Throughout the conflict, peacemaker Elizabeth continued to keep up appearances. She visited the governor at his Parramatta residence and apologised for her husband’s absence, saying he was unwell and in bed. Bligh immediately offered to visit John, although whether the visit was planned in a spirit of kindness or vindictiveness, it is hard to say. The following day Bligh arrived at Elizabeth Farm, just in time to meet John riding in from the paddocks. The governor expressed surprise at John’s recovery. Perhaps in receipt of some meaningful looks from Elizabeth, John parried lamely, explaining that it was his first outing since his illness. Governor Bligh was unimpressed and his relationship with John soured even further.
Bligh’s threat to demolish houses was triggering great concern. When the chief commissary clerk went to the governor in person in order to save his house, Bligh met him on the doorstep of Government House and shouted at him. The clerk pleaded that the house was worth £600 and that under English law he was entitled to possession. At this point Bligh really did lose his temper. ‘Damn your laws of England! Don’t talk to me of your laws of England! I will make the laws of this Colony and every wretch of you, son of a bitch, shall be governed by them; or there—’ Bligh pointed towards the gaol— ‘there shall be your habitation.’ The clerk bowed, wished Bligh good day and departed. He went to his immediate supervisors with the warning that the people of Sydney were in great fright, worried that their home would be next to go, and that unless steps were taken to conciliate them ‘a revolution, in my opinion, would shortly happen’.21 Significantly, at least half of the rank and file members of the New South Wales Corps held property of their own, many of them on land Bligh claimed was reserved by the government. Sergeant-Major Thomas Whittle was one, and he later alleged that Bligh told him ‘I will have the house down again by 10 o’clock and you shall neither take bricks, nor anything else away, but it shall be mine, house, and ground, and all’.22 Inevitably, tensions rose and Whittle’s friends and colleagues in uniform began to mutter among themselves.
Meanwhile, John Macarthur was in court again. Several convicts had escaped the colony in ships part-owned by the Macarthurs. Three had left mid-year in the Argo and later in the year another fled to Tahiti in the Parramatta. Such escapes were common as many sailing masters failed to resist the temptation of an extra crewman, particularly one accompanied by a juicy bribe. But the ships’ owners were liable to pay a bond to the naval officer (effectively a fine) worth almost as much as the ship itself. And when the naval officer placed armed constables on board the Parramatta to prevent any of its cargo from being landed, John and his co-owner lodged an appeal in the court presided over by Governor Bligh. Macarthur, in a move of dubious legality, sacked the Parramatta’s captain and crew, noting that the naval officer had effectively repossessed the ship and in consequence he, John, had abandoned it.23 As far as he was concerned, the crew were now in the naval officer’s hands and he would not submit ‘to the expense of paying and victualling of the officers and crew of a vessel over which [he] had no control’.24
Judge-Advocate Atkins wrote formally to John Macarthur, requesting his ‘attendance at Sydney to-morrow morning, at 10 o’clock to show cause for such [of] your conduct’.25 The letter was delivered to Elizabeth Farm by Francis Oakes, the head constable at Parramatta. John sent Oakes back with a carefully worded response, declining Atkin’s request and referring him to the naval officer. The next evening, 15 December 1807, a nervous Oakes returned to Elizabeth Farm with a warrant for the arrest of John Macarthur. Oakes arrived at about 11 pm, and the family were preparing for bed, but John invited him into the parlour, mixed him a glass of grog and sat him down while he read the warrant. Oakes was right to be nervous and would later testify that John reacted ‘very violently’.26 No one in the house was sleeping now. A furious John ordered his nephew Hannibal to make a copy of the warrant. Son Edward was sent to fetch Lieutenant Bayley, who lived close by. All the while John continued to rant at Oakes. Eventually he collected himself enough to write a note, the contents of which he surely discussed with Elizabeth as he wrote, and which Oakes was to take back to Atkins.
Mr Oakes, you will inform the persons who sent you here with the warrant you have now shewn me, and given me a copy of, that I never will submit to the horrid tyranny that is attempted until I am forced; that I consider it with scorn and contempt, as I do the person who have directed it to be executed.27
A weary (albeit possibly relieved) Oakes was then dispatched on a midnight ride back to Sydney.
Elizabeth knew better than to try to dissuade her husband from sending the inflammatory message, but she, as ever, did what she could to minimise the damage. Oakes had not gone far before he was waylaid in the moonlight by Edward Macarthur, who quietly asked that Oakes hand back the note. Oakes refused. That note was his reason, or excuse, for failing to bring John Macarthur into custody and he needed to keep it. Oakes continued his journey back to Sydney. Edward, at almost nineteen, was very unlikely to have been a willing instigator of this course of action. Like all the Macarthur boys, he worshipped his father but never stood up to him. Hannibal, only a year older than Edward, was equally unlikely to be the mastermind. Perhaps the bold suggestion came from Lieutenant Bayley, but he would have been a brave man indeed to thwart John Macarthur in such a way. No. The most likely source is Elizabeth Macarthur, once more trying to mitigate her husband’s wilder misjudgments. But we have to imagine it: a hushed yet heated conversation with Edward to send him flying out after Oakes and then a vain attempt to placate and soothe John, who soon saddled up and rode down to Sydney anyway, not far behind Oakes. By mid-morning John was arrested, bailed for £1000 by his friends in town and preparing to face the magistrates who in their wisdom had decided that ‘Mr Macarthur stands committed for criminal court’.28 His trial, however, was delayed for more than a month.
No one could envy Elizabeth Macarthur. Her daughter was still bedridden and the consensus was that the girl stood little or no chance of recovery. Her husband was set to stand trial for charges unspecified. The seizure of the Parramatta had lost the family potential profits of thousands of pounds, and Bligh’s regulation of the rum trade had likely lost them thousands more. Their leasehold in Sydney looked like being revoked without compensation. And now, at the age of forty-one, Elizabeth made the bittersweet discovery that she was pregnant again. It was seven years since her last child, William, was born and this new baby was due in the middle of 1808. Elizabeth did what she always did in the face of the seemingly impossible: she carried on.
In early January 1808 Elizabeth moved into the Sydney home of her friends Captain and Mrs Abbott, ostensibly to provide her invalid daughter with a change of air but probably also to keep a close eye on John. The Abbotts remained at their Parramatta residence. Throughout January, Macarthur and Bligh locked horns over the disputed Sydney leasehold. It had been granted by former Governor King in a very hasty manner, alleged Bligh, signed as the ship Bligh originally arrived on was sighted and backdated to 1 January 1806. Bligh was silent, however, about the 600 acre (240 hectare) grant made over by King at the same time to his daughter.29 No one had clean hands. Bligh ordered John not to build anything on his leasehold until he, Bligh, had received instructions from England. Furthermore Bligh stated that he would ‘not receive any letters on the subject’.30 John responded by engaging a team of off-duty soldiers to build a fence around the land in question. Bligh sent armed constables to pull it down again. The whole township was watching, agog, and Elizabeth was watching too, more discreetly but possibly with greater concern. But there was more to come. The criminal court would assemble on 25 January to try John Macarthur, although on precisely what charges nobody seemed to know.
During the days before the trial, a flurry of letters passed between John and the relevant officials, as John tried to determine his alleged crimes. Their answers seemed to encompass almost everything: the importation of illegal stills; libellous words aimed at bringing the governor into the disrespect, h
atred and contempt of the people; causing the crew of the Parramatta to come on shore in an illegal manner; and disobeying Atkins’ warrant. It was rapidly becoming clear to everyone that whatever the legal niceties, Governor Bligh was determined to make an example of John Macarthur.
The evening before the trial, on Sunday 24 January, was a night of celebration. It was twenty years since the founding of the colony and Major Johnston, the Corps’ commander in Sydney and himself a First Fleet arrival, had been granted the governor’s permission to mark the occasion. The meal was an all-male affair, something for which Elizabeth was most likely grateful. The regimental fife band played and the wine flowed freely; by the end of the night the men were dancing drunkenly with one another. All of the officers currently in Sydney attended, although the corps’ commanding officer Lieutenant-Governor Colonel Paterson was absent, overseeing the new settlements in Van Diemen’s Land. Several civilians were also in attendance, including the men who had stood bail for John Macarthur together with other men who would sit in judgment upon him the next day. Edward and Hannibal Macarthur were also there—no doubt pleased to be counted among the ranks of men—but John Macarthur was not. He spent the evening listening to the music wafting from the barracks and walking back and forth ‘in the most conspicuous part of the town where I must have been seen by hundreds and particularly by every person at Government House’.31 He was rehearsing his speeches for the next day’s trial. If Elizabeth knew what he planned to say, she might have worried even more.
When the court sat at 10 am the scene was more circus then circumspect. Men had ridden for miles to see the show. The courtroom was full to bursting and those who could not find a space inside gathered nearby. Elizabeth was probably not there. She was needed at home, and the courtroom was no place for a lady. Perhaps Edward and Hannibal ran back and forth to provide her with updates or perhaps she remained on tenterhooks until her prayers were answered and her husband walked in the door that afternoon.
John was able to tell her that he had made the speech of his life, decrying Judge-Advocate Atkins’ ability to sit in judgment on him given Atkins’ (and by implication Bligh’s) prejudice against him. John’s speech spared nothing in the detail and the many onlookers were variously shocked and hugely entertained by what he had to say about Atkins’ ‘malignant falsehoods’, his ‘vindictive malice’, and his ‘false imprisonment of me’. At the end of it Atkins shouted, ‘I will commit you to gaol, sir!’, only to have Kemp, his fellow judge shout back, ‘You commit, sir! No sir, I will commit you!’
The court adjourned in uproar, and Atkins fled to confer with the governor. The other five judges (all officers of the corps) sent a letter to Bligh asking him to replace Atkins. By late afternoon, hot and exhausted, the judicial officers from the New South Wales Corps remanded Macarthur on bail and everyone retired for dinner.32
That evening could not have been a peaceful one for the Macarthurs. John, buoyed by his day in court, and agitated about what might come next, was hardly likely to be restful company. Elizabeth could do her best to soothe and cajole him but John’s mind was a whirlwind of accusations, resentments and plans. The next morning he was once more arrested by two of Bligh’s constables and, in full view of the town, marched into gaol. The officers who had remanded him the day before were charged, by Atkins, with crimes amounting to treason. The streets of Sydney were swarming with people ‘murmuring and loudly complaining’.33
Major Johnston, his arm injured on the night of the barracks dinner in a drunken accident, reluctantly arrived in Sydney and went straight to the barracks. There he found ‘all the civil and military officers collected, and the most respectable inhabitants in conversation with them’. Johnston’s advisors beseeched him ‘to adopt decisive measures for the safety of the inhabitants and to dispel the great alarm’. It was generally understood that the officers who served on the bench of the criminal court were to be thrown in gaol and it ‘was expected, after such a measure, nothing could limit the excess of the Governor’s cruelties’.34 The seething tensions of the colony boiled over into mutiny—the governor had to be stopped.
Johnston’s first act was to order the drums beat to quarters, calling in the soldiers. His second was to have Macarthur released from gaol. John travelled straight to the barracks and added his own voice to that of Johnston’s advisors. Years later, when testifying about that day, Johnston was careful to claim responsibility for his subsequent actions. ‘If I did not put the Governor in arrest, an insurrection and massacre would ensue, and the blood of the inhabitants would be upon me. This representation, made by all persons present, before Macarthur came, alone influenced my conduct.’ At about 5 pm in the afternoon Johnston, at the head of the New South Wales Corps and with a following of civilian administrators, respectable citizens (including John Macarthur) and various onlookers, set out for Government House to arrest Governor Bligh.
14
Rebellion and Consequences
…the excessive despotism of the ruling power called aloud for a reform, but it never entered my head to imagine that the inhabitants would so effectively rouse themselves from the despairing lethargy they had fallen into, as to adopt so spirited a measure.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO CAPTAIN PIPER, 5 FEBRUARY 1808
By the time Elizabeth knew what was going on it was all over. A bloodless coup, a successful overthrow and all players in bed before midnight. As darkness fell John returned to the Abbot’s Sydney residence a free man once more, to tell Elizabeth how he marched with three hundred soldiers and officers up the hill to Government House, flags flying and the band playing ‘The British Grenadiers’.1 Bligh had tried to escape but after several hours was discovered, arrested and deposed. Major Johnston was declared acting governor. Elizabeth, always a clear-eyed pragmatist, could hardly fail to see the enormity of what they’d done. What she couldn’t see—what no one could have predicted—were the consequences.
The day following the coup was a busy one for the rebel officers. They formed committees to interview, or interrogate, key officials; took up the business of government; and developed a case to justify the overthrow. The implications of their mutiny were just beginning to register. Captain Abbott rushed down to Sydney from Parramatta. And John was there in the background: provoking, suggesting, reacting and inciting. It was a busy day for the soldiery too. Privates who a day earlier had stood sentry duty in order to guard Governor Bligh now stood at the same posts in order to imprison him. Other soldiers, following the lead of their warrant officers, spent the day preparing for celebrations. Wood was stacked for bonfires, wine and brandy was unloaded from a visiting American brig to be freely distributed, and the householders of Sydney were encouraged to illuminate their street-facing windows with pro-rebel artistic displays and slogans. Those who declined received threats and smashed windows.2
At sunset the people of Sydney lit the bonfires, roasted meat and burned effigies of Bligh. The streets were filled with men, women and children. Soldiers and sailors, shopkeepers and convicts, housemaids and prostitutes—all strolling around in the hot night, eating, drinking and viewing the decorated windows. The officers, too, enjoyed the spectacle. Major Johnston and Captain Abbott led an informal party up to Church Hill, the site of the largest bonfire and in so doing gave the celebrations their tacit approval. Johnston and Abbott were followed by John and Elizabeth Macarthur, arm in arm, and William Minchin with his wife Ann. Several other officers accompanied them. But Johnston’s de facto wife, former convict Esther Abrahams, stayed at home at Annandale, and Abbott’s wife Louisa remained in Parramatta. Elizabeth, always loyal, agreed with her husband about the monstrousness of Bligh, and years later would express sympathy for the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, who later that year were discovered living in isolation on Pitcairn Island. ‘I feel more than common interest in these people—considering Bligh’s Tyranny as the cause of their very being—or at least of their being in such a situation.’3
But John’s preoccupation wi
th the overthrow of Bligh marked something of a turning point in the Macarthurs’ marriage. The timing of the rebellion could not have been worse. Elizabeth was facing childbirth again, and this time without the vigour of youth. Her daughter Elizabeth was still very ill. The thousands of new acres at Cow Pastures needed thousands of hours of work to establish the necessary infrastructure. And the streets of Sydney were now uneasy and more unsafe than ever. Elizabeth needed John. The family needed John. Yet there he was in Sydney playing honour games again, deadly games that put his life, and therefore the future of his family, at risk.
Perhaps Elizabeth saw the pattern more clearly now. Perhaps she recalled those awful months aboard the Neptune, wallowing in English waters before they set sail for New South Wales. She had been pregnant then too, and with sickly infant Edward and the fear of the unknown before them, she can only have felt an immense pressure. At that time John’s anxiety had expressed itself in the duel with the Neptune’s captain. This time, John had turned on Bligh and embroiled himself in a political farrago. Maybe it had been a gradual realisation, or maybe a flash of insight, but Elizabeth began to spend less time in John’s company and more time relying on the only person with the necessary strength of will to safeguard her family’s future: herself.
Elizabeth Macarthur Page 16