Raise a toast to Texas history, on the streets of London town
LONDON — In the city of Westminster, a block from St. James Palace, is Berry Bros. & Rudd, the oldest wine and spirit merchant in Great Britain. The multi-story brick building at 3 St. James St., where the business was founded in 1698, has been a brothel and a notorious gambling den, while the courtyard out back was the venue in centuries past for bear-baiting, cock-fighting and London’s last public duel. The exiled Napoleon III lived in the building while plotting a return to Paris.
In more recent years, relatively speaking, Berry Bros. & Rudd rented out an upper floor of the old building to another questionable tenant, a gaggle of Texans. From 1842 to 1845, the space above the shop was the Embassy of the Republic of Texas.
Visiting daughter Rachel in Ely, the small town near Cambridge where she’s lived for several years, I knew I had to make my Lone Star London pilgrimage when the TV mysteriously came to life one afternoon a few days ago during a cooking show. Featured was London chef James Martin, who was preparing fried chicken, Texas-style, at South Fork Ranch, J.R. Ewing’s fictional spread near Plano. Martin’s dish, marinated in a concoction of buttermilk, mustard and “a garlic the size of a peach,” looked really good, although it’s so hot over here this summer that a cold chicken salad would have been more appropriate.
I could argue, I suppose, that the Texas-style heat (minus the Texas-style air conditioning) is apt, since our ties to the Brits are long and deep. According to the Handbook of Texas, the first Englishmen arrived on our shores in the 16th century, although not of their own choosing. They were three seamen set adrift by English slave trader and naval commander John Hawkins near Tampico, Mexico, after a battle with the Spanish at Veracruz. In the spirit of peripatetic Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca, the seamen, David Ingram, Richard Twide and Richard Browne, allegedly walked across what would become South Texas as they trudged northward in 1568.
Scattered English farmers and businessmen may have settled in Texas by 1800, and at least six Englishmen were awarded empresario contracts in the 1820s. None succeeded in
enticing families to their would-be colonies, but in the 1830s, several Englishmen tried again, with limited success. John Charles Beales’s ill-fated Rio Grande Colony included a few English families, as did the Peters Colony on the Red River in 1841. An Englishman named William Kennedy failed to fulfill a contract to bring 600 families to Texas, but others arrived after reading his book, Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Prospects of the Republic of Texas (1841).
Meanwhile, the progress and prospects of the struggling, young Republic were very much in question. In an effort to build international support for the new nation, President Sam Houston dispatched Dr. Ashbel Smith, a distinguished physician who served as secretary of state, to be ambassador to the Court of St. James. England voiced concerns to Smith about slavery in Texas and the potential threat to British trading partner, Mexico, if the United States annexed the Republic, as was widely expected. England could see the two countries going to war over Texas, the U.S. vanquishing Mexico and likely seizing even more of the nation’s northern reaches.
In 1842, a representative of the British government came up with a couple of proposals for the Texans: Abolish slavery and we’ll reimburse you for whatever abolition costs you . Or, if you don’t cotton to that idea, how ‘bout this: Divide Texas at the Colorado River into two states. Eastern Texas can be slave-holding, western Texas free-soil.
Early British influence
As historian J.L. Worley told the story in a July 1905 edition of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, an anti-slavery convention met in London in the summer of 1843, with the subject of slavery in Texas on the agenda. Houston attorney J.P. Andrews spoke in favor of abolition, but Ambassador Smith told Prime Minister Aberdeen that the Houstonian in no sense represented the people of Texas. Smith explained to Lord Aberdeen that it would be impossible for Texas to accept any sort of a British subsidy for the abolition of slavery “without a greater sacrifice of national dignity than she was willing to make.”
Texas dignity may have remained intact, but Worley theorized that those tentative probings and discussion about abolition in the fledgling Republic hastened American annexation.
British interests did not wane after Texas became the largest state in the union. By the late 1880s, British investors directly controlled more than 20 million acres of Panhandle ranch land, including the famed XIT Ranch. Concerned that foreign interests were monopolizing Texas lands, populist Gov. James Stephen Hogg signed the Alien Land Law, which prohibited nonAmericans from owning land unless they became U.S. citizens. Even though the law was later modified and did not prohibit land ownership by foreign corporations, British investments declined as the 19th century became the 20th. You could argue, though, that the British left their mark on the state’s proud ranching heritage. Barbed wire. Steel windmills. Deep water wells. Improved breeds of cattle. The Brits take credit.
Back on St. James Street, a block away from the Tudor palace King Henry VIII built on the site of a leper colony in 1531, Texas diplomats found themselves superfluous after 1845. They shuttered the legation, maybe drank a toast to Texas at Berry Bros. & Rudd and headed home. They also stiffed their wine-merchant landlord for 160 pounds.
Texas debt paid in full
A bourbon whiskey on the Berry Bros. & Rudd shelves called “The Texas Legation” commemorates the brief Texan presence on St. James Street, if not the ignominious exit. So does a gold-plated plaque in the alley beside the wine shop. Receptionist Emma Rogers told Rachel and me earlier this week that Texans now and then make the pilgrimage to 3 St. James Street, among them a youngster who made a rubbing of the plaque recently for his Texas history class.
During the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986, 26 buckskinattired members of the nowdefunct Anglo-Texan Society visited Berry Brothers & Rudd with the express purpose of restoring the Lone Star State’s credit-worthy reputation. Society members — whose founding president, by the way, was the esteemed novelist Graham Greene — settled with great flourish the long-standing debt.
Knowing that our fiscal sin had been absolved, we two Texans stood a little taller this week when we opened the heavy wooden doors at 3 St. James Street and stepped inside history, history as rich and venerable as a bottle of vintage red residing on a cellar shelf below the sloping wooden floor at our feet. A bit later in the day, Rachel and I drank a toast — to Texas, of course, and to bills paid, eventually.