A younger brother of the Lord Mayor, Richard Beckford, who was M.P. for Bristol, had a natural son, William Beckford, who visited his father’s Jamaica estates. His mother was Elizabeth Hay. He married his cousin, Charlotte Hay, daughter of Thomas Hay, formerly Island Secretary of Jamaica; and he impaled with his father’s arms those of the Hays—on a field argent, three escutcheons gules: but in preference to the bend sinister, the usual mark of illegitimacy, he added the less-known badge, the fimbria or border. Richard Beckford by his will trusted to the justice of his brother Julines to convey—to trustees in trust for his reputed son William—Roaring River and such other estates in Jamaica as had come into Julines’ possession by virtue of an agreement between them, and accordingly he bequeathed these properties to his reputed son William, who, on his coming of age, executed a deed in 1765, which was registered at Spanish Town in 1766, a deed to bar the entail in favour of another, who, however, subsequently re-conveyed it to him. He is therein described as “of Balls, in the County of Hartford (_sic_), Esq.” In a later deed, recorded in 1773, he is described as late of Balls, but now of Summerley (_sic_) Hall. One of his earliest works was “Remarks on the Situation of Negroes in Jamaica,” 1788; and he published in 1794 a “History of France from the most early records to the death of Louis XVI,” the early part of which is by Beckford, and the more modern by an anonymous Englishman who had been some time resident in Paris. But the work by which he is best known is “A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica; with remarks upon the cultivation of the Sugar-cane, throughout the different seasons of the year, and chiefly considered in a picturesque point of view; also observations and reflections upon what would probably be the consequences of an abolition of the slave-trade and of the emancipation of the Slaves,” published in two volumes in London in 1790. The title fully describes the contents. It is a work of no considerable merit, and displaying none of the genius which might have been expected of a near relative of the author of “Vathek.” From the dedication we learn that the author enjoyed the friendship of the Duke of Dorset, to whom it is addressed, and from the preface that the work was written in the Fleet prison—a strange residence for one who would claim kinship with the owner of Fonthill. His position was, he says, the consequence of “imprudences which I might have prevented, and of misfortunes which I could not foresee”—a subject which is constantly referred to throughout the book. Besides suffering from the great hurricane of 1780, he was evidently deceived by some friend for whom he had become security.