William Cox

by Richard Cox

  When Macquarie appointed William as magistrate, the residents sent an address thanking him for this appointment of ‘a gentleman who for many years has resided amongst us, possessing our esteem and confidence’, effectively a tribute to Rebecca’s leadership in the small community, given her husband’s long absence.11 The Colonial Secretary’s formal letter of appointment indicated that the office carried wide powers locally. William would be ‘Superintendent of the Government labourers and cattle and of the Public Works in the District of the Hawkesbury’.12 He was to report on both of the latter. Reinforced by the prestige and the £50 annual stipend, William now set about further widening his interests, in the community and commercially, whilst gradually increasing the size of his Clarendon estate.

  The Sydney Gazette noted William’s social progress in various reports, and his official actions are largely in the Historical Records of Australia. His exertions for the community during a flood in March 1811 were praised. In May he was appointed treasurer of a committee to build a schoolhouse at Richmond, for which he drew up a plan. After Macquarie ordered the setting up of the five towns, described below, in October 1811, the constables were ordered to make a return to William of the farms liable to be flooded – Macquarie was particularly worried about the dangers of floods, which indeed in 1819 took Rebecca Cox’s life.13 Come January 1812 Cox was organizing and signing an address from the residents to Macquarie, congratulating him on his safe return from a voyage. In July he subscribed five guineas towards a new schoolhouse at Richmond (which he might well have hoped to build).

  The social peak of this activity was reached when he acted as vice president at a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of Macquarie’s arrival in the colony. The vice president at a military dinner sat at one end of the table and when asked by the president, at the top end, to propose a toast, would rise and do so. On this occasion the tables to seat so many people were set in a semi-circle. The Sydney Gazette’s fulsome description of the dinner, attended by ‘nearly 150 persons, among whom were many Gentlemen of the first respectability’ will bear quoting, as it describes formal colonial hospitality of the time at its peak. There were, of course, no ladies present:

  This early watercolour, c. 1809, shows the Green Hills settlement (Windsor) from across the Hawkesbury (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW [PXD 388 Vol. 3 no. 7])

  The street going down to the river from Thompson Square at Windsor (Author’s photo)

  [In] the apprehension that a fệte champệtre would be better adapted to the warmth of the season, a spacious tent was erected in the front garden of Mr Hubert Jenkins, one of the stewards, and fancifully decorated with various ensigns, together with a variety of shrubs and boughs, formed into festoons … on the outside of the tent the British Colours were displayed … At six the company sat down to an excellent dinner, during which the full band of the 73rd Regiment … played a number of appropriate airs.

  William Gore, Esq, President, and William Cox, Esq, Vice President, were each supported by a Clergyman on the right … and the rest of the Company placed themselves promiscuously without respect to rank … and the challenge to ‘hob or nob’ was proffered and accepted with a cordiality that was truly gratifying … After dinner succeeded the Toasts, all of which were followed by well adapted airs.

  There were a dozen toasts and it was ‘near eleven when the last toast was drunk … the company retiring highly gratified’. It was hoped for the occasion to be repeated.14

  William thus honoured not only Macquarie’s anniversary, but implicitly his patronage. However, there were other aspects to the Hawkesbury with which William had to cope as a magistrate and which made it vital for him to be respected. Grace Karskens explains that the popular culture there ‘was seen as notoriously “riotous” and “disorderly” because it was beyond the pale of administration’.15 Andrew Thompson, William’s predecessor, so mourned by Macquarie, had been the constable there as a trusted convict ten years earlier. He had both established some degree of order and become wealthy as a trader, proving that an emancipist did not have to end up impoverished. He would be ‘a hard act to follow’. Finally, the Hawkesbury had been the scene of early clashes over land with the Aborigines, and would be again in 1816, with which William had to deal.

  Socially, the Hawkesbury was a tremendous step down from the Parramatta area. By contrast Sir John Jamison, whose father had instigated William’s bankruptcy, but who became a close associate, had his estate of Regentville on the Nepean River near what became Penrith, much more of a gentleman’s location. This underlines Rebecca’s shrewdness in getting her grant for Edward at Mulgoa, a few miles beyond Penrith. Whether William was responding to both local realities and his own by building his house at Clarendon unpretentiously, or whether he was so inclined anyway, is not clear. Possibly it was a bit of both. People’s aspirations, both men and women, are often expressed architecturally, Mrs Macquarie being a good example, as were William’s sons. They built themselves grand houses for the continuance of dynasties. Unlike them, their father seems to have had little ambition over his houses.

  Clarendon is described as having been ‘a large irregular bungalow built about 1810’, to which he only added a formal dining room a decade later.16 His grand-daughters, who knew what remained of the house at the end of the century, confirm its rambling character. Although in 1824 William built a much more classically elegant house in Sydney, on the corner of Bent and O’Connell Streets, his correspondence shows that it was intended only for rental to the government. Four years before his death he built another house called Fairfield at Richmond, safe from the floods, where he eventually died. It was later greatly enlarged and is now a hotel, so that it is hard to tell what it originally looked like.

  Day to day life on the Hawkesbury involved a continual interaction both with his own convict employees and with ex-convict small settlers, in which undue pretensions would have served William poorly. A most important aspect of his life in the Macquarie years was that he fully endorsed and practised his patron’s belief in the rehabilitation of convicts, once their term was expired or they were given tickets of leave to work on their own account. Macquarie had explained his views to the Secretary of State within four months of his arrival, telling Castlereagh:

  I have taken on myself to adopt a new Line of Conduct, Conceiving that Emancipation, when united with Rectitude and long tried good Conduct, should lead a Man back to that Rank in Society, which he had forfeited and do away, in so far as the Case will admit, All Retrospect of former Bad Conduct.17

  However, Macquarie named only four men who he had ‘admitted to his table’. They were D’Arcy Wentworth, the Assistant Surgeon, William Redfern, Andrew Thompson, the magistrate, and Simeon Lord, the trader. None had been common criminals, while D’Arcy had never been a convict, and all were men with whom William would have many dealings, both professionally and, in Wentworth’s case, socially.

  In fact Macquarie’s statement is curious in two ways. For him to refer to Wentworth in that way was incorrect. D’Arcy was a former volunteer officer and medical practitioner, related to the Earls Fitzwilliam, who had gone into exile to become the colony’s assistant surgeon after three times being acquitted of highway robbery. Although court martialled in 1809 on the grounds that, when in charge of the hospital, where sick convicts had to be fed by their employers for the first 14 days, he had not returned the sick to their employers, he had been acquitted. The Judge Advocate had remarked that he had known D’Arcy for 17 years and he had ‘Conducted himself … with the most propriety’.18 He was described as being ‘a handsome tall man with blue eyes … popular with all classes and both sexes’. He was married to a convict woman and fathered William Charles Wentworth of the 1813 Blue Mountains crossing. The younger Wentworth trained in London as a lawyer and later became a prominent politician, whose path crossed William’s often from the 1820s, as well as acting as his counsel over the action by Campbell.

  Macquarie did not mention the Reverend
Henry Fulton, the Protestant Irish clergyman who had travelled out as a convict on the Minerva under William’s supervision. Fulton had been conditionally pardoned in November 1800 and fully pardoned in 1805, when a Crown chaplain. He had supported Bligh and been suspended by the rebels, but restored to office by Macquarie in January 1810. He eventually founded a school at Castlereagh, which may have been attended by two sons of William’s second marriage.

  Other convicted professional men who came to play a large part in the colony’s development, and with whom William had dealings, included Francis Greenway, who was appointed as the civil architect in 1816 by Macquarie and was subsequently pardoned after building the Female Factory at Parramatta in 1820. He designed various public buildings, the most notable being St Matthew’s church at Windsor, although it has been much altered since, and the court house, still preserved as William built it. What might be called Macquarie’s ‘fit to dine with me’ qualification was odd at the best and very few men qualified for it. Although a great many working-class convicts became emancipated, Macquarie’s readmission to society does not seem to have worked except for a few former professionals. Indeed Macquarie’s position had been officially disagreed with back in 1817, when the Secretary of State wrote that he had been ‘compelled to conclude that most of the emancipists elevated to positions of trust were unfit for such preferment’ and urged restraint on the Governor. 19 Overall the way in which Macquarie viewed criminals had progressed from the classicist ‘crime-is-in-the-blood’ school of the late eighteenth century towards the ideal of rehabilitation, anticipating aspects of the Positivist approach of the 1820s in England. The historian J. M. Bennett considers that ‘In Macquarie’s personality … were mixed a broad sense of justice and a humanity far ahead of Georgian concepts’. Acting as a magistrate William shared this outlook. His recorded judgments show that common sense tempered them, for example when on two occasions he met an unreasonable complaint from a master by simply transferring the ‘offending’ convict to another employer. His sentencing – he was the chairman of three justices sitting together and the others opinions are not known – became tougher after Commissioner Bigge’s visit, although he always maintained that harsh penalties (such as severe floggings) only hardened the criminal.

  St Matthew’s church, Windsor, which William helped to build and where he is buried (Author’s photo)

  The impressive interior of St Matthew’s church, Windsor (Author’s photo)

  The tomb of William and Rebecca stands in the St Matthew’s churchyard at Windsor (Author’s photo)

  The Rectory at Windsor, built by William at Marsden’s direction

  A subsidiary part of the magisterial role was that convicts were sent up from Sydney to be allocated to employers by the local JPs, the supervision of government labourers being part of the job. Initially there were too few convicts available for private assignment and on 24 December 1810 the Colonial Secretary, John Campbell, referring to the arrival of the transport Indian, instructed that convicts being sent to the Hawkesbury should be distributed ‘free of favour or affection to the most deserving’.20 A letter dated 7 March 1811 from William to Campbell spoke of problems he had in allocating convicts to employers, particularly ex-convicts who now wanted convicts assigned to them. William wrote:

  I have been careful to prevent Prisoner settlers being set down for servants and has [sic] rejected many who have not the means of maintaining themselves, but still the claimants are numerous (170) … there are others still in the list who are very unworthy of Indulgence from the Crown, being bad members of society … also I am of opinion many of the Settlers has [sic] set down more acres in hand than they ever had in cultivation altogether.21

  Although initially he allocated himself few men, throughout his magisterial tenure, that is to say for the rest of his life, William considered himself to be one of ‘the most deserving’. He gradually accumulated a substantial number, which reached 128 by 1822 and included many ‘mechanics’ (skilled men). This was later bitterly complained about to Bigge by other settlers, as is detailed in Chapter 8, although he was not alone among JPs in the practice and it was just as true that he always believed in the potential rehabilitation of convicts and helped them towards it.

  After Macquarie left, and Commissioner Bigge’s report was acted upon, the ideal of rehabilitation faltered and the aims of punishment reverted to the old view, expressed by the Duke of Portland when he had told Governor Hunter that ‘crimes of a more heinous nature … can only be repressed by a sense of the certainty of punishment that awaits them’.22 This has been explained by the authors of a work on criminology as showing less concern with understanding the nature of the ‘criminal’ and more with developing rational and systematic means of delivering justice.23

  Whilst William’s role as a magistrate rapidly widened his knowledge of the community he lived in and was serving, only Macquarie’s personal writings underline the role which William played in developing the five ‘Macquarie towns’ on the Hawkesbury, the area on which most of his life was centred. These were Richmond, Windsor, Pitt Town, Castlereagh and Wilberforce. The Governor’s ‘Journal of a Tour of Inspection 1810–1811’ describes how he called first at the Coxes’ former farm ‘the Brush’ on 10 November 1810, which Gregory Blaxland had acquired in 1807 and Macquarie found to be a ‘a very snug and good farm and very like an English one in point of comfort’. On 18 November he went out with Mrs Macarthur into the foothills of the Blue Mountains. He next inspected farms granted ‘by the late usurped government’ and on 30 November, a Friday, visited the owners of a chain of farms along the Nepean where ‘we were joined by Mr Wm Cox the magistrate of these districts’ to ‘view the confluence of the Nepean and Grose rivers … from the confluence [where] the Hawkesbury commences’. When they camped that night ‘Mr Cox took his leave of us to go home’.24

  They then began a series of surveys to lay out possible towns, with William among Macquarie’s advisers. On 1 December, after ‘visiting the Government House – or more properly speaking the Government Cottage at the Green Hills’, they rode to the Richmond Hill accompanied by Evans the surveyor and William. They found Richmond Hill very steep and covered in brush and wild raspberries, though there was a terrace running parallel with the Hawkesbury River for about three miles. Similarly there was a terrace or ridge at the Green Hills, which was where Windsor would be laid out, overlooking the river. On Sunday 2 December they all went to church, lamenting the loss of the deceased Andrew Thompson’s ‘good sound sense and judicious advice’. Macquarie recorded: ‘Mr Cox and Dr Mileham [also a JP] dined with us today’. On the next day William accompanied them again around the Green Hills farms, Macquarie noting that they ‘yield in this present time very fine crops, but the houses and habitations of the settlers are miserably bad … and liable to be flooded on any inundation … The Revd Cartwright, his wife, Mr Cox and Dr Mileham dined with us.’

  William continued accompanying the Governor almost daily, as he identified ‘safe and convenient’ situations for townships, away from potential flooding, sometimes by boat, more often on horseback. Mrs Macquarie also rode on horseback, as well as in a carriage, and met Rebecca and William’s family. By 6 December the Governor had decided upon names for the new towns. Windsor was to be in the Green Hills district ‘from the similarity of this situation to that of the same name in England’. Richmond was named for the same reason, while Castlereagh honoured the Lord Viscount, Pitt Town ‘the late great William Pitt’ and Wilberforce ‘the good and virtuous Wm Wilberforce Esq. MP’. Wilberforce had long taken a keen interest in the affairs of the colony and been responsible for Samuel Marsden going out as chaplain many years before. Macquarie recommended those gentlemen with him to urge the settlers to lose no time in removing their ‘Habitations, Flocks and Herds to these places of safety and security’. The advice had little effect. William himself continued to live on low ground at Clarendon, with fatal results for Rebecca.

  Macquarie returned to Sydney
for Christmas, but was back in January to mark out the townships. His descriptions show quite vividly how his plans were literally breaking fresh ground. On Thursday 10 January he set out from Windsor ‘attended by family, the Surveyor, the Revd Mr Cartwright, Mr Cox and several other gentlemen’ to view the site of Castlereagh. The future great square in the centre had been marked out and ‘the name of it – Castlereagh – painted on a Board was nailed to a high strong Post and erected in the Centre of the Square’. The same was done in Richmond. On 12 January William went with Macquarie to examine Windsor and Macquarie wrote: ‘The Revd Mr and Mrs Cartwright, Mr Cox, Dr Mileham and Mrs Fitzgerald dined with us this day … and we again drank success and prosperity to the new Townships’. On 13 January ‘Mr Cox and his wife and family dined with us today previous to our return to Sydney’.25 It is fair to say that the Governor’s writings display William as a trusted adviser and official, though not as a personal friend in the way that Sir John Jamison on the Nepean became. Both Macquarie and more particularly his wife Elizabeth, who had an animated social circle around her, appreciated the social boundaries of patronage.

  Again the Gazette records some of William’s projects around the Macquarie towns, following the Governor’s tour of inspection, as does the Colonial Secretary’s correspondence. On 26 October 1811 he received payment for fencing the burial ground at Windsor. In 1812 he fulfilled a much larger project in the shape of a new gaol there, plus a house for the gaoler and a wall round it, for which the part payment in October was £350, with a similar payment in October 1813. In that year he also began the Glebe House (parsonage) at Castlereagh, for which he earned a total of £500. This immediately preceded the commission to build the Blue Mountains road.