Greenway was also nowhere near as good as Edward Bird, the largely self-taught Bristol painter of historical and religious subjects whose tragically short career reached its greatest height around the time of his fellow Bristolian’s imprisonment. Bird was well known for his local drawing society, a popular venue for both amateur and professional artists, and it is conceivable that Greenway was a member.11
The value of Greenway’s paintings lies not in any intrinsic artistic merit but in the unusual circumstances of their execution. These were not the works of a man who had been defeated by ill fortune, cowed by the shame of his predicament or troubled by harsh surroundings. Despite the mystery as to the true purpose of the two paintings, their every brushstroke evinces Greenway’s stoicism and enduring self-belief.
As equally intriguing and remarkable as the two paintings is the third of Greenway’s prison-bound artistic endeavours. With a sense of irony that was probably not lost on the artist himself, the forger turned legitimate copyist while in prison. How long Greenway took to produce an elaborate title page plus 51 following pages of ornate Gothic script, meticulously copied from a rare volume of English history, can only be imagined. The results provide yet more evidence of his resolute presence of mind, and while the motivation behind the paintings can only be surmised, the incentive behind Greenway’s work on Robert Fabyan’s The Chronicle of Fabian, Whiche He Nameth the Concordaunce of Histories of 1559 is far clearer.12
The facsimiles over which Greenway laboured by dim daylight and the flame of a guttering candle were to replace missing pages from a copy of Fabyan’s Chronicle owned by Charles Joseph Harford of Stapleton Grove near Bristol.13 CJ Harford was a barrister, noted book collector, fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and member of the influential Harford family of wealthy bankers, merchants, Quakers and abolitionists.
CJ Harford’s kinsman John Scandrett Harford FRS published a number of literary works including biographies of Michelangelo and of the American revolutionary Thomas Paine. He was also a close associate of the abolitionist William Wilberforce. In 1815, JS Harford published a pamphlet entitled Considerations on the Pernicious Influence of Bristol Gaol, so the Harford family were obviously very familiar with the prison conditions endured by Greenway.14 Given their interests, either CJ or JS Harford could easily have been among his ‘Gentlemen of the highest respectability’.
Intriguingly, JS Harford was also a minor success as a painter, producing landscapes and architectural studies from the grand tour of Europe and the like. A friendship with Greenway through a mutual interest in art seems probable, perhaps through Edward Bird’s drawing society, and JS Harford could conceivably have been the impetus behind the prison paintings.
Which member of the Harford family actually put Greenway to work on Fabyan’s Chronicle is unknown, although as the owner of the book, Charles Harford seems the more likely. One also wonders whether it was merely a task set to absorb endless days of boredom and waiting, or whether one of the Harfords paid Greenway for his labours. Perhaps payment was lobbed into the jangling pockets of his gaolers for the provision of tolerable accommodation. Whatever the arrangements, Greenway’s talents as a forger were not wasted.
Greenway considered his relationship with the Harfords close and durable enough for him to write from Sydney in 1822 to a Samuel Lloyd Harford of Sion Hill at Clifton, enclosing copies of ‘letters & papers addressed to different individuals connected with Government’.15 Greenway hoped the documents would ‘more fully explain what services I have rendered the Government and prove that I have not in any shape gainsaid the recommendation of my friends’. In other words, Greenway wanted to show Harford how poorly he believed he had been rewarded in New South Wales. Even after the passage of nearly a decade from the time he left England, he confidently believed that SL Harford, or someone else in the family, might have sufficient influence in Whitehall to help correct what he considered a grave injustice and a slight to his robust sense of worth.
How Greenway came to befriend at least two, and possibly more, members of the Harford family is unclear, but there are clues in the list of known associates of this aristocratic clan. In 1796, John Scandrett Harford senior began work on Blaise Castle House set on 650 acres of parkland near the village of Henbury, five miles north-west of Bristol.16 Local architect and mason William Paty designed the house, while John Nash added a conservatory around 1805. Nash’s sometime professional partner Humphry Repton laid out the expansive grounds, and Nash, together with Repton’s son George, was responsible for picturesque Blaise Hamlet, built to accommodate the Harfords’ retired servants and tenant farm workers.
A connection between Greenway and the Harfords may have come through the influence of Nash or Repton, although it is also conceivable that as local building suppliers, the Greenway brothers came to know the Harfords first. Greenway’s introduction to the illustrious Nash may even have originated in this quarter. And from his London days, Greenway might have come to know the likes of George Nayler through CJ Harford and their association through the Society of Antiquaries. Of course, all this is pure speculation, and again, the nature of Greenway’s relationships in England remain frustratingly beyond definition. But be it Arthur Phillip, members of the Harford or Howard families, other unnamed and unknown individuals, or even John Nash, it is certain that one or more men of influence and patronage did ease Francis Greenway’s passage through Bristol Newgate. The reach of their care for their architect friend would, however, cease as the wagon pulled up at the prison gates, there to embark the next lot of unfortunates on their enforced journey to a strange new world.
THE BLIGHTED VOYAGE OF THE GENERAL HEWETT
It is not known exactly how long Greenway remained in Bristol Newgate after his trial. He was still there in August 1812 – at work on the second of his paintings of prison life – but by early April 1813 he was gone. As Greenway’s name did not appear in the Bristol Newgate Gaol Delivery Fiats for 10 April 1813 (the next sitting of the assizes after his own trial), his long journey to New South Wales must have already begun. (The fiats were a virtual rollcall of prisoners on the day of the assizes. They included details of those who appeared before the court on that day, as well as mention of those already convicted and awaiting fulfilment of their sentences.) With Francis junior conceived some time between late 1812 and, say, the end of March 1813, the possible date of his father’s transfer to a prison hulk is narrowed to the days or weeks immediately before the April session of the Bristol Assizes.
Whatever the date, the wagon duly arrived at Bristol Newgate to transport Francis Greenway and a group of fellow prisoners to the aptly named HMS Captivity. It was one of a number of such vessels laid up on the shallow mud at Gosport at the entrance to Portsmouth Roads. Other hulks at Portsmouth included the Portland, Lealand, Retribution and Laurel – all grim staging posts on the road to banishment. In her glory days Captivity had been a 64-gun third-rate ship of the line named HMS Monmouth. Built in 1772, the Monmouth had seen active service in American, South African and Indian waters, and was badly damaged fighting the French in the Battle of Providien off Ceylon in 1782. She became a prison hulk in 1796.
By the middle of the 18th century, the gallows had come to be regarded as too harsh a destination for many offenders, and consequently transportation to Britain’s American colonies became the most common alternative punishment. But when the westward flow of convicts was cut following the American War of Independence, already crowded gaols at home became shockingly overburdened with prisoners. As the government deliberated on an alternative place of banishment, unseaworthy or obsolete dismasted ships were proposed as a convenient stopgap solution. Most of these hulks were decommissioned naval vessels. Parliament first sanctioned their temporary use in 1776, but as the hulks proved cost-efficient and secure, they were to remain in service for more than 80 years.
The hulks were privately run for profit and soon gained a notorious reputation as places of misery, disease and death, worse even than the
prisons in which the unfortunate felons had first landed. Outbreaks of dysentery, cholera and typhoid were common in the damp, unsanitary and close conditions below decks, where the prisoners were often unable to stand upright. By day, they were employed in hard manual labour off the hulks, the clanking of their chains and manacles a reminder to all who encountered them of the iron hand of punishment. And the vessels themselves, particularly those lining the banks of busy waterways such as the Thames, became forbidding symbols to the passing poor of the power and retribution of the state; a minor brush with authority and the bowels of those ships of despair might readily swallow them up. Some improvements in the living conditions aboard the hulks were gradually effected, but in Greenway’s time the experience would still have been brutal and dispiriting.
Henry Mayhew, a journalist, social commentator and co-founder of Punch, wrote of the early days of the London hulks:
One of the warders … well remembers seeing the shirts of the prisoners, when hung out upon the rigging, so black with vermin that the linen positively appeared to have been sprinkled over with pepper; and that when the cholera broke out on board the convict vessels for the first time, the chaplain refused to bury the dead until there were several corpses aboard, so that the coffins were taken to the marshes by half a dozen at a time, and there interred at a given signal from the clergyman; his reverence remaining behind on the poop of the vessel, afraid to accompany the bodies, reading the burial-service at the distance of a mile from the grave, and letting fall a handkerchief, when he came to ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust,’ as a sign that they were to lower the bodies.1
If Greenway’s path through Newgate had been eased by the intercession of his friends, the rickety gangway crossing the stinking tidal ooze to the Captivity must now have seemed like a one-way road to purgatory. And for once he would have been understandably doleful and downcast as he shuffled aboard Captivity in a bedraggled line of fellow unfortunates. After months of close physical confinement in Newgate with no chance of proper exercise, Greenway was probably a little unsteady on his feet, his gait made worse by the drag of what Ellis described as the ‘most conspicuous feature of an embarking felon’s luggage’, his twelve-pound irons.2 Other items of ‘luggage’ were not such a hindrance. They proffered hope, a hope that was precious beyond imagination. Whether he carried them with him closely pressed to his person, or they were delivered later in the care of a loyal supporter, Francis Greenway would leave England with at least three items important to his future prospects. A copy of Sir William Chambers’ A Treatise on Civil Architecture in which the Principles of that Art are Laid Down3 would survive the voyage to New South Wales, along with a portfolio of drawings of his own projects and, perhaps most precious of all, a letter recommending the fallen architect to the serving governor of the colony from an illustrious predecessor.
A letter from none other than Arthur Phillip – ever Greenway’s ‘steady friend and patron’ – may well have been a product of the forger’s pen, but it would in time have the desired effect. In 1817, Lachlan Macquarie was to write to his overlord in Whitehall, Lord Henry Bathurst, notifying him of Greenway’s appointment as acting civil architect, stating that he ‘was originally an Architect of some Eminence in England, having been strongly recommended to me by the late Governor Phillip’. By the time Greenway reached Sydney in February 1814, Phillip had only months to live. Were the letter the product of Greenway’s hand, such a forgery, perpetrated thousands of miles away, would be unlikely ever to be detected. And genuine or fake, the letter was but one more enigmatic detail on Greenway’s strange path to a new world.
To Greenway and his fellows who were crammed aboard the Captivity, its dingy, noisome interior must have seemed something akin to Dante’s vestibule of hell; ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here’ might well have been carved above the companion way.4 Her tales of derring-do no longer echoed below decks; the tumult of battle and the cries of wounded or dying sailors felled by cannon and shot had long been replaced by the groans of the sick and the curses of all. She was now a nightmarish halfway house of the damned.5
Captivity was Greenway’s unyielding home for several months, perhaps as long as six or seven. Whether he was put to hard manual labour is not known, but on either 22 or 23 August 1813, ‘prisoner no. 101 Francis Howard Greenway’ (recorded in the convict returns as ‘tried Somerset, March 1812, 14 years’) was finally taken on board the convict transport the General Hewett.6 He was joined by 31 of his fellows from Captivity. Ninety-two more convicts were collected from other hulks at Portsmouth and nearby Langstone Harbour over that two-day period.
Greenway had indeed been fortunate. He was among the last to be embarked, 29 days after the General Hewett collected her first convicts at Woolwich on the Thames back in late July. While the ship rode at anchor at Gravesend for a further two weeks, that first contingent of 124 prisoners was kept closely confined below, a circumstance that was later ‘regretted’ in an official report of the voyage. From Gravesend, the General Hewett proceeded to Sheerness for 48 more transportees before finally heading to Portsmouth and Captivity. When all were on board, the General Hewett’s human cargo numbered 300 male convicts.7 The prisoners had come from all over England, Scotland and Wales. There were even court-martialled soldiers from Canada. Their sentences ranged from transportation for seven to 14 years, or life. Forty-four of the convicts were under 21 and two were just 14 years old – Richard Aris and John Bide, both sentenced to transportation for life.
For some, the privations of prison, the hulks, and now the close confinement on board ship would in time prove too much. The General Hewett’s surgeon, Richard Hughes, later admitted that ‘some of them were in a state of Debility’ when taken aboard. According to Hughes, 10 or 15 of them should never have embarked on the voyage, but despite the lengthy delays, he claimed there had been no time to object ‘previous to the sailing of the Ship’.8 Such a lackadaisical attitude to the physical welfare of his charges augured badly for their safe arrival in New South Wales.
Three more days elapsed before the General Hewett finally cleared Spithead. On 26 August 1813, under the command of Master Percy Earl, she rolled into the sloppy seas of the English Channel on the first day of her five-and-a-half-month journey to Port Jackson. She began the voyage in convoy with the Wanstead, which was carrying 120 female convicts; and the troopship Windham, which was transporting the headquarters of the 46th (South Devonshire) Regiment of Foot, a group of officers who would in time destroy any illusion Greenway may have harboured as to the restorative benefits of exile.
The channel behind her, the General Hewett ploughed onwards across the windswept Bay of Biscay, her passage shadowed by naval convoys heading for northern Spain. Wellington and his Spanish and Portuguese allies would soon break the French and put a furious end to the seven-year Peninsular War in the Battle of Vitoria.
In addition to her cargo of convicts, the General Hewett carried a crew of 104; a detachment of 70 soldiers from the 46th Regiment, along with 15 of their wives and eight children; and a small number of government officials and paying passengers – a total complement of 515 souls.9 The 960-ton, 14-gun ‘plantation’-built ship was near new, having been launched in Calcutta in 1812 by the merchants James McTaggart & Co. The General Hewett was built as a privateer for service with the East India Company, but because of her ample carrying capacity she was also an attractive charter prospect as a convict transport.
The General Hewett was one of the largest ships to transport convicts to New South Wales, but this first voyage would also be her last in that capacity. And while she was loaded to the scuppers with her cargo of human flotsam, her holds were also bulging with such valuable trade goods as ‘214 Baskets of Tobacco … [and] 100 dozen of Porter for [the] Captain’.10
Along with Greenway, the convict manifest of the General Hewett listed the landscape artist and fellow forger Joseph Lycett. An unabashed recidivist, in little more than a year of his arrival in New South Wales, Lycett
would flood Sydney with forged currency. Punished and then redeemed, at the height of his career the prolific Lycett was to enjoy the patronage of the colony’s military and civilian elite. But on his return to England in 1822, Lycett again resorted to the forger’s craft. Arrested once more, he tried to cut his own throat and when recovering in hospital supposedly tore open the wound and bled to death.11
Then there was James Williams, a 35-year-old blacksmith and farrier who would accompany the explorer John Oxley on expeditions to the Lachlan and Macquarie rivers in 1817 and 1818. Williams received an absolute pardon for his service to Oxley and his horses. As for Nicholas Knight, a labourer from Hereford sentenced to transportation for life for stealing seven watches, his days in the colony would be few. Assigned as a stockman, Knight turned to bushranging, only to be caught, convicted and hanged in Sydney in July 1816, barely two years after his arrival in the colony.
Among the paying passengers were Dr John Harris and Captain John Piper.12 Irish-born farmer-cum-magistrate Harris was formerly principal surgeon of the New South Wales Corps and had first arrived in Sydney as a surgeon’s mate in 1790. He was returning to Sydney as a civilian after presenting evidence for the rebel cause at the court martial of Major George Johnston, one of the ringleaders in the coup d’état – the so-called Rum Rebellion – against former governor William Bligh. Piper was a former acting commandant on Norfolk Island, and had recently been appointed naval officer in Sydney. Returning from home leave in England, he brought with him on the voyage a seven-year-old black thoroughbred stallion, Wellington, of course named for the hero of the age.
A Forger's Progress Page 6