Bridgerule in the late eighteenth century was a provincial backwater with little to differentiate it from a hundred similar villages. Except, that is, for the presence of Elizabeth Veale. In Bridgerule Elizabeth gained the principles, skills, opinions and prejudices that she would carry with her to New South Wales and that she and her husband would contribute to the beginnings of the new colony. Bridgerule formed Elizabeth’s social and moral blueprint. The rules of society played out in Bridgerule every bit as strongly as they did in the drawing rooms of aristocratic Londoners. Knowing one’s place and, more importantly, keeping to it was an unwritten rule that underpinned village life. It is little wonder that Elizabeth would later find the concept of egalitarianism—where a convict emancipist might be accorded the same social standing as free settlers—utterly abhorrent.
Elizabeth, her parents and the other Bridgerule inhabitants were deeply connected to their community. Throughout England, outsiders (those from another parish or region) were listed in official documents as ‘strays’. Most families lived in the same region for generations. The Bridgerule villagers were deeply familiar to Elizabeth, each person known at least as an acquaintance and more likely as a servant, merchant, tradesman or friend. Genteel families like the Veales and the Kingdons were deeply conventional and overtly focused on family and church. Outward behaviour was a key marker of social merit and the genteel eschewed vulgarity, insincerity and—worst sin of all—display.8 Yet for all their emphasis on the rewards of heaven, the gentlefolk of Georgian England maintained a steely gaze on the rewards of this earthly life. While the aristocracy had finances enough to be able to haggle over the merits or otherwise of an individual’s breeding, members of polite society kept their focus largely on the one thing that mattered most: money. It was the element that would underpin many of the most important decisions in Elizabeth’s life.
It’s not clear how Elizabeth Veale met John Macarthur, a ‘stray’ from another parish. John was the second son of Plymouth draper, Alexander Macarthur, who provided slops (coarse fabric for clothing) for sailors.9 The family business operated from premises in Fore Street, then the busiest thoroughfare near the naval wharves.10 John’s father had spent time in America and the West Indies before settling, with his wife and eldest son James, at Plymouth Dock (now Devonport). John was born several years later, in 1766.11 According to family legend, his mother Catherine was a woman ‘of great beauty and accomplishments’ who married Alexander ‘in opposition to the wishes of her family’.12 The fifteen-year gap between John and his older brother suggests a sad string of miscarriages or infant tragedies. One more brother, William, lived to be baptised in 1770, but died as an infant. John’s mother died in 1777, when he was only ten or eleven.13 In 1782 James, at the age of thirty and having taken over the family business, married brewery heiress, Catherine Hawkins. James’s occupation is listed in the marriage register as a mercer.14 A mercer dealt in fine fabrics; so James had by this time clearly improved the family business. Catherine’s father advanced various sums of money to the couple and perhaps some of that money made its way to young John Macarthur.15 Within six months of his brother’s marriage, John, in the manner of many second sons, joined the army.16
With £400, teenage John was able to buy a commission of the lowest officer rank—ensign—in one of the lowest-ranked regiments. He joined an independent company of militia comprising, as its commanding officer Major Fish admitted, men ‘mostly old and unfit for service’ with their purpose being to defend England against incursion by the French.17 Overseas service was not then part of John Macarthur’s prospects. But at this early stage, he was not seeking a glorious military career—John Macarthur was seeking honour. Even as a lowly ensign in the lowest of regiments, his purchase of the King’s commission elevated him to the status of officer and gentleman. He could put his socially dubious mercantile background behind him and step out into the world as a man among men—gentlemen, of course. Or so he hoped. As is common among those whose footing on the social ladder is not quite as firm as they might wish, John remained throughout his life very touchy about the subject of his honour. In the absence of money or family connections, it was honour upon which his status as a gentleman absolutely depended.
John Macarthur took up his commission in October 1782, just as the American war was ending. During the winter, his regiment was moved to Barnstaple, a small port on the north Devon coast. Then, in April 1783, with his services no longer required, Macarthur was pensioned off on half pay.18 He had no desire to return to Plymouth and he remained in north Devon. His son would later record that he lived near the market town of Holsworthy ‘at a farmhouse, on the borders of Cornwall and Devonshire. There he took a lively interest in the various rural occupations going on, hunted, being a bold and accomplished horseman, and spent much time in the perusal of such books as he could obtain’.19 Given that an ensign on half pay couldn’t have afforded a lifestyle that included hunting he must have had another source of income, possibly as a schoolmaster—Elizabeth would much later write that John met one of Bridget’s younger brothers at a grammar school.20 Or he might have supplemented his income by buying, breeding and selling horses, as he would later do successfully in New South Wales. In either occupation—schoolmaster or horsemaster—he soon found cause to visit the nearby village of Bridgerule.
Exactly how John and Elizabeth first met is unclear, but they certainly had much in common. Both were articulate and intelligent. Both were members of the Anglican Church: an important connection in a time when some were beginning to lean towards Protestant dissent.21 In outlook, both were conservative and provincial. Both, too, had a lost a parent at an early age, although that was hardly unusual. And they must have exclaimed to discover their birthdays were only one day apart: John was born on 13 August and Elizabeth the following day.
Years later Elizabeth advised Bridget, using her marriage to John Macarthur as an example, to ‘look out for good sense in a husband. You would never be happy with a person inferior to yourself in point of understanding.’22 Elizabeth clearly believed she was John’s intellectual, as well as his romantic, match. Bridget, with the clear-eyed vision of hindsight, wrote back to Elizabeth saying that ‘it was ever my opinion that Mr M would make an excellent husband, if he met with a woman whose disposition and accomplishments suited him, in that respect how fortunate, and how fortunate for you, that you met with a man possessed of good sense and sensibility.’23
It appears that Elizabeth and John’s formal engagement occurred in the English spring of 1788. A man about to be married surely needed more than half pay to live on and so Ensign Macarthur resumed his commission and returned to full pay in May. He paid almost £100 to move to a regiment then stationed in Gibraltar (although John never joined it there). It seems likely that his path was smoothed by Kingdon connections.24 At around the same time Elizabeth sold some land (presumably an inheritance) to a local gentleman for the sum of £340, providing herself with a dowry roughly equivalent to a year’s income. 25
Both aged twenty-two, they were young to be marrying, particularly John. He had very little to offer his bride except castles in the air. Most grooms, in contrast, waited to marry until their careers were established and they could afford to support a family. The average marriage age for a man of Macarthur’s class and circumstance was mid- to late-twenties.26 It was typical of Macarthur’s impetuosity to act first (propose), then deal with the consequences later (try to find a more lucrative posting). It was an impetuosity he would demonstrate throughout his life. In the circumstances, Elizabeth should have refused John Macarthur. Through her Kingdon connections she could reasonably have expected to do better. A miniature portrait thought to be of Elizabeth, painted around the time of her engagement, shows a fair-skinned beauty with hazel eyes and curled dark hair. Her modish, décolleté empire line gown reveals more than just a magnificent bust—the portrait reveals a status-conscious woman aspiring to be far more than a farmer’s daughter.27
Any eight
eenth-century woman’s decision to marry was one of the most important of her life and a prudent and considered choice was of the essence if she were ‘not to be the architect of her own misfortune’.28 However Elizabeth was certain that few of her friends ‘thought that either of us had taken a prudent step. I was considered indolent and inactive; Mr Macarthur too proud and haughty for our humble fortune or expectations.’29 The villagers, then, did not approve of the match.
Macarthur was tall, by the standards of the day, but not especially handsome and his proud manner, as described by Elizabeth, was not immediately appealing. Throughout his life he was either loved or loathed. Portraits show a man with small dark eyes above prominent cheek bones, a sharp nose, full lips and a fine head of thick wavy hair swept back from his forehead.30 His sons would later point out that his features were marked by smallpox. But he was eloquent, well read, and could be charming when he chose to be. Clearly Elizabeth was in love and, besides, the Macarthur men appear to have had a certain knack for capturing brides above their station.
The clearest indicator of their engagement is to be found in the baptismal register of St Bridget’s. In May 1788, John and Elizabeth stood together as godparents to the Kingdons’ eleventh and last child, a daughter.31 A fond Mrs Kingdon knew Elizabeth would soon be leaving to start a household of her own and so offered her a double honour and loving bond by also naming the baby Elizabeth, though she would be known as Eliza. In the face of the village’s objections to Elizabeth’s fiancé, the Kingdons were offering her an important gesture of love and support. The baptism became a public affirmation of the Kingdons’ support for the couple’s intentions as well as a formalisation of their engagement.
The Reverend Kingdon officiated at the subsequent wedding ceremony, held on a Tuesday morning in early October 1788.32 A morning ceremony was often followed by a celebratory breakfast but it was not usual to issue invitations or to expect friends and family to travel from afar. Elizabeth’s mother and younger half-sister, resident in Bridgerule, were probably present at St Bridget’s but John’s father and brother, resident in Plymouth, were more likely not. Mrs Jane Kingdon, the Reverend’s wife and John Bond, a church functionary, stood as witnesses. John Bond would himself get married four years later—to Elizabeth’s mother, who had been twice widowed by that stage. John Macarthur’s name in the church register is followed by the title Esq., although no other male name is (even those whose listed occupation was ‘gent’). Maybe the title was bestowed by the Reverend in honour of Macarthur’s military commission. Or perhaps the kind Reverend was simply happy to pander to a young man’s vanity on his wedding day.
The next few months were anxious ones for the newlyweds. They probably set up home in the farmhouse where John had been living but John was absent without official leave for all but two months of his term with the 68th or Durham Regiment of Foot at Gibraltar.33 The army had never been a vocation for John, more a means to an end, and he was now determined to sell his commission. The secretary of war, though, had other plans for Ensign Macarthur, stating in reply to a query from John’s commanding officer that ‘His Majesty does not allow officers to be brought from the half-pay for the purpose of selling entirely out’ and ‘if Macarthur was unwilling to go to Gibraltar he must return to half pay, receiving no more than the sum he had lately paid out.’34 As soon as Macarthur saw the letter he set off for London to petition the secretary directly. Such a journey—some 400 wearisome kilometres by coach—should have been unremarkable but a foolhardy Elizabeth, heavily pregnant with her first child, went along too.
Travelling from Devon to London on turnpiked roads, travellers could take as many as four days. Poor Elizabeth spent uncomfortable hours bumping along in a coach, subject to the vagaries of March weather. And on 16 March 1789, at a public house in Bath called the White Hart, far from the assistance of friends and family, Elizabeth gave birth to a healthy baby boy: Edward Macarthur.35 John and Elizabeth had been married for just five months.
It is possible that Elizabeth, in deciding to travel to London, was herself unaware of how far advanced her pregnancy was. Or perhaps in convincing others that hers was a wedding-night baby she also half convinced herself. I wonder, though, if she was running away. In the early eighteenth century, a verbal commitment was considered legally valid, ensuring that a proposal, once accepted, was as binding as the marriage itself. An engaged couple may well have considered themselves as good as married and so consummated the union with impunity. However, in 1753 Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act was passed. From 1754 only the church wedding, not the verbal spousals, was legally binding.36 It was now over thirty years later, and having been raised in such proximity to the vicarage, Elizabeth must surely have known that an engagement was not a marriage and that her feminine honour and her family’s honour—that concept apparently so dear to her fiancée’s heart—was dependent upon her pre-marital chastity. While a gentleman’s honour depended upon his actions and reliability, a gentlewoman’s honour was solely dependent upon public recognition of her virtue.37 Pre-nuptial conception was dangerous enough in 1773, some fifteen years prior to Elizabeth’s engagement, for the popular The Lady’s Magazine to warn its readers to be especially on their guard against seduction between the spousals and the wedding.38 Not for the last time would John’s standards in regard to honour reveal themselves to be subject to the vagaries of self-interest.
The Macarthurs may have avoided the immediate disapproval of the village by travelling on to London, as soon as was practicable after Edward’s birth. In April John was in London, petitioning the secretary of war. He wrote three times asking to sell his commission, with the secretary’s unchanging response growing more curt each time. The Macarthurs felt keenly their lack of influence and connections. John might well have styled himself a gentleman, but in this instance the twenty-two-year-old ensign had neither the resources nor the clout to enable his desires to come to pass. It looked like he was off to Gibraltar after all.
In frustration, John scoured his mind for any other military patrons who might promote his cause—and found one. The undersecretary in the Home Office, Evan Nepean, was an acquaintance of John’s older brother James.39 Nepean was responsible for appointments in New South Wales. He had just arranged for his own younger brother, Nicholas Nepean, to form a company within the newly minted New South Wales Corps. Evan Nepean certainly had a vested interest in attracting bright young officers like John Macarthur to a posting that was far from attractive. He would have emphasised the opportunities available to those men of ambition who were early on the scene. Not only was John offered a place, but also a promotion and a financial incentive in the form of a recruiting bonus for every man he enlisted.40 Thus Lieutenant Macarthur, his wife and their infant son were soon installed at Chatham Barracks, readying themselves for departure to Port Jackson. Just as he was to do time and again in the future, John had managed to turn a difficult situation to his own advantage.
For John, travelling to New South Wales was the least worst alternative and offered some hope of material advancement. More puzzling, though, are Elizabeth’s reasons for accompanying him to the end of the earth. Was it love—or something more? The young couple had become engaged on the assumption that John would resign his commission and that they would create a home in England. Yet here was John only a year later—or rather a wedding, a baby and a year later—deciding whether or not to embark upon a military career; whether or not they should all set sail for an infant colony on the other side of the world. They may as well have contemplated a trip to a colony on Mars.
The First Fleet had sailed for Botany Bay from John’s home town of Plymouth nearly two years earlier, generating enormous fanfare and public interest.41 At the end of March 1789, First Fleet ships began to arrive back in England. A total of six published accounts of the new colony, written within the first few months of arrival, found an eager and widespread audience. The first to be published in book form—A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay—was
by marine officer Watkin Tench, who would later become a good friend of Elizabeth’s. His book was an immediate success and went through three editions by the end of 1789, was pirated in Dublin and was translated into Dutch, French and German. Governor Phillip’s early reports to government were also published, in parts, between July and December 1789. As the officially sanctioned account, this book was also highly successful.42 These early reports were uniformly optimistic and Elizabeth had clearly done some reading.
Elizabeth avoided returning to Bridgerule. She wrote to her mother from London, describing the positive things she had read about the new colony. She admitted she had at first found John’s New South Wales proposal to be ‘terrific and gloomy’; it made her feel ‘timid and irresolute…[and I] suffered myself to be blinded by common and vulgar prejudices’. But she soon came around to become ‘a warm advocate for this scheme’ and felt she would ‘be greatly disappointed if anything happens to impede it’. Elizabeth said she regretted leaving her mother but tried to console her by pointing out that ‘if we must be distant from each other, it is much the same whether I am two hundred, or far more than as many thousand miles apart from you’. How consoled her mother actually felt by that thought is a moot point. Elizabeth’s rationale for the change of heart was purely economic: ‘We have every reasonable expectation of reaping the most material advantages.’43 But it wasn’t only the money that talked.
John was no doubt articulate and persuasive in his arguments for taking the whole family to New South Wales. It would certainly be more comfortable for him if Elizabeth came along. But surely the village of Bridgerule was talking too—who could resist counting the months between the October wedding and the March birth? If Elizabeth were to return, she faced the weight of community censure, the sly smiling whispers seasoned by the hint that perhaps Macarthur had left her behind deliberately, even as family and neighbours cooed at her baby. After all, except for the Kingdons, Elizabeth’s friends in the village never approved of the match in the first place. The tightly knit village community that could be so comforting could also be achingly claustrophobic. Elizabeth, in the space of less than a year, had begun to experience a wider world—Bath, Plymouth, even London. At Chatham Barracks she had made new friends and joined the community of officers’ wives. To stay behind would be to turn her back on adventure, on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to leave the physical and social confines of Bridgerule. But worst of all to the young and passionate Elizabeth, to stay behind would be to lose for years—perhaps forever—her newfound friend, confidant, lover and husband. So she embarked on what would be the longest, hardest and most terrifying journey of her life.
Elizabeth Macarthur Page 2
