Elizabeth Macarthur

by Michelle Scott Tucker

  From the top of Mount Taurus, Elizabeth and the Macquaries had a fine view of the countryside, despite the governor grumbling that Taurus was hardly high enough to deserve the name mountain. From there they rode along a ridge to Mount Hunter and were entertained by the sight of a fight between two wild bulls. By two o’clock they returned to the governor’s campsite for food and a rest before setting out once again to see the farm of Walter Davidson. Davidson’s property, adjacent to Macarthur lands, was stocked and managed by Elizabeth. Macquarie’s description of the farm as being in ‘a beautiful situation and excellent rich Land for both Tillage and Pasture’ in fact summed up the whole Cow Pastures region.36 The weary party returned to camp at five o’clock, where the Macquaries’ servants had dinner waiting for them. After dinner Elizabeth left to spend the night at her Cow Pastures farm, Belgenny.37

  The next morning the governor and Mrs Macquarie dropped in at Belgenny to see Elizabeth ‘with whom we sat for a little while in a small miserable Hut’.38 Elizabeth not only worked hard, but she worked in primitive conditions. The governor’s visit was not made on the off-chance that Elizabeth would be available in the middle of a working day to sit with him. The visit was clearly pre-arranged and it speaks to Elizabeth’s take-me-as-I-am attitude that she was willing to entertain her friends in what was probably a shepherd’s shed. Such was the Macarthurs’ straitened financial position, any funds left over after paying for John and the boys in England had to be used wisely. Elizabeth invested in livestock rather than on improving the living quarters on outlying properties.

  Elizabeth’s friends were among the highest-ranking people in the colony but that was to be expected—among the small population of New South Wales she simply mixed with people of her own age, class and circumstance. But given her secluded upbringing in Bridgerule, it is also very likely that she spoke with a Devonshire accent. Any aspirations to be seen to belong to the upper classes (and Elizabeth does not seem to have harboured any) would be dashed as soon as she opened her mouth to speak. Elizabeth was not unaware of the governor’s condescension. She found him the most pleasing of men ‘but then he is the Governor and it is not possible to forget that he is so’. Elizabeth Macquarie, on the other hand, Elizabeth found to be ‘very amiable, very benevolent, in short a very good woman’.39

  If Elizabeth found satisfaction in her work, and solace in her friendships with other women, it was still not enough to make up for her absent husband. Elizabeth was a strong-minded woman but her natural optimism and equanimity was sorely tested in John’s absence. Their love for one another, and their shared ambitions, had seen the couple successfully weather a great many storms, and, despite John’s many faults, she missed him. ‘I know not what to think,’ she wrote to her friend Captain Piper in late 1811, ‘whether my dear Mr McArthur will or will not have left England. How cruel is this perpetual state of uncertainty.’40 Unfortunately for Elizabeth, there was a good deal more uncertainty to come.

  16

  Bad Debts and Sharp Words

  I am perfectly aware, my beloved wife, of the difficulties you have to contend with, and fully convinced that not one woman in a thousand, (no one that I know) would have the resolution and perseverance to contend with them at all, much more to surmount them in the manner you have so happily done.

  JOHN MACARTHUR TO ELIZABETH MACARTHUR, 3 AUGUST 1810

  None of Elizabeth’s letters to John during this his second absence in England have survived. Elizabeth, though, carefully kept the letters she received from John. And from those she learned that he was miserable in England. From his career zenith immediately after the rebellion, when he more or less ran the colony, he plummeted into a depressive nadir. In London he was a nobody with no easily discernible future, surviving on the limited funds Elizabeth could provide. He was regularly unwell, tormented with digestive complaints, debilitating gout, ‘nervous affliction’ and ‘seized with violent spasms in my side’.1

  His sandalwood trading enterprise, for which Hannibal had travelled to China, had amounted to nothing. A ship he part-owned was lost at sea and his sealing ventures resulted in a ‘considerable loss’.2 Several men who owed him money could not (or would not) pay. John would have liked to do a favour for Doctor Redfern, to thank him for restoring young Elizabeth to health, but he lacked the finances to make any meaningful gesture. ‘You must,’ he wrote to Elizabeth, ‘exert yourself to remit me all you can.’3

  John worried, too, about his ‘beloved Wife’.4 He fretted about ‘the many adverse circumstances to which you have been exposed, and the extraordinary trials that you have borne’, and he was impressed and grateful that Elizabeth coped ‘not only without sinking under the accumulated pressure, but with the most active fortitude and good sense’.5 It was impossible, he wrote, for him to fully express the admiration he felt and equally impossible for him ‘to repress the pride which I feel in having to boast of such a pattern for Wives and Mothers as my own’.6 John’s peers may have found him arrogant and haughty but, in London at least, he was full of self-doubt. He saw much of himself in his son Edward, in Edward’s ‘independence’ and ‘obstinacy’ and John noted to Elizabeth that when he observed ‘the too prominent parts of [Edward’s] character which he derives from a person you well know he makes me shudder for his safety on the voyage of life’.7 Perhaps writing these letters helped John to feel better but they cannot have given Elizabeth any peace of mind.

  At one point in 1810, John seriously considered a seat in the English parliament. ‘The expense will be great, but the prospect of benefit from it is still greater.’8 This plan, like many others he hatched at around that time, came to nothing. John was despondent and his letters home were full of sorrow and complaint. He prayed for the health and happiness of his wife and daughters every day and worried that Emmeline, only a year old when he last saw her, would not know him. ‘Kiss my sweet cherub Emmeline and teach her to love me,’ he wrote plaintively.9 He took some ‘unexpected gratification’ though, from seeing a list of naval promotions in which many officers with less seniority than Bligh were promoted above him. John took this as a sign ‘that Government view his conduct as it deserves’.10

  John, deeply anxious about the forthcoming trial, tried to curry favour with friends (and friends of friends) in high places. But until the court martial of the rebel officers was completed, John’s well-placed patrons would do nothing for him. Major Abbott summed up the situation when he wrote from England to Captain Piper about their mutual acquaintance John Macarthur: ‘Mack makes a very little figure in this part of the world.’11 There was little Elizabeth could do or write, from so far away, to lift John’s melancholy.

  Yet the 1811 trial of the rebel officers was, in the end, an anticlimax. While it was Lieutenant-Colonel Johnston who officially stood trial as the leader of the rebellion, the focus was also on the activities of civilian John Macarthur and his nemesis Bligh. None of the three men emerged very cleanly from the treasonous mire. Bligh was in the witness stand for three and half days and managed to lose his temper several times, confirming the defence’s argument that he was too easily provoked into ungentlemanly behaviour. And Macarthur himself began with his usual confidence and bluster, but soon discovered that while his dissembling, evasions and outright contradictions might have served in a colonial court, they soon dissolved in the face of fierce and intelligent cross-examination. John Macarthur was out of his depth and it showed.

  Johnston was found guilty of mutiny but instead of being sentenced to a prison term, or death, he was dishonourably discharged from the army and sent on his way. His miraculously light sentence has long been considered an acknowledgment that he was never the true leader of the rebellion: John Macarthur was.

  John had resigned his army commission nearly ten years earlier and, as a civilian, he could not be subject to a court martial. Nor, it was eventually determined, could be he tried in England when his alleged crimes were committed in New South Wales. Tellingly, Governor Macquarie’s orders for Macar
thur’s arrest on charges of high treason were not revoked after Johnston’s trial, so while he remained a free man in England, he was effectively and indefinitely prevented from returning to Sydney. If he did, he would be arrested the moment he disembarked. And he could not risk a trial at home where, if found guilty, he would face a gaol sentence or possibly even the noose.

  So, while other rebel leaders left the army to gradually and quietly resume their lives in New South Wales, John was forced to recalibrate his future. He wondered if he and Elizabeth could make enough money from their New South Wales activities to support the whole family in England, calculating that they would need at least £1600 a year for a comfortable life.12 John estimated there might be enough capital to establish a small estate in England. At this point he bravely wrote to Elizabeth and told her of his new plans. She would have to sail to England without him, but if she had ‘the smallest dread or apprehension of coming home alone’ she need only to say so, wrote John, and he would ‘sacrifice every other consideration and come out for you’.13 In this he seems to have underestimated his stoic wife. Sailing to England in the company of her daughters and trusted servants was unlikely to raise too many apprehensions for a woman who travelled and worked alone on the edge of the colonial frontier. Any dread Elizabeth may have felt was far more likely to arise from her understanding of the financial risk if they left New South Wales.

  The sentiment in John’s letter is quite romantic but Elizabeth’s concerns were wholly pragmatic and, from John’s subsequent letters, we can infer that Elizabeth’s response was adamant. There would be no selling up. The family’s future lay in New South Wales, not in an ignominious and impecunious return to England. The brouhaha surrounding the trial would blow over soon enough and John would surely be able to negotiate his return. Clearly Elizabeth had faith in his ability to turn the situation around, although it seems she also included some sharp words about financial speculation. Elizabeth was definitely no silent partner when it came to crucial decisions about the future of the family.

  John accepted Elizabeth’s decision, and subsequently thanked her for it:

  I have the greatest reason to be thankful to God, that your good sense enabled you to resist the temptation of coming to England, had it not been so—into what an Abyss of misery would you and my beloved Children have been plunged—dearest beloved Woman, how great are my obligations to you!14

  Then once again he turned his mind to the family business. His letters become full of advice and suggestions about the flocks, much of which Elizabeth could safely ignore. She was too busy getting things done.

  In 1812, along with Reverend Marsden and pastoralist Alexander Riley, Elizabeth exported a commercial quantity of wool to England. It was the first time anyone in New South Wales had been able to do so. Riley, buoyed by the success of that venture, subsequently ‘paid Mrs Macarthur 108 guineas…for six merino rams’.15 John Oxley and William Lawson were inspired to buy sheep from Elizabeth too. Under her discerning eye, the Macarthurs’ pioneering breeding regime, for fleece rather than for meat, was finally paying dividends. The Blaxland brothers were similarly enthusiastic about the prospects for sheep, but it had been the publicity surrounding John’s 1804 purchases of rams from the King’s flock at Kew that had prompted them to buy some royal rams of their own to bring with them as free settlers in 1806. In 1813 Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth were feted for finding a way to cross the Blue Mountains that surround the Sydney basin; they were driven to do so almost entirely by a desire to find new grazing land for their sheep.

  Elizabeth received excellent prices for that first shipment of wool, in 1812, but it was otherwise a difficult year. Her letters to John were delayed, or lost, and he went without hearing from her for two whole years. He still wrote to her though, long letters full of doubts and fears. Elizabeth knew from these letters that her own had not reached him. What questions had she asked him? What advice might she have been waiting to hear? And all the while worrying about her husband and sons at a time of war. With Edward soldiering on the continent, John took an active interest in the activities of Napoleon, who he described as a ‘Ruffian’ and ‘the great disturber of the World’.16 In November 1812, when the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars was far from settled, even John realised that ‘Never was there a more important period than the present…For my own part I cherish the most sanguine hopes that [Napoleon] can never escape out of Russia’.17

  Meanwhile, any financial gain made by Elizabeth was lost by John. His mercantile misadventures had ‘swallowed up all the money I could command, and left me considerably in debt’,18 he wrote to Elizabeth. His financial wounds were further salted when he went to some trouble, ‘indeed to part with my last guinea and to depend upon my credit’, to advance £400 pounds to rebel leader George Johnston so that he could afford to sail home. Elizabeth could be forgiven for exclaiming with indignation as she read this, given how hard she worked to make their businesses successful, and to keep John in funds. John went on to write that he subsequently discovered that Johnston had been advanced an additional £1200 by another New South Wales colleague and was sour. ‘This is all perfectly consistent with the whole of his conduct towards me,’ wrote John, as if he expected Johnston to somehow feel grateful to him for instigating a rebellion for which he, Johnston, took the fall.

  But, unlike John Macarthur, in late 1812 Johnston was allowed to sail home to New South Wales, and to return to his Annandale farm. In an echo of Elizabeth’s circumstances, Johnston’s convict partner Esther had been ably managing the family properties—and raising their seven children—in his absence. It would be entirely understandable if Elizabeth also felt sour seeing Esther’s de facto husband return so soon. A year after Johnston arrived back in the colony, in November 1814, he married Esther and legitimised their relationship. Most historians argue the marriage occurred at the urging of Governor Macquarie but I wonder if, free of the burdens of upholding regimental honour, Johnston simply and finally followed his heart.

  While Elizabeth continued to wait for John’s homecoming, in 1812 John’s nephew Hannibal (aged twenty-four) returned to New South Wales with his bride Anna Maria King (aged nineteen). Maria, as she was usually called, was the daughter of former governor King, and John was full of praise for her. He wrote to Elizabeth of the London wedding, confident that the new bride would ‘soon entitle herself to your warmest regard, since to know her was to love her’.19 The beleaguered King had died within a year of his return to England. Since then, John Macarthur and Hannibal had visited the widowed Mrs King, who having tried, and failed, to extract a pension from the government was living in straitened circumstances.

  Within days of the wedding, Hannibal and Maria set sail for New South Wales aboard the Isabella, overseeing a mixed cargo of retail items of Uncle John’s to be sold in Sydney. This was yet another venture that did not go well, and a year later John wrote to Hannibal to say he hoped the affair would be a lesson to him. In truth, the colony was at that time enduring a commercial depression and its effects were widely felt. Hannibal was unlucky rather than incompetent, although John may have believed otherwise. To continue John’s own run of bad luck, the Isabella was shipwrecked on her way back to England, off the Falkland Islands, although the cargo, crew and passengers were saved.20 Hannibal, wrote John as the newlyweds departed, was as ‘blunt, honest and unsophisticated as when he left Parramatta’,21 but he sincerely hoped his presence would relieve Elizabeth from ‘the necessity of attending to the laborious and more disagreeable part of an undertaking that not many men would be capable of conducting so successfully as you have done, so much to your own credit, and to the advantage of your Family’.22

  No doubt Elizabeth warmly welcomed Hannibal and his wife in Sydney in August 1812. Apart from being pleased to see them, the extra assistance the couple could provide on the farms and in the house was much needed. Maria came equipped with her sunny disposition and a book-length letter from her godmother with enor
mous detail (and numerous recipes) about how best to entertain at home including menus, the placement of dishes on the table and crucial details like ‘you must have 2 boats of Fish Sauce, for you have no idea how soon it is ladled away’.23 However, Maria would have little chance to take this advice—she would give birth to eleven children over the next twenty years and, probably as a result of all those pregnancies, would be an invalid for much of her life.

  By the time Hannibal and Maria arrived, Elizabeth had some interesting wedding news of her own—her fully recovered eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was to be married too. Miss Macarthur (aged twenty) had accepted Mr John Oxley (aged twenty-eight), a handsome, dark-haired naval officer and long-time family friend. Unfortunately, though, the couple had become engaged without John Macarthur’s permission, and Oxley had subsequently departed for England, seeking a civilian appointment to the role of New South Wales’ surveyor-general as well as John’s consent. John gave it, albeit hedged with many provisos about marriage settlements. He knew Oxley was heavily in debt and while noting the young man’s good nature, he doubted his financial prudence and economy. Without knowing Elizabeth’s or his daughter’s views on the matter, but wishing that he did, he left it all up to his wife to determine. ‘In whatever way you decide upon this momentous question of the happiness of our dear Child, be satisfied my beloved wife, I shall be sure to approve your decision.’24

  But within a year, and still without hearing from Elizabeth about whether or not the marriage had gone ahead—or was even agreeable to his daughter—John discovered the true extent of John Oxley’s debts and promptly retracted his consent, forbidding the marriage. As a result, Oxley withdrew and the marriage did not go ahead. It was all very well for John to make the principled decision, but it was Elizabeth who had to break the news and then comfort her daughter in her disappointment. There is no happy ending here; daughter Elizabeth never married—she lived out her life in her parents’ home. John Oxley eventually married in Sydney and had two sons. Before then he had two daughters with one woman and a third daughter by another.25 Perhaps that news had also reached John and influenced his change of mind. Oxley served the colony in various senior positions, earning a handsome wage and accumulating land grants, but when he died in 1828 at the age of forty-two he was ‘much embarrassed in his pecuniary circumstances’.26 His one-time fiancée was, as Elizabeth noted in a letter, deeply affected by his death.27