On 21 October 1800 the Buffalo left Sydney Cove for Norfolk Island, to deliver the Irish prisoners, now punished by exile there, and from there for London, with retiring Governor Hunter aboard. Norfolk Island was at that time under the command of Major Foveaux, and there, too, the Irish planned a rising—for Christmas Day. Five soldiers were even recruited—two of them Freemasons in an age when Freemasonry was associated with Irish, French and American republicanism. At a fi nal meeting it was decided that offi cialdom’s women and children could be put to death and a conscience-stricken Irishman presented himself next morning at Foveaux’s house ‘in much agitation’. Two ringleaders were taken from church parade and summarily hanged within two hours. More than twenty were flogged; the fi ve soldiers amongst them were drummed out of the corps.
After the initial Irish rebelliousness was crushed, the colony was quiet, said King, newly installed as governor, though the arrival of the Anne meant the number of rebels in New South Wales who, as King described it, had never dishonoured their oath as United Irishmen was close to six hundred: a regiment of disaffected Irish ‘only waiting an opportunity to put their diabolical plans in execution’.
Another ship, the Atlas, had left Cork with the former sheriff of that city, Sir Henry Hayes Browne, aboard. Hayes Browne was said by some to be a United Irishman, but was more probably an eccentric, and an opponent of autocracy. Hayes Browne had signed the warrants of the first Irish convicts shipped directly from Cork in 1792, and now had been sentenced himself to transportation as a middle-aged widower with many children for attempting the abduction of a Quaker heiress, Mary Pike, and conducting a spurious marriage with her for the sake of her fortune. The marriage was not consummated, which made wits declare that though he took up his Pike, he was not United. To the disgust of the surgeon John Jamison, Hayes Browne travelled in the cabin section of the ship. On the overcrowded prison deck, which stank terribly from the fermenting bilges, and which was so lacking in oxygen that lights would go out, were the plainer criminals and Croppies, the United Irish rank and file, once more underfed and under-supplied, and chained in their bunks.
The captain, Brooks, was guilty of inventing a mutiny that never occurred so that he could put into the Cape of Good Hope purely for his own trading benefit. His neglect of the convict deck contributed to the deaths of sixty-three male and two women convicts, but he escaped punishment after his ship arrived at Sydney Cove in July 1802. On the Hercules, which left Cork in late 1801, there had been a true and horrifically responded-to uprising in which thirteen convicts were shot or bludgeoned to death.
In Sydney, King called a Vice-Admiralty court together to try the captain of Hercules, Luckyn Betts, and to perhaps refer charges against him to Great Britain. But the Vice-Admiralty courts, though making exacting and fair enquiries, nonetheless had a record of going softly on ships’ masters. In a sense these reprehensible captains were not in the end as great a worry to administrators as were the rebels their ships carried. And for the British authorities the issue was this: if they began sending masters to gaol for crimes against humanity, including manslaughter or murder, they might not be able to fi nd captains and shipowners willing to commit their vessels to transporting convicts.
To the Irish, such an outcome to enquiries on their behalf, as distinct from enquiries into their own activities, merely confirmed their belief that their tormentors would always go unpunished under the Crown.
The words recur in Governor King’s dispatches—‘diabolical’, ‘seditious’, ‘mutinous’. To Governor King the intractable Irish Croppies represented three forms of evil—they spoke their own language; they were by and large Papists, willing in his mind to use the confessional as a mechanism of plotting; and they had been infused with the Jacobinism of their leaders in the failed Irish uprising. And he had to deal with Irish leaders too, gentlemen rebels who had surrendered to the amnesty offered by the authorities and who had travelled in the cabins, men like General Joseph Holt of Wexford, a determined, fiery and resourceful Presbyterian United Irishman.
King reported to the Duke of Portland, Secretary of State for the Colonies, that the mutinous behaviour of the Irish convicts had not ceased even after some of these principal United Irish were sent to Norfolk Island in 1801. And the rebelliousness was ongoing. ‘Although everything was ready for general insurrection and massacre yet as no overt act had taken place, I did not conceive myself justifiable in adopting more rigorous measures.’
The hapless and inoffensive priest referred to King on the Anne, Father Peter O’Neil, was in reality not diabolical or seditious at all. He had been parish priest of Ballymacoda, a rural area in Cork, an area which provided considerable support amongst the sons of small tenants for the 1798 uprising. Father O’Neil was summarily arrested, and without trial given nearly three hundred lashes with a cat of wire to make him inform on his parishioners. His refusal to do so had guaranteed his imprisonment and transportation. The Lord Lieutenant in Dublin Castle, hearing of O’Neil’s rough treatment, signed an order of release, but by the time it reached Cork the Anne had sailed.
Perhaps King’s low opinion of O’Neil and the other Anne convicts was based in part on an uprising amongst the convicts which had occurred in the Atlantic while the prison decks were being fumigated by small, controlled explosions of gunpowder and most of the United Irishmen were on deck. The assumed leader of the revolt, Manus Sheehy, was executed by firing squad on the maindeck.
King dealt with the imagined threat O’Neil was to the good order of New South Wales by shipping him off to Norfolk Island. There he met up with that other priest-prisoner, Father Harold. The Dublin order for release would catch up with Peter O’Neil on Norfolk Island by the end of 1802, and enabled him to go home.
That the United Irish were disaffected was undeniable, but King was aware that half the problem he had inherited came from the improper way they had been tried, imprisoned and transported. ‘I beg to submit to your Grace’s consideration,’ wrote King to the Duke of Portland, ‘the situation of several persons who were sent from Ireland during the late rebellion, many of whom without any sentence being sent here against them.’ He mentioned men whose behaviour was uniformly good and highly deserving. Father Dixon was one, and also the Reverend Henry Fulton, a middle-aged, progressive Church of Ireland clergyman from Tipperary. An Englishman by birth, Fulton had uttered sentiments considered seditious in the inflamed atmosphere of the time, though his friends claimed that his confession had been extorted ‘by fear of a species of torture at that time too common’. This was probably flogging, the pitchcap— pouring hot pitch on the prisoner’s head—or repeated half-hangings.
Fulton spent some years on Norfolk Island, where his Christianity showed itself less punitive than that brand pursued by Parramatta’s chaplain, Samuel Marsden. He would settle in well, and stay permanently in New South Wales.
To the governor, in the meantime, the Loyal Associations recruited from Sydney to the Hawkesbury to serve as a militia were a comfort—‘so many sureties to be of peace and tranquillity’. One of the sergeants of the Loyal Association who kept a musket ready on his farm along the Parramatta River, where he lived with his plentiful offspring and his common-law wife, Sarah Bellamy, was James Bloodworth, founder builder and brick-maker, ready to defend the sovereignty of the King who had transported him.
As for the gentlemen offi cers, King’s garrison, who treated him—as they had Hunter—with increasing contumely as he tried to regulate their trade, still had no fort to which to retire to resist a French regiment of the kind that, appearing from nowhere, perhaps charging in from the Heads, perhaps marching up the old Frenchman’s track from Botany Bay, would combine with the Irish and devour the population. Distance and unimportance were the governor’s chief protection from the likelihood that United Irish gentry might be in France even then, persuading Napoleon to send a regiment to Sydney to vanquish the not quite martial Rum Corps, as the citizenry had long called the New South Wales Corps.
/> TRADE AND THE IRISH
In the narrowness of the Sydney flood plain settlement, amongst the population of fallen convicts and quasi-gentlemen, there was suffi cient fear and rancour, posturing and paranoia to fill a full-fledged nation, or the court of a Caesar. The tenuousness of the modest society on this charming if less than fertile strand of earth did not diminish the self-seriousness of the gentlemen at all. Indeed such impulses were enhanced here, since all seemed at stake.
The governor was an autocrat according to the writ of his commission, and thus the scope of his power could be offensive to colonial citizens. His first concern, now continuity of supplies seemed assured, was to keep spending in check—no Secretary of State for War and the Colonies ever dismissed a colonial governor for reducing a budget. King was happy to tell the Duke of Portland that he had reduced the number of public ration books by fi ve hundred. The next concern was the trade in liquor, and the third and not unrelated was located in the turbulent breast of one person, John Macarthur, the focus of resistance, of whom Governor Hunter had previously also complained. Macarthur had earlier put up his property for sale to the government and been politely refused by King. It was curious he did so, but the temptation to go home to England was not a stranger to him. Yet he treated any, even the smallest, attack on his property as if it were an assault on his person.
The Scottish Martyr, Dr Margarot, despite being ill, offered his intelligence on the sins of the offi cers, including Macarthur, to King. The governor, however, did not deign to receive what could have been excellent information.
Not long after, Margarot complained to the Undersecretary in London: ‘I was roused in the middle of the night by two serjeants, under false and frivolous pretences. I complained the next day.’ Then, at King’s muster, Mrs Margarot was compelled to turn up for the count like a common convict woman. ‘No man of but even decent education and behaviour could have expected her to attend his levy of female prostitutes and thieves . . . Governor King, however, having laid in a great stock of irascibility towards me, thought proper to vent some of it upon his intended victim, and the next day issued a warrant for apprehending and committing me to gaol as a vagrant.’ Hunter, still in the colony, intervened and King’s rage was great and diffi cult to appease.
Maurice Margarot was applying for redress and protection to save not only himself, he said in his letter to London, but the colony. ‘The first error of ministry was suffering Major Grose to succeed to that worthy man Gov. Phillip; but the second, and by far the most fatal, is suffering a man like Governor King to succeed Governor Hunter. The fi rst error introduced corruption, but the second will most likely end in ruin.’
CHAPTER 10
A NEW VINEGAR HILL
In the sweltering January of 1804 news arrived in New South Wales of the Irish rebellion led by Robert Emmet in the high summer of 1803 in Dublin. Emmet, wearing a uniform of green and white, had led his followers against Dublin Castle. On the way they had met the carriage of the Chief Justice and his nephew, and piked them to death. The force degenerated thereafter, and Robert Emmet withdrew to the Wicklow Mountains. He, like Irish rebels before him, had been negotiating with the French. The Scottish Martyr, Maurice Margarot, keeping his journal in his little hut in Sydney Cove, already knew about all this from various British radical friends.
When captured, Emmet was hung, drawn and quartered—literally, his body being torn into parts by four horses pulling in different directions. The news spread through the Irish community in the colony. It upset the former sheriff of Cork, Sir Henry Hayes Browne, who had just been released from a six-month sentence in prison for insulting the governor. Mary Turley, the Irish de facto wife of a Parramatta officer, coming down from that town to Sydney Cove in a boat, met an Irishman she knew, Sir Henry Hayes Browne’s former servant John Sullivan, who said that if the offi cer himself had been in the boat he would sooner cut his head off than eat his dinner, and that he hoped the time would shortly come when he would have an opportunity of doing it. Mary Turley charged Sullivan and one of the other boatmen with threatening language. But four witnesses said they had not heard Sullivan make these comments. Turley was charged with perjury but acquitted.
In Parramatta also lived a French prisoner-of-war, François Durinault and his transported United Irish wife, Winifred Dowling. Durinault had given his word of honour that he would not attempt to escape. Joseph Holt called on Winifred and her husband in late January. Durinault told Holt that four men from Castle Hill would call on him later in the day to ask him to lead a planned convict insurrection. Winifred scolded her husband ‘that if she saw any more whispering or anything suspicious she would quit the place, for it was by such means the misfortune of her family as well as those of Ireland were occasioned’. Holt warned the Frenchman not to have anything to do with the plotters and promised that he himself would not. He would later claim that he would be a number of times approached to lead the uprising, but always said that with his wife and children in the colony he was not willing to jeopardise them.
Nonetheless, at a junction somewhere between Parramatta and the Hawkes-bury, a number of Irish messengers met each other, carrying intelligence about the uprising. These men were talking about deliverance, redemption, the validation of all they stood for. Yet one of the Irishmen felt very much like Winifred Dowling that rebellion had been the cause of all his misery, and he passed the news that there was an imminent and serious uprising on to the overseer of Captain Abbott. The overseer was a United Irishman from the Atlas, who after great thought passed it on to his master. Samuel Marsden, Parramatta’s man of Christ, was informed and set off—as in 1800—for Sydney to notify the governor and request more ammunition for Parramatta. In any case, it was a sort of open secret that an uprising was about to take place.
The Munster men, the men from the south and south-west of Ireland, were heavily involved, it was said. Joseph Holt, having rejected leadership of any uprising, stayed at his liberal employer William Cox’s house, Brush Farm, and two guards were set, both of them United Irishmen, but loyal to Holt.
At seven o’clock as darkness fell on Saturday 3 March, a convict hut at Castle Hill, to the north-west of Sydney, burst into flames as a signal that the rising had begun. Two hundred convicts at Castle Hill were guarded only by a few convict constables, most of whom joined the rising. The cry of ‘Death or Liberty’ was heard as they searched for the resident flogger, Robert Doogan, and a number of hated constables. Fortunately for their targets, there were a number of misfi res, and no one was killed. Led by the United Irishman Philip Cunningham, the rebels scoured the area for arms, and at one house they found weapons and a keg of spirits.
The plan was that the Castle Hill convicts would march to the Hawkesbury where they would collect other disaffected men and form a force of over one thousand. The combined force would then return to Castle Hill and go on to Parramatta which ‘two well-known disaffected persons’, unspecified, would assist them to capture. They would plant the Tree of Liberty at Government House there and proceed to Sydney to embark on ships which would be waiting for them. ‘Now boys’, cried Philip Cunningham, ‘liberty or death!’
Cunningham had been the overseer of the government stonemasons at Castle Hill, and had spent twelve months building himself a stone house, as if he foresaw a future in New South Wales. But now he led the Castle Hill convicts to the top of a nearby hill where they divided into parties to raid the surrounding settlements for more arms and volunteers. They raided the convict stations at Pennant Hills and Seven Hills. They took settlers prisoner. One of the settlers escaped and galloped into Parramatta to give the alarm at about 9 p.m. He burst into Samuel Marsden’s parlour where the Marsdens and Mrs Macarthur were sitting at supper. (John Macarthur at that time was in exile in England.) ‘He told us that the Croppies had risen, that they were at my Seven Hills farm, and that numbers were approaching Parramatta,’ Elizabeth Macarthur would later write.
To the Marsdens’ and Elizabeth’s minds wou
ld have come accounts of Croppy atrocities in Wexford. The women would have feared being ravished and piked. For the next hour the drums at the barracks beat to arms and the settlers headed there. They could see the flames at Castle Hill ten kilometres north. A dispatch rider was sent off to alert the governor and the main body of the New South Wales Corps that Parramatta expected an invasion of four hundred United Irishmen. Mr and Mrs Marsden and Elizabeth Macarthur, with the wife and children of Captain Abbott and of the deputy commissary, went down to the river and took boat for Sydney. Even then Elizabeth was full of fear. ‘You can have no idea what a dreadful night it was and what we suffered in our minds.’
Parramatta’s garrison of soldiers was expecting the rebels to attack and try to capture the arsenal. Instead, on a hill three and a half kilometres from Parramatta, the ex-soldiers and United Irishmen Cunningham and William Johnson drilled their men, looking down towards Parramatta lying in its bowl by the river. From here they could control the road between Parramatta and the Hawkesbury.
In Sydney the beating of drums started a little before midnight, with the firing of cannon. Major Johnston was fetched from his house in Annandale, a few kilometres west of the town of Sydney, and soon after Governor King rode up and told him five hundred to six hundred Croppies had taken up arms and that the call was to march to Parramatta. The governor got to Parramatta quickest, at four o’clock in the morning, and told the anxious men of the garrison that Major Johnston was on his way. A little after five o’clock Johnston arrived with his troops. The soldiers breakfasted on rum and bread. After a twenty-minute rest they marched to Government House, Parramatta.
King’s latest information was that the rebels had recently been at the park gate near Parramatta and had retreated to Toongabbie, the work depot nearby. Johnston was to go after them. He sought and got permission to fi re at anyone who attempted to run when called on to stop. King also signed off on martial law for a region north and south of the river and westwards.
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