Lord North with vital leverage. Through the Regulating Act, passed in June 1773, ministers gained some control over the management of India; in return, the Company was granted a loan of £1,400,000, as well as concessions to help reduce its tea mountain. Under the Tea Act, all duties previously charged on leaves imported to Britain and then re-exported to America were cancelled; the saving could be passed on to consumers. Suddenly, a pound of the Company’s fully taxed tea cost Americans a penny less than the smuggled variety. Ministers were confident that the lower prices would persuade American consumers to swallow their pride, but they were quite wrong; the colonists saw the Tea Act for what it was, a clumsy attempt to trick them into accepting the Townshend duty and thus the principle of parliamentary taxation.

On 20 August 1773, Lord North and his Treasury Board issued a licence for the export of 600,000 pounds of tea to the ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston. The Dartmouth, laden with 114 chests of tea, entered Boston harbour on 28 November; from then its captain had twenty days to pay the duty on his cargo, or else the vessel would be impounded. Leading merchants of the town, insisting that the tea must be rejected, requested a special clearance to allow the ship to leave port without unloading its cargo – but the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, declined to grant permission. Soon two more vessels filled with tea arrived from London and moored alongside the Dartmouth.

The ‘Mohawks’ empty the tea chests into Boston harbour.

Granger Collection/Bridgeman Images

On 16 December, the day before the Dartmouth’s customs payment was due, a crowd of several thousand gathered to hear the ship’s owner, a local merchant, reveal that Governor Hutchinson remained adamant in his refusal to let it depart. As the meeting broke up in the late afternoon, a number of men dressed as ‘Aboriginal Natives’, their faces blackened with coal dust, ‘gave the War-Whoop’, a pre-arranged signal to hurry to the three vessels.[2] Over several hours, by the light of lanterns, these self-styled ‘Mohawks’ smashed open 342 chests of tea and threw them overboard. Next morning, at high tide, the broken-up tea chests could be seen bobbing above a vast slick of briny sludge that stretched across the bay.

BRITISH PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS during the eighteenth century were notorious for their bribery, bullying and other skulduggery – sins which could undoubtedly be laid at the door of Sir James Lowther, who owned great tracts of Cumberland and Westmorland, and whose sense of entitlement was so inflated that he saw the parliamentary seats returned by those counties, and all the boroughs within, as his personal property.

Much more importantly – at least for the purposes of this story – John Robinson was Lowther’s law agent, land steward and chief stooge. Born in 1727 the son of an Appleby draper, Robinson had been articled to his uncle Richard Wordsworth, attorney-at-law to the Lowther family, at the age of seventeen. Over the years he had upset numerous people while executing his employer’s orders, and many blamed the ‘dirty attorney of Appleby’ for the baronet’s obnoxious behaviour in general.[3]

Lackey though he may have been, John Robinson did not lack political ambitions of his own. In January 1764, he was returned through Lowther’s influence as MP for the county of Westmorland. He would (at least in the beginning) faithfully support his patron’s interests, while forging a close friendship with another of Lowther’s men, Charles Jenkinson, the MP for Cockermouth, who was at that time Secretary to the Treasury. In 1765 Robinson acquired a long lease on the White House in Appleby, which he remodelled in Venetian style; its ogee-arched windows remain to this day an incongruously exotic feature of the town’s handsome main street.

George Atkinson was only three years younger than Robinson, and they must have moved in overlapping local circles; so it seems likely that they were already well acquainted when, in 1769, George applied to Robinson to sponsor a parliamentary bill permitting the enclosure of the common at Temple Sowerby. Indeed, Robinson may have urged George to make the application – for the enclosure of common land was a well-worn method of forging political allegiances, through the creation of freeholders who would gain the franchise. George had hitherto been ineligible to vote, for what land he owned was held under a thousand-year lease from the lord of the manor, Sir William Dalston. It certainly served Sir James Lowther’s interest to facilitate the enclosure at Temple Sowerby, for he was at the time tussling with the Duke of Portland for political supremacy in the area. Dalston, for one, detected mischief in the scheme. ‘The Lowtherians Resentment is so great,’ he told the duke, ‘as to spirit up my Lease-hold Tenants of Temple Sowerby to the Honourable House of Commons against me, for liberty to take up a large Quantity of waiste Ground where I am Lord, without consulting or acquainting me with it, and directly against my Opinion.’[4]

John Robinson’s focus shifted from Westmorland to Westminster in 1770, on his appointment as Secretary to the Treasury under Lord North. The new prime minister – whose courtesy title, as the heir to an earldom, meant that he sat in the Commons, not the Lords – was one of the warmest men in politics, with a quick wit and a nice line in self-deprecation. In his appearance, North cut a clumsy figure, of which Horace Walpole offered this uncharitable description: ‘Two large prominent eyes that rolled about to no purpose (for he was utterly short-sighted), a wide mouth, thick lips, and inflated visage, gave him the air of a blind trumpeter.’[5]

Robinson had been warned that his post at the Treasury would involve ‘a Sea of Troubles’, and it certainly required the mastery of several briefs.[6] There was the nation’s financial administration, which tied him up in correspondence with officials throughout the land; there were twice- or thrice-weekly Treasury Board meetings, chaired by Lord North, after which Robinson was responsible for issuing all the necessary orders, contracts and payments of money; and there was the role of chief whip in all but name, through which he managed the prime minister’s parliamentary business. Although the Secretary to the Treasury operated behind the scenes, he wielded great influence.

In the spring of 1773, four years after George Atkinson’s application, Robinson at last placed his private bill to enclose ‘Temple Sowerby Moor’ before parliament; royal assent was granted on 28 May.[7] Now the commissioners appointed to oversee the division of the common could get to work. The 360 acres were distributed between the heads of twenty-four households in Temple Sowerby, and the resulting fields demarcated with hawthorn saplings; the area was then mapped out on parchment and executed as a legal document. George, who bankrolled the process, was allotted fifteen acres in lieu of his expenses, taking his overall share of the land to fifty-one acres.

GEORGE III OPENED PARLIAMENT on 13 January 1774 with a ‘gracious speech’ outlining his government’s priorities for the coming session.[8] News of the Boston ‘tea party’ arrived a week later, however, and the unruly state of the American colonies suddenly trumped all other concerns. On 29 January, the cabinet agreed that strong measures would be needed to bring the colonies back into line; as a result, the passing of a series of ‘coercive’ acts would occupy parliament over the coming months.

Lord North announced the measures that would be contained within the Boston Port Act on 14 March; the town’s harbour would be shut up for business until its people had made ‘full satisfaction’ to the East India Company for the destruction of the tea.[9] The House of Commons almost unanimously welcomed the legislation; even Colonel Barré, a hero to the Sons of Liberty, gave it ‘his hearty affirmative’.[10] Three more coercive acts were nodded through before the summer recess, one of which revoked Massachusetts’ 1691 charter and restricted the people’s right of assembly; another allowed the governor to move a trial to Britain if he believed a fair hearing was unlikely in the colony; and a third permitted uninhabited houses, outhouses and barns to be requisitioned as accommodation for British soldiers. Meanwhile a law extending the boundaries of Canada, and guaranteeing the free practice of Catholicism there, angered many Americans, who saw it as an assault on their territory and their faith.

The ‘intolerable acts’, as they soon became known throughout the thirteen colonies, turned hordes of wavering loyalists against the mother country. In New Jersey, Robert Erskine continued to enjoy a frank correspondence with Richard Atkinson – ‘I write to you as a brother & as a friend, and it is a relief to give you my sentiments naked open & undisguised,’ he wrote on one occasion – but from this time onwards, his tone is one of noticeable disaffection.[11] ‘I have had a great deal too much business on my own hands to think of, much less to write on politicks till now,’ he wrote in June 1774, ‘but things draw fast to a Crisis if the news be Confirmed that an obsolete Act of Henry the VIII is to be extended to this Country whereby people obnoxious to the Governor here or Government at home may be transported for trial to Britain. I have no doubt that a total suspension of Commerse to and from Great Britain and the West Indies will Certainly take place.’[12]

THESE ILL WINDS from America did not entirely blow the domestic agenda off course during the parliamentary session of 1774. As the king had heralded back in January, his government introduced bold measures to improve the ‘state of the gold coin’, and not before time, because guinea, half-guinea and quarter-guinea coins had become so debased – through ‘clipping’ (filing metal from a coin’s circumference) and ‘sweating’ (collecting metallic dust from coins shaken in a bag) – that they were on average one-tenth lighter than their legal weight.[13] The Recoinage Act passed on 10 May 1774; by a Royal Proclamation pinned to the door of every church in the land, the order went out that all ‘light’ gold should be passed over to the official collectors for the district. They would take it at face value, cut and deface it, and transport it to the Bank of England in London, returning with pristine coin of the correct weight. Over the following four years, gold coins worth £16,500,000 would be renewed by this process.

John Robinson ran the operation out of the Treasury in Whitehall, commissioning 130 local money changers and settling terms with them. It was necessary that they should be men of substance, since the payments they would make to those handing in defective coins would need to come out of their own coffers – they would be reimbursed for their services later. ‘The Allowances are from a third to one per cent in lieu of all risque, trouble, loss of Interest and Expences,’ Robinson told prospective changers.[14] He appointed George and Matthew Atkinson to oversee the recoinage in Westmorland; the county was so remote from the capital that he allowed them a special commission of 1¼ per cent on all the money they exchanged.[15]

Robinson’s choice of the Atkinson brothers for his home county may have been rooted in old acquaintance, but they were also eminently qualified for the task, for banking had overtaken tanning to become their primary line of business. The difference between the two occupations was not so great as it might sound, for tanning was a capital-intensive trade, and large sums of money passed through the brothers’ books. Moreover, they permitted their customers what would these days be considered excessively long payment terms – often a year or more – and it was a relatively small leap from providing credit to offering bank accounts.

During the early stages of the industrial revolution, when coin was often scarce, manufacturers regularly relied on brokers to convert the bills of exchange that they received for their goods into gold and silver with which they could pay their workers. Since the 1750s, George and Matthew Atkinson had been performing this service for the proprietors of Backbarrow ironworks, at the southern tip of Lake Windermere, where it was the custom to hold a grand payday at the feast of Candlemas. Every year, in January, the partners of the ironworks would make the eighty-mile round trip to Temple Sowerby to exchange paper bills for coin; the delegation generally consisted of at least half a dozen armed men, passing as it did through some truly desolate terrain. Towards the end of 1774, however, gold was in such universally short supply – £4,500,000 had been withdrawn from public circulation over the summer – that the Atkinson brothers’ usual banking contacts in Newcastle and Glasgow could not provide the £14,000 in coin needed for the Backbarrow payday.

Over the autumn, George had conveyed several loads of ‘light’ gold – on two occasions, more than £20,000 – down to London to be recoined, and he now proposed to his friends at Backbarrow a scheme that would have to be kept secret. He wrote from Temple Sowerby:

The only method that we can think of to be on a certainty is to fetch about £8000 from London in this way – that two of your people must come here the 29th day of January with all the bills that have come to your hands then, and they shall have £4000 home with them next day. And I will go off in that night, fly to London, get there on Wednesday night, stay Thursday and Friday to get the bills discounted, and set out on Saturday or Sunday morning and be here on the 8th or 9th with as much as will make your payments easy. The only objection to this plan is the short days and dark moon, and to balance that we will take 4 days to come down instead of 3 which was our limited time last August, and after one is 60 or 80 miles from London the danger of robbery is over.[16]

Such a mission entailed a good deal of risk, for the lonely roads surrounding the capital were haunted by highwaymen legendary for their brazenness; only two months earlier the prime minister had himself been held up at gunpoint and relieved of his pocket watch and a few guineas.

LORD NORTH CALLED a general election in September 1774, six months sooner than strictly necessary, for it made sense to get this business out of the way – a ‘Continental Congress’ had recently assembled at Philadelphia to debate the colonies’ collective response to the ‘intolerable acts’, and trouble was looming. John Robinson assisted the prime minister with the purchase of seats for those men whose presence in the House of Commons the ministry deemed necessary. (With patrons of ‘pocket boroughs’ demanding around £3,000 per seat, the Treasury spent nearly £50,000.) Sir James Lowther, having quarrelled with Robinson, chose to represent Westmorland himself – George Atkinson, as a newly minted freeholder of the county, dutifully awarded Lowther his vote.[17] Robinson secured a Treasury-sponsored seat at Harwich in Essex.

Twelve of the thirteen American colonies, all apart from Georgia, sent delegates to the First Continental Congress; the sibling territories had not always agreed, but their anger towards the mother country now bound them together. ‘The Oliverian spirit in New England is effectually roused and diffuses over the whole Continent,’ Robert Erskine wrote to Richard Atkinson on 5 October. ‘The rulers at home have gone too too too far: the Boston Port Bill would have been very deficient of digestion, but Altering Charters, the due course of justice & the Canada Bill are emitents which cannot possibly be swallowed and must be thrown up again.’[18]

Congress published its resolutions on 20 October. The import of any goods from Britain, and sugar, coffee or pimento from the British West Indies, would be banned almost immediately, and no American goods would be sent to Britain or the West Indies after 10 September 1775 unless the coercive acts were repealed. On its final day, Congress issued a ‘loyal address’ to the king, listing its grievances in carefully deferential language; but since His Majesty viewed Congress as an illegal body and the imperial relationship as non-negotiable, he did not see fit to dignify the petition with a response.

The West India lobby took particular fright at the resolutions of Congress, since sugar planters looked to the American colonies for much of the basic food on which their enslaved workforce subsisted. On 18 January 1775, more than two hundred men gathered at the London Tavern to discuss what to do next; Richard was present, and he argued firmly (but with little effect) against a proposal to send parliament a petition warning of the calamity threatened by the resolutions, pointing out that since it ‘was only meant to recommend to the consideration of Parliament, what Parliament would certainly consider of themselves, it was a futile measure’.[19] His assertion would be proved correct. The government, inundated with merchants’ entreaties on the subject, set up a special panel for their assessment, which was dubbed the ‘Committee of Oblivion’. It was two months before the West Indians’ petition reached the top of the pile; by this time the ministers had already made the policy decisions that the petitioners had been hoping to influence.

It was alarming that West Indian planters should rely so much upon American grain and rice, and crucial that a substitute for these starchy crops was found – one that would grow on the islands. Thus, in March 1775, the Society of West India Merchants announced the reward of £100 for anyone who brought ‘from any part of the World, a plant of the true Bread Fruit Tree, in a thriving Vegetation, properly certified to be of the best sort of that Fruit’.[20] Captain Cook had enthused about this plant after visiting Tahiti five years earlier. ‘The fruit is about the size and shape of a child’s head,’ he had written, a rather unsettling description. ‘It must be roasted before it is eaten, being first divided into three or four parts: its taste is insipid, with a slight sweetness somewhat resembling that of the crumb of wheaten-bread mixed with a Jerusalem artichoke.’[21]

BOSTON, THE HUB OF colonial discontent, remained calm for the time being. ‘The winter has passed over without any great Bickerings between the Inhabitants of this town and His Majesty’s Troops,’ General Thomas Gage reported to Lord Dartmouth, the Colonial Secretary, on 28 March 1775.[22] Two weeks later, though, Gage received orders from Dartmouth to use force in disarming any rebels. Before dawn on 19 April, seven hundred soldiers marched from Boston to seize a stockpile of weapons from the village of Concord, some seventeen miles away. The mission was meant to be secret, but everyone living along the route had somehow been alerted. At Lexington, a skirmish blew up between redcoats and rebel militia that left eight local men dead. By the time the British reached Concord, the colonists’ stash was no longer in evidence; and as they withdrew, a running battle started that continued all the way back to Boston. Harassed by crossfire, about 250 redcoats were either killed or wounded, versus ninety rebel casualties.

These clashes signalled a new escalation of the conflict. Within days, an army of fifteen thousand rebel volunteers had mustered to block access to the peninsula on which Boston was built, and where the British were garrisoned. On 3 May, Robert Erskine informed his employers in London that he had received an application for gunpowder from the ‘principal people of the County of Borgen in the Jerseys, in which your Iron Works are situated’, and that these men were forming a militia to defend themselves against the British. He no longer believed that a reconciliation between America and the mother country was possible – unless, that is, ‘Blood seals the Contract’.[23]

Congress convened again at Philadelphia on 10 May; among the delegates was Benjamin Franklin, recently returned from London. On 14 June Congress voted to establish its own fighting force – the ‘American Continental Army’ – and appointed George Washington, a wealthy Virginia planter, as its commander-in-chief. Meanwhile at Boston, on 17 June, a British force led by General William Howe attacked the Charlestown peninsula – the closest promontory across the water from the town – and captured it from rebels occupying Bunker Hill. This was a tactical victory for the British, for it secured control of Boston harbour, but a Pyrrhic one, too, with more than a thousand redcoats dead or wounded – twice the casualties of their opponents. Only recently, ministers had sneered at the ‘raw, undisciplined, cowardly’ colonists, but General Gage advised them to think again: ‘The Tryals we have had shew that the Rebels are not the despicable Rabble too many have supposed them to be.’[24]

BY NOW, GAGE was finding it near impossible to obtain food for the eight thousand men under his command. ‘All the ports from whence our supplies usually came,’ he wrote to the Treasury on 19 May, ‘have refused suffering any provision or necessary whatever to be shipped for the king’s use.’[25] The Treasury was the Whitehall department with responsibility for army provisions; which is why Lord North, as First Lord of the Treasury (and therefore, according to convention, prime minister), needed to attend to the minutiae of feeding a garrison more than three thousand miles away. On 13 June the Treasury Board ordered their usual contractors to ship 4,000 barrels of salt pork, 6,000 barrels of flour and 1,000 firkins of butter to Boston.

News of the Battle of Bunker Hill reached London on 25 July; the following day, Lord North solemnly informed the king that the conflict had now grown ‘to such a height, that it must be treated as a foreign war’.[26] At some point it must have dawned on the prime minister and his colleagues at the Treasury that if the soldiers cooped up at Boston were to remain healthy over the winter, they would need better than salt rations to sustain them; and yet, given the onset of the hurricane season, it was perilously late in the year to start planning the dispatch of fresh food supplies. At the Treasury, it fell to John Robinson to procure the shipping that would be needed for such an operation. He soon discovered that the army’s most robust transport vessels had already left for America; meanwhile his next port of call, the London merchants who specialized in the America trade, refused to charter their ships to the Treasury, fearing the consequences for their colonial property if they were seen to be aiding the authorities. Sometime during August, it seems that Robinson sought Richard Atkinson’s advice on this knotty problem. The partnership of Mure, Son & Atkinson had never undertaken government business before, but Richard readily offered his assistance.

On 8 September, Robinson confirmed that the Treasury wished to send large quantities of food and fuel to Boston before the arrival of winter; later that day, Richard attended Lord North at Downing Street, and offered to obtain and ship the necessary items. The prime minister agreed to his terms – a commission of 2½ per cent, as was the mercantile norm – with one notable exception. Given that the price of rum was almost as volatile as the spirit itself, Lord North preferred to fix its cost beforehand; so the two men agreed to use the price quoted in the standing contract for supplying the navy with rum in Jamaica, adding on the ‘usual freight of 6 pence per gallon’, and allowances of 4 per cent for insurance and 10 per cent for leakage.[27]

The rushed manner in which Lord North engaged Richard’s services reflected the emergency. No contract was drawn up; no record of the agreement made it into the Treasury Board minutes. Richard at once committed four of Mure, Son & Atkinson’s vessels to the expedition, swaying fellow merchants to volunteer ships. These were the items on the prime minister’s ‘shopping list’:

4375 Chaldron of Coals

468,750 Galls of Porter

2,000 Sheep

2,000 Hogs

Potatoes

Carrots

Sour Crout

Onions

Sallad Seed

Malt – a small Quantity for the Hospitall

Vinegar – a reasonable Quantity for six Months Consumption

20 Boxes of Tin Plates

33,320 Pounds Wt of Candles to be shipt from Cork

100,000 Gallons of Rum – to be sent from Jamaica next Spring

400 Hogsheads of Melasses – ditto [28]

The list was largely compiled through guesswork. ‘We are busy sending out every Comfort & Conveniency for the Troops,’ Robinson wrote to Charles Jenkinson on 19 September, ‘but since Gen. Gage does not tell us anything they want or may be useful, we are obliged I may say to grope for it.’[29] The Thames set sail for Boston at the end of September, the first of thirty-six ships that would depart over the following two months as soon as their holds were packed and winds permitted. The captain of the Thames, David Laird, was not only one of Mure, Son & Atkinson’s longest-serving employees – it was he who had eight years earlier been involved in the altercation over Jonathan Strong’s fate – but was also known to General Howe, the new commander-in-chief of the British forces in America, both men having fought at the Battle of Havana back in 1762.

As is clear from his correspondence with General Howe, Richard took great pains to make sure the supplies arrived in optimum condition. Five hundred tons of potatoes were loaded gently into the ships ‘so as not to bruise them’, and onions were stored in hampers for the same reason. To guarantee the safe passage of livestock, Richard ordered generous pens to be built in the ships’ tween decks. The Lincolnshire breed of sheep was chosen as fittest to undergo the voyage, in preparation for which the animals were kept on dry food for ten days before being taken on board; the pigs were the ‘half fed kind from the Country & of a large Size, such as will pretty certainly get fat upon the Voyage, a Plentiful Stock of Beans & Water being provided for their Consumption’.[30] As a further incentive to take care of the animals, Richard offered the ships’ captains a bonus of 2s 6d for each one they landed alive.

Scurvy, which we now know to be caused by a lack of vitamin C, was by no means limited to seafaring men; it often afflicted those subsisting on salt rations. Sauerkraut, or ‘sour crout’, was widely believed to be effective against the disease, and its main ingredient, cabbage, was just then coming into season. Richard planned to send up to 300 tons of the stuff out to America. ‘We are informed that in general the Sailors have disliked it at first & afterwards grown extremely fond of it,’ he told General Howe. ‘This first dislike may we hope be lessened by our having left Juniper berries & Spices out of the composition which appear to contribute nothing to its Preservation.’ Normally, it would be unwise to seal and ship casks of sauerkraut during its six-week fermentation period, as they were likely to rupture – but such obstacles did not faze Richard. ‘We have caused Valves to be made (which cost a mere Trifle) to fix in the Bungs of the Casks which Valves being kept down by a Spiral Spring strong enough to resist any thing that can happen in rolling the Cask, will at the same time give way to a Pressure far less than sufficient to burst it & so let out the expanded air,’ he explained to Howe. ‘By this means we shall be able to ship the Sour Krout within a week or ten days of gathering the Cabbage.’[31]

John Robinson kept the king updated on the progress of the Boston expedition. ‘Mr. Robinson,’ starts one of his memoranda, ‘has the Honour to send, by Lord North’s Directions, for His Majesty’s Inspection, two Casks of Sour Crout, put up with Valves, in the same Manner as the Casks shipped for America; and also one of the Valves – The Cask marked No. 1 has been sometime made and may be nearly fit for use, that marked No. 2 is at present in a state of Strong Fermentation.’[32] No detail affecting the comfort of His Majesty’s troops was beneath royal scrutiny.

All the while, the press provided a sardonic commentary on these goings-on. ‘One person has contracted for several thousand cabbages at 3d. each, which, were they brought to market at home, would barely fetch half that price,’ reported the Evening Advertiser on 5 October. ‘It is computed, that, by the time the above sheep and hogs arrive at the places of their destination, they will stand the government (or rather the public) in no less than two shillings per pound, bones included, which occasioned a Wag to remark, that the Ministry have brought their pigs to a fine market.’[33]

DURING THE SUMMER of 1775, Congress ordered all able-bodied men to form into companies of militia – an edict that presented Robert Erskine with a headache, for he knew that were his forgemen, carpenters and blacksmiths to enlist in different units from each other, production at the ironworks would soon seize up. He therefore applied to the New Jersey Congress for permission to raise his own company of foot soldiers, and gained his captain’s commission in mid-August.

Erskine explained the situation in his next letter to Richard, neglecting to mention that the owners of the ironworks would bear the cost of the muskets, bayonets, flints, powder and shot with which their employees would, if necessary, fight the British. He also expressed his disappointment at not having received a personal letter from Richard for the best part of a year: ‘You would add greatly to my satisfaction were you to favour me oftener with a few lines directly from yourself – I know, my Dear Sir, the multiplicity of your engagements and that you have no time to throw away in letters of mere Compliments – but I cannot help wishing to hear from you were it ever so short, especially since I heard of your bad state of health.’[34] (This is the earliest mention I have found of Richard’s fragile constitution.)

It was not long before Erskine faced a crisis at the ironworks, after the London-based proprietors decided they would no longer honour his bills drawn on them. With little coin circulating in New Jersey, Erskine started dipping into his stock of iron – ‘a commodity which neither fire nor vermin can destroy’ – to settle with tradesmen.[35] As he informed Richard on 6 December:

I have between 6 & 700 Ton of pig & 20 & 30 Tons Bar at the Works and expect to make 50 more before the frost sets in. I have no reason to despair, it gives me some satisfaction to tell you so, because I have no doubt it will give you pleasure. I know it would pain you to see anyone in distress, much more one who has had so many proofs of your regard – Distress did I say? Oh my country! To what art thou Driving – this gives me poignant distress indeed. How long will madness and infatuation Continue?[36]

The first four ships of Richard’s provisioning fleet limped into Boston harbour on 19 December, with the Thames at their head, having experienced atrocious storms during the twelve-week crossing. On 31 December, General Howe wrote to John Robinson with a description of the cargoes of the nine ships so far arrived. The supplies of porter, malt, vinegar, salad seed and sauerkraut had held up well, but most of the potatoes had putrefied in the heat of the hold. Only forty out of 550 sheep and seventy-four out of 290 pigs had landed alive; their pens had proved too spacious, and they had repeatedly been ‘thrown upon one another by the Violent motion of the Ship’.[37] Most of the carcasses were too badly crushed to be fit for consumption and had been thrown overboard.

The expedition’s goal had been to bring home comforts to the besieged garrison over the winter, but it proved an abject failure. A foot of snow had fallen in Boston on Christmas Eve, and fuel was in such short supply that Howe authorized the scrapping of old wharves, houses and ships for firewood. The general would be forced to place his troops on short rations in mid-January 1776. In the end, just twenty-four of the thirty-six provisioning ships made it to Boston, including seven stragglers that arrived too late for their rotting cargoes to be unloaded, since by then the garrison was on the point of departure. (The remaining twelve ships were forced ‘by Stress of Weather’ to put into Antigua for essential repairs.)[38]

On the morning of 5 March, Howe discovered that Washington’s Continental Army had, overnight, occupied the Dorchester Heights, a lofty no-man’s-land across the water. Twenty American cannons now pointed towards Boston. The next ten days saw the packing up of the British garrison. Any ordnance that could not be carried away was destroyed or dumped in the sea; seventy-nine horses and 358 tons of hay were also left behind.[39] On 17 March, with the arrival of a fair wind, 120 ships carrying more than ten thousand troops and loyalists set sail for Halifax, Nova Scotia.

SIX

The Rum Contracts

AN ARMY THAT LACKS a strong supply of food, clothing and shelter will be fatally weakened; and yet military historians have often ignored the behind-the-scenes contribution of those working to provide these necessities. As Professor Arthur Bowler, one of the few academics to have studied the logistical minutiae of the American conflict, has written: ‘Since human society began, minstrels and historians have told over and again the exploits of men on the field of battle while condemning to limbo by the process of neglect the more prosaic activities of contractors, commissaries, quartermasters, subtlers, and administrators generally.’[1] Presumably these storytellers have considered the deeds of such people to be too boringly deficient in that stirring narrative quality, jeopardy, to merit their attention – but what greater jeopardy could there be than knowing that a vast army, struggling to save an empire on the other side of a wide ocean, looks to you for its every need? This was the burden that Richard Atkinson would bear for the next six years.

By the start of 1776, it was clear that the redcoat army fighting the American rebels would have to be almost entirely provisioned from home. The shortcomings of the system by which the Admiralty was the government department with responsibility for shipping the troops out to America, while it fell to the Treasury to organize the delivery of their supplies, were perfectly obvious – but the Navy Board categorically refused to offer assistance.

Custom dictated that each British soldier in the field received the same basic ration: one pound of bread and either one pound of salted beef or nine ounces of salted pork every day, plus items issued on a weekly basis, typically eight ounces of rice or oatmeal, six ounces of butter or cheese and three pints of pease. On 9 February, the Treasury Board settled terms with six merchant syndicates who would between them, over the following year, supply provisions for 36,000 men in America and 12,000 men in Canada, at a cost of 5¼d for each daily ration. Richard was the managing partner of the group that won the contract to feed the army in Canada.

Two weeks later, the Treasury agreed to engage Mure, Son & Atkinson to ‘take up a sufficient Quantity of Shipping to carry the Provisions ordered from Time to Time by this Board for the Supply of the Forces in America’.[2] The individual contractors would arrange for supplies to be taken to Cork, on Ireland’s south coast, where under the direction of a Treasury commissary they would be loaded into ships chartered by Mure, Son & Atkinson. The provisions would be sent to America in quarterly batches, with ships making two return crossings every year; that, anyhow, was the theory.

During the spring of 1776, the Treasury Board and the Navy Board – which was preparing to take 27,000 infantry, plus a cavalry regiment and 950 horses, out to America – were in fierce competition for the limited pool of merchant shipping that was available to hire. By the end of April, Richard had succeeded in chartering fifty-two ships on the Treasury’s behalf; but then the Navy Board, urgently needing vessels to carry horses, unilaterally hiked the previously fixed hire rate of 11s to 12s 6d per ton per day. This placed Richard, who was still obliged to offer the lower rate, at a serious disadvantage, and over the next six weeks he managed to charter only nine more ships. On 12 June Richard expressed his concerns at a meeting between Lord North and Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty; afterwards the Treasury Board put up its rate to 12s 6d, while the Navy Board dropped its rate back down to 11s. The manoeuvre enabled Richard to hire seventy-six more vessels over the next seven weeks, although merchant shipping was so scarce by then that he was forced to cast around in ports as distant as Amsterdam and Hamburg.

Once chartered, the Treasury required Mure, Son & Atkinson to have the merchant ships armed ‘in due Proportion to their Burthen’, meaning that a large number of cannons in a variety of sizes had to be found at short notice.[3] Thus (to give two examples) the Locke, an ex-East Indiaman of 685 tons’ capacity, was furnished with twenty nine-pounder and six four-pounder cannons, while the Lyon, a vessel of 170 tons from the port of Leith, was fitted with ten two-pounders and eight swivel guns. ‘You are already, Sir, apprized of the Disappointment we have met with in Guns,’ Richard wrote to John Robinson at the Treasury. ‘This has driven us to ransack this Town and its Environs for light six Pounders.’[4]

Although rum did not fall within the standard army ration, it was still considered essential. It provided warmth on cold nights; it made bad water drinkable; it offered relief from pain; and it prevented wounds from turning septic. On 2 May, the Treasury Board settled terms with five West India merchants, each of whom was to supply 100,000 gallons of rum from the sugar island with which he was closely connected. Richard’s tender for Jamaican rum was the winning bid for that colony. Each island distilled its rum to a different strength, and Jamaican rum was most potent of all – a distinction which did not, however, quite account for the discrepancy between the 5s 3d per gallon that the Treasury agreed to pay Richard, and the 3s secured by a Barbados merchant. The suspicion that Richard had negotiated an outrageously good deal for himself by underhand means would follow him around like a bad smell for the rest of his days.

THE ABSENCE OF any surviving letters between Richard and his siblings at Temple Sowerby has left a glaring gap in the family correspondence, and I have little sense of the dynamic that existed between them. But they were by no means estranged. George Atkinson saw his youngest brother quite often during the mid-1770s, when his duties as the Treasury’s money changer in Westmorland regularly took him to the capital; the task of replacing the nation’s defective gold coinage would take four years to complete.

As for Bridget, who we last met in 1762 – it’s fair to say she had been far from idle, not only having given birth to ten children (two of whom died in infancy), but also running the family house and farm. During the late 1760s, Bridget and George had taken the lease on one of Lord Thanet’s new farms across the river at Whinfell; it was just as well that she did not mind getting her hands dirty, for it was a condition of the tenancy that the land should be cleared, and she often came home reeking of gorse smoke.[5] (One lucky day, while turning over an old rabbit warren, Bridget’s plough unearthed a gold ‘fede-ring’ brooch – two pairs of arms joined together with clasped hands, with a devout message in raised letters on the sleeves – that dated back to the fourteenth century, when Whinfell had been a deer park belonging to the great Clifford family.) Bridget abhorred waste of any kind, and made a point of planting apple trees in the corners of her fields where the plough could not reach – it became a kind of signature of her occupancy. The topographer William Hutchinson, who toured the northern counties in 1774, observed the Atkinsons’ farm approvingly. ‘We then passed Whinfield Park,’ he wrote, ‘where we had the pleasure of viewing a large tract of ground, lately enclosed from the park, and growing corn. There is not any thing can give greater satisfaction to the eye of the traveller, than to behold cultivation and industry stretching their paces over the heath and waste, the forest and the chase – population must follow, and riches ensue.’[6]

The gold brooch that was ploughed up on Bridget’s farm.

Andrew Davidson

So far as I know, Bridget only visited London twice – and her second visit, as an old woman, would be a miserable business. The first time, in May 1776, when she was forty-three, George brought her down with him after the weaning of their final child. George returned to Westmorland a week later; Bridget, on the other hand, decided to stay put until her husband came back with another consignment of ‘light’ gold. It was, in fact, her brother-in-law Richard who urged her to remain in the capital, as Bridget explained in a letter to her eldest child, fifteen-year-old Dorothy:

Your Uncle was not willing I should return with your Father. He purposed my seeing the King go to the House of Lords and two or three Little jaunts into the country. I have been foolish enough my Dear Dolly in buying you a peice of Checked Muslin for a Gown and also a peice of striped Lutestring for another it is not very fashionable but I got it cheap. I durst not sent your Hatt and cloak by your Father I am sure they would have been quite spoiled. I have almost spent all my Monny, many Temptations are here.[7]

Bridget must have spent a good deal of her ‘Monny’ on shells, for a cart would soon arrive at Temple Sowerby, delivering a box that contained, among other things, ‘54 pretty shells in a Bag & 4 mighty ugly ones loose’.[8] Her collection was acquiring a global dimension; her latest coup had been to persuade George Dixon, a Kirkoswald man who was appointed armourer of the Discovery on Captain Cook’s third voyage, to keep an eye out for specimens. ‘Hear is sum smal Qurosetes such as large Locusts, small spotted snakes, but no shells of any account,’ Dixon would report from Cape Town on 24 November 1776. ‘What is qureas I shall get, if our stay will Permit (but ounderstand we must sail on Wednesday first from this for New Zealand, in the South Sees).’[9]

Shortly after returning from London, Bridget would oversee the ‘inocolation’ of her four youngest children against the smallpox.[10] This nerve-racking procedure involved scratching the skin with a needle, then rubbing the contents of a smallpox pustule into the wound. Within days, symptoms including a high fever, a painful rash and pustules might start to appear, and the danger period could last a fortnight; the possible side effects of this treatment ranged from disfigurement to death.

This, of course, was some twenty years before Edward Jenner’s famous experiments of the 1790s, which confirmed the common rural belief that an infection from cowpox conferred immunity to smallpox, and explained why milkmaids were possessed of such flawless complexions. As a young man, in 1772, Jenner had attended George Fordyce’s courses on the ‘practice of Physick’, the ‘Materia Medica’ and chemistry.[11] A brief sentence in a letter written by Bridget to her husband George around this time (she neglected to give the date) offers an obscure hint, tucked among chit-chat about prison visits and church pews, that she knew about the connection between cowpox and smallpox, and might even have discussed it with George Fordyce. ‘I shall go to the Gaol to see poor Mr. Bird,’ she wrote. ‘I was sure Dr. Fordice would be of my Opinion in regard to Matts Cow but all the World could not convince my Sister. I am glad you have got the Seats in the Church made up I hope our Rector and you are sitting in it today it is a great acquisision and a good thing as I saw no use that piece of Space was to any one and now we shall have room enough for all our Family.’[12]

I LIKE TO IMAGINE Bridget and Richard, the two pivotal characters in this story, standing side-by-side in the crowd that watched George III travel in his golden coach to the House of Lords to close parliament on 23 May 1776. (I cycle along the processional route, past St James’s Park, on my way into work every day.) The king addressed his subjects solemnly on that occasion, expressing regret that he had recently found it necessary to ask his ‘faithful Commons’ for extra money to pay for the American conflict, and still holding out hopes that his ‘rebellious subjects’ would yet be ‘awakened to a sense of their errors’.[13]

But it was too late for that. In Philadelphia, on 4 July, Congress ratified the final text of the ‘unanimous declaration of the Thirteen United States of America’. The document, which started by stating the ‘self-evident’ truth that all men were ‘created equal’, went on to list the ‘Injuries and Usurpations’ to which the colonists had been subjected, before drawing the following conclusion: ‘A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every Act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.’[14] The text was in large part drafted by the Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson, and its pretensions to moral authority did not go unchallenged. ‘If slavery be thus fatally contagious,’ pondered Samuel Johnson, ‘how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’[15]

The withdrawal of British forces from Boston in March 1776 had left them without access to a port between Nova Scotia and Florida. Now the British high command aspired to make New York their headquarters, since it held the key to the American interior, as the gateway to the mighty Hudson River; for the time being, though, the Continental Army controlled the island of Manhattan. General Howe sailed from Nova Scotia with nine thousand men, seizing Staten Island – five miles south of Manhattan – at the end of June. Two weeks later Admiral Howe, the general’s brother, arrived at the head of a fleet carrying eleven thousand troops. Thirteen thousand more would soon follow, including a large contingent of Hessians – German mercenaries hired to serve alongside the redcoats.

When Robert Erskine learnt, on 12 July, that five British warships had outrun rebel batteries defending the mouth of the Hudson, and were now anchored only twenty miles from Ringwood, he set to work on a contrivance to prevent further incursions. Erskine’s ‘Marine Chevaux de Frise’ – along the same lines as the wooden frames with spikes that were used to head off cavalry charges – was a tetrahedron made of oak beams tipped with iron points that would pierce the hull of any ship passing over it. Eight days later, he presented a scale model for General Washington’s inspection; he also wrote to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, offering it for use on the Delaware River. In the end, similar devices of a rival design were used to defend the Hudson, although it appears that the ironworks at Ringwood provided the spikes – Erskine’s cash book records a debit of £1,022 against ‘the United States’ for eleven tons supplied to make ‘Chevaux-de-frise’.[16]

Robert Erskine’s device to prevent the British from penetrating the Hudson River.

American Philosophical Society

During the autumn of 1776, the British advance seemed almost unstoppable. Four thousand redcoats landed at Kip’s Bay, on the east side of Manhattan, on 15 September; within hours they had taken New York. By the end of November, General Howe was confidently predicting the expulsion of the Continental Army from New Jersey; this territory, with its abundance of ‘covering, forage, and supplies of fresh provisions’, would make fine winter quarters for his troops.[17] ‘I think the game is pretty near up,’ General Washington told his brother on 18 December. ‘No Man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties and less means to extricate himself from them.’[18]

A week after writing these words, on Christmas night, Washington led a straggling column across the icy Delaware River. The next morning, after a short battle, they captured two-thirds of the Hessian brigade garrisoning the small town of Trenton, New Jersey. This modest victory marked a turnaround for the rebels; another morale-boosting win followed ten days later at Princeton. Howe’s hopes that his army might achieve self-sufficiency were dashed; from now on, he told the Treasury Board, all provisions must come from Britain – since America could be relied upon for nothing.

‘WE ARE IN FORCE sufficient to enter upon offensive Operations,’ General Howe had written to ministers in London on 6 August 1776, ‘but I am detained by the Want of Camp Equipage, particularly Kettles and Cantines, so essential in the Field, and without which too much is to be apprehended on the Score of Health.’[19] Consequently, on 14 September, the Treasury ordered Richard Atkinson to supply ‘barrack furniture’ for 25,000 men, uniforms for 5,000 loyalist militia, and a pair of ‘thick milled woollen mittens for every man’, as well as to ‘take up & arm shipping sufficient to carry the whole together with the Camp Equipage Shoes Stocking & Linnen for the next Campaign’.

Richard’s clerks immediately set about sourcing thousands of beds, bolsters, blankets, candles, candlesticks, rugs, pokers and tongs. ‘We are obliged to obtain goods of all Sorts from the Makers as matter of favor & preference,’ he commented, ‘whilst their workmen are universally Engaged in Combinations & all the Licentiousness arising from a Superabundance of employment.’[20] (A collective demand for improvements in pay or conditions was known as a ‘combination’.) With winter coming, shortcuts were needed, and Richard warned General Guy Carleton, commander-in-chief in Canada, that he had ordered 30,000 yards of ‘legging dyed at Leeds to be sent unpressed’; the material might seem coarser than usual, but it would not be any ‘less durable or less warm’.[21]

The sheer unpredictability of the business of provisioning the army in America was already abundantly clear. The idea that each of the Treasury’s ships would make two return crossings a year had proved hopelessly optimistic. In August 1776, a westerly wind confined several Canada-bound ships to the English Channel for three weeks, giving rise to fears that they would fail to reach Quebec before the annual freezing of the St Lawrence River. Such setbacks were intensely stressful for all concerned. ‘I am sorry to find Lord North by his letter so uneasy at all the Victualling ships being not yet sailed for Canada,’ the king wrote to John Robinson, ‘as I attribute part of it to his not being in good spirits.’[22] By 26 September, when the last of the twenty-nine ships destined for Quebec that year sailed from Cork, Richard and his partners in the Canada contract had supplied 591,500 pounds of salt beef, 2,366,000 pounds of salt pork, 3,458,000 pounds of flour, 1,274,000 pounds of bread, 253,496 pounds of butter, 610,985 pounds of oatmeal, and 27,420 bushels of peas for the consumption of the troops.

The mounting cost of feeding the army soon began to attract scrutiny. Richard’s name was not mentioned during a robust parliamentary debate about the subject on 21 February 1777 – surprisingly, perhaps, given that more than one-third of the Treasury’s expenditure on the war over the previous year had passed through his books and those of his various partners. Colonel Barré did, however, observe that 5s 3d per gallon for the 100,000 gallons of Jamaican rum supplied by Richard was a ‘most unheard of and exorbitant price’ – but Lord North insisted it had ‘left little or no profit for the contractor’.[23]

The prime minister’s annual budget, delivered on 14 May, revealed a shortfall of £5 million that would have to be met with a public loan. When, by way of response, the opposition launched a stinging attack on the cost of the war, Colonel Barré returned to the cost of the rum; the contractor, he suggested, must be a ‘very good friend of the treasury indeed’. Not so, said Lord North: ‘The contract with Mr. Atkinson was for rum of the very best proof, the finest that could be had in Jamaica.’ Indeed, he continued, once freight, leakage, insurance and commission were taken into account, the 5s 3d agreed by the Treasury Board, ‘so far from being a bad bargain, was evidently a very favourable one’. Barré replied sarcastically that on such terms the poor contractor ‘must be ruined’, and it was cruel of the Treasury to treat him so unfairly: ‘He now plainly saw the reason why people of all sorts were so shy of taking government contracts. But this Mr. Atkinson must be the greatest idiot in the whole contracting world: did he make his contracts for sour crout and porter upon the same principles?’[24]

At one point during these proceedings Lord North tripped over his numbers and confessed that he was not certain whether the values he was quoting were in pounds sterling or Jamaica’s local currency – a hugely embarrassing slip-up. Afterwards the Morning Post gossiped that Sir Grey Cooper – John Robinson’s fellow Secretary to the Treasury, who sat beside the prime minister during debates and was meant to feed him with facts and figures – had received a ‘private whipping’ for the blunder.[25]

Decisive action was clearly needed to head off a brewing political scandal. The next time Richard was summoned before Lord North and his Treasury Board, on 3 June, it was agreed that some independent merchants should be asked to evaluate whether the rum might reasonably have been cheaper and, if so, how much it ought to have cost. Beeston Long, the chairman of the Society of West India Merchants, and two other City of London grandees, were appointed referees.

THE TREASURY BOARD had already given General Howe the go-ahead to order more rum direct from the merchants who had shipped such large amounts of it to New York during the summer of 1776. It was typical that Richard should have been the only one of the five original suppliers who was far-sighted enough to appoint an American agent. He wrote to Howe on 14 January 1777 offering to furnish as much rum as necessary: ‘We have by various Conveyances ordered our Agents in Jamaica to secure a sufficient Quantity to enable them to execute your Excellency’s Commands to what extent soever they may receive them.’[26] The same day he informed Joshua Loring, the merchant acting as his agent in New York: ‘Doubting as we do whether any of the other Contractors have made proper dispositions for a supply in the West Indies, we think it probable that the General may call upon us for more than one fourth part of his whole supply.’[27]

In the event, this would prove quite an underestimate. On 1 April, Howe and Loring concluded an agreement for Mure, Son & Atkinson to provide 350,000 gallons of rum. This colossal order – equivalent to one-sixth of the volume that would be exported from the West Indies to Britain that year – was the entire quantity required by the army for the year ahead.[28] (General Howe told John Robinson that he had thought it advisable to confine the order to Mure, Son & Atkinson, rather than divide it between several contractors, so that ‘there might be no disappointment in the main Object’.)[29] Unfortunately Howe and Loring chose not to specify the cost. Instead they declared: ‘Whereas the price of Rum is very fluctuating and it is impossible to obtain sufficient Information on that Head, it is agreed by & between the Partys that the same be referred as a Point hereafter to be settled upon the most reasonable Terms between the right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of his Majesty’s Treasury and the said Messrs Mure Son & Atkinson.’[30]

The Lords of the Treasury heard about the new contract in early June, shortly after Lord North’s humiliating budget speech, and they soon told Howe that they were unable to ‘ascertain here the price to be paid for Rum’, instead ordering him to settle the matter from New York.[31] Unsurprisingly, Richard saw things differently; he believed a clear understanding had existed that any top-up order from America needed only to specify the quantity of rum, since the price had already been fixed at the time of the previous contract in May 1776.

The Lords of the Treasury would spend many hours considering the rum contracts over the summer of 1777, and Richard would be repeatedly summoned to appear before them. On 10 July they ordered him to cut his agency rate from 2½ to 1½ per cent, an indignity to which he ‘chearfully’ submitted, while voicing concerns that his rival merchants might see this as a scheme of his own devising to undercut them. ‘These things are not reckoned reputable in the City,’ he told John Robinson.[32]

Sometime in mid-July, Beeston Long and the other referees filed their report on Richard’s previous rum contract, the one from May 1776. They concluded that the spirit had been too expensive at 5s 3d per gallon, and proposed it should be priced at 4s ¾d – a reduction of nearly a quarter. Richard disputed this figure on grounds that they had incorrectly estimated the cost of the insurance premium at 13½ per cent – despite having seen the actual policies, which showed that of the 1,126 puncheons of rum which Mure, Son & Atkinson had arranged to be shipped to America, the premium paid on 826 barrels had been 15 per cent of their value, and on 100 barrels it had been 25 per cent. On 200 barrels Richard had been unable to secure cover – too bad that this last consignment had been seized by privateers. According to Richard’s calculations, these costs and uninsured losses were equivalent to an insurance premium of 31½ per cent – which proved that, far from having profited by the contract, as was claimed, he had lost by it.

After the referees refused to concede that he might have a point, Richard’s tone turned combative. On 23 July he wrote to the Treasury Board, hoping they would ‘consider the increased price of 5s. 6d. as the very lowest’ fair price for the rum.[33] By mid-August his patience was all but exhausted, and he wrote an exasperated letter to the Treasury, reeling off some of the unforeseeable events that ‘every Contractor not meaning to ruin himself’ was obliged to factor into his prices:

Short Crops in Jamaica. Combinations against him. Negligence of Agents. Misconduct of Masters of Ships. Want of supply of Lumber. Long Detention & consequent Leakage and Expences in following the army from Port to Port in America; but above all that imminent Danger inseparable from the nature of the Undertaking, by which so heavy a Loss has been actually sustained, the Danger of uninsurable Risques.[34]

It was a howl of frustration from a man whose considerable powers of persuasion seemed for once to have deserted him.

LIKE ALL CIVIL WARS, the conflict in America created fault lines that severed families and friendships; such was the rift between Benjamin Franklin and his loyalist son William, the last colonial governor of New Jersey, that they never made their peace. Suffice to say, Robert Erskine could not have foreseen that within five years of his arrival in New Jersey he would find himself on the opposite side of a full-blown war from his friend Richard Atkinson.

Before his move to the colonies, Erskine had been a surveyor of some repute. The first map he drew for George Washington, which charted adjoining districts of New Jersey and New York, was small enough to be folded in a pocket; Erskine handed it to the general himself. Shortly afterwards, on 19 July 1777, Washington wrote to Congress: ‘A good Geographer to Survey the roads and take sketches of the Country where the Army is to Act would be extremely useful and might be attended with exceeding valuable consequences.’[35] Which is how Erskine came to be appointed Surveyor General to the Continental Army, with the rank of colonel. However, his sense of obligation towards Richard and the other owners of the ironworks prevented him from taking up the position until he had made arrangements for his absence. ‘The great Confidence my employers have all along placed in my integrity and honour, has demanded my best endeavours on their behalf,’ Erskine explained to Washington. ‘What ever feuds and differences take place between States and nations yet these cannot alter the nature of justice between man & man; or cancel the duty, one individual owes to another.’[36] Despite the political chasm dividing him from the men who had sent him to America in the first place, his loyalty towards them did not falter.

During the next three years, Erskine and his team of assistant surveyors, draughtsmen and chain-bearers traversed New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, creating more than 250 maps that would prove of inestimable value to the revolutionary cause. He would never meet Richard Atkinson again; for a heavy cold contracted in the field soon turned into a fever, and he died at Ringwood on 2 October 1780. Less than two years later, the New Jersey legislature would pass an act confiscating the ironworks from its British proprietors and vesting control in Erskine’s widow and her second husband.[37]

ALTHOUGH THE FRENCH loudly protested their neutrality, it was an open secret that they were providing all manner of supplies to the American rebels – cannons, rifles, gunpowder, clothes, leather, salt, brandy and wine. American privateers, meanwhile, were welcomed at French ports. ‘I trust the different Vessels that hover round the Island will be put on their guard particularly to protect Liverpool, Whitehaven, the Clyde and even Bristol,’ the king wrote to John Robinson in May 1777, ‘for I do suspect that the Rebel vessels which have been assembling at Nantes and Bordeaux mean some stroke of that kind which will undoubtedly occasion much discontent among the Merchants.’[38]

Sure enough, in August, at the mouth of the English Channel, American privateers managed to pick off two ships from a 160-strong merchant convoy returning from Jamaica, and sailed them to Nantes, where they were plundered, stripped of their rigging and abandoned on mud flats. One of the vessels, the Hanover Planter, which belonged to Mure, Son & Atkinson, had 360 hogsheads of sugar and eighty-seven puncheons of rum on board. Lord Stormont, the British ambassador to France, personally negotiated the return of the ships and their valuable cargoes, an outcome which prompted Lord North to write, on 25 September, that he was ‘more sanguine’ than he had been for a while in his ‘expectations of the continuance of peace’.[39]

The main thrust of the British campaign in America for 1777 was to isolate the rebellious New England colonies from the more loyalist middle colonies by securing the Hudson River; General Burgoyne would lead a southbound expedition from Montreal, with General Howe leading a northbound one from New York, and the two forces would converge on Albany. ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne’s push started well, with the capture of Fort Ticonderoga on 6 July. Howe changed his mind, however, and instead sent his army south to take Philadelphia. An inveterate gambler, Burgoyne chose to press ahead, but his luck ran out at Saratoga on 17 October; surrounded by the Continental Army, he was forced to surrender with nearly six thousand men. The defeat would prove a turning point of the war, for it persuaded the French that it might be worth openly backing the American cause. ‘This unhappy Event,’ Lord Stormont reported from Paris, ‘has greatly elevated all our secret Enemies here, and they break out, tho’ not in my Presence into the most intemperate Joy.’[40]

RICHARD’S RUM CONTRACTS would go down as a footnote in the history of the American war, yet they consumed an undue quantity of ministerial time, and generated a mind-numbing amount of paperwork. I could well imagine how all those beleaguered clerks must have felt; after weeks spent sifting through hundreds of Treasury and Colonial Office box files and letterbook volumes in the bunker-like confines of the National Archives at Kew, I myself felt heartily sick of the business.

A letter in which General Howe refused to suggest a price for the rum reached Whitehall from Philadelphia in January 1778; he merely expressed his regret that the affairs of Mure, Son & Atkinson, who had ‘exerted themselves so manifestly upon every occasion which has fallen under my Observation’, should have been left undetermined for so long ‘from a Chain of Difficultys they could not foresee’.[41] Richard continued to press the Treasury Board for a decision. The ‘unexampled Hardship’ of his case, he argued on 12 January, had only worsened in recent months – of the 4,032 puncheons of rum shipped by Mure, Son & Atkinson in fulfilment of the April 1777 agreement, 1,490 barrels had been lost to American privateers.[42]

The Lords of the Treasury again summoned Richard before them on 22 January, and informed him that they wished to turn the last rum contract retrospectively into an agency agreement, and for Mure, Son & Atkinson to bill them for the various costs of fulfilling it, plus the usual 1½ per cent commission. However, Richard rejected their proposal as completely unworkable:

Your Lordships know that we offered originally to transact this branch of business on a commission if it had been thought fit. But when your Lordships very properly determined that so distant a service was not fit to be carried on otherwise than upon contract, we considered ourselves as accountable to no body for our proceedings & executed what we had undertaken in a way so entirely interwoven with our other affairs in Jamaica & concerns of shipping: that they cannot now be separated.[43]

When Richard learnt, two days later, that the Treasury Board still planned to convert this contract into an agency, despite his objections, he wrote again: ‘I have already in so many ways submitted to you the Impossibility of stating the Expences as an Account, that I am at a Loss how to assert that Impossibility in Terms more decisive.’ So sure did he remain of his position that he offered to hand over the arbitration of the rum contracts to another ‘indifferently chosen’ referee, and the decision was soon entrusted to Stephen Fuller, the Jamaican Assembly’s agent in Britain.[44]

By now, Richard’s role as the government’s shipping agent had started to attract hostile attention. A letter in the Public Ledger, published on 17 December 1777, made the scandalous claim that Richard paid a £5,000 salary to his friend John Robinson, Secretary to the Treasury, which he funded by overcharging for the shipping that he chartered on the Treasury’s behalf. This could not go unchallenged, and a jury found in Richard’s favour, judging the article to be ‘grossly libellous’, since it falsely accused him of ‘imposing on his employer, and bribing a person to avoid detection’.[45]

Some mud must have stuck, nonetheless, since shortly afterwards, in the House of Lords, the Earl of Effingham tabled motions to obtain ‘more accurate accounts from the Treasury of the ships taken up by them for the service of America’.[46] On 12 March 1778, before a committee of the House, Richard endured lengthy interrogation about the transport service. When the Duke of Richmond enquired what he charged for his agency, Richard explained that he had originally received the standard merchant’s commission of 2½ per cent, until the Treasury Board docked it by a point. Lord Shelburne wondered whether Richard thought the Treasury ‘had been too hard upon him’, to which he replied that ‘he must say he seriously did’ (a response which apparently ‘set the House a laughing heartily’). Lord Effingham invoked parliamentary privilege, which protected him against defamation charges, for what he had to say on the subject: ‘These premises fully authorised him to brand this transaction with its true name, a job; and that of the most disgraceful nature. It carried about it all its proper marks; it was a most beneficial contract, made in the dark, with a favourite contractor.’[47] The word ‘job’ was often used during the eighteenth century in connection with grasping corruption – Dr Johnson’s dictionary definition was ‘a low mean lucrative busy affair’.[48]

This discussion was merely the curtain-raiser for a heated debate in the lower house, on 23 March, in which Colonel Barré tabled a motion for a select committee to investigate the money squandered on the ‘disgraceful, ruinous, and inglorious’ war.[49] The motion was passed, whereupon the committee of twenty-one MPs decided to focus on the rum business – and specifically on Richard’s first contract, whose terms had been so hastily agreed with Lord North back in September 1775. This particular transaction had not come under the referees’ scrutiny, but now, over the following weeks, more than two dozen witnesses – under-secretaries, chief clerks, insurance brokers, sugar brokers, planters and merchants among them – were called upon to analyse its every last detail.

It was soon revealed that Richard had managed, almost by accident, to make an excellent bargain for himself. As it turned out, the price paid by the Royal Navy for its rum in Jamaica, which was the basis for his deal with the prime minister, was surprisingly high. John Robinson had only later worked out why this should be so, when he discovered that rum was just one component of a much more extensive naval provisioning contract. Whereas the Treasury Board treated rum as a separate item, in the navy ‘grog’ was part of the standard daily ration. Three merchants in Jamaica had bid for the navy’s provisioning contract, quoting individual prices for each item – bread, beef, pork, pease, oatmeal, butter, vinegar, rum – from which a total cost per man, per day had been calculated. While the winning tender had been the cheapest overall, for rum it had been on the high side.

THE LONG-DREADED ALLIANCE between America and France finally materialized in a treaty signed on 6 February 1778. No longer was the war at arm’s length, on the other side of a wide ocean; now it threatened British shores. On the night of 23 April, Captain John Paul Jones of the Ranger, an American naval vessel sailing out of Brest, raided Whitehaven, the Cumberland port where he had once served his apprenticeship, disembarking thirty men who spiked the town’s cannons and set fire to ships in its harbour. Meanwhile, down south, where the threat of invasion was all too real – French troops were reportedly massing in Brittany and Normandy – a series of tented cities sprang up to accommodate the newly mobilized county militia.

The Treasury Board invited tenders for supplying the camps with bread, wood, forage and straw; the winning bid came from Simon Fraser, one of Richard’s close friends. In its contract with Fraser, the Treasury specified that the army’s ‘ammunition bread’ should be baked from whole wheat into loaves of six pounds. But many of the soldiers refused to eat this coarse bread; Colonel Henry Herbert of the Wiltshire Regiment, camped at Winchester, complained to John Robinson that it contained ‘Bran capable of purging a Horse’.[50]

When the tradesman sub-contracted to supply the bread unilaterally took it upon himself to provide bran-free loaves for the troops, Richard, who was Fraser’s hitherto silent partner in the contract, reluctantly intervened. He wrote to the baker:

I understand that you have agreed to deliver Bread of Better Quality than the Contract specifies without increase of Price or diminution of Weight. This I am confident Mr. Fraser will have put a stop to, but lest he should have missed you, or by any other accident this letter should find you still undecided, I am to desire, and Expressly to direct that on no account whatsoever you deliver any other Bread than is described in the Contract.[51]

A few days later Richard visited Coxheath camp, near Maidstone, to smooth over the matter with its commander, General William Keppel. ‘I have this morning seen Mr. Atkinson, and If he is as Honest as he appears Sensible; & is Clear – The Camps will be very well furnished with Every Article he is Contractor for,’ Keppel told General Amherst, the British commander-in-chief, on 18 June. ‘We parted very Good friends as he may tell you; and perfectly satisfied with each other.’[52] But Keppel, after going without bread for two days, soon downgraded his opinion of Richard and his ilk. ‘The Contractors deserve to be hanged,’ he wrote to Amherst on 23 June. ‘It is Mr. Atkinson or Mr. Frazar that is to supply Bread, and good Bread, every delivery in Camp, and they must be made answerable notwithstanding they are under the Protection of Mr. Robinson altho’ he perhaps deserves hanging as much as either of them.’ Keppel, whose political allegiances lay with his cousin, the Duke of Richmond, added a telling postscript: ‘I beg this Letter may be considered as a publick one.’[53]

As was bound to happen, the press picked up the story and mangled the facts. ‘The contracts for serving all the camps with bread,’ reported the Evening Post, ‘are executed by Mr. Atkinson, partner with Lord Bute’s agent, and brother-in-law to Mr. Robinson, of the Treasury. The bread has been scandalously bad, but how should it be otherwise. Every thing is now an arrant job. Mr. Atkinson is a Scotchman.’[54]

All this time, of course, Richard was making a fortune. Of the £1,406,923 expended by the Paymaster of the Forces for the twelve months up to February 1778, some £495,020 had been billed by Mure, Son & Atkinson, and £133,772 by Richard on behalf of the Canada contractors – although how much of this was profit is impossible to say.[55] But he was also under constant pressure; in particular, the burden of managing the transport fleet that shipped the army’s supplies across the ocean lay heavy upon his shoulders. His partners, the Mures, offered negligible support, for they rarely came to town. Clearly Richard was unable, or unwilling, to delegate the fine details of the government contracts to his clerks, for the hundreds of letters, reports and bills from Mure, Son & Atkinson which are scattered throughout the public archives are mostly in his handwriting. He made himself so indispensable to Lord North and the Treasury Board that he became their first port of call for any business requiring special speed or discretion. He had a heroic capacity for work, often writing, writing, writing late into the night, and his letters generally convey boundless energy and optimism. The issue of the rum contracts, still unresolved, enveloped his activities in a cloud of opprobrium – and yet here he was, pulling off astonishing logistical feats in the service of king and empire. At times he must have felt close to buckling beneath the intolerable weight of it all.

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