The Kentish associations of a great West Indian planter: Sir William Young (1725-1788)

ArticlesVolume 142

25 Jun

THE KENTISH ASSOCIATIONS OF A GREAT WEST INDIAN PLANTER: SIR WILLIAM YOUNG (1725-1788) AND HIS MONUMENT AT CHARTHAM

p.j. marshall

William Young was born in 1725 on the small West Indian island of Antigua. He was the eldest son of another William Young, a Scottish doctor who, as was quite common in the eighteenth century, had turned from medicine to become a sugar planter. Antigua planters enjoyed boom conditions in the first half of the eighteenth century and Dr William prospered there greatly. On his father’s death in 1740, the fifteen-year old William inherited plantations which in 1780 extended over 655 acres and were worked by 325 enslaved people.¹ In 1752 he was reported to have boasted that £6,000 was only one-third of the income that he could then expect to derive from his estate.²

When he was appointed to the Council in Antigua in 1761, William Young was described as a ‘Gentleman of polite Education’.³ He had, as was customary with rich planters’ children, been sent to school in England to get such an education. A notice in 1778 that he was to be one of the Stewards for the Anniversary Meeting of the ‘Gentlemen Educated at Hackney School’⁴ indicates that he had been at Newcome’s school at Hackney. This was ‘the largest and most fashionable of all eighteenth-century private schools’ and had many aristocratic alumni.⁵ At Newcome’s school he acquired the conventional polite accomplishments of facility in Latin and an interest in experimental science. At the early age of 23 Young was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society as ‘a Gentleman well versed in Natural and Experimental Knowledge and alwaies ready to promote whatever may tend to the Improvement of Arts and Sciences’.⁶

During his minority, Young’s Antigua estates were managed by his guardians resident there. Although his mother continued to live in Antigua until a great age, William Young seems initially to have had no intention of returning to the West Indies, putting his property under the care of attorneys, while he lived on the income from it in England. As was not uncommon with people of Scots descent who had prospered overseas, he seems not to have identified himself with Scotland and there is no evidence that he ever went there. He was a young man determined to make his way into the highest ranks of English society. He was soon to strike Sir Horace Mann, the fastidious British Consul in Florence, as a ‘roaring rich West Indian, who talks of his money and swaggers in his gait as if both his pockets were full of it’.⁷ His boisterous exuberance, love of ostentatious display and reckless extravagance are well documented, but so too are his generosity to many and his boundless hospitality. In a poem to his memory, his daughter Mary, a published poet at a very early age,⁸ wrote:

Thy generous kindness glows within my breast!

Thy sweet benevolence, thy friendly worth

Thy spotless honour, thy ingenuous truth.⁹

His verdict on himself, when trying later in life to explain to the Lords of the Treasury why he lacked the resources to pay an enormous sum he owed to the public, was entirely characteristic of him. ‘I am afraid, my Lords, the Fault is in my Constitution; I have Compassion and Liberality beyond the Measure of strict Discretion; and with all my Imperfections, I think I possess some qualities I would not exchange for Gold’.¹⁰

Did his compassion and liberality extend to his slaves, whose total number had grown to around 1,100 by the early 1770s?¹¹ This increase followed a great expansion of William Young’s plantation interests away from Antigua, the productivity of whose overworked lands was by then in sharp decline,¹² to islands not previously cultivated for sugar, which had been ceded to Britain in 1763 after the end of the Seven Years War. Young’s appointment in 1764 as the chief commissioner of a body appointed to sell land in these new islands on behalf of the British government gave him great advantages, including access to public money, in making new acquisitions for himself. The most valuable of his plantations were now three in St Vincent and one on Tobago. How slaves were treated on Young’s plantations was largely determined by the managers that he appointed. Young, who seems to have been benevolently inclined to his slaves, was reputed to have taken care that they were men of ‘known humanity’.¹³ His will, however, suggests that what he was prepared to do for those who laboured for him was in practice circumscribed within conventional limits. He ordered that, to mark his passing, a handful of people of mixed race should be freed and that extra ‘good herrings’ be distributed to all his slaves, who were also to have an additional day off work to cultivate their own plots.¹⁴ Even if he urged humanity on them, his managers knew that they were required to drive their labour force to maximise the output of sugar in order to provide the funds sent to Britain to finance Young’s increasingly extravagant lifestyle. Slaves on St Vincent and Tobago were subject to particularly heavy labour in clearing virgin woodlands for planting cane. Those on Young’s plantation on Tobago, an island on which violent slave resistance was endemic during early British settlement, rebelled in 1774. They killed three whites. Seven of the captured rebels were burnt alive.¹⁵ A very different story was told of the Calliaqua plantation in St Vincent, where Young was obliged to live out the last years of his life with as much grandeur as he could muster in a ‘manor house’, which he called The Villa. On Young’s death in 1788, the Calliaqua slaves were said to have petitioned that ‘the remains of their dear master might be interred in the plantation’. When his corpse was shipped off to England, ‘the negroes who could not obtain boats to accompany it on board, swam after it as far as the ship’. Some were even said to have drowned in the attempt.¹⁶

At some point presumably during his schooldays, but quite when or under what circumstances remains uncertain, the young William Young came to live near Canterbury. It was customary for planters to entrust the care of their children at school in England to their London merchants or to other planter families who had returned home. There were a considerable number of such people living in Kent during the eighteenth century.¹⁷ It may be that the residence there of William’s guardian initially drew him to eastern Kent, which was to be his home until 1751. On 18 July 1746, he was married at Chartham, a village close to Canterbury, to Sarah, daughter of the late Charles Fagg (or Fagge), sister of Sir William Fagg, the 5th baronet, whose ‘unsullied Excellence’ is commemorated by a monument in Chartham church. His marriage brought William Young into a highly respected, if probably not a very affluent, landed family. Although he owned ‘a handsome and well built seat’ a mile-and-a-half from the centre of the village of Chartham in a hamlet called Mystole,¹⁸ Sir William had not inherited the greater part of the Fagg estates in Sussex and Kent with his title. A rich West Indian as a brother-in-law might therefore have been an attractive prospect for him. At the time of his marriage, William Young was 21 and his wife was in her teens.

After his first marriage, Young lived for some five years in villages around Canterbury. A deed relating to his property in Antigua describes Chartham as Young’s residence in August 1748.¹⁹ Most of his time in Kent seems, however, to have been spent at Charlton in the village of Bishopsbourne, four miles south-east of Canterbury. In his application for the fellowship of the Royal Society, Young wrote of his ‘residing at Chalton [sic] near Canterbury’.²⁰ His eldest son was born at Charlton on 4 December 1749.²¹ When he left England to travel in Europe in 1751, Young was glad ‘to hear of the great Care my successors at Charlton take of my possessions’.²² It seems highly probable therefore that Young’s principal residence in Kent was Charlton Place, now known as Charlton Park, described in the early nineteenth century as ‘a handsome house situated in a small park’ (Fig. 1). He presumably rented it from its owner, Elizabeth Corbet or Corbett.²³

William Young’s first marriage lasted only a few months. Still only 18, Sarah died on 24 January 1747.²⁴ She was buried in the south aisle of St Mary’s Church at Chartham. Her distraught husband had a tribute inscribed to her ‘on a flat stone’ placed in the church. She had, he related:

afforded a Short but most illustrious Example, in the Beauty of her Person, the Virtuous Accomplishments of her Sex, and the Lovelyness of her Disposition. She was so truly excellent, that here perhaps could be no Room for flattery, even tho’ the Affection of a grateful Husband should represent Her in the most Romantic Terms. Reader – in her Life She was Boloved [sic]; and at her Death, universally lamented. Wouldst Thou resemble Her and be Happy, blest be Thy Divine Pursuit; And mayst Thou Live virtuously, and die well.²⁵

The Chartham memorial

A version of this tribute was to appear on a much more elaborate memorial that was to follow shortly afterwards. This was the work of one of the most distinguished sculptors practising at the time, the Flemish artist Michael Rysbrack. Since he had emigrated from Antwerp to England in 1720, Rysbrack had acquired many illustrious patrons, including Queen Caroline, wife of George II, Frederick Prince of Wales, Lord Burlington and Viscount Cobham of Stowe. There are three figures in his striking design for Chartham (see Plates I, II and III) – Sarah and her grieving husband ‘in Roman habits’ together with a putto [a little boy] extinguishing the torch of life on a skull. Behind them was ‘a lofty pyramid of grey marble, ornamented near its apex with a handsome shield bearing the arms of the families, viz Young impaling Fagg’.²⁶ The monument is signed on its base ‘Michl. Rysbrack fecit. 1751’,²⁷ A group of William Young, Esqr; and his Lady was included in the sale of Rysbrack’s models in 1766.²⁸

When and where the monument was initially installed is unclear. It is not mentioned in a list of monumental inscriptions at Chartham made in 1757. Contemporary accounts say that it had been ‘laid by’ or had ‘lain by for many years’ in the church until 1789.²⁹ Then, following the death on 8 April 1788 of William Young, now Sir William (the first baronet since 1769), in St Vincent in the West Indies, new lettering was added to Rysbrack’s monument and it was given a new position. It was now to be a memorial for both William and Sarah. William had stipulated in his will that his body should be ‘decently interred at Chartham near Canterbury in the County of Kent in the former grave with my former dear Wife’. He hoped that his second wife might be willing to be buried there too. Were he to die in the West Indies, which was indeed the case, he ordered that his body should be sent home to Kent.³⁰ His remains were landed at Deal in June 1788 and duly interred in the church at Chartham near those of his wife.³¹ His eldest son then applied for a faculty for permission to erect a monument in memory of both his father and of Sarah. This monument, clearly Rysbrack’s work of 1751, said to have been ‘some times since prepared’ and described as ‘Pyramidical’, was now to be placed against the south wall and under ‘the great south window’ in Chartham church.³² New lettering was put on it, commemorating William as well as his first wife. Six lines of verse by ‘E. Y’ (presumably Young’s second wife, Elizabeth, see below) were added to the earlier inscription in tribute to Sarah together with a new inscription describing William as ‘the Ornament and Delight of Society’ and praising his ‘Benevolence’, which ‘Relieved Distress where It could and Consoled where it could not relieve’.

Work was completed on the monument in 1789. It has suffered considerable damage since then. The pyramid has disappeared and with it the arms of Young and Fagg, which were reported to be lying on the floor of the church in 1950. The base and the figures remain, although Sarah’s left hand has been broken off. Even so, it can be rightly called ‘a handsome monument’.³³ Horace Walpole thought that Rysbrack was too fond of pyramids, but that ‘his figures are well disposed, simple and great’.³⁴ That seems to be true of those on the Young memorial. They indeed form ‘a noble group’.³⁵ William Young’s legacy from a relatively short sojourn in Kent was thus a fine work by a great sculptor, albeit one to be admired with a full awareness that Young’s memorial was made possible by the wealth generated for him by enslaved people in the Caribbean. The Chartham monument is an example of how the fruits of such wealth spread out widely from London and the great Atlantic ports, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, even to a village near Canterbury.

Within a few months of Sarah’s death, William Young married another young bride from a Kentish gentry family living near Canterbury. This was Elizabeth Taylor, aged 17 at her wedding. The seat of the Taylors was Bifrons in the village of Patrixbourne, but they also owned Bridge Place in the parish of Bridge, where Elizabeth lived before her marriage. She was the daughter of the distinguished mathematician Brook Taylor, described by William Young, the second baronet and Taylor’s grandson, as one ‘of a circle of luminaries ... who threw a new and clear light on the operations of nature and on the mind of man’. He was the friend of the great astronomer Edmond Halley and of Sir Isaac Newton.³⁶ Elizabeth’s male kin sought preferment in the Church of England or in government offices.³⁷ Horace Mann, who took a dim view of William Young, very much approved of Elizabeth. He thought her ‘a rather fine young lady of Kentish breed, refined in France from which she brought the newest modes. She is young and rather pretty’.³⁸ Elizabeth was evidently the devoted friend of Sarah Young, to whose memory she wrote an elegy that was set to music by William Flackton, the Canterbury bookseller, musician and composer.³⁹

As well as a shared devotion to the memory of Sarah Young, William and Elizabeth were united by a common passion for music. William Young was throughout his life an avid collector of music, promoter of concerts and performer on the cello.⁴⁰ He professed that what he most wished for on his grand tour was to hear Scarlatti ‘play five Barrs that I may not seem to Have Travelled thro’ Italy and lost the greatest Curiosity In It’.⁴¹ William Flackton told Elizabeth that, while the musical taste ‘of most of our Ladies and Gentlemen’ ran to little more than ‘a Country Dance or a Ballard’, her taste had been formed by ‘hearing a Diversity of Compositions of the greatest Masters of the most Musical and Politest Courts of Europe’.⁴² Both William and Elizabeth were very active in encouraging the musical life of Canterbury, which, in the manner of other English provincial centres, revolved around clubs at which gentlemen sang catches and glees and subscription concerts with the annual celebration of the day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music, as its high point.⁴³ William Young was evidently part of a group of musicians who regularly played together. William Flackton was the inspiration for much of this endeavour. The Youngs were closely associated with him as customers and patrons. William declared himself to be his ‘Old and affectionate Friend’.⁴⁴ On his European travels, Young collected music for Flackton, who later dedicated to him his Six Sonatas, Three for a Violincello and three for a Tenor [a viola], published in 1770.⁴⁵ In 1760 Flackton also dedicated what he called his ‘Lessons’ to Elizabeth.⁴⁶

William Young and Elizabeth left Kent for Europe in 1751. After prolonged stays in Paris and Marseilles, they were in Florence in August 1752, buying pictures and collecting music. His grand tour seems to have ended William Young’s direct connection with Kent, at least until his remains were brought back to Chartham in 1788. On his return home from Europe, he moved first to Wiltshire, paying £14,200 for a house at Standlynch near Salisbury, which has been called ‘a triumph of English Palladianism and neo-classicism’.⁴⁷ In 1767 he moved from Wiltshire to Buckinghamshire, paying £18,300 for ‘the manor and mansion house’ of Delaford. This was to be his home in England for the rest of his life. He also rented houses in fashionable parts of London.

Whereas material about William Young’s years in Kent is scarce, his life from 1752 until his death in 1788 is very fully documented. It can be briefly summarised as years of fame and fortune in the 1750s and 1760s and years of crisis and retrenchment in the 1770s and the 1780s.⁴⁸

In the 1750s Young and his wife seem to have enjoyed a prominent place in Wiltshire society. William became a Major in the Wiltshire militia and took a leading role in the annual Salisbury St Cecilia’s day music festival. Yet it is clear that sales of sugar from his Antigua plantations were failing to deliver resources on a scale that he needed to sustain his English life-style. In 1760 William returned to Antigua, no doubt with the intention of taking measures to increase the yield of his estates. By January 1762 he had evidently conceived a much more ambitious plan for boosting his West Indian income. He then enlisted as a volunteer officer in the great British expeditionary force that conquered the French colony of Martinique and cleared them out of some other islands. He and other Antigua planters were hoping that new conquests would enable them to develop plantations on islands that would be much more productive than their own long over-cultivated one.⁴⁹ What he saw on his campaign seems to have impressed Young with the possibilities for sugar planting on the islands that were retained by Britain at the peace. In July 1762 he returned to England where decisions would be taken about the future of the West Indian conquests. There he achieved the great coup of getting himself appointed chief of a commission to sell lands in the new Ceded Island colonies on behalf of the government. For the next few years William was mostly in the West Indies. Much land was sold at generally high prices, while William secured for himself estates on St Vincent and Tobago. He won recognition for his services from the government, being appointed in 1768 Governor of Dominica, another of the islands annexed in 1763. In 1769 he was made a baronet.

In Kent, William Young had established himself in gentry society around Canterbury. In Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire, he gained entry into the circles of great territorial aristocrats, the Earl of Pembroke of Wilton House and Lord Temple, later the Marquis of Buckingham, of Stowe. The final seal on his rise into the highest levels of British society came in 1781, when King George III and Queen Charlotte, accompanied by the Prince of Wales, rode from Windsor Castle to visit the Youngs’ house at nearby Delaford, even though neither William, then in the West Indies, nor Elizabeth, at Bath, were there at the time. ‘Their Majesties’ were said to have gone over ‘every part of the house’, even closely scrutinising the books in the library, and to have conversed with the Young children. As a consequence, Mary, the published poet, was invited back to Windsor to present ‘a few occasional verses’.⁵⁰ Such an honour suggests that there were no limits to the social recognition that conspicuous West Indian wealth, if accompanied by pleasing manners, could not hope to attain. William Young seems to have developed a persona much more ingratiating than that of a ‘roaring rich West Indian’ that had marked his youth. ‘Conversation, talent and magnificence of temper are interesting to every body’, a newspaper wrote of him.⁵¹

By 1781, however, William’s good fortune had run out. The turning point came in the early the 1770s when the British Treasury felt it could no longer ignore the disparity between the large nominal sums raised for land sales in the new islands and what was actually being received in Britain. In response to their inquiries, Young resigned the Governorship of Dominica in 1773 and returned home, admitting that he owed the public £156,763. He put the value of his assets, mostly his West Indian plantations, at nearly twice that, but in a period of falling values for West Indian property he could not realise them. He therefore agreed to place his property in the hands of trustees, stipulating for a limited income for his family, until his debt was paid off. His debt to the government was not to be settled in his lifetime, but Young regained control over his property, returning to the West Indies in 1780 to manage it and to ward off the ill effects from French occupation of St Vincent and Tobago during the American Revolutionary War. Nearly all the rest of Young’s life was spent at St Vincent. He complained in 1784 that ‘nursed in the Lap of Fortune, he has grown old in Distress’. He was now suffering humiliations which ‘depress his Nature and make Life almost a burthen to him’.⁵² He died in 1788 in St Vincent, aged 64.

His eldest son, Sir William Young, the second baronet, seems to have inherited his father’s determination to cut a great figure, albeit in a rather different way, as a long-serving Member of Parliament and weighty participant in public affairs, rather than as the flamboyant adventurer, socialite and aesthete that the first Sir William had been. The second baronet is likely to be better known to historians than his father is, chiefly because of the leading role he played in opposing the abolition of the slave trade. He, but not his father, appears in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He inherited from his father debts of over £100,000, the major part of which were secured by mortgages on the West Indian plantations.⁵³ Like his father, the second baronet was a big spender. Eventually nearly all the West Indian estates were to pass to his creditors and he was to sell Delaford.

Sir William Young, first baronet, left his mark on St Vincent. A mountain and a small island are called after him. His great house at Calliaqua, The Villa, gives its name to a beach resort. Some legends about him are still current, such as the almost certainly untrue story that he obtained Young Island from the Carib chieftain Chatoyer in exchange for a horse. In Britain, however, little survives of the first baronet beyond a magnificent portrait of the family at Delaford, now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, painted by Johann Zoffany (Plate IV), with him in the centre, holding a cello and surrounded by his wife, holding a mandolin, and their children in what was known as Van Dyck costume, and a fine, if damaged, monument at Chartham in Kent.

acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his warmest gratitude to Hugh Carson for the photographs used for Plates I, II and III. Plate IV is reproduced by permission of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Canterbury Cathedral Archives most helpfully provided digital versions of material in the Flackton Scrapbook, Add MS 30.

endnotes

¹ R.B. Sheridan, ‘The Rise of a Colonial Gentry: A Case Study of Antigua’, Economic History Review, new ser., 13 (1961), 356.

² Sir Horace Mann to Horace Walpole, 31 August 1752, W. S. Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, 48 vols (New Haven, CT, 1938-83), 20, 331.

³ V. L. Oliver, History of the Island of Antigua, 3 vols (London, 1894-9), 3, 282.

⁴ General Evening Post, 10-17 February 1778.

⁵ T.F.T. Baker, ed., The Victoria County History – Middlesex, vol. 10, Hackney Parish (Oxford, 1995), pp. 161-2.

⁶ Royal Society MSS, EC/1747/18.

⁷ Mann to Walpole, 31 August 1752, Walpole Correspondence, 20, 330.

⁸ Her Horatio and Amanda, a Poem by a young Lady appeared in 1777.

⁹ Poems by Mrs G. Sewell (Egham and Chertsey, 1803), pp. 152-3.

¹⁰ Memorial to the Treasury, 14 December 1773, T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], TS 11/214.

¹¹ The chief source for this estimate is the newspaper advertisements for the sale of most of his properties which appeared in the London press at intervals in 1774-5.

¹² Accentuated by a long succession of dry seasons. See, A.J. George and G. Enfield, ‘Drought and Disaster in a Revolutionary Age: Colonial Antigua during the American Independence War’, Environment and History, 24 (2018), 209-35.

¹³ J. J. Dauxion Lavaysee, A Statistical, Commercial and Political Description of Venezuela, Trinidad, Margarita and Tobago (London, 1820), p. 390.

¹⁴ See TNA, PROB 11/1168250 and St Vincent Deed Book, 1787-8, Endangered Archives Project, https:/eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP688/1/1/34.

¹⁵ J-C. Nadin, La Mise en Valeur de l’Isle de Tabago (1763-1783) (Paris and The Hague, 1969), pp. 265-6.

¹⁶ Dauxion Lavaysee, Statistical Description, pp. 390-1.

¹⁷ D. Killingray, ‘Kent and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: A County Study, 1760s-1807’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 127 (2007), 109-14.

¹⁸ Edward Hasted, A History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 12 vols (Canterbury, 1797-1801), 7, 311.

¹⁹ Microfilm of fragments of Records of the Court of Common Pleas, Antigua, TNA, https://www.familysearch.org/catalog/16517.

²⁰ See note 6.

²¹ William Young (1749-1815); see, R.A. Austen-Leigh, ed., The Eton College Register 1753-1790 (Eton, 1921), p. 583.

²² Letter to W. Flackton, 2 August 1751, C[anterbury] C[athedral] A[rchives], Add MS 30/3.

²³ C. Greenwood, An Epitome of the County History ... vol. 1, County of Kent (London, 1838), pp. 399-400 with plate; see also, https//www.charlton-park.org/history.

²⁴ Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, Dcb/BTI/62/109.

²⁵ Inscription recorded in 1757, www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/monumental-inscriptions/Chartham.

²⁶ [Z. Cozens], A Tour through the Isle of Thanet, and some other parts of East Kent (London, 1793), pp. 217-18.

²⁷ R. Gunnis, ‘Signed Monuments in Kentish Churches’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 62 (1949), 80.

²⁸ A Catalogue of the ... Collection of Models &c. of Mr Michael Rysbrack ... which will be sold by Auction ... on 24th 25th January 1766 (British Library, C 119, b. 3, part ii, no. 62).

²⁹ Hasted, History of Kent, 7, 316; P. Parsons, The Monuments and Painted Glass of upwards of One Hundred Churches: Chiefly in the Eastern Parts of Kent (Canterbury, 1794), p. 97.

³⁰ For Young’s will, see note 14.

³¹ Kentish Gazette, 4 July 1788.

³² Allegation of Sir William Young, 14 August 1788, Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, Dcb/E/F Chartham St Mary/2.

³³ M.I. Webb, Michael Rysbrack, Sculptor (London, 1954), p. 175.

³⁴ Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4 vols in 2 (London, 1782), 4, 208.

³⁵ J. Newman, The Buildings of England, Kent: North-East and East (New Haven, CT, and London, 2013), p. 276. The Young monument is shown in plate 94.

³⁶ William Young, ed., Contemplatio Philosophica ... to which is prefixed a Life of the Author (London, 1793), p. 5.

³⁷ W.A. Scott Robertson, ‘Patricksborne Church and Bifrons’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 14 (1882), 251-2.

³⁸ To H. Walpole, 11 August 1752, Walpole Correspondence, 20, 327.

³⁹ See her letter to Flackton, 28 February 1747 (CCA, Add MS 30/2) and the draft of her verses endorsed, ‘This elegy set by WF 1747’ (CCA, Add MS 30/13). For Flackton, see Sarah Gray, ‘William Flackton, 1709-1799, Canterbury Bookseller and Musician’, in P. Isaac and B. McKay eds, The Mighty Engine. The Printing Press and its Impact (Winchester, 1999), pp. 121-30 and her biography of him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/72298. There is a small collection of his papers in Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Add MS 30.

⁴⁰ There is much on Young’s musical interests in D. Burrows and R. Dunhill, Music and Theatre in Handel’s World: The Family Papers of James Harris 1732-1780 (Oxford, 2002). Harris was a close friend of Young’s at Salisbury.

⁴¹ Letter to W. Flackton, 2 August 1751, CCA, Add MS 30/3.

⁴² Letter of 28 February 1760, CCA, Add MS 30/5.

⁴³ Tickets for the St Cecilia celebration of 1750 in ‘the Concert Room in the Dancing-School Yard’ could be obtained from William Flackton’s shop (Kentish Post or Canterbury News-Letter, 14-17 November 1750) There is a valuable chapter on music in eighteenth-century English provincial centres, including some material on Canterbury at a later period, in J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 1997), pp. 531-72.

⁴⁴ Letter of 26 January 1770, CCA, Add MS 30/9.

⁴⁵ Exchange of letters, 10, 26 January 1770, CCA, Add MSS 30/8, 30/9.

⁴⁶ Letter of 28 February 1760, CCA, Add MS 30/5.

⁴⁷ J.M. Kelly, ‘Making a Palladian Country House: Trafalgar Park and its First Owners’, https://www.jasonmkelly.com/2014/07/08making-a-palladian-country-house-trafalgar-park-and-its-first-owners.

⁴⁸ For a fuller account see, P.J. Marshall, ‘A Polite and Commercial People in the Caribbean: The British in St Vincent’, in E. Chalus and P. Gauci, eds, Revisiting the Polite and Commercial People: Essays in Georgian Politics, Society and Culture in Honour of Professor Paul Langford (Oxford, 2019), pp. 173-90.

⁴⁹ For the expansionist ambitions of Antigua planters, see the address of the Assembly, 15 April 1762, TNA, CO 9/26.

50 F.M. Bladon, ed., The Diaries of Robert Fulke Greville (London, 1930), pp. 51-2; ‘Bon Ton Intelligence’, Whitehall Evening Post, 8-12 January 1782.

⁵¹ World, 26 September 1787.

⁵² Printed Narrative, Case and Memorial, 28 June 1784, TNA, TS 11/214, ff. 146-8.

⁵³ The second baronet set out the debts he inherited in a Memorandum of his dealings with his British merchants of 20 March 1810, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Young collection, MS W. Ind. t. 1(6), cols. 2-3.