Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  The voyage had offered very few consolations. It had taken five months, bypassing the usual port of call of Rio de Janeiro, so not stocking up with water and fresh food supplies, although it was a smooth enough passage to the Cape of Good Hope. But then they had lost Jane on the way to Hobart Town.5 The family had endured the cramped cabin space (and their two domestic servants suffered far worse between decks), the sweltering heat of the long crossing of the Indian Ocean, the stink, neighing, bellowing, grunting and screeching of the cooped farm animals, then the terror of howling gales in the Southern Ocean, lashing rain, heavy seas, and the massive rolling waves of the Roaring Forties that tossed their little vessel like a leaf. But that was all nothing, compared with the loss of Jane.

  Until then, the long voyage had been endurable for the Balcombes because of some interesting companions. They naturally sat at Captain Gillies’ table in the saloon for meals, along with seven others. The new attorney-general, Saxe Bannister, travelling with his two adult sisters, had an awkward, slightly haughty manner, which would not have endeared him to Balcombe.6 Captain Edward Macarthur was sometimes willing to discuss early days in the colony. His father was the well-known John Macarthur, a former officer of the New South Wales Corps; later to be revered as ‘the father of the Australian wool industry’, but in the 1820s he was a controversial figure. Edward was a baby when his parents settled at Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta. He was nineteen in 1808 when he joined his father and other officers in ousting Governor William Bligh, who had experienced a major rebellion before, having survived the Bounty mutiny of 1789. Young Edward was sent to London to give the officers’ version of the coup, accompanied by the first bale of merino wool exported from the colony. He had subsequently obtained a commission and joined the British army; after honourable service, he was returning to Sydney and his family for the first time in fifteen years.

  He was now acting as the agent for the wealthy British politician and landowner Thomas Potter Macqueen. He carried a despatch, approved by Lord Bathurst, directing the governor to grant Macqueen an extensive run of 10,000 acres, to be chosen by Edward, with the possibility that once it was in production an equivalent grant might follow. Macqueen had read the Bigge report with its recommendation to expand the colony from a penitentiary and encourage independent agriculture and commerce. He would remain an absentee landlord but proposed, instead of convict workers, to send out ‘British subjects’ where possible, even ‘Parish Paupers’, so contributing to a more ‘honest and wholesome Population’ in New South Wales.7 Balcombe listened and was inspired by the possibilities if he owned land.

  When the Hibernia arrived at Sydney Cove, Sir Thomas Brisbane, the governor of New South Wales, was 15 miles away at his official country residence in Parramatta. However, the colonial secretary Major Frederick Goulburn (who also acted as the governor’s private secretary and had assumed many of the governor’s responsibilities) would have been at the wharf to welcome the new officials. An earlier ship, the Guildford, bringing the chief justice, would have conveyed the news that the new attorney-general and the colonial treasurer with his family of six plus servants were not far behind. Acting on that information, Governor Brisbane had arranged for the Balcombes to occupy a recently vacant house on the corner of O’Connell and Bent streets in the centre of town. Goulburn probably led them to see the property, a short walking distance from the quay. He was another beneficiary of patronage, a younger brother to Bathurst’s former under-secretary, whom Balcombe had met (not always in auspicious circumstances).8 Balcombe must have wondered what information concerning himself might have passed between the brothers.

  The substantial two-storey brick house with shuttered windows, behind a stone boundary wall, was better than the family could have hoped. It even had an established English oak tree shading the garden, planted at the time the colony was first settled, probably next to an original bark hut.9 This new house had been built for William Cox, a military officer and engineer still appreciated in the colony for supervising the construction of the first road over the Blue Mountains just ten years earlier. As a reward, Governor Macquarie had granted him good grazing land at Bathurst on the western plains and Cox had moved there to take up the life of a country gentleman and magistrate. Balcombe was not to know that Cox had previously agreed to rent his house to another man, an arrangement overruled by the governor.

  Small societies are habitually plagued by factionalism, enmities and intrigue, and Sydney was no exception. Balcombe had already made one enemy without being aware of it. George Boyes had arrived in the colony in January, appointed deputy assistant-commissary-general, while he awaited the expected arrival of William Lithgow, the head of the accounts branch of the Commissariat. Boyes was an intelligent man and a talented artist, but he was perpetually embittered that too few people seemed to recognise this. Within a month he reported to his wife in England that he had dined at Government House and had come to know ‘everyone in the colony worth knowing’, but that he disliked them all, preferring ‘my own fireside and a book’.

  Boyes had expectations of sitting by the fireside in Cox’s house and gave his wife a detailed description of the property: ‘There are some good houses in this place—that I have taken is one of the best, 3 rooms on the ground floor, one of which is about 36 feet by 28 and 18 high; over these are six tolerably sized rooms which I propose for Lithgow and myself—there are fine cellars, dairy etc, a pump (the greatest of all luxuries in a place so badly supplied with water as this), coach house—stables for 4 or 6 horses and a green on one side of the house—fit for drying clothes—a verandah running two sides of it—rent £125 per annum.’10 It had all been settled with Cox, and Boyes had just been waiting for Lithgow in order to take possession, when the governor had learned of the Balcombes’ imminent arrival and took the prize away from him! He would not forgive Brisbane nor the usurping newcomers: ‘Mr & Mrs Balcomb & family—he comes out Colonial Treasurer—tis the man who was at St Helena, whose daughter teased Buonaparte so abominably’.11

  The house was ideal for the Balcombes. Two rooms on the ground floor were suitable for the treasurer’s office and an assistant’s, while the huge room with its lofty ceiling would be appropriately gracious for both dining and entertaining. The six upstairs rooms could accommodate the whole family, as well as young James Harrison and the two servants. They stayed on the ship for a few days until basic furnishings were organised and their luggage delivered, and then settled in.

  However, the day after their arrival, 6 April, Governor Brisbane came into town along the dusty road from Parramatta in a carriage drawn by four horses. At midday he was to preside at the High Court of Appeal to be held at Government House.12 In the morning he had time to welcome the new officials and their families. For Balcombe it was a short walk from the wharf to Government House. Brisbane, aged in his early fifties with long patrician features, had a relaxed and pleasant manner, unruffled by the many conflicting issues that were the daily challenge of his administration. He had behind him a distinguished military career, serving in Flanders and the West Indies, and had been a brigadier-general under the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War. After Waterloo he was again with his patron Wellington, commanding a division of the occupation force in France.

  The arrival of Balcombe and the other new officials was most welcome to him. The colony had expanded in size and population in recent years and he had long complained that he had too few men for the work of government; in fact, his relations with one significant official, Frederick Goulburn, his colonial secretary, had become fraught.

  The new officials gave the governor their letters of introduction from the Colonial Office. Bathurst’s communication of 2 October 1823 regarding Balcombe and his new position was remarkable for its brevity. He wrote that in order to establish the New South Wales government ‘upon a system of more immediate efficiency, I have appointed Mr W. Balcombe to proceed to New S. Wales as Colonial Treasurer. I have thought it preferable however not to assign any p
articular Salary to Mr. Balcombe, but to leave it to you to submit a proposition to me’, based upon Balcombe’s duties ‘and the degree of pecuniary responsibility which will necessarily be imposed upon him’. In the meantime, his lordship asked Brisbane to issue ‘such a moderate salary’ as seemed reasonable and to advise on the securities Balcombe should pledge in a bond as protection against ‘all monies which may come into his hands. His personal bond may be taken in the Colony, and that of his Securities will be entered into hereafter with the Board of Treasury.’13

  That was the extent of the information. However, it would be surprising if no private letter for the governor from Bathurst or Wilmot Horton had come on the Hibernia, no explanation of the scandal from which Balcombe had been extricated, no mention of his influential protector, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, and, in particular, nothing concerning his experience at St Helena and his too close connection with Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Brisbane must have learned some background from Goulburn’s correspondence with his elder brother who was formerly at the Colonial Office, and local gossip was not long in coming. Mail from Hobart had arrived on the Hibernia. Robert Lathrop Murray, a former soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, transported to Van Diemen’s Land for bigamy, was a journalist for the Hobart Town Gazette and the following year would become its editor. On 27 March 1824, he had dashed off a letter to his good friend D’Arcy Wentworth, Superintendent of Police in Sydney, who until then was mainly responsible for managing the government funds. Murray ensured that the family would not make a quiet arrival in New South Wales: ‘This ship the Hibernia takes up a number of Newcomers to relieve the old Hands,’ he wrote, ‘amongst them Mr Balcomb, your successor as Colonial Treasurer. This is the gentleman who was sent by Sir Hudson Lowe from St Helena for being too intimate with Napoleon. His daughter, now Mrs Abell, is also on board. She was Napoleon’s great favorite and married a Mr Abell in England who has deserted her, leaving her unprotected with a child. So here she is, a very beautiful young woman, bewitching . . .’14

  That was obviously a story worth several retellings. The word spread. Many gentlemen were soon interested to make the acquaintance of the beautiful, bewitching Mrs Abell, tantalising because almost available to court and yet, in genteel society, not so. Meanwhile, Boyes, whose position as deputy assistant-commissary-general was much lower in rank than Balcombe’s, bitterly complained in a letter to his wife about the loss of the house he had planned to occupy.

  Brisbane had settled on a tentative figure of £1200 per annum as Balcombe’s salary and agreed that the New South Wales government should pay the hefty rent demanded by Cox.15 Balcombe considered that reasonable given that his home was expected to double as the Treasury building, which was why the governor had thought it suitable, being of ‘unusual solid brick’ with barred windows. However, there was no vault or safe, so Balcombe soon decided that the safest place to keep government monies was in his bedroom and ‘armed himself with a brass-barrelled blunderbuss and two pistols beside the bed’.16

  Nothing the family had heard before their arrival about the crime rate in the colony made them feel comfortable. In 1819, William Wilberforce, best known for his crusade to end slavery, had made an alarming speech in the House of Commons about the practice of transportation. He denounced it as inhuman and wanted it ended, warning that they were creating in New South Wales ‘a nest of vipers’ which could ‘form a nucleus of contagion in that part of the world’. He quoted figures showing that the crime rate in ‘Botany Bay’ was sixteen times greater than in the English county of Warwickshire. British government ministers thought that only to be expected, as criminals were sent there.17

  Balcombe and his family had come to a young colony that was at a stage of awkward but assertive adolescence, still gawky and uncertain, between its origins as a gaol for unwanted felons and its new future as a productive colony of the British Empire with its own democratic institutions. Sydney town and its surrounding districts had grown into a bustling, lively centre of trade, with numerous commercial connections with India and with the islands of the Pacific for sealing and whaling. It was inevitably still a society with distinct divisions of social class, but the divisions were more flexible of entry and exit than those in the old country from which it had sprung.

  Sydney society was a composite of free-settling landholders, government employees, emancipated convicts, convicts still serving their sentences, and the children of convicts or emancipated convicts. Former convicts who had served their term or gained their ‘ticket of leave’—the ‘emancipists’—were free to take up farming or fishing or to find ways to cater for needs not yet met in the various communities. So much was needed in this new society in the process of inventing itself, so many openings were available for the enterprising, that some former convicts had already exploited them with such resourcefulness and daring—or unscrupulousness—that they had grown wealthy. A few were even fabulously rich, such as Samuel Terry, ‘the Botany Bay Rothschild’, who had arrived in Sydney in 1801 at the King’s pleasure after stealing 400 pairs of stockings. Having served his term, he opened a public house in Pitt Street that soon became notorious. He would encourage drunken customers to sign away their properties, their jewellery or literally the shirts off their back at his pawn shop next door. Historian Michael Cannon has noted: ‘By 1820 he held about one-fifth of all mortgages in the colony—more than the Bank of New South Wales itself.’18 Terry had been no friend of Governor Macquarie’s, but some emancipists were: Dr William Redfern, Simeon Lord and Mary Reibey had dined occasionally at Government House, blurring social boundaries in ways not approved of by the pastoral elite, dubbed the ‘exclusives’, who wielded great influence.

  At the time of the Balcombes’ arrival, the fluidity of this new society was beginning to congeal into an approximation of the old social patterns of the mother country. There was now an influx of free settlers, eager for land grants. Some earlier settlers and former officers had become so wealthy and established that they saw themselves as the aristocracy of the new society. The Macarthurs led these ‘exclusives’. John Macarthur, aged 57 in 1824 and ‘incorrigibly haughty’, had long been a successful and entrepreneurial pastoralist, with government assistance for his breeding flock of merino sheep. Having connived to oust one governor, Bligh, he and his younger sons William and James and nephew Hannibal exercised a vigorous and informed voice in colony matters. Along with their pastoral colleagues—the brothers John and Gregory Blaxland and the formidable parson the Reverend Samuel Marsden—this group, dubbed the ‘Parramatta party’, rather thought they determined the rules. They were a constant irritant to the governor.19

  Balcombe formally took up his appointment as colonial treasurer on 28 April, although he and Harrison began setting up his office from the second day ashore. As recommended by Commissioner Bigge, the new role was designed to consolidate the administration of the finances of the colony, taking over responsibilities previously divided between a number of officials. The colonial revenue was raised by import duties; royalties on timber and coal; wharf taxes; fees on shipping; tolls on public roads and bridges; dues on markets, fairs and auctions; and fees for slaughtering cattle and sheep at the public slaughterhouse. Monies derived from these sources had been collected principally by D’Arcy Wentworth, treasurer of the police fund, and by Captain John Piper, the naval officer.20 The revenue was then expended on public works; the maintenance of gaols, the police force and the orphan institution; grants in aid of official salaries; and rewards for services rendered.

  The Colonial Office, according to one historian, ‘showed typical empiricism in the manner in which the new system was to be inaugurated, although “indifference” would be a better term. Balcombe was given no instructions about his responsibilities or the nature of his duties.’21

  The new treasurer was expected to shape his role as he went along, but essentially he was to be a collector and custodian, not a policymaker on financial matters. In some ways Balcombe was peculiarly suited to
the post, given the colony’s former guise as a penitentiary: he had provided for prisoners on St Helena, another remote outpost; he was an experienced businessman; and he understood dealings with a commissariat and the intricacies of negotiating a variety of coinage and monetary bills. (Because of a shortage of sterling, Spanish dollars were still widely in use.) But in response to the Bigge report, the colony could no longer be regarded merely as a gaol: it was in the process of transition to a more complex future, and Balcombe, if running the Treasury by himself, lacked the managerial and office skills to cope.

  However, he immediately had enormous support from young James Stirling Harrison. Born in the same year as Betsy, Harrison was 22 and more than equipped with the skills required. In recommending James, his father had written that ‘he has had a most liberal Education, speaks five Languages, was four years in a Dutch Counting House, two at Smyrna and Constantinople for improvement; he is a complete man of Business’.22 As it was the governor’s prerogative to appoint clerical staff in the colony, the title ‘tutor’ had obviously been used so as not to offend him—and Harrison would have been an excellent tutor for the boys during the five-month voyage. But Sir Thomas Brisbane, at his first meeting with Balcombe on 6 April, approved Harrison’s appointment as principal clerk at the Colonial Treasury.23 It was the beginning of a productive professional relationship between Balcombe and Harrison and a personal friendship also.

  Betsy must surely have delighted in exploring the town. It was more extensive than she might have imagined, with some fine buildings, although many of them coexisted with less desirable neighbours, such as rackety shanties and grog houses. One eccentric shop, built of slabs, was mounted on large wheels, so that when business proved slack in one place, the owner could try his luck in another.24 Horse-drawn carts and carriages jostled in the unpaved streets. Mud spattered pedestrians as they passed. This could never be mistaken for an English town: people walked along to the sound of trilling, squawking and screeching, for many shops had parrots and cockatoos in birdcages at their doorways.25 ‘Talkative birds’ were offered for a guinea each and there were many stories about their cleverness.26 ‘George Street was brilliant with jewellers’ shops,’ a colonist recalled, for Sydney had become a useful place to dispose of stolen goods.27