Under date January 5, 1660–61, Pepys wrote: “The great Tom Fuller come to me to desire a kindness for a friend of his who hath a mind to go to Jamaica with these two ships that are going, which I promised to do.” The friend, Peter Beckford, quitted England in search of adventures, and settled in Jamaica, where he rose to considerable wealth as a planter. He did not, as Bridges suggests, fly from Cromwell’s tyranny, for the Restoration had taken place before he left England. In 1663 the name of Beckford appears amongst the planters of St.-Thomas-in-the-Vale. Colonel Peter Beckford, a son of the immigrant, was elected member of the Assembly under Lord Carlisle, who must have been—if we are to believe Nichols in his “Herald and Genealogist” and Burke in his “History of the Commoners”—a man of somewhat humble estate in spite of his high ancestry, for they tell us that Sir Thomas Beckford, sheriff of London, and Colonel Peter Beckford, governor of Jamaica, were brothers—both sons of a tailor of Maidenhead. Lord Braybrooke, in his notes to Pepy’s Diary, says that Sir Thomas and Colonel Peter were uncle and nephew, the former being a son of the tailor. Colonel Beckford was elected member for St. Catherine in the Assembly which met on April 26, 1675. He afterwards served in several Assemblies for the parishes of St. James, Clarendon and St. Dorothy. He was then called to the Council and became its president. On the death of the Governor, Major-General Selwyn, on April 5, 1702, when the Legislature was sitting, Colonel Beckford, who had a dormant commission of old date, caused himself to be proclaimed lieutenant-governor. In his speech to the Assembly he said, “I have gone through most of the offices of this Island, though with no great applause, yet without complaint.” The manner of his death has been already narrated in the account of St. Catherine. His personal wealth, which was said to have amounted to £478,000, and his real estate to as much more, gained for him great influence with the planters. This wealth was inherited by his son Peter, the speaker of the Assembly above mentioned. His second son, Thomas, married “en secondes noces” Mary Ballard (apparently a cousin) and had three sons; the eldest, Ballard Beckford, who married a daughter of John Clark, Governor of New York, was expelled from the House “during the continuance of this Assembly” in 1739, for adultery with the wife of another member, Manning, the member for Kingston. At his death his estate was in debt, and an Act was passed to enable certain properties to be sold. The second, Thomas, married a daughter of Robert Byndloss, the brother-in-law of Sir Henry Morgan, of buccaneering fame, and their daughter and sole heiress married firstly John Palmer, and secondly Edward Long, the historian. Thomas Beckford himself, who sat in the Assembly for St. Catherine, and was elected speaker in 1727 and 1728, died in 1731, “slain, it is believed, in an