Elizabeth wasn’t fooled. She knew how very deeply John’s feelings ran for his son. And she grieved too, in her quiet way. ‘How often my thoughts dwell on our loss, and on you, my dear Edward. I must not tell, nor will I give way to feelings of sorrow and regret, which can be of no avail.’3 Her husband had no such qualms. John spoke constantly about his beloved son, reading and rereading aloud all his letters. Elizabeth bitterly resented her husband’s behaviour, feeling that he was indulging his sorrow ‘at the expense of ours in talking of the dear departed continually’.4 Their son’s death further deepened the fault line in their marriage, with neither feeling they could lean on the other for support.
Elizabeth wrote as often as she could to her sons in England, whenever a ship was about to leave for England. In an age when the ‘enormous charge of postage’5 was paid by the recipient, based on distance travelled and letter size, Elizabeth attempted frugality by crossing many of her letters—writing across the page from left to right in the usual way and then turning the page at a right angle to write more lines across the existing ones. She seems to have written them on the fly, noting thoughts down as they enter her mind and then apologising. ‘This my dear sons you will say is a proper old woman’s gossipy letter.’6 In fact there is little or no gossip, and rarely a bad word to say about anyone. Elizabeth’s letters, especially after her son’s death, are full of warmth and love and family comings and goings.
John Macarthur seems to have favoured his son John over Edward, and probably over James and William too. John was the child with the shining intellect, with the burgeoning London career, with the parliamentary connections. It was John who was directly responsible for the successful prices received for Macarthur wool in English markets, John who established the Australian Agricultural Company, and John who whispered in all the right ears to ensure land grants and other perks flowed to Macarthur family members. As a father, John Macarthur loved all his children, but he was unlikely to have been subtle about any favouritism. Within a few days of his brother’s death, Edward told his parents that he wished he had been the one to die instead of John, given that Edward’s own life was ‘less valuable than was his’.7
It was now up to Edward to take on the role of family agent and fixer, and he was quick to point out that it meant ‘my destinies now seem fixed in England’.8 Edward was in no hurry to return to New South Wales. In the months following his brother’s death, a worried Edward wrote constantly from London to Parramatta. As the eldest son and his father’s heir, he assumed a patronisingly formal tone towards his adult siblings. ‘My dear Brothers and Sisters,’ he wrote, ‘It becomes your duty to bear up against this heavy calamity and to comfort and console our dear parents. Be assured that in all things I will do my duty here. I feel assured you will do yours at home.’ The question was, though, in the face of their father’s worsening mental state, what did duty entail?
John Macarthur was continuing to give his family plenty of cause for concern and seemed to have entered a state of mania. Elizabeth wrote to Edward:
It is the old story. Setting a variety of wheels in motion, with a Steam Engine power—planning—building—making believe to do so at least, digging up the Earth—altering—directing, driving about at all hours changing his mind continually and in short keeping his family in a perpetual worry.9
John became more and more restless, barely sleeping, walking out for miles and, with no regard for propriety, talking to anyone he encountered. It was clear to Elizabeth that John laboured ‘under a divergence of mind’.10 She had seen it before, but in the past John’s problems had not been quite so exposed to the world.
John soon fell completely into the abyss of paranoia. He accused Elizabeth of infidelity, his daughters of theft, and thought James and William had fled into the countryside. He claimed his son-in-law, Doctor James Bowman, was trying to poison him (which, given the quality of nineteenth century medicines, may not have been far from the truth) and took ‘a most unaccountable dislike to our friend Mrs Lucas’.11 In a frenzied climax at Elizabeth Farm, he rampaged through the house with pistols and swords. Doctor Anderson was fetched from the hospital in Parramatta. He was ‘a very worthy man’, who had been visiting John daily and who, according to Elizabeth, ‘quite understands the nature of his complaints’.12 John was eventually restrained and, in consultation with their doctors, the family confined him within three rooms of the newly renovated house, where he was looked after by longstanding and trusted servants.
Elizabeth, peremptorily ordered out by John, stayed in Sydney with Mary and her family, while her other daughters moved in with Penelope Lucas at Hambledon Cottage. Elizabeth bore her husband’s capricious demands with calm resignation—she would do whatever was necessary to help maintain his peace of mind and if that meant staying away from him then, as she wrote to Edward, ‘such is life’.13 John, although remaining confined, soon recovered his equanimity. He was in good physical health, Elizabeth was told, and appeared ‘cheerful and not at all unhappy’.14 Elizabeth and her children made the heartbreaking decision to have him declared insane.
Elizabeth had long anticipated John’s breakdown: ‘I cannot say that the blow—severe as it is—has come upon us without long previous apprehensions that sooner or later, that mighty mind, would break down and give way.’15 In Sydney she kept to herself and stayed within the family circle: walking in the newly planted Botanical Gardens; taking carriage rides with Mary and the grandchildren; accepting some callers but declining to visit in return. John recovered enough to visit his wife, just for the day, and Elizabeth thought him better ‘but still too restless’.16 Although she remained optimistic about John’s recovery, Elizabeth did not, then or indeed ever, make a return visit. Her marriage was effectively over. It is impossible to know whether the separation was simply a matter of acquiescing to John’s capricious demands, or because Elizabeth had finally had enough. Either way, it was a difficult time for everyone.
James and William, appointed as John’s guardians, took it in turns to stay at Elizabeth Farm. James, especially, found it emotionally gruelling. His father would rail against him, wrote Elizabeth to Edward, with ‘all the bitterness which your poor father can readily call to his aid’.17 But when James, hurt and distressed, left to return to Camden, his father would then demand his return. He wanted James with him all the time.
Almost a year after his initial confinement, there was some sense that he might be improving—and Elizabeth dared hope she could return home. John was able to walk into Parramatta, and there talk rationally and calmly with those he met. But he continually invited strangers home to dine with him, much to James’s dismay. One of his Bowman grandsons, little James, ‘was taken to see his poor grandfather’, wrote Elizabeth to Edward, and, much to everyone’s relief, ‘was kindly received’.18 But the improvement did not last, and Elizabeth and John did not reconcile. John continued to believe his family was conspiring against him, and he was causing havoc within the house.
In 1833 the family decided to move him to Belgenny Farm. One of the men John had stopped to chat with a few months previously witnessed his removal and, shocked and upset, wrote with alarm to the newspaper. When he had last met with John in the street:
I never in my life saw him look better, or converse more rationally, and he told me he was every day hoping to resume full management of his affairs. [And yet] passing through Parramatta a few days since, I was astonished to find that Mr John McArthur was hurried off to Camden against his will, the poor man loudly protesting against the violence.19
This meddling, anonymous ‘Observer’ called for an immediate inquiry. The family was, understandably, rather put out. James visited the newspaper editors to explain the situation and, according to Elizabeth ‘they all behaved very well’.20 They apologised for inquiring into a private matter, and John Macarthur’s illness was not mentioned in the press again.
Despite John’s apparent unwillingness to remove to Belgenny Farm, Elizabeth reported to Edward that s
he had been told he was ‘there enjoying himself very much, taking great interest in the building, the garden and horses. I do not hear that he makes any enquiries or notices anything relative to the sheep’.21 Elizabeth did not visit him. In the privacy of his estate at Camden Park, away from interactions with strangers, John regained his physical health and, in the later part of the year, was once more fully lucid. He took a lively interest in the building of the new family home although in practice it was William who oversaw the day-to-day operations.
John also recognised that the Camden property was no longer quite the jewel in the Macarthur crown. Overgrazing and drought had taken a toll on the quality of the grasslands. John’s will, which distributed the various Macarthur properties among his sons but marked Edward as the heir and chief beneficiary, now needed to be revised to ensure that James and William were still treated fairly. But John had drafted and signed his will before his sons assumed guardianship over him. In order to revise it now, James and William would have to revoke their guardianship and restore their father’s legal rights. Was John well enough for them to take the risk? To their credit, James and William maintained the guardianship arrangement and refused to allow their father to change his will in their favour, even as friends advised them against doing so. They trusted that Edward would treat them fairly. Despite these ongoing concerns John, for the time being, relaxed at Belgenny Farm into a better, calmer state of mind.
With John at Belgenny, Elizabeth was finally—after an absence of more than a year—able to ‘return to dear home’ at Parramatta.22 Before she moved back to Elizabeth Farm, her youngest daughter Emmeline (now twenty-six) spent some time putting the house ‘in better order’, perhaps to spare her mother the full evidence of John’s destructive outbursts. The emotional turmoil of John’s illness had taken its toll on Elizabeth, and once she returned to Parramatta she was increasingly unwilling to leave home. ‘I have plenty of exercise within the limits of our own estate and the looking about the gardens and grounds annexed keeps me amused,’ she wrote to Edward, ‘but the effort is to make visits abroad and the apprehension of coming in contact with strangers I have not been able to combat.’23 All those curious people asking after John, all the excuses she made on his behalf—it was too much. Easier by far to stay at home and receive visits only from those who knew her—and understood her current circumstances. ‘People in the world would think this is a foolish feeling,’ continued Elizabeth ‘and perhaps it is so.’24 But there was little she could do about it.
Elizabeth took comfort in her friendship with Penelope Lucas, and in her garden at Elizabeth Farm, which by all accounts included an impressive collection of plants from around the world. Edward regularly sent her seeds and seedlings, including a sample of corn. Penelope Lucas, knowing full well how much her friend liked to discuss her sons, would without fail comment upon the little corn plantation when they walked together in the grounds. There was a decorative pond near some willows and native cypresses, and although the water remained a little muddy, Elizabeth hoped it would clear when some rain fell.
Elizabeth’s eldest daughter, now known as Aunt Eliza, had an interest in the garden too. ‘She has a fine collection of bulbs from the Cape,’ wrote Elizabeth to Edward.25 Portugal laurel, hydrangea, iris—the garden was ‘very full of large & beautiful flowers…but the pride of the garden just now is the Magnolia’.26 Explorer Thomas Mitchell had spent a night at Elizabeth Farm in 1831, before setting out on one of his expeditions, and he wrote about its gardens: ‘There I saw the first olive tree ever planted in Australia; the Cork-tree in luxuriance; the Caper growing amongst the rocks, the English Oak, the horse chestnut, broom, magnificent mulberry trees…[and a] great variety of roses growing in beds, also climbing roses.’27
At sixty-seven, Elizabeth had for some time suffered from slightly inflamed eyes and was beginning to find it difficult to write to her children as often as she might like. Her eyes ached and she could not always see clearly enough to trim the end of the quill she used for writing. Edward sent out a pair of spectacles which, as Elizabeth wrote back, ‘answer exceedingly well’.28 She preferred to write by day, but sometimes wrote to Edward of an evening:
It is now candlelight, and I know you will hardly be able to make out my scribble…Emmeline is at the same table with me, writing to you also. She is not quite well, but nevertheless she writes. Elizabeth and our friend Mrs Lucas are in the adjoining room chatting with Dr Anderson and your little nephew and namesake has just been to kiss grandmother and Aunt Emmeline and bid goodnight.29
Elizabeth did not keep herself in total isolation. John’s nephew Hannibal, his wife Maria and their many children still lived just across the river and the two families were in regular contact. Her old friend Betsy Marsden visited, accompanied by her grown-up daughter. And Anna King, wife of the former governor King and mother to Hannibal’s wife, Maria, had returned to New South Wales after a twenty-four-year absence. She became a frequent visitor to Elizabeth Farm. ‘She desires her kind love to you,’ wrote Elizabeth to Edward. ‘She is very active and visits about in a most wonderful way for an elderly person.’ Mrs King was then sixty-nine—only a year older than the tongue-in-cheek Elizabeth.
Immediately prior to Mrs King’s arrival in New South Wales, Elizabeth was thinking about whether her friend would ‘be pleased with this altered community’.30 Elizabeth considered the colony wonderfully changed, with ‘ships arriving and departing continually. It has started forward into a degree of importance I had never expected to see it attain. Two or three stage coaches leave Sydney every day to Parramatta and one to Liverpool.’31 But in her current, troubled state of mind, there was so much rapid change in the community ‘that I could hardly feel myself at home in it. It is literally by keeping at home that I do feel at ease’.32 In March 1834 Elizabeth put away her fears long enough to travel to Sydney, to stay again with Mary. She wrote to Edward to say, ‘Yesterday your dear sister Mary was safely delivered of a fine little girl!’33 Finally a granddaughter, after three boys. Not that Elizabeth in any way resented those little boys, noting in the same paragraph that the second eldest, James, ‘is a very merry active little fellow full of frolic and merriment’.34
Hannibal Macarthur, with his mother-in-law’s arrival, not to mention the recent birth of his and Maria’s eleventh child, finally decided to commence ‘building a house on a very extensive scale and next to the present cottage’.35 The new house would be a two-storey building of Georgian Regency design, with a Doric colonnade along the ground floor. It very much resembled the house John had been building (and revising, and changing his mind about and revising again) at Camden Park since the mid-1820s. John’s enthusiasm for the new house, which would become the grand family seat, was such that he moved from the cottage at Belgenny into one of the partially completed wings. The family had ‘never known him in such good health—he eats, sleeps and looks well’.36 Of course, it couldn’t last.
In March, at about the same time as his first granddaughter was born, John descended again into illness and mental collapse. He was once more restrained, this time confined to the farm cottage at Belgenny. There, on 11 April 1834, John Macarthur died. It was three years, almost to the day, since his son John had passed away and two years since he had seen his wife.
Details of John’s final days are scant and the actual cause of his unexpected death is unclear. The newspapers of the day barely mentioned John Macarthur’s passing, and he was buried quickly and quietly at Camden Park, not in a churchyard but on a rise opposite and about a mile away from the still-unfinished grand house. More and more the colonial settlers were aping the English aristocracy by establishing family burial grounds within their own estates and in time John’s wife and children would be buried beside him. Elizabeth did not attend her husband’s funeral, but that was not unusual—funerals were routinely, at this time, male-only events.
Instead she stayed at home and wept. It was five weeks before she could bring herself to write to Edward. ‘
I had fondly indulged myself with the hope,’ Elizabeth wrote to her son, ‘that it would have pleased God to restore the dear departed to a more sane state of mind & that he might have been at peace with his family.’ It was not to be. Now that ‘the shock arising—or rather increased by the suddenness of the event, is in some measure subsided’, she could only take consolation in her faith: ‘Thy will be done on Earth blessed God as it is in Heaven.’37
John Macarthur’s will, written in 1828, bequeathed Elizabeth Farm and all its contents to Edward. Elizabeth, as John’s wife, was to have the use of the property, and the contents, during her lifetime. He also left her his shares in the Bank of Australia and an annuity, to be charged on the estate. Similar annuities were provided for his unmarried daughters, and £100 each to the Bowmans and Mrs Lucas. John stipulated that his ‘esteemed friend Penelope Lucas spinster of Parramatta [was] to reside in the house and premises wherein she now lives during her life or so long as she shall think fit.’38 If Mrs Lucas were to leave, or die, then his eldest daughter Elizabeth was to have the use of Hambledon Cottage. Everything else—all of his considerable property and stock—was divided between Edward, James and William Macarthur. In an era of the primacy of the male first-born, John’s will seemed to Elizabeth and her family to be entirely appropriate and, anyway, in day-to-day terms, nothing changed. James and William continued to manage all the various estates on behalf of the whole family, with the profits pooled and drawn down only as required to meet everyone’s relatively modest living expenses.
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