William Cox

by Richard Cox

  Wentworth had been mortally offended in 1819 when John Macarthur refused to allow him to marry his daughter, Elizabeth, after a quarrel over a loan. It was after this that he went to Cambridge University. The upshot was that, when he returned in 1824, whilst preoccupied with the greatness of his family and the glory of his country, he resolutely identified himself with the interests of the emancipists and their children. Effectively he went on fighting the battles of his youth throughout his life, despite rapidly becoming a highly successful lawyer and a major pastoralist himself.63 When he retired it was to England, where, apparently coincidentally, he lived at the country estate of Merley, literally across the road from the Coxes’ Fern Hill in Dorset.

  Inevitably Wentworth campaigned stridently through his newspaper for jury trials and an elected assembly. Both involved the highly charged question of whether emancipists should be allowed to serve as jurors, and if so only in civil cases (for them to sit in criminal trials was unthinkable). These were two questions on which William Cox displayed a particular interest, although he usually tried to keep out of politics. Under Macquarie such public questions had been put on hold. Now, on the question of an elected Legislative Council the exclusives were in conflict both with the governors and with the governors’ masters in Downing Street.

  Jury trials and an elected assembly were seen as the birthright of Britons and were issues on which the exclusives might have provided leadership, had not so many been opposed to one or the other, or both. As time passed, the exclusives’ role in public life was becoming increasingly contentious, not least in opposing emancipists potentially serving as jurors at all. Meanwhile the arguments over press censorship which had begun under Brisbane rumbled on under Darling. The landowners and their sons became more and more drawn into political positions, to the detriment of their more enlightened leaders’ non-profit objectives. Indeed the exclusives’ initiatives were increasingly being propelled by their sons, who became more overtly political in pursuing their class interests. William himself had been proposed by Brisbane for the first (unelected) legislative council in 1824, after the ‘Black War’ related in Chapter 11, possibly because he avoided taking contentious positions. But the nomination was rejected by the Secretary of State, who chose only officials.

  In September 1828 a major personal event disrupted William’s life. He fell ill with an irregular heartbeat. An article in the Sydney Gazette leaves no doubt about either the seriousness of the illness or how well he was regarded. ‘A Correspondent’ wrote that:

  Cox has for a few years past been frequently subject to the disease, described by the Hawkesbury people as ‘a palpitation of the heart’ … by copious bleeding, cupping and the aid of cathartics, he is now considered to be out of danger … The sensation on the public mind … can more easily be accounted for by bringing to recollection, that very many of the inhabitants of the Hawkesbury enjoy sweet liberty under his auspices, hold land under his recommendation … have reared families in his employ … His humanity has been conspicuous.64

  ‘Cupping’ meant the use of leeches. The ‘palpitations’ must have been severe. Even allowing for a degree of journalistic excess, it is clear that William exercised a paternal authority in the community. One example had been when in June 1820 he had helped the ex-convicts William Lawrence and Andrew Scott to obtain smallholdings (although, as has been seen in Chapter 5, he also pressured ex-convicts to sell him plots).65

  Nor was the collapse surprising. In July 1827 William had felt so unwell that he had declined the chairmanship of the Quarter Sessions.66 He had been combining his duties as a JP with a demanding range of activities, not least in continuing to acquire land, albeit in collaboration with his sons George and Henry. The ‘Black War’ of 1824 had involved him controversially as both a stockholder and a magistrate. He was very active in benevolent works and with the Agricultural Society. If Anna made running his household easier, she was many years his junior and William, now in his sixties, was not only fathering a new family, as a young woman Anna required a social life. He kept her happy by building extensions to the house and using it for parties. Among occasions which the Sydney Gazette reported in 1822 and 1823 were those marking the christening of a son, a race meeting at Richmond and a ball attended by 60 guests at Clarendon. At one party the guests sang the popular (among themselves) ditty, ‘The Pure Merino’.67

  Pressures on the exclusives continued to build under the more liberal, pro-emancipist rule of Governor Bourke in the 1830s, when the movement for an elected assembly took on a new vitality. In 1833 a public meeting was held to petition the King and the House of Commons for a house of assembly. Atkinson observes that: ‘The names of Jamison, Wentworth, Robert Wardell, William Bland, Simeon Lord, Cox and Blaxland appear as usual’ among the 68 signatories. A subsequent petition for an elected assembly attracted 6025 signatures and was an extraordinary 17 yards long.68 Those just named were liberal minded landowners, including Lord. A surprising signatory was the hardline ‘Major’ James Mudie of Forbes Castle on the Hunter, but that was for the partisan reason of wanting a council as ‘independent as possible of the Governor’.

  Mudie’s antagonism to Bourke stemmed from the Governor’s Summary Punishment Act. This was intended to protect the convict ‘from the tyranny of his master and the local [settler] magistrate’.69 Mudie claimed that it undermined convict discipline. In his case it did not work, and culminated in the Castle Forbes revolt and the hanging of several of his servants. In fact he was expressing the views of many conservatives when he wrote that ‘a convicted felon is unworthy both of future trust and of mingling with and participating in … the social enjoyments of his former associates and fellow subjects’.70 Although at the time Bourke’s Act was considered to threaten the colonial gentry, it was really an expression of the Governor’s liberalism.

  The petitioners were also confronting the squatters, who the gentry felt should bring their land within the official framework of land ownership, but to whom the government gave way. In 1837 Bourke appointed a retired officer of the 62nd Regiment, Edward Denny Day, a squatter, as a magistrate. Bourke reported to Lord Glenelg that Day had ‘sold out to settle’, married in the colony, and was so highly respected that other residents had asked the Governor to enable him to ‘remain among them’ (why he might not have been able to was unclear). ‘This being out of my power,’ Bourke wrote, ‘I have named him Police Magistrate at Mussel Brook.’ It had been the repeated desire of settlers to have such magistrates in remote parts of the colony.71 This provides a good example of the dilemma facing the exclusives in objecting to respectable middle-class squatter arrivals. As Roe observes, the gentry, the nucleus of conservative power, were to be ‘destroyed by the new [squatter] movement’, although when the 1846 Land Act legalized their position the squatters’ attitudes changed. They began to settle and raise families and became politically conservative.72 This was what Day had done.

  Further undermining the exclusives’ authority, and preventing what could have been a gradual broadening of their narrow social base, was the seemingly everlasting quarrel about how to define a ‘gentleman’. Even in the 1830s there was still bitter dispute over the extent to which a connection with trade was a disqualification. The Australian Club in Sydney, founded in 1838, had an upper membership limit of 300 and excluded anyone in trade, mimicking the snobbery in England. The unreality of the exclusives’ attitude was underlined by there having long been in Sydney, as Roe observes, ‘a handful of merchant princes having economic and social affiliations with the gentry’. Paramount among them was Robert Campbell, while another was the Australian Club’s founder himself, S. A. Donaldson, and of course Lord.73

  A recent commentator, J. J. Spigelman, refers to ‘the social pretensions of an insecure upper class, desperately trying to mimic the social order and hierarchy of a distant aristocratic society’ and says that for ‘those who could not rely on the presumption of respectability conferred by … “breeding”, actual conduct alone revealed
the character entitling one to gentry status’.74 William Cox’s conduct and leadership, not least towards the convict labourers on the mountain road, had fully earned him that status. Furthermore, he had the ‘breeding’ which so many did not. Where Spigelman exaggerates, in this author’s view, is in suggesting that the English aristocracy was their inspiration, rather than the squirearchy. The true English aristocracy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was almost absurdly grand. If it inspired settlers, it was of the next generation when William Cox Jnr, for example, had his coat of arms painted on his carriage.

  The most lucid thinking of that second generation’s thinking came from James Macarthur, John’s fourth son. Ward suggests that: ‘James Macarthur was our earliest systematic thinker on society. He wanted to build up in New South Wales a society and government based on a pastoral hierarchy with strong emphasis on the rule of law … the family and property’. But by the time he took over his father’s direction of family policy it was too late. ‘Politically his attempts were in ruins by the end of the 1850s.’75 The liberalism which Bourke had first supported, combined with popular politics, had eclipsed the pastoralists.

  If William Cox’s sons were giving thought to the society they lived in, as James Macarthur did, there is little sign left of it. William Jnr, the eldest, had been commissioned into the New South Wales Corps in 1808, survived its transition into the 102nd Regiment and been sent home with it. He fought in the Peninsula War at the siege of Badajoz and married the sister of a brother officer. He then returned to the colony to live as a gentleman, indeed somewhat as an aristocrat, developing an existing house at Richmond, called Hobartville, into an altogether grander mansion. His and his brothers’ lives are explored briefly in the final chapter.

  The Macarthurs – led by James Macarthur – reached a peak of prosperity during the economic expansion of the 1830s. At the same time, despite the much disliked Goderich reforms, which only allowed land to be sold, not granted, William Cox and his sons never ceased expanding their estates. In 1834 James Cox began building his own magnificent Clarendon in Tasmania. In 1835 William Jnr ‘of the 12th Regiment of Foot’ was using his commutation (of half pay) to buy land, just as the ex-officers immigrants did.76 In 1836 William Snr bought 1100 acres in the Country of Roxburgh (near Bathurst) for £290. Even after he died, on 15 March 1837, his executors were dealing with an application for 2560 acres in the County of Ellis, Upper Hunter, originally made ‘during the administration of Brisbane or Darling’, for which he had paid £640.77

  William died on 15 March 1837. A brief family notice was printed in the Sydney Gazette of 18 March, which read

  DEATH. At his residence, Fairfield, Windsor, on Wednesday morning last, the 15th instant, after a long and severe illness, William Cox Esq, aged 72, deeply regretted by his numerous relatives and friends.

  Surprisingly the paper does not appear to have published any obituary. By that time the sunshine of the Pure Merinos’ day was already showing signs of fading. Whilst it has been easy for historians, from Samuel Bennett onwards, to explain their decline with the help of hindsight, the exclusives themselves do not appear to have realized that the pillars of their temple were cracking until it fell in the 1850s. If the gentry who survived the disastrous 1840s ‘no longer played by 1851 the undisputed role that they had twenty years before’ it was, to quote Dyster, due as much to ‘diversification in society as to defeat in the field. In their home districts they were still the men given pride of place.’78 Some of their descendants did fulfil the Victorian ideal of country squires, after which later generations simply became respected members of professions, such as the Coxes who pursued the law and medicine.

  In William’s time the gentry had continued to fight their corner, against both the squatters and what many of them saw as dangerous democratic and emancipist influences, disfiguring their own reputations. Bennett, writing in 1867, observed that the:

  early colonists indeed, to their honour be it spoken, in bestowing names upon their estates appear to have acted under the elevating ideas that they were not only the founders of families, but were helping to create ‘a new Britannia in another world’ … with whose glories they wished to identify themselves and their posterity.79

  Bennett exactly identifies their aspirations. Some, like Jamison and Macarthur, named their estates after their aristocrat patrons. William drew on his Dorset and Wiltshire heritage. Bennett also refers to W. C. Wentworth pouring ‘the vials of his wrath’ on that class (the exclusives) and to ‘the bitterness of the social and political quarrels which then raged in the colony’.80

  However, it was as much economic catastrophes as political ones which made the 1840s so disastrous for the landed gentry, when the great prosperity of the 1830s gave way to the colony’s first recession. The Bank of Australia failed in 1843 and the shareholders – who included members of the Cox family – had to pay up their shares of the default. The value of cattle and sheep collapsed and George Cox was forced into slaughtering his stock and boiling down the carcasses for tallow, which could be exported to England, as they had no other value. W. C. Wentworth had foretold this situation in his description of the colony as it was back in 1819. At that time, he wrote, ‘Good milch cows may be bought for £5 to £10, fine young breeding ewes from £1 to £3 … low as these prices may appear they are in great measure fictitious; since there is more stock of all kinds in the colony, than is necessary for its population’.81

  George Cox, William’s fourth son, who established Burrundulla at Mudgee (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW)

  Wentworth was proved right, if only three decades later. Although the Coxes survived, many pastoralists did not outlast the 1840s. In June 1848 John Blaxland’s Luddenham and Newington estates were in the hands of a trust company (he had died at Newington in 1845), their owner having ‘ignored the transient, but more profitable benefits of squatting’.82 The colony was almost littered with abandoned great houses, such as Aberglasslyn, overlooking the Hunter River near Maitland, whose builder, George Hobler, had been bankrupted in 1843, tried squatting and ultimately emigrated to South America. 83 Many settlers had ‘their plans prostrated by the financial disasters … Castles in the air had suddenly faded,’ Bennett wrote.

  However, in 1865 Bennett was still able to list 30 families who were ‘the landed gentry of that part of the colony’ within 30 miles of Campbelltown. The list included the Macarthurs, MacLeays, Wentworths, Jamisons and Coxes. He described the ‘little clique of exclusives … who regarded themselves as the only persons whose claims (to land, labour and social recognition) … ought to be considered for a moment’.84 Bennett was writing with a degree of ironical contempt, if also of recognition. Despite their pretensions, the ‘ancient nobility’ still captured some imaginations, not least their own.

  Bennett also remarked that ‘The fluctuating circumstances of colonial existence have always proved fatal sooner or later to the designs of those who have endeavoured to found a territorial aristocracy’.85 It had done, even though the colonial landed gentry had evolved into a model significantly different to its home country inspiration, which is another aspect of the colonial experience that has seldom been discussed. By the mid-nineteenth century those of their descendants who survived the crash of the 1840s did become recognizable squires, accepted as leaders of their local communities, as the Coxes were. William had established a dynasty. His family had both arrived and survived.

  13 The Cox Dynasty Established

  William Cox died on 15 March 1837. It would be roughly a decade and a half before the dream of the exclusives also perished, both as the result of the social and political development described in the previous chapter and of the gold rush of 1851. Yet, because it is indeed an ill wind that blows nobody any good, the gold mining at Gulgong north of Mudgee enabled George Cox of Burrundulla to sell off building plots on the parts of the estate nearest the growing Mudgee township, where his descendants became archetypal squires, accepted as leader
s of their local communities. Few of any family were national figures in the way that William’s grandson, George Henry Cox, was or as ambitious as James Cox in Van Diemen’s Land. An obvious exception to this dictum about the second generation was the thoughtful James Macarthur, who set out his vision of a landowning aristocracy in his New South Wales, its Present State and Future Prospects of 1837. By contrast the Coxes of that era were doers, not thinkers.

  First, however, what of William Cox himself? How does he emerge? As a natural gentleman, as well as one by birth; as considerate of the ex-convicts who he recognized had created the colony by their labour; as someone genuinely concerned with improvement, both agricultural and in terms of citizen’s rights. On the obverse side of this silver gilt coin, William remained more than a little unscrupulous to the very end. He was involved in a land acquisition dispute on the day he died, over which his executors were forced to admit he was in the wrong. He retained throughout his life an eighteenth-century view of entitlement to the spoils of office, even though that morality was changing around him. But without ambition, and with too much scruple, the pastoral economy of early New South Wales could not have been created, nor the colony developed.

  No study of William’s life and career would be complete without looking at what happened to his descendants and the dynasty he founded. The lives of William Cox Jnr, James, George, Henry and Edward further illustrate the continued rise and slower ultimate decline of the landed gentry. In acquiring land the first generation had been nakedly ambitious in the way that settlers on any new frontier have to be, although much less so than the settlers of the American West were. The second generation of Coxes were more socially ambitious and less obviously grasping, but they continued in their father’s tradition of buying land, whenever the opportunity arose. It has also to be remembered that their lands were often heavily mortgaged, which helps to explain their continued antipathy to the squatters, whether gentlemen or not, who took land without paying for it. But mortgages did not stop William’s sons continuing to expand their estates and build themselves suitably splendid houses.