Since he was to bring on in parliament in the next few days his motion respecting the state of the colony of New South Wales, he would then ‘take that opportunity of doing you the justice to which you are entitled’. His real target was Macquarie, Bennet admitted, and what he had said was never intended as ‘an individual attack’ on D’Arcy but was directed against the system pursued by the governor.
Later in the day, William, having consulted Cookney, wrote, ‘Sir, since I quitted you this morning, I have found in conference to my father’s friend Mr Cookney that your assertion of his having been found guilty on a charge of highway robbery . . . is not founded . . . No one has any right to draw any conclusion but that he was innocent of the crime imputed to him and I can positively take upon myself to say that . . . after his acquittal he protested in the most solemn manner that a jury of his peers had only done him justice. Very shortly after this trial he voluntarily embarked for New South Wales having first obtained the appointment of Superintendent of Convicts.’
This was a misstatement, but a son’s misstatement. ‘Delicacy like his could not exist in the heart of a felon,’ said William. Believing himself descended from a long unsullied line of illustrious progenitors, William felt that the glory of his ancestry was in some degree tarnished by the mere imputation that had been cast on his father’s character. ‘But twenty-six years of unimpeachable rectitude, during which period he has risen by his single merit to the highest point of distinction and respectability abroad, have not sufficed to silence the venomous tongue of slanderer . . . the suggestion of guilt has been conjured into guilt itself, suspicion into proof, accusation into condemnation.’
The next day, young Wentworth sat in the visitors gallery of the Commons and heard a most thorough withdrawal by Bennet of the accusation in his pamphlet. Bennet withdrew the first edition of his pamphlet too, and corrected the second. But the reality of his father’s four charges hurt William and became a spur in his vitals. ‘I will not suffer myself to be outstripped by any competitor and I will finally create for myself a reputation which shall reflect a splendour on all those who are related to me.’
Including, of course, the sometimes inattentive Earl Fitzwilliam.
THE COMMISSIONER VISITS
Under pressure from men like Bennet, the Earl of Bathurst, Secretary of State for the Colonies and War, had decided that he was going to send an investigator to New South Wales to look at the question of the cost of transportation and whether it worked as a punishment. Bathurst suggested to John Thomas Bigge, a former judge in Trinidad and his appointed commissioner, that he should investigate all laws, regulations and usages of the settlement with a view to seeing whether transportation should be made ‘an object of real terror’, and that he should report any weakening of terror by ‘ill-considered compassion’.
Macquarie had earlier applied to resign for health and other reasons, and when at the end of September 1819 Bigge came ashore in Sydney, Macquarie was totally taken by surprise and unprepared for him. The liberal-minded Macquarie, who had helped make New South Wales a viable society through his own discretion and labour, found himself subjected to the demands of a royal commissioner who was an aristocrat, a stickler, a man of the law’s letter. He was of cramped temperament and lacked a wife to spike his pompousness. Not that Bigge’s investigative methods were of the highest order. He accepted attacks on Macquarie and others from witnesses without questioning their bona fides. There was no distinction made between sworn and unsworn testimony. Macquarie himself surmised Bigge’s opening question was always, ‘Tell me any complaint you have against Governor Macquarie.’ In his free time, Bigge found much hospitality at the country house of John Macarthur, who was willing to utter every grievance about Macquarie’s preference for emancipists. It was in part through Bigge’s ear that Macarthur would have a hand in destroying yet another governor.
Bigge’s three reports proved massive when they appeared: one on the state of the colony, published in 1822; one on the judicial establishments of New South Wales and of Van Diemen’s Land, published in 1823; and one on the state of agriculture and trade, published the same year. Macquarie knew the reports would be very damaging to him even before they appeared. He had quarrelled bitterly with Bigge over his intention to appoint the former Nore mutineer, Dr Redfern, as a magistrate. Then Redfern accused Bigge of demeaning himself by questioning ‘common strumpets in the streets of Sydney’ about ‘the character of Mr Wentworth and myself ’. Macquarie had been calmer in answering before Bigge the sixty-three charges which had been made against him by others.
In the first report, for example, Bigge pointed to the inconsideration of Macquarie in having the Reverend Mr Marsden serve with Mr Simeon Lord, former convict, and the late Mr Andrew Thompson, ditto, as trustees of the public roads. Thus was ‘violence done to the feelings of Mr Marsden, which could not be compensated by flattering those of his two . . . associates’. But even more inconsiderate, said Bigge, were the efforts by Governor Macquarie to introduce emancipated convicts to the notice and society of the military bodies. For Governor Macquarie and his deputy, Maurice O’Connell, Mary Bligh’s husband, had success in habituating the officers and soldiery of his 73rd Regiment to being polite to convicts.
This was all part of what Bigge would call the ‘mismanagement of convicts’. Macquarie sent home for publication his own A Letter to Viscount Sidmouth. He left Australia with his family in February 1822, giving place to Governor Brisbane who had orders to enforce some of Bigge’s recommendations—the setting up of an appointed Legislative Council, the use of convict gangs to clear land, the sale rather than granting of Crown lands, the accurate registration of prisoners, the creation of Van Diemen’s Land as a separate penal administration. Bigge endorsed no legal reforms and did not recommend trial by jury in criminal cases. He left the legal status of emancipists in limbo. But the building program in which Macquarie had engaged was too extravagant, he said, and should be curtailed.
Macquarie and Elizabeth Macquarie were greeted in London by young Wentworth. By the time Macquarie and his wife went north to the Island of Mull to take over a farm his agent had purchased, they were so poor they could not travel by coach but made their way by a small, extremely perilous coasting vessel. Driven back to London by illness, Macquarie died in 1824 of some of the same symptoms of exhaustion and physical damage which D’Arcy had treated in New South Wales.
Having made such a compendium of New South Wales affairs, one which at least the officials in Britain believed, Bigge became a successive investigator into colonies, to the extent that the work itself, which one of his assistants described as ‘interminable as the web of Penelope’, and the accidents and hardships of travel, certainly shortened his life, as he had shortened Macquarie’s.
A HOTHEAD’S PROSE
In 1819, young William Wentworth’s book on New South Wales, some of it written in a winter of rheumatic gout brought on by the excesses of life in Paris, appeared in England. It was entitled A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen’s Land, and William intended it to declare his arrival as his nation’s annalist and coming statesman. The book would go through three editions, the second in 1820, the third in 1824, each seemingly dictated by his friends’ and father’s assessment of the latest situation in New South Wales, or, more accurately, of the forces of exclusivism, that is, the desire to exclude former convicts from public life, which attacked them. First there was a statistical section which contained long extracts from the surveyor and explorer John Oxley’s journals. The second section contained historical and political description and, presaging Bigge, argued there should be a Legislative Council since—whether the governor was an acerbic Bligh or a genial Macquarie—the colony suffered from the governor’s autocratic powers. At the beginning of the historical section Wentworth placed emphasis on Bligh’s administration as an example of unlimited autocracy. He did not mention Bligh by name but
described him as ‘a wretch whom it would be superfluous to name, as it is needless to hold him to the execration of posterity’. His father had been dismissed as assistant surgeon by Bligh.
The third section had to do with immigration and the advantages of New South Wales over North America for British immigrants. ‘I am in great hopes that a large body of Quakers will be induced by my representations to settle in the colony. I have had frequent interviews with them on the subject . . . but the nature of the government is almost considered by them as a decisive obstacle.’ But William also spoke of the parlous condition of agriculture, partly due to the lack of a market for grain apart from the domestic needs of the colony. With no market for a surplus, there was no incentive to grow more. Together with frequent losses to drought and unscrupulous creditors, the majority of the settlers were kept in a state of ‘poverty, slavery and degradation’. This was ‘in some measure imposed on the settlers by their own imprudent extravagance’. But overall, he decided that the chief cause of their trouble was not their ‘early habits of irregularity’ but ‘the actual impolicy and injustice of their rulers’. One of the impolicies, in William’s opinion, was the granting of too many tickets-of-leave which undercut the labour supply. He recommended distilleries as a means of using excess grain, and reminded readers that the Select Committee on Transportation in 1812 had recommended it as well, and that it had been recommended by Governor Macquarie but not approved by Earl Bathurst. He argued that distilleries would be good for the moral fibre of the young colonials, because the product was ‘depreciated in the estimation of its consumers in exact proportion to its abundance’.
Then Wentworth raised the possibility that the colonists could be goaded into rebellion by British ill-rule, and described how they would be able to ambush the forces of tyranny in the ravines of the Blue Mountains. In this, says historian John Ritchie, he was influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s contemporary bestseller, Rob Roy, in which Scots used their ravines to good purpose against the redcoats. ‘Let the Minister for the colonies then take heed how he acts,’ warned the hard-up, gout-suffering young colonial, reaching for eloquence worthy of a Benjamin Franklin or an Edmund Burke. ‘His Lordship should know that it is the tendency of colonies to outstrip even legitimate restraints: how then can it be expected that they will long wear the fetters of injustice and oppression?’ Wentworth saw New South Wales as an exact or very close replica of Virginia, Georgia or the Carolinas. The result of Britain’s refusal to negotiate responsible government, he said, would be ‘a spirit which will be handed down from father to son acquiring in its descent fresh force, and settling at length into an hereditary hatred’.
But he argued that although he criticised government, he was not one of those who were sworn enemies of all authority. Nor did he belong to the ‘band of ruffian levellers’. He then detailed the commercial disability suffered by New South Wales under the monopoly of the East India Company and recommended that the colony be given parity in trading status with Newfoundland and the West Indies. All these grievances had been included with a petition from the leading emancipists to the Colonial Office in March 1819, which was sent off with Macquarie’s endorsement. Since the changes Wentworth recommended were not within the power of New South Wales colonial governments to bring about, it would be up to the British government to effect change.
He was not embarrassed in stating his personal hopes. He had ‘the most sanguine expectations of being the instrument of procuring a free constitution for my country’. The idea that finding out that his father was a former highwayman took away his ambition to be the leader of the free immigrants is not borne out by some of his letters, in which he talks a great deal about free immigrants.
Between the 1819 and 1824 editions of his book, Wentworth’s attitudes changed according to what was happening to his hopes. The 1820 edition was marked by the still-stinging wound of Bennet’s attack on his father. By the 1824 edition, Macarthur, who had prevented William’s marriage to his daughter Elizabeth, was described as head of the family which systematically opposed every innovation by which the condition of the community at large was likely to be ameliorated. But Bigge was the bête noir of the third edition.
The third edition might also have been influenced by the fact that Wentworth was calling at the time at the Colonial Office, trying to get a pension for his father, and was appalled by the supercilious behaviour of the bureaucrats there, probably because they had read Bennet’s revelations. Nonetheless, an annual pension for D’Arcy of £200 was the ultimate outcome.
In 1822, D’Arcy’s friend William Redfern and Robert Eager, a Cork lawyer transported for uttering a forged bill, arrived in London to present a petition from the emancipists of New South Wales asking the government to guarantee the legality of their pardons, which had been questioned in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and to allow them full civil rights, including the right to hold legal office and serve on juries. Wentworth’s contacts with Redfern and Eagar would further colour the third edition of his book, especially in its criticisms of Bigge and the flawed way he had collected evidence.
In July 1822 William challenged Bigge to a duel for stating that he was the author of the pipes attacking Molle. And Bigge had reported criticisms of the running of Sydney Hospital under D’Arcy Wentworth, in terms of morality, record-keeping, syphilitic intercourse between patients, nurses throwing warm meat at the patients and so on. D’Arcy Wentworth’s defence was that the fact that the female patients were syphilitics inhibited the males from sexual intercourse and the nurses threw the meat to avoid contagion. Bigge would also say that before relinquishing office, Macquarie had granted Wentworth another 3150 acres (1276 hectares) and paid money on behalf of the government for a house he owned in Sydney. Given D’Arcy was a former highwayman, this was seen as part of Macquarie’s supposed indulgence towards those directly or indirectly associated with convictism.
Having challenged Bigge to a trial of honour, something Bigge was not designed for, William found police were sent around to his rooms to restrain him, and that added to his fury. Commissioner Bigge was given pause enough to admit he may have drawn an unjust conclusion. The commissioner agreed to delete the offending passage about the Molle pipes before his first report was tabled in the House of Lords, and to insert an apology to D’Arcy in the second report. This did little to soothe the young colonial, since so many men he had grown up with had been maligned.
On 27 February 1823, Wentworth entered Peterhouse, Cambridge’s oldest college. At thirty-two, William was much older than most of the undergraduates, but he wanted the éclat of having been to a famous university and he sought through the Chancellor’s Prize for poetry to make a mark much larger than that young John Macarthur had. The subject for the prize that year was Australasia.
Wentworth’s 443-line poem was dedicated to Macquarie. Wentworth’s lines run more sweetly and authentically than those of the poet who won. He did not write of Australia in direct Australian terms, but his preoccupations were identifiably those of the Currency. That the new landscape produced its European interpreters of the first order:
And tho’, bright goddess, on the far blue hills,
That pour their thousand swift pellucid wills
Where Warragamba’s rage has rent in twain
Opposing mountains, thundering to the plain,
No child of song has yet invoked thy aid
’Neath their primeval solitary shade.
Still, gracious Pow’r, some kindling soul inspire
To wake to life my country’s unknown lyre,
That from creation’s date has slumbering lain
. . .
Next, the dream that the child might become more glorious than the parent:
And, Oh Britannia! Should’st thou cease to ride
Despotic Empress of old ocean’s tide;
. . .
When thou no longer freest of the free,
To some proud victor bend’st the vanquish’d knee—
Relume, and shine more brightly still than here;
May this, thy last born infant, then arise,
To glad thy heart and greet thy parent eyes;
And Australasia float, with flag unfurl’d,
A new Britannia in another world.
In the circumstances, his poem emerges as yet another plaint for recognition, another lever to put beneath the vast stone of the world’s indifference and hostility.
By 1823 William Wentworth, a notably unsuccessful lawyer and student, was telling D’Arcy he saw no prospect for himself in England. The New South Wales Act of 1823 had been passed establishing a Legislative Council but failed to introduce trial by jury in criminal cases. The new Legislative Council, said William, was a ‘wretched mongrel substitute’ for the partially elected one he had recommended. Civil juries were introduced, but based on a property qualification. The Act was to be revised in five years time, and William believed that if he returned to New South Wales he could be in place to influence its revision.
Wentworth’s preoccupation with a free constitution was not of great interest to most emancipists. Their main concern, shared by some free immigrants, was trial by jury, which had been a contentious issue for some time. Wentworth knew instinctively he needed to identify his longed-for free constitution with the emancipists’ concerns, to put the ‘exclusives’ in their own barren corner. He was the first Currency child, that is, native-born, who saw a constitutional future of some robustness. But his patriotism, despite his threat about fighting the English in the Blue Mountains, was a British patriotism—he saw New South Wales as ‘a new Britannia in another world’, as he declared in verse. He now said he would hold no government position in New South Wales as he meant to lead the colony as a private person. He came to an agreement with Robert Wardell jointly to publish a newspaper that would launch his campaign on colonial civil rights. Wardell, a doctor of laws from Cambridge and the same age as Wentworth, was editor of the Statesman, a London evening paper. It was an endangered paper, being under the threat of a Tory writ which would very likely finish it. Wardell was happy to escape. He embarked with Wentworth on the Alfred for Sydney in February 1824, along with William Redfern and John Mackaness, colonial sheriff designate, all of them tipplers and friends for life.
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