The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  This sense of restraint had only increased at the end of September 1756, when they were allowed to leave Marrakech. With the immediate danger and excitement receding, she became almost paranoid that spies working for Sidi Muhammad might uncover evidence of her unmarried status in her papers. She persuaded James Crisp to purchase a gold ring from a Swedish merchant, and hid it in her clothes chest in case her belongings were searched. She was torn between desperately longing for letters from her parents (and hence reassurance that they still acknowledged her) and fear of ‘their being intercepted, as they would have discovered my real name’.79 Although her last weeks in Morocco were spent in relative comfort, in a house in Asfi owned by Andrews, the Irish merchant, and his Greek trading partner Demetrio Colety, she seems to have been unable to rest or relax. For a while, John Court remained with them, entertaining her with ‘new and improving’ tales of his travels in Africa. But in general this period of waiting was ‘irksome’ to her. Even dressing was ‘a pain’, she admitted later in print, ‘any farther than what decency required’; and for several reasons she was weary of enforced male company, ‘solitude being the principal object I desired’. Beneath her agitation and despondency lay not just physical and mental exhaustion, uncertainty and fright, but also ambivalence about the prospect of return. She worried about being forcibly retained in Morocco. She was also afraid of returning to what she knew, and to those who knew her, in case ‘the ill-disposed part of the world would unmercifully, though unjustly censure my conduct’.80 At the heart of these fears was a specific, legitimate concern.

  What this was emerges indirectly from an account she wrote of a wedding procession in Asfi. She observed it through the narrow windows of Andrews’ house during this final period of waiting, when she was feeling ‘extremely melancholy’:

  The Bride was invisible, it being the fashion of the country to conceal such persons from public view; the vehicle wherein she was enclosed resembled a garland, not unlike that our milk-maids carry on a May-day, decorated with flowers and other ornaments. In a little time after this, the Bridegroom followed, on a mule richly caparisoned, with a Moor on each side, fanning him to keep off the flies; they went a slow pace, with a band of music before them; and the lady, as I heard, was not above twelve years of age, and, in all probability, had never seen the man she was married to, until that very day.81

  There is an obvious way in which this passage might be interpreted. Western observers at this time regularly employed the treatment of women as a prism through which to examine and judge other societies. Then, as now, dwelling on the real and reputed restrictions faced by Muslim women could be a way of criticizing Islam and Islamic societies’ perceived limits on political and personal liberty far more broadly. Yet in this case such a conventional reading would be inadequate. Too much of Elizabeth Marsh’s account of this Asfi wedding procession evokes joy and celebration, and is suggestive more of envy than of censure. As she describes them, the Moroccan couple go to their wedding amid music, ornament, richly decorated mules, and so many flowers that it reminds her of May Day. Most of all, the couple marries in the customary manner, ceremoniously, watched by ‘a great crowd’, and with all the proper ritual. By contrast, what sort of wedding – and what sort of marriage – could she expect, once her masquerade as a wife and her near-disappearance into a harem became more widely known? The best she could hope for, given conventional expectations of unsullied female virtue, must have become increasingly clear to her during these final weeks in Asfi. Rather as she imagined the young Moroccan bride she observed there, Elizabeth Marsh could no longer expect much real choice over whom she was to marry.

  The Portland and its passengers reached Gibraltar on 27 November. Some time between early December 1756 and 7 January 1757, in a private ceremony there, she became in law, and not merely in counterfeit name, Mrs James Crisp.

  3

  Trading from London, Looking to America

  WHEN JAMES CRISP proposed to Elizabeth Marsh at Gibraltar in December 1756, she ‘was not much surprised at this declaration’. Nor was she immediately won over, but his ‘general good character, the gratitude I owed him, and my father’s desire over-balanced every other consideration; and … we were married’. This, at least, was the version of events that she subsequently published for anyone to read. But what it left out is as suggestive as what she chose to emphasize. She admitted feeling grateful for Crisp’s aid and protection in Morocco. She stressed that her father, Milbourne Marsh, had pressed the match. She was careful to allude, for all sorts of reasons, to Crisp’s ‘general good character’; and she described how he had worked hard to persuade her ‘of his love for me, and the unhappiness he was under at the thought of parting’.1 Neither in her accounts of her Moroccan ordeal and its aftermath, nor in any other writings that survive, however, does she use the word ‘love’ in connection with her own feelings for the man who became her husband.

  She claimed indeed that there had been ‘many difficulties to surmount’ before she could resign herself to marrying him, and that the struggle ‘caused me many tears’. The account of the making of this marriage supplied by her uncle, George Marsh, is more comprehensive but still slanted. In his Family Book he records, as she never did, that James Crisp had first ‘paid his advances’ to Elizabeth Marsh in 1755, when both of them were living in Menorca. These initial approaches were rejected, he claimed, because Crisp ‘was not thought a suitable match for her, though a fine, handsome man and rich’. Instead, the Marsh family at this point had another candidate in view. Before being captured at sea and taken to Morocco, George Marsh asserts, Elizabeth ‘was contracted to Captain Towry of the Navy’, information that she half-corroborates in her own writings.2 Who was this individual? At the time that Elizabeth was briefly engaged to him, Captain Henry John Phillips was not yet a Towry. He was the nephew and heir of a Captain John Towry, who was the navy’s Commissioner at Mahón, Menorca, and he inherited the latter’s surname along with the bulk of his estate when Towry died in 1757. The worldly attractions of Elizabeth Marsh’s first fiancé went beyond this, however. The Towrys were a Scottish naval dynasty well represented in the higher echelons of the Royal Navy’s administration and among fighting sea officers. A later Towry fought alongside Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797. Commissioner John Towry was also closely connected by marriage to another originally Scottish naval clan, the Clevlands, and from 1751 to 1763 John Clevland was Secretary to the Admiralty.3

  Some of the reasons why Henry John Phillips, the future Captain Henry Towry, was judged preferable as a likely husband for Elizabeth Marsh are therefore obvious enough. As she later wistfully recalled, this was an ‘alliance … such as I had no reason to expect’.4 It would have offered her social as well as economic advancement, a definitive remove from her own distinctly mixed origins to within touching distance of Britain’s governing class. Given the paramountcy of kinship links, her marriage to a future Towry would also have been potentially transformative for her ambitious, striving father and uncle. It would have given both men a direct line to the Admiralty and more, since John Clevland was also a Member of Parliament. From such a connection, the men of the Marsh family could plausibly have anticipated enhanced access to the powerful, and swifter promotion. All this they might have hoped for; and all this was lost when Moroccan corsairs intercepted the Ann, and Elizabeth Marsh’s reputation was compromised. Milbourne Marsh promptly received a letter from the soon-to-be Henry Towry withdrawing his suit, and ‘importing that his cousin, Mr. Clevland … insisted upon his marrying a lady he had provided for him’.5 As for James Crisp, whose reactions no one took the trouble to record, he was abruptly promoted from rejected suitor to the one possible candidate for Elizabeth’s hand, the only man who, in the light of events in the Mediterranean and Morocco, could reaffirm her respectability to the world through the act of offering her marriage.

  Hence at least some of Elizabeth Marsh’s ambivalence in the face of Crisp’s renewed proposal,
and her parents’ urgings this time that she accept it. How much she felt for the soon-to-be Henry Towry is unclear. She claimed later that it was in order to join him that she had embarked on her disastrous voyage on the Ann; and certainly she understood something of the future she was losing along with their engagement. She also recognized that, in the wake of her North African ordeal, marriage to James Crisp was now imperative.6 It was a union that reinforced the distinctive, revealing trajectory of her life. Becoming Mrs Henry Towry would not, in the event, have provided for prolonged happiness, since the by-now Captain Towry died in battle in 1762. But the Clevland connection, and the Towry family’s wealth, would have guaranteed her a more than satisfactory widow’s pension. Like many other prosperous naval widows, an Elizabeth Marsh-turned Elizabeth Towry might have retired to Bath, with its genteel society, spa, and constantly replenished supply of possible second husbands. She would probably have spent the rest of her life in England, and there would have been no further dramatic links between her private story and more extensive histories. As it was, she married James Crisp, and was caught up again in the flux of transcontinental events and contacts. Slavery, the sea, empire, war and the ambitions of contending states had brought her into being and shaped her experiences across three continents. Now it would be the turn of international trade, and the lure of transatlantic projects.

  Arriving at a fair and comprehensive view of the man responsible for this shift in Elizabeth Marsh’s experience is difficult, in part because she and other members of her family distorted the record. In his wife’s retrospective writings, and in those of her uncle, George Marsh, James Crisp features from the outset as the eager, already slightly suspect suitor, while she is the reluctant, put-upon bride. In reality, Crisp too may have felt under constraint in 1756. Given what was expected of a gentleman, there were few decent alternatives available to him in the wake of events in Morocco except to renew his proposal to Elizabeth. But whereas her doubts and struggles and subsequent escapes are preserved in intermittent, always intense autobiographical writings, most of Crisp’s personal papers, like all of his account books, disappeared in the successive crises of his life. Such business correspondence of his that does survive gives little away about his inner life. Establishing his perspectives and actions, which in the 1760s and early ’70s substantially determined Elizabeth’s own life, thus requires a different kind of narrative and analysis. In his case, personal information has to be garnered and inferred from a mass of seemingly impersonal sources. Most of all, Crisp’s intricate commercial existence has to be tracked across at least three oceans, and four continents.

  James Crisp (it was sometimes spelt Crispe) was a member of one of early modern Britain’s most consistently extrovert commercial dynasties. His most famous ancestor, Nicholas Crisp (c.1599–1666), had started out as a Mediterranean trader, but then moved into the East Indies and Africa. He was a leading figure first in the Guinea Company, the earliest joint-stock enterprise in England to trade with Africa, and then in the Company of Merchants trading to Guinea which was established by Charles I in 1631. Both companies focused on Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, and on gold, ivory, redwood, sugar and, over time, slaves. The English had been voyaging to West Africa to buy and sell since the sixteenth century, but Nicholas Crisp helped to alter the quality of this trading connection. He and his brothers took on Dutch and Portuguese competitors more aggressively than their predecessors and, by way of an agent, established English factories and forts at Kormantin in Abanze in present-day Ghana, and at Komenda, Anomabu and elsewhere on the Gold Coast. Kormantin remained the headquarters of England’s dealings in goods and ultimately human traffic in West Africa until it was superseded by Cape Coast in 1665, by which time Nicholas Crisp was a baronet and had imported by his own estimate half a million pounds in African gold. He also established a manufactory for glass and ceramic beads on his landed estate in Hammersmith, to the west of London. Together with the cloves, indigo, ivory, silks, calico and shells he imported from the East Indies, these brilliantly patterned beads supplied him with the wherewithal for barter in the trade in West African cloth and slaves. ‘There was scarcely a branch of English overseas trade in which he had no interest,’ one historian has written of Nicholas Crisp, ‘so that he was justly termed “the most general trader of the time”.’7

  Even during Sir Nicholas’s lifetime there were many branches of this Crisp dynasty, not all of them enterprising or successful. Yet over the generations the family exhibited certain recurring characteristics. There was a predilection amongst its males for particular names: Nicholas, Samuel, Rowland, Ellis and James. One of Sir Nicholas’s distant cousins was a James Crisp, a London-based embroiderer.8 As in this case, there was a persistent and unsurprising family association with the City and port of London. There was an intermittent family connection with the production and sale of salt, one of the prime commodities in transcontinental trade; and there was an intermittent connection too with the slave trade. There was also a marked, sometimes disastrous proclivity for participating in conspicuously long-distance enterprises, and for taking risks. In 1670, Ellis Crisp, a descendant of Nicholas Crisp and a factor with the East India Company, became the first English merchant to voyage to Taiwan. He won an audience with its acting ruler, Cheng Ching (1642–81), who was determined to make Taiwan ‘a place of great trade’, and wrote an account of the ‘soile, customes, habitation & healthfulness for merchants to live in that country, as also … the merchandise desireable to bee imported and of merchandise propper for us to exporte’. The following year, 1671, Ellis Crisp embarked for Taiwan again, intending to establish a permanent factory there. He disappeared at sea along with his ship, the Bantam Merchant.9 Other branches of the family remained active in West Africa and India; still others crossed the Atlantic and settled in North America and the West Indies. By the early 1700s there were members of this Crisp dynasty in St Kitts, Barbados and South Carolina, some of them substantial plantation- and slave-owners.

  The man who courted and married Elizabeth Marsh came from a minor, and mainly Eurocentric, branch of the family. As was true of Sir Nicholas Crisp, James Crisp’s initial area of concentration was the Mediterranean. His father seems to have been a Harvey Crisp who obtained his Lieutenant’s certificate with the Royal Navy in 1711, but subsequently went into the merchant marine and trade with Spain. Harvey Crisp married a Dorothy Burrish in 1722, and James and his brother Samuel were probably born in the Iberian peninsula or on one of the Balearic Islands in the late 1720s or early ’30s.10 ‘Seems’ and ‘probably’ because, like many actors in this story, like Elizabeth Marsh herself, James Crisp was a transient, one of the many ‘problematically hybrid people’ being created at this time by expanding geographies of trade and rising levels of migration.11 Accordingly, he evaded some of the routine documentation that accumulated around more settled lives: but two things are clear. Socially, James Crisp’s background was superior to that of the Marsh family, and in marrying Elizabeth Marsh he made a substantial economic sacrifice.

  For any overseas merchant, and especially for one who was just starting out, marrying well was a vital part of business strategy. A well-dowried bride provided a nest egg of capital, and eased any difficulties a young trader might experience in obtaining credit. Elizabeth Marsh could not offer these advantages.12 By the 1760s, Milbourne Marsh’s naval posts at Gibraltar and Menorca had enabled him to begin accumulating savings, as well as consumer goods appropriate to his rising status, including plate, table linen and fine glassware. When Elizabeth’s younger brother, John Marsh, got into financial difficulties during the 1770s, Milbourne was able to lend him £1000 at a derisory rate of interest without any difficulty or need for retrenchment on his own part. As for her uncle George Marsh, the Seven Years War catapulted him decisively into the ranks of the substantial professional class. In 1762 alone he made £1500 from acting as an agent dealing in captured French ships, in addition to his government salary.13 Back in 1756, however, the br
others were still climbing slowly into respectability. They could give James Crisp advantages in kind, namely useful Navy contacts, but not a large cash sum. That he still offered Elizabeth marriage shows kindness and a sense of honour on his part, or deep affection, or infatuation, or possibly all of these things. The fact that the new couple chose to return to England from Gibraltar in February 1757 on a merchantman called the Elizabeth may suggest a degree of romance on Crisp’s part, and perhaps at the time also on hers.14

  James Crisp felt able to take the risk of marrying an under-portioned woman because his elder brother Samuel was already well established in the family business, Crisp Brothers, and because he himself at this stage was moderately affluent. Like many overseas traders, James Crisp had started out working as a ship’s master and supercargo for more senior merchants, sailing regularly between Spain, Portugal and the main Italian ports with cargo and ballast while still in his teens.15 Then family connections gained him the captaincy of one of the packet boats operated by the British Post Office: an eighty-ton ship called the Lovel operating between Mahón in Menorca and the two most thriving ports in the Mediterranean, Marseilles and Livorno (Leghorn). Seemingly mundane, this appointment was actually a significant coup. In the 1750s, Post Office packet boats carried more official than private mail; in the case of the Lovel, not just communications between British Consuls and agents in France, Italy, Spain and Menorca, but also secret correspondence to and from ships in the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet. In return for their usefulness to the state, packet-boat captains were allowed considerable slack. They wore elaborate uniforms of their own devising, and they could make substantial profits from carrying passengers, bullion and freight, and from private trade. They were also able to engage in some mild smuggling, since British customs officials were under instructions to look the other way as far as packet-boat officers were concerned.16