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The fortunes of the Lascelles/Harewood family of Yorkshire provide an example of wealth creation for the successful (and fortunate) British investors in the Atlantic slave system. But was the Harewood money made from trade, or from plantation ownership, or both? This essay seeks to explain, and to answer the question, "What happens to money made from slavery when returned to Britain?"
I
Harewood House is one of England's great stately homes, a major architectural gem some ten miles north of industrial Leeds, and half-way to the genteel eighteenth-century spa town of Harrogate. This large Palladian building affords panoramic views across parkland and a lake, and is fringed by sweeping lawns and gardens, all landscaped by England's foremost eighteenth-century gardener, Lancelot "Capability Brown". The house (though that word does scant justice to the building) was designed by the eminent architect John Carr of York and renovated by the Scot, Robert Adams, who "tickled it up so as to dazzle the eyes of the squire". The foundations were laid in 1759 and the house was habitable by 1771. Thereafter it rapidly filled with furnishings and fittings crafted by England's greatest furniture-maker, Thomas Chippendale, a local man who, by then, was working from his London workshop in St Martin's Lane.1 Harewood House was soon home to what most critics accept to be Chippendale's finest work. More gradually, the house also became a treasure trove of paintings, furnishings, statuary and tapestries from across Europe, eventually creating one of the finest private art collections in Britain. Today, Harewood House attracts a third of a million visitors in the summer,2 part of the extraordinary phenomenon that has converted swathes of historic Britain into museum exhibits.
From the 1770s to the present, Harewood House has been home to the Harewood family; the current Earl of Harewood is first cousin to the Queen. The house and the family share the same name, and form a dynasty that occupies an elevated rank within that distinctive hierarchy of aristocracy and royalty that constitutes the most rarefied elite within the British social system. Yet it was not always so. If we push back the story of the Harewoods a mere century from the apogee of their lateeighteenth-century wealth, that is, if we examine...