Arthur Phillip

by Michael Pembroke

  In 1764, in accordance with the custom of the time, Charlott and Phillip had their portraits painted. The artist was George James, who had returned to England from Italy in 1760 and whose portraits, like so many others of the period, were in the style of Thomas Gainsborough. Charlott’s portrait shows a fine-boned, elegant woman with low-cut bodice and slender waist. Her appearance is demure and youthful, her bearing gentle but upright. Her unblemished complexion is pearl white across the bosom and faintly coloured in her cheeks. She is a picture of controlled femininity and possibly of circumspection. Her chosen background reflects the romanticism of the age – a sky of Canaletto blue, light scudding cloud and the distant prospect of a grand house elusively concealed. In the foreground, prominence is given to her silver gown in shimmering silk edged with gold brocade and lace embroidery. Her regal, dusky pink cape is gathered at each shoulder by a bejewelled clasp and her tiara, with its substantial pearl drop as its centrepiece, sits ritually above her forehead. As was the fashion, her décolletage is unadorned, flat and cut as low as decency permitted.

  Phillip’s portrait conveys a different image. The newly married lieutenant appears somewhat jowly, even plump, and a little sallow. He wears a navy-coloured coat with gold braid and buttons, a style that was popular with naval officers. His shirt and ruffles appear to be of white linen, possibly of cotton. His solitary concession to fashion is a tangerine-coloured waistcoat edged in gold. It contrasts distinctively with the stark white of his shirt and the deep navy blue of his jacket. Somewhat portentously, he holds a chart, presumably naval. Behind him, the sea stretches limitlessly to the horizon.

  The background sea of Phillip’s portrait could not have reflected his life at Hampton Court, where there are no vistas of the sea. It is presumably aspirational, redolent of the view of the English Channel seen from the South Downs of Hampshire and Sussex. The Hampshire countryside, within an easy coach ride of Portsmouth, was a place where naval officers congregated in peacetime as gentlemen farmers. In about 1765 Phillip and Charlott came to Lyndhurst in the ancient New Forest. Their farm was known as Vernals. The road running past the door led to the Channel port of Lymington. Michael Everitt was not far away in Portsmouth. The tithe survey suggests that Vernals was a substantial establishment, consisting of a house, farm offices, garden and shrubbery, as well as 22 acres of adjoining pasture. Phillip diligently carried out the role and responsibilities of a country gentleman and became one of the parish’s Overseers of the Poor. He also expended large amounts of his wife’s capital. Some years later, the London Observer reported that while at Lyndhurst Phillip spent £2000 of his wife’s money ‘principally in domestic disbursements’. He also expanded their land holdings, acquiring a property known as Glass Hayes where the Lyndhurst Park Hotel now stands, another known as Black Acres or Blackacre and a third known as Coleman’s. The term ‘Blackacre’ is a legal euphemism, coined by the Elizabethan jurist Lord Coke and still used as part of the arcana of the law to describe unnamed or fictitious estates in land. It may well have referred to the fields lying between Vernals and Glass Hayes.

  The country Phillip farmed was moist, green countryside, shaded by trees of oak and beech, ‘acquiescently fertile with the faithful tillage of hundreds of years’. The shaggy New Forest ponies that are indigenous to the area caused some degradation of the soil but in the main the land was deep-soiled and benign. The farming was gentle and the evenings peaceful. Most landowners kept horses, cattle, sheep, poultry and pigs on small holdings. Phillip was assisted in his rural endeavours by a man named Henry Dodd. The male farm workers were mostly ploughmen, carters, shepherds and horsemen; their major responsibilities were caring for the draught animals. The women carried out the lighter tasks associated with the household. They made cheese, managed the poultry and tended to the vegetable garden where they grew chard and spinach, swedes and turnips, onions and leeks, potatoes and carrots, cabbage and beetroot. In the orchard, the mainstays were apples, pears and quinces. Rural England was then a leisurely, well-mannered society: gentlemen raised their hats to one another; labourers touched their forelocks to their masters – and especially to the squire and his lady. In the rating book for the parish of Lyndhurst, Phillip was described as a substantial inhabitant and was accorded the status of ‘Esquire’. With the accretions he added to Vernals, he had become, at a young age, the respectable squire of a considerable farming estate.

  But Phillip’s time as a gentleman farmer in the New Forest ended badly. And it may never have been the bucolic bliss that he and Charlott presumably wished it to be. The years 1766–68 happened to be tumultuous years for the rural community of southern England and the West Country. Harsh winters, record heavy snowfalls and flooding spring rains ruined crops and led to prohibitive prices for staple products. In the parish of Selborne, 30 miles to the east of Lyndhurst, the curate Gilbert White recorded that on one day the temperature was fourteen and a half degrees below freezing ‘within doors’. He said that there was ‘reason to believe that some days were more severe than any since the year 1739–40’ – a winter when the Thames was frozen over from Christmas to February. In 1766–67, the winter hardship caused hunger and rioting in market towns in Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. And at one stage, 3000 troops were sent in to quell looting and attacks on food stores. We do not know how Phillip’s daily life and farming routine at Vernals were affected, but it is clear that by 1768 a great unhappiness had descended on the married couple. Phillip’s life as a country gentleman was coming to an end.

  In the eighteenth century, England was the only Protestant country in Europe without a specific divorce law. Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Scotland and even some of the English colonies in America all permitted divorce on grounds including adultery, impotence and desertion. Henry VIII had the opportunity to introduce a divorce law, and was encouraged to do so by several clerical advisers, but he did not grasp the nettle. Instead, he had his marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves annulled. Divorce or annulment was not necessary in the case of his other wives. For the vast majority of English couples death was the only means of release from a miserable marriage. But there was another means for the well advised and well to do. Deeds of separation, drawn up by Chancery lawyers acting on behalf of the husband and the trustees of the wife – as she had no legal status – became widespread. They could provide for the division and settlement of matrimonial property, and even for the repayment to one party of monies expended by the other during marriage. These deeds were necessarily consensual and were ineffective without the cooperation of both parties. And of course they had no legal effect on the existence of the marriage, so that neither could re-marry while the other was still alive.

  After six years of marriage, Phillip and Charlott concluded a formal ‘Indenture of Separation’ on 22 April 1769. It seems that the fatherly Michael Everitt supported Phillip in this dark time, for he was one of the signatories to the document on Phillip’s side. The deed recites that Phillip and Charlott had ‘lately lived separately and apart’ – something which seems to be confirmed by the fact that Phillip resigned from the office of Overseer of the Poor at Lyndhurst during the previous summer and was replaced by a William Lake. The language of the deed contains the usual obscurities of which lawyers are so fond, but in essence, Phillip renounced any title or claim to ‘all and every the Household, Goods, Plate, Chair, Horses, Furniture, fixtures and things whatsoever then in the possession or Use of the said Margaret Charlotte Phillip or in or about her Dwelling House or Place of abode at Hampton Court in the County of Middlesex and also all her Wearing Apparel, Jewels, Diamonds, Watches, rings and ornaments of her person’. But that was not all. Phillip had come into the marriage with nothing, but left with a continuing financial commitment to secure several annuities in favour of persons nominated by Charlott. This was a burden that was to dog him for more than twenty years until Charlott’s eventual death and his release.

  What caused the marriage to break down re
mains a matter for speculation. A newspaper later reported that ‘some circumstances occurred which induced [him] to wish for a separation’ – suggesting that Phillip may have been more wronged than wronging and may have sought the separation. He does appear to have acted honourably – the same newspaper reporting that he made enough money in the immediately succeeding years to pay his estranged wife what he had spent of her fortune. And he secured the annuities that Charlott stipulated. But what he did in the years following his separation, and how he made his money, are matters of mystery. These were his lost years in France.

  In September 1769, a few months after the separation, Phillip obtained permission from the Admiralty to go to St Omer in Flanders. In fact, apart from a short period of service as the fourth lieutenant on the Egmont, Phillip spent most of the next five years on the continent at St Omer, Lille and St Amand les Eaux – towns of north east France that were central to the linen and wool trade. He seems also to have been at Toulon, France’s principal naval base on the Mediterranean. The Admiralty records suggest that the purpose behind Phillip’s extended sojourns in Flanders was for the benefit of his health. Indeed, the combined effect of the failure of his marriage and the loss of his wife’s very substantial resources may have left Phillip feeling sickly, but the explanations appearing in the Admiralty records probably concealed the truth.

  St Omer and Lille were not Flanders health resorts. They were textile trading towns in one of the most densely populated and urbanised regions of northern Europe. All of the region’s principal cities – Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Lille, Brussels and St Omer – had risen to prominence through international trade and the manufacture and sale of textiles. Nearby in Hainault, the small town of St Amand les Eaux had a reputation for its natural waters but in the eighteenth century its importance lay in cloth manufacture, and the local waters were essential to power the mills. The three towns (St Omer, Lille and St Amand les Eaux) are in close proximity to each other, connected by river and canal and beyond to the Channel port of Calais at the Strait of Dover – the gateway to English trade in the 1760s and 1770s. It is inconceivable that Phillip passed his time in those Flanders towns merely tending to the rejuvenation of his health. If that were his true object, there were better places to go.

  The region’s prominence in the textile trade provides a further clue as to Phillip’s true activities. Charlott’s first husband John Denison had been a prosperous cloth merchant. His business and connections are unlikely to have vanished upon his untimely death, and Phillip would not have been human if he were not naturally interested in the subject matter of his wealth. Phillip would later demonstrate that he was acquainted with the cloth trade – showing a keen interest in the cultivation of cochineal, the insect that is the source of the brilliant red dye that was essential to the eighteenth-century cloth trade. And courtesy of Michael Everitt, he had acquired a personal and professional connection with John Lane and his merchant banking firm Lane, Son &Fraser, which combined trade with banking and finance.

  Phillip’s time in Flanders between 1769 and 1774 is the period when he is supposed to have made enough money to repay Charlott what he had spent of her fortune. While we cannot be certain how he made this money – if it is true – we do know that St Omer, Lille and Hainault were not places of rest and recuperation. They constituted an axis of trade and commerce, with a heavy emphasis on linen and wool. And through marriage and circumstance, Phillip appears to have been well positioned to profit from the cloth trade. Mercantile connections like those with the Lane family would have been valuable to someone in Phillip’s position. When this is added to John Denison’s past commercial pedigree, and the spirit of the times, it would be surprising indeed if Phillip was merely resting in Flanders. The trade in linen and wool suggests the answer but the picture is shadowy.

  Phillip’s activities were not confined wholly to the cloth trade during these years. He still held the rank of fourth lieutenant, to which he had been appointed in the West Indies. When a Spanish force of more than 1000 men in five frigates took the British settlement of Port Egmont in the Falkland Islands in June 1770, a crisis erupted – British forces mobilised for war and Phillip returned to England in anticipation of conflict. In November he joined the Egmont, a 74-gun ship of the line, and for the next few months led a press gang in London. Augustus Keppel, under whom Phillip had served at Havana, was to lead the fleet if war were declared. However, in January 1771 an unsatisfactory compromise between Britain and Spain was reached, leaving for future resolution – and continuing dispute – the sovereignty of the islands that the Spanish called ‘las Malvinas’. As the need for recruitment dissolved, Phillip re-joined his ship, which gradually worked her way round from the Thames estuary to Spithead, from where he left her. His name was once again entered in the half pay register and in August he returned to Flanders to resume whatever activity had first drawn him there. The fact that he had returned to England because of the prospect of war against Spain, and had served for seven months until that prospect fully receded, tends to put the lie to the statement in the Admiralty records that in August 1771 he was going to Lille in Flanders ‘for the benefit of his health’.

  It is even less likely that the genuine reason for Phillip’s third stint in France between July 1773 and August 1774 was ‘for the recovery of his health’. In 1773 Lord Sandwich was the First Lord of the Admiralty and Augustus Hervey was the ‘Naval Lord’ – a serving naval officer on the Admiralty Board. Phillip was known to Hervey, especially from the siege of Havana, where he had served with distinction under his command. In mid 1773, there was considerable consternation and alarm in London at reports that the French were aggressively rebuilding their navy at Toulon. British state papers are replete with official correspondence recording the anxieties of ministers and public officials. Whitehall was in urgent need of intelligence concerning France’s military intentions. In July, the Secretary of State requested the Chargé d’affaires in Paris to ‘constantly attend to what is passing in the French ports, and lose no time in transmitting the earliest intelligence of what comes to your knowledge’. It may not have been a coincidence that in the same month, Phillip sought approval from the Admiralty to go to France for a third time. Hervey was one of the Lords of the Admiralty dealing with the alarm. He would have been aware of Phillip’s request, quite probably conferred with him and may well have engaged him.

  The Admiralty records in 1773 state that Phillip was going to St Amand les Eaux for ‘the recovery of his health’. In truth, it appears more likely that he went to Toulon. A later remark by Phillip provides a clue as to where he may have been. In the mid 1780s when Phillip was undoubtedly engaged in professional espionage at the French naval base at Toulon, he reported that the French arsenal was ‘superior to what it was when I saw it before the War’. His observations of Toulon ‘before the War’ could only have been surreptitious, for British naval officers were not welcome, to put it neutrally, at French naval ports. And we now know that from 1774 until 1784 Phillip was elsewhere engaged and could not have visited Toulon. The concern about the French naval build-up in 1773, the relationship between Phillip and Hervey and the fact that in July of that year Phillip sought and obtained permission from the Admiralty to go to France for a further twelve months, suggest that his earlier observations of the French arsenal at Toulon were likely to have been during the 1773–74 alarm. As a naval officer, with a discreet manner, fluent in French and German, and who had been living and travelling in France almost continuously since 1769, Phillip would have been a particularly suitable choice to carry out covert observations at the French naval dockyard at Toulon. The undisputed fact of his later espionage activities in 1784–86 suggests his secret life may have commenced at this time.

  There is one more aspect to Phillip’s lost years in France. In the book Adventures and Recollections of Colonel Landmann, published in 1852, the author GT Landmann explains that one summer in the 1790s his father paid him a short visit and there had ‘the uns
peakable pleasure of meeting his oldest and most intimate friend, Captain Phillip of the Royal Navy’. The author’s father was Isaac Landmann. Like John Lane, Isaac Landmann was a similar age to Phillip. And he was of German origin. Landmann was the Professor of Fortification &Artillery at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich from 1777 to 1815. But Phillip’s relationship with him probably originated in the early 1770s when Landmann was attached to the École Militaire in Paris during a period that overlapped with Phillip’s years in France. While in Paris, Phillip may have attended Landmann’s well-publicised lectures. At a professional level at least, Phillip and Landmann would have had a natural affinity and much to offer each other. They certainly had mutual interests. One of Landmann’s specialities, the science of fortification, included the manner of attacking and defending places and the use, conduct and direction of mines. His other speciality, the theory of artillery, included the doctrine of projectiles applied to gunnery and the principles on which ordnance and their carriages were constructed.