Arthur Phillip

by Michael Pembroke

  This agreeable but subdued lifestyle came abruptly to an end on a particularly cold night in February 1808. Phillip and Isabella had only been in Bennett Street for just over a year. During the night Phillip suffered a paralytic stroke, losing the entire use of his right side, both his arm and leg. He was approaching 70 years of age and had lived longer than many of the men who had shaped his life. His early patrons Michael Everitt and Augustus Hervey had died at the ages of 60 and 55 years respectively. And of his close friends and colleagues with whom he was associated in the great experiment of New South Wales, Gidley King would die in a few months’ time at the age of 50; Collins would die two years later at the age of 54; and Nepean would die at the age of 69. Sydney was already dead. Only the robust Hunter would live to the grand age of 83.

  Understandably, the stroke caused Isabella to become distraught. And in the blackness of night there must have been confusion, commotion and probably panic among the servants. Early in the morning, Isabella sent for Jemima Powell, begging her to request the trusted Hutton Cooper to come at once. When Jemima and Miss Fanny arrived shortly afterwards, they found Isabella ‘as mad as a March hare’. Jemima went in to see the poor admiral and was distressed by what she observed. The ladies feared he would not recover. Phillip’s paralysis was on the right side and was therefore a function of left brain damage. His speech is likely to have been affected, but contemporary accounts make no mention of it. He was, however, ‘very much altered’.

  From late March visitors from out of town commenced to arrive. The loyal Henry Waterhouse was the first to see Phillip. Then came Gidley King, himself feeble with gout. Afterwards he wrote to his son, Phillip Parker King, whom he had proudly named after Phillip, informing him that the admiral ‘may linger on some years under his present infirmity, but from his age, a great reprieve cannot be expected’. In September Gidley King visited again, a week before his own death, this time informing his son that Phillip ‘is quite a cripple … but his intellects are very good, and his spirits are what they always were’. Hutton Cooper attended – to ‘bleed’ the patient, it seems. Bleeding was one of those treatments that was thought to be a cure for almost everything. And Phillip became sentimental, more than once crying violently and kissing Miss Fanny’s hand two or three times.

  Phillip may have had some good fortune, however. Depending on the location of the affected brain cells, damage caused by a stroke may turn out to be temporary. Sometimes the cells resume functioning or reorganise themselves. Occasionally stroke survivors experience an unanticipated recovery. Symptoms such as paralysis, blindness, memory loss, aphasia, loss of vision, numbness, confusion and even deafness can recede. This is what appears to have happened to Phillip. After eighteen months, there was a marked improvement in his health. Mobility and sociability returned and he was on his feet again, despite Gidley King’s pessimistic prognosis and notwithstanding Hutton Cooper’s almost certainly unhelpful ‘bleeding’. But the risk of recurrence of stroke remained – a stroke survivor is always the most vulnerable.

  In late October 1809, at the celebrations to mark the 50th year of the reign of George III, Phillip and Isabella stepped out one evening, calling on Jemima Powell and Miss Fanny, presumably at Milsom Street. Phillip even went upstairs. In November he and Isabella travelled to Oxford. And they now entertained more often, receiving visits and making up a foursome at cards after dinner. Casino seemed to be their game of choice. In May 1810, they even received Jemima Powell and Miss Fanny as house guests in their home for four days. Twelve months later Miss Fanny’s diary records Phillip and Isabella ‘strolling’ in the Circus. And in June 1811, Phillip’s health was sufficiently robust to allow him to undertake with Isabella a two-month summer holiday at Clifton near Bristol – from which they did not return until late August.

  There are no more direct accounts of Phillip but in 1812 the Naval Chronicle published an extensive biographical memoir about him. Among other things, it recorded his service on the 90-gun Union under Captain Everitt between August 1757 and November 1758. This was not official information, for Phillip’s name does not appear in the ship’s muster book and Phillip’s service in that period is otherwise a blank. As Everitt was long dead, the source of the information must have been Phillip himself who, one might reasonably infer, was consulted about his entry and was well enough in 1812 and sufficiently interested to assist in setting the record straight.

  During the same period, Phillip appears to have developed and maintained a connection with Francis Greenway, the architect who was later responsible for some of the earliest and most important public buildings in colonial Sydney. History does not reveal the reason or the circumstances, but it appears that Phillip was friendly with the much younger Greenway, whom he may have met in Clifton where Phillip and Isabella holidayed during the previous summer. Greenway’s sentence for forgery at the Bristol Assizes in March 1812 has the faint suggestion of favour and influence. Greenway pleaded guilty to the forgery charge ‘under the advice of his friends’ and duly received the death sentence, knowing, one suspects, that it would be commuted to transportation to New South Wales. Phillip then made it his business to recommend Greenway to Macquarie, the current Governor of the colony. Phillip’s testimonial was so effective that within a few months of Greenway’s arrival in New South Wales, Macquarie consulted him about several government commissions. And within a few short years, he was emancipated.

  Greenway regarded Phillip as ‘his friend and patron’. And at an official ball held at Government House on 26 January 1818 to commemorate 30 years since Phillip came ashore at Sydney Cove, Greenway recorded his gratitude publicly by presenting a ‘likeness’ of Phillip which he had executed. The Sydney Gazette responded to this gesture by warmly announcing that Greenway ‘felt much pleasure in this opportunity of celebrating the memory of the Vice Admiral who had ever been his friend and patron’.

  Death eventually came on 31 August 1814. There were no suspicious circumstances and there is no record of a coronial inquest. When a person died a natural death, he or she had a common law right to be buried in the parish churchyard or burial ground. The honour of interment within the walls of a sacred church building was reserved for ‘persons of great sanctity or considerable wealth’. In the case of suicide, both church and state law not only proscribed a Christian burial but specified other grim and salutary consequences. As the 1811 edition of the venerable Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England noted, the law enacted vengeance on the dead person’s reputation and fortune – ‘on the former by an ignominious burial in the highway, with a stake driven through his body; on the latter, by a forfeiture of all his goods and chattels to the King: hoping that his care for his own reputation, or the welfare of his family, would be some motive to restrain him from so desperate and wicked an act’.

  Phillip died at home and was buried at the medieval church of St Nicholas, Bathampton on 7 September. Just a few friends made the journey from Bath. The funeral cortège consisted only of a coach and carriage. The vicar was the Reverend Richard Bedford. Phillip and Isabella had a connection with Bathampton, where they had resided in 1804, and their closest friends Jemima Powell and Miss Fanny had an even closer connection with adjoining Batheaston. The two neighbouring villages are linked by the River Avon. Both are two miles from Bath and each of them has a parish church dating from the Middle Ages. The grounds of St Nicholas’ church include an ancient graveyard filled with crooked headstones and dotted with the ubiquitous yew trees whose resinous scent was once thought to repel the noxious vapours of the dead. The choice of the village church of St Nicholas, and not Bath Abbey, was in keeping with ‘the uniquely English tradition of the country’s elites being buried not in a grand metropolitan church but in the local parish church’.

  The actual place of burial was inside the church, just beyond the entrance. Consistent with his status and indeed his wealth, Phillip was not buried in the graveyard. A slate slab that was for a long time concealed beneath a floor cover
ing in the church bears the following inscription: ‘Underneath lie the remains of Arthur Phillip, Esq., Admiral of the Blue, who died 31st of August 1814 in his 76th year. Also of Isabella relict of above Admiral Phillip, who died the 4th of March 1823, in the 71st year of her age’. High up on the north wall of the church tower, accessible only by a ladder, is another unobtrusive plaque on which the following words are written: ‘Near this tablet are the remains of Arthur Phillip Esq., Admiral of the Blue, first Governor & Founder of New South Wales.’ The death was routinely noted in all the usual places and no suggestion of scandal accompanied its announcement in the Bath Chronicle and the Bath Journal. Nor was there a hint of controversy in the Naval Chronicle or the Sydney Gazette. Isabella continued to live in their home at No. 19 Bennett Street and in her will she requested that she be buried alongside her husband in St Nicholas’ Church.

  Almost a hundred years after Phillip’s death, an improbable theory of his suicide emerged. Its origin can be traced to a familiar and unreliable combination, all too capable of leading to a travesty of justice. It involved an elderly spinster called ‘Miss Bowie’, who believed that the former home of Isabella and Phillip was inhabited by the admiral’s ghost. She was emphatic, she told a journalist in 1910, that not only had she seen the ghost but so had unnamed others. She asserted that on one occasion the ghost even brushed past her on the staircase and that its features were of ‘quite an ugly little man’. The ghost behaved, she said, in a manner that was brusque, commanding and authoritative. She attributed the reason for the presence of the ghost to a family ‘legend’ that Phillip’s death was suicide. Her story captured the imagination of John Francis Meehan, an enterprising Irishman – journalist, writer and minor publisher. His interest was the famous houses and celebrities of Bath, and he made it his business to be constantly on the lookout for unusual stories and fresh angles, real or imagined.

  In the April 1911 edition of a local Bath paper called the Beacon, Meehan laid out the fanciful story of the recently deceased Miss Bowie in all its improbable detail and stitched it together with his own journalistic embroidery. Miss Bowie’s family legend, which never descended to the detail of how the suicide supposedly occurred, took on a life of its own. Rumour subsequently piled on conjecture, which piled on speculation. The gullible and the irresponsible leapt to the assumption, for which there was never any contemporary foundation, that Phillip threw himself out of a sitting room window and that his body was found outside the basement cellar. A century after Phillip’s death, a theory that started from nothing became Kafkaesque, entirely lacking facts, credibility and probability, failing the simplest tests of reliability. It should now be finally despatched, ignored and laid to rest. Neither Meehan nor Miss Bowie ever suggested that Phillip threw himself out of a window. Miss Bowie said nothing on the subject and Meehan merely speculated, with no basis other than idle conjecture, that Phillip might have died in one of two rooms, but possibly he thought in ‘the back room on the drawing-room floor, for a long time occupied as a bed-room by the late Miss Bowie’.

  More reliable are the inferences about Phillip’s life that can be drawn from the terms of his will and the size of his estate. One of the most revealing features that emerges from Phillip’s will is the magnitude of his estate and the degree of financial acumen that it reflects. And the terms of the will reveal some of Phillip’s closest personal associations. Phillip’s estate was valued for probate at £25,000 – a present value in excess of £40 million, once again depending on the methodology used and the assumptions adopted.

  Naturally Isabella was the major beneficiary of Phillip’s estate and the recipient of his first bequest. He left her £600 stock in four per cent annuities, explaining that this was in substitution for a legacy of £250 in ‘Navy five per cents’ left to her by a mutual friend ‘but which was afterwards sold out by me and reinvested in my name in the four per cent annuities’. The financial instrument known as ‘Navy five per cents’ was a relatively high interest rate annuity backed by the Bank of England. It originated from debts incurred by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and was a popular investment vehicle between 1810 and 1821. Phillip also held a parcel of Old South Sea Annuities in the precise sum of £8333 6s 8d. This was not a random number but the capital amount necessary on a 3 per cent return to produce an annuity of £250. It represented the security for the marriage bond that he had executed in favour of Isabella prior to their marriage – to provide for her future in the event that he died before she did.

  The four per cent annuities and the Old South Sea Annuities were reliable and conservative investments that would have provided a generous income stream for Isabella. She also received the home at No. 19 Bennett Street for the remainder of her life. And Phillip gave her his household goods, although he only allowed her a life interest in the most valuable items – the Brazil diamond ring from Charles Slingsby Duncombe and his extensive collection of silver. Isabella thus became the possessor for her lifetime of the ring and the silver and the outright owner of all of Phillip’s linen, china, liquor, books, jewels, watches and trinkets as well as his ‘horses, carriages and harness’. As Jane Austen frequently emphasised, ownership of a carriage was an undoubted status symbol at that time. It was always a matter of interest to the impertinent and the nosy whether a person kept a carriage and what kind. This is not difficult to understand given that a carriage was a significant luxury item, expensive to purchase and costly to maintain – both in the coachmen who were necessary to care for and operate it and in the horses that were required to be stabled or rented. The pretty yellow landaulet with its Moroccan leather seats became Isabella’s. However, Phillip’s drawings from New South Wales did not. No sentimentality seemed to attach to them. The will directed that they be sold.

  Phillip’s collection of Georgian silver was meticulously itemised in his will. Although he permitted Isabella to have the use of it during her life, he specified that the best items were to go to her nephew Newton Shaw after her death. Each item was individually described and its weight listed in ounces. All of the pieces would have been sterling silver. A quality piece of Georgian sterling silver often had its weight inscribed on the underside. Sheffield plate was not yet common and would not have formed part of Phillip’s collection. The collection included a large oval ‘waiter’ or tray, a large cup, a tea urn, a coffee urn, a soup tureen cover and ladle, a bread basket, a pair of saltcellars, a teapot and a cream jug. The silver tray and the tea urn each weighed over a hundred ounces and the weight of most of the other items was also substantial.

  Subject to Isabella’s life interest, the valuable Brazil diamond ring went to Lady Nepean, wife of Phillip’s loyal long-time supporter Evan Nepean, who did so much to advance his career in the 1780s. He stipulated that if she died before being able to enjoy it, the ring should go to her daughter, Harriet. It was obviously a prized possession of great sentimentality. Duncombe had been a friend to Phillip since at least the 1770s. And his family papers show a number of payments to Phillip in 1786-87 as well as transfers in the other direction. All were conducted through Duncombe’s banker, Messrs Child & Co. Between 1788 and 1791 when Phillip was in New South Wales, Duncombe received on Phillip’s behalf a number of substantial payments from ‘Osborn Standert’ and made investments in annuities for him. It is likely that these monies represented part of Phillip’s remuneration as Governor of New South Wales, for Standert was a chief clerk of treasurer’s accounts in the Navy Office. Indeed Phillip trusted Standert so much that he appointed him as one of his executors, along with John Lane.

  John Lane features throughout the will. The relationship between Phillip and John Lane went right back to Everitt, Phillip’s first patron and Lane’s father-in-law. It is detectable at almost all stages of Phillip’s life. When Phillip sailed on the Europe, John Lane was the one to whom Phillip entrusted his secret charts of the South American coast. And according to one source, John Lane also once fitted out a frigate in which Phillip sailed ‘to the
other side of the world’. Phillip therefore left John Lane a token of his appreciation. It was the largest single legacy in his will. After Isabella’s death, he directed that Lane should have the interest on a principal sum of £2000. When he died, the interest and dividends were to go to Lane’s wife Eleanor, the daughter of Michael Everitt. After her death, the whole of the principal sum of £2000 was to go to their daughter, another Harriet.

  Many others were nominated to share in Phillip’s estate. There was one legacy of £200 and nine legacies of £500 to cousins, nieces, nephews, friends and other relatives. One of those was Susannah Richardson, ‘granddaughter of my late Uncle Pagester’. This brought the wheel of life almost full circle for she appears to have been the granddaughter of Susanna Breach, a relative of Phillip’s mother Elizabeth Breach. In Phillip’s early life, his mother moved to the docklands of Rotherhithe where, as it happens, in 1752 Susanna Breach married Charles Pagester, a shipwright at Rotherhithe. It was presumably from here in 1751 that Phillip went as an ‘orphan of the sea’ to the Charity School of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. And it was presumably from here in 1753 at the Greenland Dock that he commenced his apprenticeship on an Artic whaling ship.