by Richard Cox
Such charitable activities were ones which Macquarie would have had little reason to impede. In the larger, colony-wide, sphere, resistance to his restrictions mounted. In January 1819 the Governor yielded to the extent of giving permission for a meeting of gentlemen, clergy, merchants, settlers and other free subjects to draw up a petition to the King, mainly on the subject of trade. The petition was formulated at a meeting on 12 February 1819 of ‘Gentlemen, Clergy, Settlers, Merchants, Landholders and other respectable inhabitants of New South Wales’, as the Sydney Gazette phrased it, and presided over by Sir John Jamison. William Cox was a signatory. The petitioners also requested a repeal of the weight limit of 350 tons burthen on ships trading between the colony and the Cape of Good Hope, over which the East India Company exercised a monopoly and which prevented small colonial-owned ships from operating. The petition was presented to the Governor with 1260 signatures and he forwarded it to London.29 The committee had included the emancipists Simeon Lord and William Redfern, thus uniting exclusives and traders, presaging alliances which William would later form in opposition to many of his own class. The following year Bathurst permitted the shipping measures, but not civil government. Changing the shipping measures would have suited the home government’s purposes, since in 1813 it had removed the East India Company’s monopoly of trade with India and was increasingly trying to regulate the way in which the company ran the subcontinent.
The petition had also raised the extremely contentious subject of trial by jury, the institution of which it solicited from the home government. At the meeting of 12 February 1819 the petitioners had asserted that there was now a great number of free, respectable inhabitants competent to act as jurymen, although the politically charged question of whether they should include ex-convicts was not touched on. The petition was sent off by Macquarie on 22 March.30 It can be seen as a landmark event in leading citizens making positive, if polite and respectful, efforts to change colonial policy. William would have been unlikely to have taken part if it had been at all extreme in its presentation.
Thanks to Macquarie’s restraints, the colonial landed gentry was only able to reach a form of responsible social maturity in the decade of the 1820s, in the middle of which the aggressive young W. C. Wentworth returned from England and began championing the emancipists through his Australian newspaper. The freedom of the press then became a major issue with Governors Brisbane and Darling, and not to the exclusives’ advantage either, even though James Macarthur had convinced both Darling and Whitehall of the importance of having an upper class of landed settlers and that government should be carried on according to the wishes of the dominant landowners.31
Conservatives usually sided with the governors, until Bourke, an Irish Whig, took the emancipists’ side. There was increasing agitation, promoted by Wentworth, for the controversial jury trials and an elected legislature. William had long before taken a cautious position on both in his evidence to Bigge. Now he sometimes sided with the emancipists. Bourke, perhaps reflecting this measured involvement, described him as ‘one of the many free emigrants of great wealth … who advocate liberal principles’. Others he named included Jamison, John and Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, James Macarthur and, rather surprisingly, in view of the evidence to Bigge, Archibald Bell.32 Bourke himself was described by the Reverend James Dunmore Lang as ‘capable of the most comprehensive views in matters of state-policy and civil government’.33
Long before Bourke arrived, when Macquarie’s immediate successor Brisbane was governor, a potentially most significant initiative – in terms of the landed gentry’s status – was launched, with which William was strongly involved. This was the delayed creation of an agricultural society. Stimulating improvement in the colony’s farming methods might have been the vehicle for the exclusives’ greatest contribution to the colony’s development, since this was where their expertise lay. The enterprise it aimed to encourage was vital to the economic life of the colony, yet the way in which it gradually collapsed was symptomatic of the exclusives’ own decline.
Bell had told Bigge in 1819 that the objects originally proposed were ‘For the purpose of communicating our own experiments & information … in our practice of farming & to have an exhibition of live stock for the purpose of further general improvement’.34 That was the potential for good. There was no apparent direct profit for the promoters, although as farmers they would be the first to benefit from any improvements. The bad outcome lay in the conflicts which rapidly enveloped the society, demonstrating how even the gentry’s most well-meaning initiatives could end up undermining their own standing.
The Hobart Agricultural Society had been inaugurated on 8 December 1821 and the Sydney one came into existence on 6 July 1822, with Jamison as president and William as one of four vice presidents, along with Mr Justice Field, the Judge of the Supreme Court, and Samuel Marsden. The Judge shared many of the exclusives’ views.35 A large committee, all but five of them JPs, included John Piper, John Blaxland, Archibald Bell, William Lawson and George Cox. It was very much a committee of exclusives, paying the substantial annual subscription of five guineas and immediately pledging to form a subscription fund to import ‘a more important breed of cattle, Horses, Sheep etc’.36 The Governor’s patronage was hoped for, just as Macquarie’s had once been. This time there was no official objection to emancipists not being involved – most would have been excluded by the five guinea subscription anyway.
The society’s first dinner was held a week after its formation and the first show was held at Parramatta in 1823. The two brother societies ‘went beyond discussion of farm science and holding of shows to become quasipolitical organizations’.37 Unfortunately, Jamison had issued a political statement in the Sydney society’s name, reflecting one of the Hobart society’s objectives, which was the protection of stock against felonies (i.e., bushrangers): hardly a disinterested purpose. William and others strongly objected to this at a special meeting on 20 August 1822.38 They did not wish to set themselves up as arbiters of the community, which would not have been acceptable to the Governor. This resulted in Jamison’s immediate resignation, although according to one bowdlerizing history of the society, he resigned because he was going to visit England, from whence he did not return until 1825.39
It was not until 1826 that Jamison did deliver a presidential address.40 He was again president in 1827, by which time it had been renamed as the Agricultural and Horticultural Society. In that year he attempted to stand down, but was firmly re-elected by Cox and Marsden, so evidently the quarrel had been resolved. One factor must have been the pre-eminence which Jamison’s title and wealth gave him. The other vice presidents were now Hannibal Macarthur and John Blaxland.41
After his own return from England, in February 1824, Samuel Marsden addressed the Society on 15 July and attempted to brush aside the early political embarrassment. He complimented Field, ‘under whose direction our Society made rapid advances towards the accomplishment of our immediate objects of pursuit’. This would, Marsden hoped, excuse the delays that ‘had arisen out of the difficulties thus unfortunately encountered in the infancy of our Establishment’. It was now ‘acquiring the strength to ensure our prosperity as a public body. We hope by the nomination of a President to see the Society placed again in active operation’ and for ‘steady perseverance in maintaining the Rules laid down for our governance’.42
Since the Society’s articles specifically abjured political activity, which was where Jamison had offended, Marsden’s remarks might have been thought apposite. But Brisbane responded in fury, apparently because of the plaudit for Field, vividly illustrating the in-fighting which bedevilled public life in the 1820s and 1830s and which obstructed the efforts of the exclusives to play a leading role. The Governor claimed to Bathurst that ‘the manner this Address was got up proved that a party purpose was the sole object of the few members concerned’. He forbade its publication, which as governor he had the power to do.43 He appears to have completely
disregarded the fact that ‘over a thousand pounds was sent to England in 1822 in order to acquire more livestock, with another hundred pounds for fresh seed and agricultural textbooks … raised by the infant Agricultural Society’.44
Brisbane next accused ‘Mr Field, late Judge of the Supreme Court’ of being behind attacks on him in letters to the (London) Morning Chronicle.45 On 9 February 1825 he wrote to Bathurst transmitting ‘some hasty replies to many of the foulest, most unjust, ill timed and most unprovoked attacks on my character … in the Morning Chronicle of last August.’ There seems to be no proof that Field, by then back in England, did have anything to do with the letters, although he and the society were referred to in one of them, which attacked Brisbane’s ‘littleness of mind’ in suppressing Marsden’s address. Other letters in this long-distance dispute included a highly pertinent attack on the government being ‘occupied in the most ridiculous cabals and private intrigues’, while Brisbane was particularly stung by the accusation that he spent ‘the greater part of his time in the Observatory or shooting parrots’ (he had built an observatory at Parramatta).46
Thus in the colony Brisbane had contrived to offend both sides: the emancipists, whose influence he had undermined, and the landowners, who resented the rising economic power of the new settlers and denounced him to London.47 When he was removed by Earl Bathurst, after badly mishandling the imposition of martial law at Bathurst in 1824, his valedictory despatch was critical of various members of the landed gentry. He reported that he would have had ‘difficulty in restoring’ Marsden to the magistracy ‘independently of his clerical office’. He had himself recommended Jamison for a possible legislative council, but ‘his character is so fallen in the Country that he is no longer respected nor in fact associated with by the better class of Colonists’.48 Jamison had been one of the principals in accusing the Governor of having ‘improperly sent convict women to the penal settlement at Emu Plains for impure purposes’. His Regentville estate was nearby, on the other side of the Nepean River. The 260 or so convict workers lived in a variety of small cottages, which no doubt did contribute to promiscuity, while William’s road to the mountain ran across the Emu plains at an inconvenient angle in terms of isolating the settlement. But Jamison’s accusation seems to have been unjustified in terms of Brisbane’s intentions.49
Under these intense and partisan pressures, the Agricultural Society lost its sense of direction and its activity lapsed in 1836, although it was reconstituted in 1857. It is now the Royal Australian Agricultural Society of New South Wales, bringing ‘expertise to rural, business and professional pursuits’.50 In the 1840s local agricultural shows continued, however. In February 1847 George Cox won a prize for his Mulgoa wine at the Richmond Show, even when he was suffering financially in his main activity of stock rearing from the collapse of cattle and sheep prices.51 So the impetus for improvement was still there. But the larger issue for the Pure Merinos was that the pursuit of public interest goals, which had begun as the objective of some of their leaders, had been so discouraged during Brisbane’s intemperate governorate.
Throughout the 1820s the policy arguments became stormier. On 16 January 1827 Jamison, William Cox, Gregory Blaxland, John Blaxland, Archibald Bell, W. C. Wentworth and others wrote to Sheriff Mackaness requesting ‘that you will be pleased to convene a further meeting of the free inhabitants of the colony for the purpose of petitioning the King and both Houses of Parliament for trial by jury and a House of Assembly’. This Mackaness did and a deputation to the Governor told Darling that Gregory Blaxland ‘intends to proceed to England, and is charged with the petition to the two Houses of Parliament’. The petitioners felt it was within the competency of the colony to furnish the 100 members they proposed for the assembly, thus avoiding involving emancipists.52 A part of the objective was to control the powers of the Governor.
This démarche infuriated Darling, who promptly removed Mackaness from office as being ‘a Common Associate’ of Wentworth and Wardell (who had jointly founded the Australian newspaper at the end of 1824).53 In his valedictory despatch, after receiving notice of his recall in July 1831, he later asked Goderich to make allowance for the ‘Persons I have had to deal with, Men I may say habitual Drunkards filling the most important Offices, Speculators, Bankrupts and Radicals … If it is your Lordship’s will that I should be the Sacrifice, I must submit’.54 Those words speak for themselves of Darling’s extreme attitudes and self-pity. Nor did the removal from their posts of two fractious governors in succession (Brisbane and Darling) help the transition of New South Wales towards being a free colony, inevitable though that was, with emancipists and their offspring becoming a growing proportion of the population, as more convicts completed their terms of servitude and had more children.
As to the jury trial question, Francis Forbes, the Chief Justice, wrote in November 1827 that ‘it is now generally conceded that the colony is quite advanced to a state to fit it for this mode of trial, but … there must be a great number of details to arrange’. He then approached the delicate question of whether ‘persons who had been transported to this colony’ should be admitted as jurors, presuming that property would be the test of eligibility and that it would be set ‘sufficiently high’ to ensure respectability.55 On 18 April 1828 the petition, taken to London by Blaxland, was presented to the House of Commons. But MPs decided in July that the time was not ripe for either jury trials or an elected assembly. Those discussions continued until 1842, when an Act of Parliament did provide for a partially elected council. Two of William’s sons, William Jnr and George, were among those put forward in 1835.
Earlier, in 1827, Darling had felt that ‘the Colony was by no means prepared for such an Institution as a Legislative Assembly … which would be forcing it beyond its strength and powers’.56 In fact popular agitation for one was limited almost entirely to Sydney, except that a large number of landowners were involved in the leadership of the campaign, including Jamison, John Blaxland and William. In fact they were principally concerned with the uncontrolled spending of public money.57 But if they were active in asking Darling for financial reform, when in 1829 W. C. Wentworth attempted to have the Governor impeached over the death of a soldier named Joseph Sudds, who had been put in leg irons and an iron collar after committing a theft, Jamison, Blaxland, Cox and many others dissented. After all, Cox himself owed his career as magistrate and contractor to the authority of a governor.
Again, when Wentworth’s Australian virulently attacked Darling, the same Pure Merinos were among 115 landowners and merchants who sent an address to him on 4 July 1829 regretting that he had been ‘grossly vituperated by licentious public writers’. They somewhat slavishly asserted that ‘We are convinced that every act of Your Excellency’s administration has emanated from the purest motive’. The great majority of the signatories were identified as being ‘L.D.’ – landed proprietors – plus such merchants as Robert Campbell, now a considerable landowner as well. Their sons outnumbered them. The Blaxlands were represented by George, the Bells by John, plus Thomas Jamison, Charles Marsden, John Lawson, three Cox sons and many others.58 William Cox was then 65 years old, John Blaxland 60, Jamison only 53, William Lawson 55, Simeon Lord 58 and John Piper 56. Even including their sons, the exclusives were still only a small group, even if now allied politically with such successful emancipists as Lord. When the Governor was challenged seriously, the sons also supported the legitimate authority.
Generally speaking, William appears to have trimmed his support between the authorities, his own class and the emancipist challengers. It might appear that a few exclusives lining up alongside emancipists, like Lord, would have potentially damaged them, but there is no evidence for that. More damaging was the active and growing presence of the ‘gentry’ of the Hunter Valley, whose settlers’ motivations were directed to their own immediate enrichment.
If public life increasingly involved the next generation, that involvement was most prominent on the emancipists’ side in
the shape of Wentworth, the outspoken and populist lawyer son of William’s contemporary, D’Arcy. The young Wentworth did not intend to make matters any easier for the exclusives and a brief conspectus of the life of this unusual man will explain his motivations. The furore with Brisbane had coincided with his return to the colony in July 1824, after studying law at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, where he had coined the famous phrase prophesying Australia becoming ‘A new Britannia in another world’. This was in a poem written for the Chancellor’s Medal at the Cambridge Commencement, called ‘Australia’, although it only came second.59
Shortly after his return Wentworth founded the Australian, jointly with a fellow barrister, Robert Wardell, who had run a newspaper in London.60 In January 1825, soon after it started publication, Brisbane told Bathurst that they had published the newspaper ‘shortly after the promulgation of the new Charter of Justice for the Colony’ and ‘These gentlemen never solicited my permission to publish their Paper’, but as ‘the opinion of the Law Officers was that there was no power to prevent it without going to Council, I considered it most expedient to try the experiment of the latitude of the full freedom of the Press’. He added that ‘I shall beg to decline for the present my opinion in regard to its effects’.61 One effect was to be unrelenting editorial attacks on the exclusives (which did not stop Wentworth acting as William’s legal counsel).
Wentworth’s mental outlook was greatly affected by his paternal origins. He was born illegitimate. His mother, Catherine Crowley, had been a convict sentenced to transportation in 1788, who had travelled out with his father. D’Arcy, once an officer in the Irish Volunteers, had trained as a doctor. He was going into exile after four trials at the Old Bailey for being a highwayman had ended in his discharge, and he agreed to go out as the assistant surgeon in the colony, in a kind of voluntary transportation. William Charles had been horrified when he discovered his father’s unpalatable background. Nonetheless the Wentworths were related to Lord Fitzwilliam, who had helped William Charles to become a lawyer in London in 1817, when he described himself as thereby ‘qualifying myself for the performance of those duties, that my Birth has imposed’.62
