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such aristocratic blood. Codrington also appears to have had Royalist sympathies, in contrast to the likes of Drax, Middleton and the other earliest planters, who instinctively took against Charles I’s ‘personal rule’ and pro-Catholic leanings. Nevertheless, sometime in the late 1630s, Codrington married Frances Drax, sister of James and William, creating an important alliance between the two families. In 1640 their first son was born, also called Christopher. This son was destined to be at one time the most important Englishman in the Americas. Soon afterwards, Codrington the first, his father, started acquiring land and took up a place on the island’s council. A second son, John Codrington, followed a few years later.
The bitter and bloody Civil War in England brought many more families of the ilk of the Codringtons to Barbados, particularly after the defeats of the Royalists at Naseby and Langport in the summer of 1645. Leadership of the ‘Cavalier expatriates’ was quickly assumed by Humphrey Walrond and his brother Edward from a wealthy landed West Country family. Humphrey, at this time in his mid-forties, had been given up as a hostage at the surrender of the Royalist enclave of Bridgwater in July 1645. He was imprisoned, but then released on agreement that he pay a huge fine. Instead, Walrond sold up his estates and, together with this brother Edward and son George, who had lost an arm fighting for Charles I, fled to Barbados.
Also captured at Bridgwater was 22-year-old Major William Byam. Like Codrington, he would become the founder of a great West Indian dynasty, and he too claimed distinguished blood. One of his ancestors, an Earl of Hereford, was supposedly one of the Knights of the Round Table. His uncle was Charles II’s personal chaplain. Byam was imprisoned by the Parliamentarians in the Tower of London, but then given a pass ‘to go beyond the seas’. He, too, headed for Barbados, together with his wife Dorothy, who not only boasted royal connections, but was also, according to a French priest who met her some seven years later, ‘one of the most beautiful women ever seen’.
These new arrivals brought an aristocratic and metropolitan sophistication to the small island, as well as money and credit. Some bought up plantations, others acted as factors for the Dutch shippers who dominated Barbados’s trade. They also brought a new attitude to the top echelons of island society – a sumptuous, showy style of living, where their extravagance and taste were there for everyone else to see and admire.
In April 1646, the besieged city of Exeter surrendered to Parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax. Amongst the captured Royalists was 27-year-old Thomas Modyford, a barrister, the son of a prosperous Exeter merchant and mayor of the city. Appointed by the King as a Commissioner for Devon, he was part of the Royalist delegation negotiating the surrender of the city. Fairfax remembered that Modyford ‘demeaned himself with much civility and mildness, expressed a more than ordinary care for easing the country, and for its preservation from oppression, and showed activity and forwardness to expedite the treaty for the surrender’. Such pragmatism and tact would serve Modyford extremely well during his subsequent spectacular career in the West Indies.
Modyford was fined £35 but escaped imprisonment. He decided that he was ‘now willing to shift’ and, like many of his fellow defeated Royalists, determined on a new start in the West Indies. But for Modyford, it was not the hopeful voyage of servants or the poor but a well-organised and determined act of colonisation. Modyford’s brother-in-law was Thomas Kendall, a wealthy and influential London merchant with experience of the Caribbean trade. The two men now formed a partnership, and in the summer of 1647 two ships were dispatched, one from Plymouth, carrying ‘men, victuals and all utensils fitted for a Plantation’, the second, the Kendall-owned