The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  This seems in keeping with the occasional dismissiveness, even cruelty, towards her husband that Elizabeth Marsh displayed when writing The Female Captive in 1769. Her behaviour was also influenced, however, by the changes in her circumstances that had occurred since then. Newspapers, satirical verses and novels at this time frequently accused middle- and upper-class European women in India of displaying ‘vacuous idleness’, extravagance and, sometimes, sexual immodesty:

  … And yet, dear Girl! This place has charms,

  Such as my sprightly bosom warms!

  No place, where at a bolder rate,

  We females bear our sovereign state.

  Beauty ne’er points its arms in vain,

  Each glance subdues some melting swain.37

  These sorts of (male-written) caricatures and condemnations, like the perduring argument that developed later that British women in India were more racially prejudiced than their menfolk, were partly a way of shifting the blame for moral turpitude among the white community as a whole onto its more marginal female members. But accusations that British females in the subcontinent were more libidinous and self-indulgent than at home were also an acknowledgement that, in this new environment, incoming women could indeed sometimes venture far outside conservative notions of their proper role. As one novelist wrote of the British expatriate community in the 1780s: ‘Control is not an article of matrimonial rule at Calcutta.’38

  The root cause of this was that white females, and females who passed for white, were so extremely sparse. There were probably fewer than two hundred white women in the whole of Bengal when Elizabeth Marsh arrived there, as against four thousand British troops, 250 East India Company civilian officials, and an unknown but much larger number of private merchants, tradesmen, miscellaneous servants and mariners.39 Their rarity, and the availability of large numbers of indigenous servants and slaves to take care of domestic chores and child raising, allowed some female immigrants to seize hold of levels of opportunity only occasionally available to women in Europe and colonial America. To be sure, female incomers were also very sparse at this time in some of the newer, more westerly regions of the American colonies. But in the latter case the hard manual labour that was involved in a settler existence, the unending work of cultivating the soil, planting, harvesting, building barns and outhouses, cooking, laundry, and making clothes, preserves and soap, tended to reinforce traditional gender roles, and encouraged immigrant families to stay together in order to survive.40 By contrast, in the Indian subcontinent, incomers from Europe were not allowed to settle land. Here, female immigrants were not just extremely sparse; those who were possessed of any means at all were likely also to command abundant leisure.

  As a result of this, and because of the availability of longestablished, indigenous commercial and cultural networks, some incoming women, far from being merely complicit in empire, were able at this time conspicuously to profit from it. Marian Hastings, the German-born second wife of Warren Hastings, who was first Governor, then Governor General, of Bengal between 1771 and 1785, had accumulated over £100,000 from her contacts in the subcontinent by the 1790s.41 Few other women possessed her opportunities for graft, but many widows and spinsters seem to have engaged directly in Asian commerce, like Mary Cross of Bombay, who in the 1770s was trading regularly with Persia. Other women, like Elizabeth Marsh’s friend and patron in Calcutta, Johanna Ross, made money by lending capital through their sarkars – personal Indian bankers – to British and sometimes to indigenous merchants. And some women worked for their husbands. Eliza Draper, whom Elizabeth encountered during her progress in Machilipatnam in 1775, had in earlier years carried out much of the official and commercial paperwork of her husband, a Company servant and factory chief outside Bombay. As Eliza Draper wrote: ‘I’m necessitated to pass the greatest part of my time in his office.’ Even when not doing his work, or choosing to ‘bathe in the sea, read volumes – and fill reams of paper with my scribble’, she frequently had to deal with ‘a full house of shipping gentry, that resort to us for traffic and intelligence from all parts of India, China and Asia’.42

  Other privileged women in India seized the chance to engage in modes of study that were often denied them in Britain. The wife of Robert Clive, victor of the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the first British Governor of Bengal, reportedly enjoyed ‘lectures on astronomy, [the] solar system and the use of globes’ and mathematics. The latter subject, which was traditionally of great importance in Indo-Persian and Hindu culture, seems to have become something of a cult among elite white females in the subcontinent. Margaret Clive passed on her interest in mathematics to Margaret Fowke, daughter of a leading diamond merchant in Calcutta. Fowke in turn went on to study Euclid and Newton, and left behind at her death five volumes of mathematical deductions and two volumes of algebraic exercises (all of which her family seem to have destroyed). ‘She had moreover,’ wrote her son in his memoir of her, ‘a great love of liberty, and dislike to the idea of restraint upon her freedom of will.’43 It is clear, too, that some women participated in the developing interest among senior Company officials at this time in Indo-Persian and subsequently Hindu science and culture. Hester Johnston, wife of Samuel Johnston, whom Elizabeth Marsh met at Visakhapatnam, employed ‘the most distinguished of the Brahmins in the neighbourhood to collect for her information on Hindu knowledge of mathematics and astronomy’. Again, one notes how the study of mathematics and female high rank – Hester Johnston was the daughter of a Scottish aristocrat – tended to go together in India at this time. When Colin Mackenzie, a fellow Scot, arrived in Madras in 1783, Hester Johnston introduced him to her circle of indigenous scholars, thereby contributing to Mackenzie’s ultimately very important collection of south Indian learned manuscripts and antiquities.44

  How far European women in India at this time wanted and were able to enjoy greater sexual freedoms and unconventionality is less clear. Custom, the constant surveillance of indigenous servants who placed a high value on female modesty and seclusion, together with laws passed in Britain, ensured that white females only rarely formed relationships with indigenous men. After 1730, ‘every child born abroad, whose father was a natural born Protestant subject of Great Britain’, could in law be accounted a natural-born subject also; and in 1772 this privilege was extended to the grandchildren born abroad of such ‘natural born [male] subjects’. Many East India Company officials, fathering children on Asian wives or concubines, sought to take full advantage of these laws. However, no such provisions existed for British women. Indeed, it is indicative of contemporary expectations that, before 1791, Parliament declined to legislate about what should happen if a British woman abroad gave birth to a child by an ‘alien’ of any kind.45

  Yet there is more evidence in the correspondence and wills of European women at this time of friendship with, and on occasions of physical awareness of, Asian men than has been acknowledged. ‘In the evening,’ wrote the young Margaret Fowke in Calcutta in 1783,

  Bahauder … came with a most jockey-like air, and a smart pair of boots. His turban was of a fine geranium. I declare he had chosen the most beautiful colour in the rainbow. Lady Day and I admired it extremely. His cummerbund was of a light yellow. After he dismounted, he stood playing with his whip with the most careless and satisfied air imaginable.46

  There is evidence, too, that even conspicuous illicit sexual liaisons between Europeans did not necessarily damage a married woman’s reputation in the subcontinent to the same degree as obtained at home. In 1773, Eliza Draper abandoned Bombay and her indolent, abusive husband to run off with Sir John Clerke, the same man whom Elizabeth Marsh encountered on the Dolphin in the Bay of Bengal two years later. Subsequently in 1775, Elizabeth also met Eliza Draper herself at Machilipatnam. By now, the latter was no longer living under Clerke’s ‘protection’. But, as Elizabeth records, Eliza Draper was still able to preside, alongside her uncle, who was the Company chief at Machilipatnam at this time, and apparently involved himse
lf in a passionate homosexual relationship, at a ‘very polite reception … [and] continual parties and engagements’.47 It is unlikely that a runaway wife who was known to have been recently involved in scandal could have won acceptance as a hostess in this manner in contemporary European or colonial American polite society.

  In much the same way, Elizabeth Marsh’s capacity to absent herself from her husband and child for over a year, and to travel and share a house with an unmarried man, while still being abundantly fêted by what passed for genteel white society throughout the Madras Presidency, illustrates how at this time women – as well as men – associated with the British in India were able, on occasions, to chart a more erratic, independent course.

  Marsh’s behaviour during her progress illustrates something else. During the eighteenth century, as now, extensive kinship networks could ease the experience of long-distance migration. Being able to make claims of family obligation on General Richard Smith, and on George Smith, whoever he was, considerably smoothed Elizabeth Marsh’s passage through eastern and southern India. But while elaborate kinship ties of this sort could facilitate an individual’s extreme physical mobility, the latter inevitably placed strains on, and sometimes shattered, nuclear family and marital solidarities. It is inappropriate therefore to view Elizabeth Marsh’s actions at this stage of her life only in terms of her personal waywardness and desires. The fissures in her marriage with James Crisp – like the making of their union in the first place – were also due to the way in which she and he were repeatedly driven and chose to travel very large distances on land and sea. At least some of the stresses that were increasingly evident in their relationship were part of the price that each of them paid for being so markedly itinerant.

  By this time, members of the extended Marsh clan were already well familiar with how moving across oceans and continents could put pressure on an individual’s marriage and morals. Milbourne Marsh’s own passage to Jamaica in the 1730s, and his courtship there of the woman who had once been Elizabeth Bouchier, or Boucher, or Bourchier, had, after all, been at the cost of the peace, and perhaps the life, of her first husband, James Evans. Then there was Elizabeth Marsh’s eldest brother, Francis Milbourne Marsh. While on military service overseas in the early 1770s, he seems to have fathered a child on the wife of his sergeant, Isaac Myers. George Marsh was obliged to pay off Myers with a comfortable post in Chatham’s naval dockyard in order to avoid any scandal.48 Until now, however, it had been Milbourne Warren, a first cousin of Milbourne Marsh, who best exemplified to the family the emotional and sexual disruptions that could ensue when individuals ventured too much across great distances.

  Yet another mariner, Milbourne Warren, had clandestinely married a Mary Brown ‘in the liberty of the Fleet prison London’ in the early 1750s, and then sailed without her to Madras, intending to work there as a shipwright and make their fortune. In 1762 Warren was swept into the combined navy and East India Company invasion of Manila in the Philippines, sailing on Admiral Samuel Cornish’s seventy-four-gun flagship the Norfolk, the first time that a member of the Marsh family is known to have reached South-East Asia.49 Since Spain had colonized the islands in the sixteenth century, Manila had developed into one of the most vital conduits between eastern and western sectors of the world for trade, bullion and people. Silver from Spain’s colonies in South America passed regularly through Manila en route to Asia in payment for commodities from China and the Indian subcontinent; and from the early 1600s onwards, thousands of Asians migrated every year byway of Manila into Mexico. The settlement itself attracted Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Mexican immigrants, who lived moderately peaceably alongside its indigenous population. The British occupation of Manila, which lasted from 1762 to 1764, added further strands to its tapestry of multiple cultures. Six hundred Indian sepoys arrived with the British invasion force, and some of these men chose to stay on in Manila and raised families there.50

  Milbourne Warren, though, sailed back to Madras on the Norfolk in 1763, having invested all of his earnings from private trade in the subcontinent in purchasing precious commodities and booty in Manila. His plan was to dispose of some of these luxury and exotic goods in Madras, and then to carry the remainder back with him to London and sell them at a high profit so as to provide himself and his wife, Mary, with security. All of this cargo, and all of these dreams, were lost at sea when the Norfolk was caught in a storm on the return voyage to Madras. When Milbourne Warren finally left the subcontinent and arrived back in London in 1765, it was in an almost penniless state, and to find that Mary – left on her own for seven years – had been unfaithful. The family’s fixer, George Marsh, patched things up by having Warren replace Milbourne Marsh as Naval Officer in Menorca, and this time made sure that he took his wife with him.

  The story of the next phase of the Warren marriage, its next fracture through distance, was read aloud in the Court of Arches in London, the ecclesiastical court that dealt with petitions for divorce. The Warrens had ‘cohabited together at Port Mahon’ in Menorca until 1768. Then:

  She, the said Mary Warren, being unmindful of her conjugal vow and not having the fear of God before her eyes, but being instigated and seduced by the devil did frequent the company of William Madox Richardson Esq., Captain in the third regiment of foot then stationed at Port Mahon aforesaid, and had the carnal use and knowledge of his body.

  Richardson and Mary Warren, the court was told, would ‘retire to a bed-chamber’ in the smart new naval officer’s house in Mahon whenever Milbourne Warren was absent at his duties on the island. When Warren discovered what was going on, he sued for divorce ‘from bed and board and mutual cohabitation’.51 Thus, in 1769, when the Marsh clan was coping with the backwash of James Crisp’s bankruptcy and flight to India, and with Elizabeth Marsh’s revelations in The Female Captive, it also had to contend with Milbourne Warren’s protracted and graphic divorce proceedings. It had, in other words, to deal simultaneously with three unhappy family stories that together involved events and individuals in North and West Africa, the Mediterranean, Florida, and parts of the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia.

  In Elizabeth Marsh’s own case, experiencing distance and extensive mobility once more, with all their potential for loosening established ties, seems to have acted as a source of renewal and redirection, and not just in emotional and possibly sexual terms. In early February 1776, George Smith’s regiment was ordered to leave Ellore for Madras. She and he lingered behind in the settlement ‘some days after’ most of the soldiers had departed, on the grounds that Smith was needed to escort ‘the remaining troops, who were either sick, or in cnfinement’; and it was not until 22 February that the couple made themselves leave the house which they had shared together, ‘with tears, and infinite regret, having passed there many, many pleasing hours’.52 She was already substantially altered by her journey, but moving on again precipitated a different kind of looking.

  For a week it was easy: ‘the life was new and by no means unpleasant’. She and George Smith were able to follow in a carriage, as the troops marched on to Machilipatnam. It was there that a change in her priorities began. Their host and the new acting chief at Machilipatnam was a Scot named Quintin Craufurd (1743–1819). Elizabeth Marsh had been ‘particularly recommended to him’ because he had been in Manila for some of the same time as Milbourne Warren, and ‘an intimacy … had long subsisted’ between Craufurd and George Smith. Unlike most East India Company officials she had encountered up to this point, Craufurd was a scholarly, though quirkish and greedy, man, multilingual, well read in the classics, and interested in the study of comparative mythology and religions. ‘To hate or despise any people, because they do not profess the same faith with ourselves,’ he wrote some years later, ‘to judge them illiberally, and arrogantly to condemn them, is, perhaps, in fact, to arraign the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty.’ It was necessary and important, Craufurd believed, that Islam, Hinduism and Christianity be studied in conjunction, since the
se religions together attracted ‘by far the greatest portion of the inhabitants of the globe’ – though, like many other Company intellectuals, he himself was increasingly drawn to concentrate on Hinduism and its adherents. He wanted, Craufurd wrote in a book published in London in 1790, to distract ‘the attention of the public, for a moment, from the exploits of Mahomedans and Europeans, and direct it to the original inhabitants’ of the subcontinent.53

  Craufurd’s intellectual sophistication and application were far beyond Elizabeth Marsh’s own reach. But conversing with him over the five weeks she remained at Machilipatnam seems to have contributed to making her intensely curious to see some religious sites and buildings for herself. When, in early April, George Smith was ordered to go to Aska to supervise some court martial proceedings there, she seized her opportunity. As the road system worked, Aska was about forty coss (eighty miles) inland from Ganjam, in the northernmost part of the Madras Presidency. Her plan initially had been to wait in Machilipatnam for a ship that would take her back to Calcutta. Now, with Smith heading northwards overland, she decided ‘it would be a fine opportunity for me to proceed to Bengal by that route’. It would delay her return to Dhaka and allow her to remain longer in Smith’s company, while providing opportunities to observe and explore as they went along.54