The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  In strategic and naval terms, the Battle of Toulon proved an embarrassment for the British. For reasons that provoked furious controversy at the time and are still debated now, many of the Royal Navy ships present did not engage. The damage to the Namur’s masts and rigging, which Milbourne tried so desperately to monitor, persuaded Admiral Mathews to withdraw early from the fighting on 11 February, and he retreated to Italy two days later. The Franco-Spanish fleet was forced back to Toulon, but emerged from the encounter substantially intact. Milbourne Marsh’s own account of the battle underlines again some of the paradoxes of his work. His testimony makes clear that he was obliged to possess a pocket watch, still a rare accessory at this time among men who worked with their hands. It is also striking how confidently this skilled artisan communicated with the Admiral of Britain’s Mediterranean fleet. Indeed, when Mathews was court martialled for failing at Toulon, he asked Milbourne to testify on his behalf. Yet what happened in the battle also confirms the precariousness of the carpenter’s existence, and therefore of his family’s existence.

  ‘A Draught of the Marlborough as she appear’d in the late engagement in the Mediterranean’. Etching, 1744.

  At one stage, the Namur’s withdrawal left the Marlborough, Milbourne Marsh’s former ship on which many of his friends were still serving, alone to face enemy fire. He watched, from relative safety, as the sails of the Marlborough caught fire, and as its main mast, battered by shot, crashed onto its decks. The ship stayed afloat, but its captain and about eighty of its crew were killed outright, and 120 more of its men were wounded. The battle also killed the Namur’s Post-Captain, John Russel, who had been one of Milbourne’s own patrons, along with at least twenty-five more of the ship’s crew. As for the Spanish, a British fireship had smashed into some of their warships, resulting, it was reported at the time, in ‘the immediate dissolution of 1350 souls’. Witnessing death on this scale, experiencing battle, persuaded Milbourne to change course. He was not a coward: one of his private discoveries at Toulon was that, at the time, he ‘did not think of the danger’.66 But he was now in his thirties, married, a father, and his parents’ oldest surviving son, whereas most seamen were under twenty-five and single. So in 1744 Milbourne Marsh left the sea. For the next ten years he repaired ships at Portsmouth and Chatham dockyards. On land, at what passed for home.

  For his daughter, Elizabeth Marsh, this decision led to a more stationary, and seemingly more ordinary, life. To be sure, there were certain respects in which her experiences in the 1740s and early ’50s already made her distinctive. Moving between Portsmouth, London and Chatham, and between various ships at sea and the land, allowed her in some respects an ironic counterfeit of genteel female education, but also more. In addition to the fluent French she acquired from aunt Mary and uncle Duval, she learnt arithmetic and basic accounting from her father, and she acquired a relish for some of the more innocuous pastimes common among sailors, reading, music and singing. She learnt too how to operate without embarrassment in overwhelmingly masculine environments, and how to tolerate physical hardship; and she also learnt, through living close to it, and through sailing on it from infancy, how not to fear the sea, or to regard it as extraordinary, but rather to take travelling on it for granted. She also learnt restlessness and insecurity, and – from watching her mother – a certain female self-reliance.

  Mariners’ wives had to be capable of a more than usual measure of independence and responsibility, because their husbands were so often away. During Milbourne’s absences at sea, Elizabeth Marsh senior ran their household in the New Buildings and its finances by herself.67 She also had to cope at intervals with the harshness and enforced intimacies of living aboard ship. Both of their sons, Francis Milbourne Marsh and John Marsh, the latter Elizabeth Marsh’s favourite and confidant, seem to have been born at sea. Giving birth to the elder, Francis, may indeed have been what confined Elizabeth Marsh senior to the Cambridge in Portsmouth harbour – that is, several miles from shore – for several weeks in 1741, and what tempted Milbourne to ‘borrow’ supplies of navy bedding ‘till my own was fit’.68

  In the normal course of events, none of these mixed influences on their daughter Elizabeth Marsh would have mattered very much. When her father left the sea in 1744 after the Battle of Toulon, his and the family’s prospects were modest, and would have appeared predictable. One of the attractions of working in naval dockyards, as distinct from a commercial shipyard that paid higher wages, was that they allowed skilled employees a job for life. Once he came ashore in 1744, Milbourne’s income declined slightly, from £50 per annum to around £40, a sum that placed the family at the bottom of England’s middling sort at this time, ‘the upper station of low life’, as Daniel Defoe styled it.69 But at least there was security. It seemed likely that Milbourne would build and repair a succession of warships until he was pensioned off, that his two sons would in due course become shipwrights in their turn, and that ultimately his only daughter would marry a man of the same trade. But this was to reckon without changes that crossed continents, and the second influential man in Elizabeth Marsh’s life: her uncle George Marsh.

  Born in January 1723, George Marsh was the eighth and penultimate child of George Marsh senior and Elizabeth Milbourne. This position in a large artisanal family may have made him slighter in physique, and more susceptible to illness – he seems to have suffered sporadically from epilepsy – but he was as driven as any eldest child. Initially sent to sea in 1735, because his father was not ‘able to purchase me a clerkship’, he soon moved to an apprenticeship to a petty officer in Chatham dockyard, and by 1744 was working as a clerk for the Commissioner of Deptford’s naval dockyard.70 His next break came almost immediately. In October 1745 the House of Commons demanded a detailed report on how naval expenditure in the previous five years, when Britain had been at war with Spain, compared with that in the first five years of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–07). As he was ‘acquainted with the business of the dockyards, and no clerk of the Navy Office was’, George Marsh was ‘chosen … to perform that great work’. Labouring at the Navy Office in London ‘from 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning till 8 or 9 o’clock at night from October to the end of January’, mining avast, unsorted store of records for the requisite figures, and organizing and writing up the usable data, exacerbated his epilepsy. He suffered intermittent attacks of near-blindness and dizziness, and ‘fell several times in the street’, he recorded much later, ‘and therefore found it necessary to carry constantly in my pocket a memorandum who I was and where I lodged’. He nonetheless produced the report ‘in a few months’.71

  This episode suggests some of George Marsh’s qualities: his ferocious capacity for industry, strong ambition, and utter belief in paperwork. It also suggests how – through him – Elizabeth Marsh was connected to yet another aspect of modernity and change. The circumstances of her birth and upbringing had already linked her with slavery, migration, empire, economic and industrious revolutions, the navy and the sea. But it was primarily through her uncle George Marsh that she connected with the expanding power of the British state at this time, and with an ever more conscious mobilization of knowledge and paperwork in order to expand that power. To paraphrase the economist J.R. McCulloch’s later verdict on the East India Company, Elizabeth’s father, Milbourne Marsh, was caught up with the power of the sword, Britain’s fighting navy; but it was her uncle, George Marsh, who exemplified the power of the pen and the ledger.72

  Detail from a pastel portrait of George Marsh by J.G. Huck, c.1790.

  And he was unstoppable. He rose early every morning, drank only water, confined himself to two meals a day, took regular exercise, spent little on himself, and worked very hard. In 1750 he moved from the provinces to the tall pedimented brick building that Christopher Wren had designed for the Navy Office in Crutched Friars by the Tower of London. From 1751 to 1763, George Marsh was the Clerk in charge of seamen’s wages. He then spent almost ten years as Commissioner of Victual
ling, before becoming Clerk of the Acts in 1773. This was the position that Samuel Pepys had occupied after 1660, and used as a power base from which to transform the administration of the Royal Navy. Pepys, however, had been able to draw on aristocratic relations and on high, creative intelligence. George Marsh possessed neither advantage, yet he retained the Clerkship of the Acts for over twenty years, and ended his career as a Commissioner of the Navy. At his death in 1800, this shipwright’s son was worth by his own estimate £34,575, over £3 million in present-day values.73

  The contrast between his remarkable career and his evident personal limitations reduced some who worked and competed with him to uncomprehending fury. George Marsh, complained his own Chief Clerk in 1782, was

  totally unfit for the employment as he can neither read, spell, nor write. This office has in my memory been filled with ability and dignity … but the present Clerk of the Acts has neither, and we should do ten times better without him, for he only perplexes matters.74

  Yet, as this denunciation suggests, some of the criticism George Marsh attracted at different stages in his career was rooted in snobbery, and he was always able to exploit people’s tendency to underestimate him. In reality, he wrote all the time, privately, and not just in his public capacity. His papers also confirm that he read widely and that, like his parents and his niece Elizabeth Marsh, he enjoyed constructing stories. More than any other member of his immediate family, perhaps because he spent virtually all of his life in a single country, George Marsh seems to have been conscious of the scale of the transformations through which he was living, and he sought out different ways to make sense of them. He was the one who stayed behind. He was the spectator, the recorder, the collector of memories and eloquent, emblematic mementoes. Most of all, George Marsh was someone who relished facts and information, and knew how to deploy them: ‘I am sensible my abilities fall far short of some other men’s,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but [I] am very certain no one knows the whole business of the civil department of the Navy better or perhaps so well as I do.’75 This massive, cumulative knowledge gave him an element of power, as did his acute understanding of how patronage worked.

  As his correspondence with successive aristocratic First Lords of the Admiralty reveals, he was both unctuously deferential in his dealings with his official and social superiors, and capable sometimes of hoodwinking them. In private, and like his parents, George Marsh tended to be critical of members of the aristocracy, writing regularly about the superiority of ‘the middle station of life’, and of those (like himself) who had to work seriously hard for a living. But he was adept at the patronage game, which necessarily involved him paying court at times to ‘the indolent unhappy nobility’, and he was interested in securing advancement and favours for more than just himself. He ‘always had a very great pleasure’, he wrote, in ‘doing my utmost to make all those happy, by every friendly act, who I have known to be worthy’.76 Chief among these worthy beneficiaries were the members of his own family. It was George Marsh’s willingness and ability to use his power and connections to promote his family that transformed Elizabeth Marsh’s expectations, and that separated her forever from the life-trajectory that might have been anticipated for a shipwright’s daughter. Having as her uncle someone with access to influence over several decades was one of the factors that made her life extraordinary. By way of George Marsh, she was able at times to have contact with some of the most powerful men in the British state, while also being helped to travel far beyond it.

  His first substantial intervention in his niece’s life was indirect, but it changed everything. In January 1755, using his connections at the Navy Board, George Marsh secured for Milbourne Marsh the position of Naval Officer at Port Mahón in Menorca.77 A ‘Naval Officer’ in eighteenth-century British parlance was not a fighting sea officer. The post was a clerical and administrative one, in an overseas dockyard, and for a ship’s carpenter it represented a distinctly unusual career break. To begin with, it tripled the family’s income. In the late 1740s and early ’50s, Milbourne had rarely earned more than £12 a quarter, whereas this new post brought with it an annual salary of £150, and the opportunity to make more. The rise in income was only part of the alteration in the family’s status and outlook. As a carpenter aboard ship, Milbourne had been an uneasy amalgam of specialist craftsman, resident expert and manual labourer. This now changed. Nothing would ever take him completely from the sea, or from his delight in the construction of wooden ships and in drawing plans, but from now on he ceased to work with his hands for much of the time. The announcements of his promotion in the London press referred to him as ‘Milbourne Marsh Esq.’, thereby conceding to him the suffix that was the minimum requirement for being accounted a gentleman.78

  But the most dramatic change involved in his promotion to Naval Officer was one that affected his whole family, his wife, their sons, and – as it turned out – the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Marsh most of all. In March 1755, the family left Portsmouth forever and sailed to the Mediterranean and Menorca. She was on her way.

  2

  Taken to Africa, Encountering

  Islam

  MOVING TO MENORCA meant an immediate change of landscape, climate and cultural and religious milieu, and a conspicuous change of scale. Accustomed, when on land, to crowded ports in the world’s foremost Protestant power, Elizabeth Marsh now found herself on a rocky, sparsely cultivated, ten-mile-long Mediterranean island of twenty-eight thousand souls, where a sprinkling of Jews and Greek Orthodox Christians were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Catholics, and where the dominant language was a form of Catalan. Most of the four-thousand-odd Britons on Menorca were soldiers or sailors. The officers among them, and the few civilian professionals and merchants, generally held aloof from the local Catholics (who tended to cold-shoulder them in turn), organizing for themselves a cosy, desperately restricted simulacrum of social life back home.1 In her case, the claustrophobia scarcely had time to register. What did was a rise in status marked out by shifts in behaviour and consumerism. She seems to have learnt how to ride and to have acquired a riding costume. Her father could now afford a music teacher, and she began reading sheet music, as distinct from simply memorizing tunes. And, in place of shared lodgings, she moved with her family into a substantial freestone house on Hospital Island, a twelve-acre offshore islet in Mahón harbour. She was ‘happily situated’, she wrote later, abruptly promoted to minor membership of a colonial elite, and refashioning herself in a setting where young, single Protestant women who might conceivably pass as ladies were flatteringly sparse.2

  Milbourne Marsh’s new life was also substantially different. No longer a full-time manual worker, he was now a ‘pen and ink’ man, without a uniform or a sword, and therefore on a different and lower level than the senior military and sea officers who ran the colony, yet indispensable and multi-tasked. Part of his job as the island’s Naval Officer was to act as Clerk of the Cheque: that is, as senior financial officer of Menorca’s naval dockyard. The naval stores lining the wharves of Mahón’s huge harbour, which extends inland for some six thousand yards, were his responsibility. So was paying the Britons and Menorcans who worked in the dockyard as shipwrights, sail-makers and carpenters, and in the navy’s victualling office, bakehouse, windmills and magazines. In addition, Milbourne acted as Clerk of the Survey, drafting maps and drawing up plans for new buildings and defences. At intervals he was Master Shipwright too, overseeing the repair and careening of incoming British warships and transports, and keeping an eye on the merchant ships arriving with provisions and bullion to pay the troops. In his limited leisure time he joined his wife, sons and newly accomplished daughter on Hospital Island, with its ‘rocks and precipices … intermixed with scattering houses’, where the navy’s local commander, surgeon and any visiting admirals were also accommodated.3 But Milbourne’s daylight hours were spent in the undistinguished row of low-storeyed sheds that made up the naval dockyard, or rowing the small boat
that came with his office from ship to ship in the harbour, seeking out information from their captains, or mustering men and resolving disagreements, or surveying the island’s innumerable coves, inlets and bays.

  For Menorca was not a place of refuge and colonial ease. The British had seized it from Spain in 1708 for essentially the same reason that had led the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and Catalans to invade it before them, and for much the same reason too as would cause the United States Navy to maintain a base of operations there in the nineteenth century. Menorca offered an advantageous location from which to monitor and to seek to dominate the western Mediterranean. In the words of a British writer in 1756:

  All ships sailing up the straits of Gibraltar, and bound to any part of Africa, east of Algiers, to any part of Italy, or to any part of Turkey, either in Asia or Europe, and all ships from any of those places, and bound to any port without the straits-mouth, must and usually do pass between this island and the coast of Africa.4

  Some of the main sea routes to and from Genoa, Livorno, Nice, Sicily, Marseilles, Lisbon, Tetuan and Tripoli lay within easy reach of Menorca. So did ships setting out from Spain’s Mediterranean ports, and from its naval bases, Cartagena and Cádiz. Possessed of Menorca and sufficient force, Britain could intervene in the commercial and naval activities of three of its imperial competitors: France, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire with its provinces in Northern Africa. Toulon, the prime French naval base, was 220 miles away from Menorca, within striking distance of a British fleet using the island as a base. Of course, the converse also applied. Ringed and replete with commercial, strategic and warlike possibilities, Menorca was itself a natural target. It was a ‘frontier garrison’, one politician had remarked in the 1720s, where discipline and watchfulness were mandatory ‘as if it were always in a state of war’.5