William Cox

by Richard Cox

  The way in which William built up this estate needs to be set in the context of the widespread misuse of regimental funds. The military historian Anthony Clayton, reviewing officers’ public morals at that time, writes that from the seventeenth century onward ‘Officers were all as much preoccupied with the business side of their lives as the professional’. This did not cease until the Victorian era. In William’s time the essential corruption of the whole system continued to enable officers both at home and overseas to supplement their income in such dubious, but usually legal, ways as ‘managing regimental funds’.22 The New South Wales Corps officers were particularly adept at this. Between 1792 and 1798 they had invested £36,844 of regimental funds in their own enterprises.23 Even the relatively more scrupulous Macquarie, when a newly married captain, paid to take on the army paymastership in Bombay in 1795 so that he could draw the regiment’s pay three to five months in advance and invest it short-term with Arab money lenders.24 William’s mistake was to invest in the illiquid asset of land.

  In parallel with this, William was taking a serious risk by disregarding new official regulations rescinding permission for officers to farm actively, ordered by the Commander in Chief, HRH the Duke of York, the brother of George III, in 1802. This was done at the urging of the Duke of Portland, who had become aware that in 1800 Macarthur owned 1300 acres, in spite of being a serving officer.25 Macarthur escaped the ban, because he had been sent home for court martial by Governor King in 1801, after fighting a duel with Lieutenant Colonel Paterson (the trial was aborted for lack of evidence) and was allowed to leave the army. But William was caught by the prohibition. As a result, his first appointment as a magistrate (at Parramatta), made on 6 January 1802, was cancelled on 5 October that same year by King, who as a naval officer neither could nor would tolerate the disobedience of orders. Cox rashly continued to disregard the prohibition and the whole question of failure to obey orders eventually became a more serious disciplinary matter than the ‘malversation’ of the regimental funds.

  The historical backdrop to the acquisition of land by officers went back almost to the first days of the colony. Originally Governor Phillip had made few land grants. Samuel Bennett remarks that whereas at the time of his departure not much more than 3000 acres had been allotted, in a short period afterwards the officers secured 15,000 acres for themselves.26 This was thanks to Major Francis Grose. When serving as lieutenant governor in 1792–95, after Phillip’s departure, Grose freely gave land grants to his officers. Another commentator remarks that under Grose ‘the spirit of commercialism and the desire to obtain landed estates became the principal motives in life with many officers of the New South Wales Corps’.27 It was no coincidence that in the early 1800s the largest landowner was Quartermaster Laycock with 1470 acres. He and William were the two officers best placed to profit from their official positions.

  This heyday of the officers in obtaining land ended with the Bligh Rebellion and the arrival of Macquarie as governor, although during that period of army rule Lieutenant Colonel Paterson made grants of some 67,000 acres, a small one being at Mulgoa to Rebecca Cox for her four-year-old son, Edward – a grant which she later had to ask Macquarie to ratify.28 Not that the officers had been alone in acquiring land. On a lower level the first free emigrants who arrived on 16 January 1793 on the Bellona were given free passages and land grants, tools, two years’ provisions and convict labour by government.29 However, during that decade the landed interests of the officer class – including officials – became paramount.

  A considerable change in official policy took place during the first decade of the new century, benefiting only a few gentleman settlers, but allocating much larger acreages to them. The idea originated from the surgeon William Balmain, a friend of Governor Hunter, who suggested to Lord Camden, the Secretary of State, that he should send out gentlemen settlers who could form an élite. The first beneficiaries were John Macarthur (5000 acres) and Walter Davidson the son of the Prince Regent’s physician (2000 acres). Their grants were on the Cowpastures, an area of excellent grazing on the south-west of the Cumberland Plain, where a herd of cattle had long before strayed, gone wild and greatly multiplied. It was hoped, ultimately in vain, that the herd could be domesticated again. The grants of land were to be ‘fit for the pasture of sheep … in perpetuity, with the usual reserve of quit rent to the Crown’. Macarthur was also to be ‘indulged with a reasonable number of convicts … for the purpose of attending to his sheep’. He would pay for their maintenance and so ‘a saving will accrue to the Government’.30

  Governor King was opposed to this plan, avowedly because of the hope of domesticating the wild cattle. Additionally, the serving governor had an interest in the herd because he had a share in it.31 King intensely disliked Macarthur, whom he had called ‘The Great Perturbator’ on account of the trouble he had caused. But an order from the Colonial Secretary could not be refused. Whilst acknowledging the value to the colony of Macarthur’s sheep breeding, King managed to delay the grant’s execution. Nonetheless, in the end the whole area became Macarthur’s Camden Park.

  Lord Camden’s instruction was an historic turning point in the rise of the pastoralists. The 5000 acres was the largest grant ever given in the colony. Thereafter, directions were given to governors by secretaries of state to make land grants to favoured settlers, to allocate them convict labour and, to a lesser extent, to give them cattle. In 1806 grants totalling 12,000 acres were ordered by William Windham, as Secretary of State, for two gentleman farmers from Kent, John and Gregory Blaxland, who were selling up to emigrate.32 King expressed disappointment that, although the brothers had brought out seed, they claimed it had rotted on the voyage and refused to attempt planting it, insisting instead that they should buy 1700 breeding stock from the government herds.33 Cattle rearing on broad acres would have looked more like a gentleman’s occupation than growing crops. King himself was realistically concerned about having sufficient agricultural production to feed the growing population, but had to obey. Thus 1806 can be set as a date for the recognition of the landed gentry in New South Wales. By this time William Cox was bankrupt and waiting to be sent home for trial.34

  William’s whole edifice of debt had collapsed when, in January 1803, he had a quarrel with Dr Jamison, the Surgeon General, to whom he owed £200. ‘In February Dr Jamison pressed him for the money,’ Holt records. ‘The sum itself was a trifle to pay; but the doctor had circulated a report that Mr Cox had failed, which made everyone who had the slightest demand upon him press forward with their claims at once … they made no less a sum than twenty two thousand pounds.’35 Ironically, this doctor was the father of Sir John Jamison, with whom William was to have a close political and cultural relationship in the 1820s. In spite of maintaining that his debtors owed him enough to cover his position, William was unable to stall the creditors, who foreclosed.

  The exact wording of these bills of exchange issued by William is shown by one he gave to Robert Campbell, a leading Sydney merchant and trader, in the same month that the creditors foreclosed. It read:

  Ninety days after sight Pay this my First Bill of Exchange, Second and Third same Tenor and Date unpaid unto Robert Campbell Esq for one thousand pounds and place the same to the Acct of the pay of the New South Wales Corps without or without advice from, Gentlemen, Wm Cox Paymaster

  It was addressed to Messrs Cox (no relation) and Greenwood, Craig’s Court, Charing Cross. This particular bill had been presented numerous times and was ‘protested’ on 28 July 1804 by a notary ‘In Testimonium Veritatis, Thomas Bonnet, Notr Pub’, as others had been by another notary named Venn. Bonnet eventually spoke to a clerk who said the bill would not be paid.36

  Since any bill had to be sent to London to be presented, it could be nine months at least before its beneficiary learnt that it had not been honoured and could take action through a London agent, in this case Bonnet, taking the time of a further voyage. Meanwhile, of course, William enjoyed the use of the thousan
d pounds. Between October 1801 and January 1803 William issued a total of six bills to Campbell, totalling £4717. Campbell, who then did very well out of William’s best farms, was appointed treasurer to William’s estate.

  Miniature of Robert Campbell (Courtesy of Elizabeth Forbes)

  The first sale was held on 15 April 1803 at Campbell’s order. On 26 May the 900 acres of Canterbury Farm were auctioned, as well as two other farms of 100 acres at Prospect Hill, a third of 94 acres ‘adjoining’ the town of Parramatta and also 1700 sheep ‘part of which are of Spanish breed’. The auctioneer was Simeon Lord (an ex-convict trader, later to become both a magistrate and a pastoralist). Holt helpfully gave everyone there plenty of rum to stimulate the bidding. But the individual plots of land fetched far less than William had paid for them. D’Arcy Wentworth, who bought five, paid only 108 guineas for 100 acres, Samuel Marsden gave 56 guineas for the Barrington (or Berrington) property which Holt had bought for William for £100.37 On 6 July household goods were sold, including ‘linens, curtains, calicos, shoes, leather, soap, tobacco, ironmongery’.38 It must have been intensely distressing for Rebecca. On 10 May 1803 Holt records ‘I found that Mrs Cox had no horse at her command. I asked if she would accept of my mare … after a pause Mrs Cox said she would accept of my very friendly offer and expressed herself greatly obliged to me. She was a complete gentlewoman.’39 Rebecca evidently displayed great fortitude, as she did again when her husband was sent home for trial and was receiving no pay.

  On 11 November 1803, ‘a quantity of wheat and about 50 pigs’ were sold.40 Holt began to collect the debts due to the estate, but they were nothing like enough. From Governor King’s point of view William’s disaster had a silver lining. He reported home, on 17 September 1803, that ‘not a few [settlers] have profitted [sic] by the division of the Paymaster’s of the New South Wales Corps large stock of cattle, horses and sheep, which he had been monopolizing until he was compelled to sell them to satisfy the great debts he had accumulated in and out of the colony’.41 King was a realist and William’s disaster would have helped his aim of bringing about a wider ownership of property. His comments illustrate how significant a landowner William had become.

  Simeon Lord, the ex-convict trader who auctioned William’s property in 1803 (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW [MIN 92])

  For whatever reason, the Governor began helping William in various practical ways. On 3 February 1804 he agreed to accept £1500 from the sale of £2000 of 3 percent stock and also to take £2949 8s 2¼d worth of Cox’s wheat into the Commissary, both of these to help liquidate the debt owed to the army agents, which it halved. There followed what seems to have been a curious manoeuvre by King to help even more, when the trustees, headed by Robert Campbell, asked if they could pay another eight to ten thousand bushels of wheat into the Commissary. This wheat had remained in store in William’s ownership, despite the forced sales. On 1 March 1804 King informed the trustees that ‘The stores are now, and will continue open for the receipt of wheat in payment of debts due to the Crown’. He emphasized that every cultivator would have an ‘equal chance’ to dispose of wheat. Since no public notification of this opportunity appeared in the Sydney Gazette in either February or March, the equal chance appears to have been deliberately non-existent, although the colony and the newspaper were much preoccupied at the time with the Castle Hill convict riots of 4 March. Even better, King gave the trustees a complete indemnity for any damages resulting from the arrangement, which he need hardly have done.42

  King’s assistance had its political side. The Hawkesbury had been settled by Grose in 1794 to accommodate former soldiers and ex-convicts. King wanted to see the settlement improved, populated as it now was mainly by ex-convict smallholders, the soldiers often having been persuaded to sell their plots, usually in exchange for spirits. At the same time King was sympathetic to William, possibly because he was himself in a more or less permanent stand-off conflict with the New South Wales Corps and might have seen Cox in some way as a victim. The Governor had known when he arrived in 1800 that he would have to fight the officers and, in the words of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘was faced with frequent disobedience and insolence’ from them, after he refused to allow a cargo of spirits to be landed (spirits being the great trading asset of the officers).

  Court martial records, not often quoted, show how King was constantly frustrated in his efforts to bring the officers to heel. He ordered the trials of a succession of officers for offences as blatant as looting a wrecked ship. The court martial records show that in at least four cases the accused men’s brother officers acquitted him. Each time King appealed to the monarch against the verdict without result.43 Additionally, officers circulated libellous ‘pipes’ (doggerel attacks) against him. One, written by Captain Anthony Fenn-Kemp, for which King accused him of sedition, read in part:

  On Monday keep shop

  In two hours, time to stop

  To relax from such KINGLY fatigue

  And rob Government more

  Than a host of good theives [sic] by intrigue.

  The Board of Officers felt the satire acceptable rather then seditious and honourably acquitted the captain. Whether the officers were aware of it or not, these pipes were little different to the cartoons which constantly lampooned the Prince Regent at home in England.

  In the end the officers defeated King and when he eventually left in 1807 he was a sick man. But for all his faults, including what we would see today as corruption, King warmed to and befriended the young circumnavigator of Australia, Matthew Flinders, in 1802, and seems similarly to have liked William. He also gave semi-official appointments to Barrallier and Harris, officers disciplined by Paterson. He sardonically appointed Barrallier ‘King of the Mountains’, before sending him on an expedition now forgotten to explore the Blue Mountains.

  Governor Philip Gidley King, who befriended Cox (State Library of New South Wales)

  On 16 July 1804 King went further by granting William and his second son James, jointly, 200 acres at Mulgrave Place, near Windsor.44 This dovetailed conveniently with the founding of the Richmond Hill District as part of Mulgrave Place. It included what were to become the Macquarie towns of Richmond and Windsor (known originally as Green Hills), Pitt Town and Wilberforce. The precise location of the Coxes’ grant has been identified as having been on the south side of the Hawkesbury (Nepean) river between South Creek and Yarramundi Lagoon.45 The importance of this grant to the family, with its eight assigned convicts, can hardly be overstated. William was to call it Clarendon and the estate became the focal point of his life. Nor is ‘estate’ the wrong word. He instantly expanded the family holdings there, as is explained in an extraordinary letter from Parramatta to his friend and fellow officer John Piper at Norfolk Island on 28 July 1804.

  By the Experiment was received our two dearest sons safe & well … I got them sent out as settlers (to save expence) & have got 250 acres of ground for them with 4 men, tools etc etc as other settlers have, this with my spare time assisting them will soon get them a farm, they are likewise on the store … I have no doubts of being able to get a living out of the Regiment, as well as in it.

  William also said, ‘Charles is still left in England, Capt Nelson [?] of the Royal Admiral objected to his coming and said if I could not maintain him then he would [be liable]’.46

  This part of the letter is not only hard to read, it is inexplicable. Charles was the third son, born in 1792, he was clearly recorded in Price’s manifest as having travelled out on the Minerva and no other mention of his staying in England was made, although the details of where William and James spent their time is known. They had been left behind at the grammar school in Salisbury and with the Dawe family.

  It was James with whom William had just been given a joint grant by King, perhaps before the boy had actually arrived. William evidently also obtained one for William Jnr, these new grants adding 500 acres to the first 200, illustrating how exploitative William could
be. In the 1820s he claimed that his youngest son, Edward, who had been born in the colony, was a new arrival when he returned from training in Yorkshire.

  Even more oddly, the letter to Piper shows that, in spite of having been suspended as paymaster when bankrupted, and having disobeyed the C-in-C’s prohibition on farming, William expected to be able both to continue farming and remain in the army. Nor was he being paid, since the National Archives records show that in 1809 a Mr Merry, at the Office for War, was calculating what he was owed since 1803. During the intervening six years the family must have lived either off what money they had managed to keep, if any, or more probably what farm produce they could get to market. In 1809 Rebecca was obliged to ask for rations from the government store on three occasions, in February, March and July 1809.

  The forced sales continued to the end of 1804, with a sale of household effects reported in the Sydney Gazette of 6 January 1805.47 Brush Farm itself was not sold until 14 January 1805, when Simeon Lord acquired it for £546 (he sold it on to Gregory Blaxland in 1807). This meant that the family were able to remain there until they established themselves on the Hawkesbury grant. The delay in putting Brush Farm on the market suggests that William was being enabled to avoid homelessness. The sale advertisement described it as being situated in the Field of Mars and ‘one of the most eligible situations for a family in this colony’. On 31 March 1805 a further dividend to creditors was announced, making a total of 75 percent.