The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  Trying to live in the Indian subcontinent as a European immigrant but ‘without an appointment’, wrote a senior East India Company official later in 1777, was ‘a woeful extremity. It gives me a shivering to think that … a man should be reduced to it.’35 The loss of his semi-detached association with the Company, with its comfortable regular salary, did not however affect James Crisp alone. The insecurity of his position now also involved his only recently returned, but still considerably dependent wife.

  In the immediate aftermath of his dismissal, Crisp’s Asian commerce seems to have continued to expand. Even in 1778, a Company official included him in a list of European private merchants resident in Dhaka whom ‘we understand to have considerable dealing in trade’.36 Yet, well before this, some of those close to the Crisps seem to have regarded the couple’s situation as being under stress from more than just their respective wanderings. It is suggestive that in late 1776 Johanna Ross, the rich Calcutta widow, left Elizabeth Marsh five thousand rupees (about £500) in her will, the same sum she bequeathed Warren Hastings, who had acted as one of her executors. Initially Johanna had allowed Elizabeth only four thousand rupees, but she later evidently decided that her friend either deserved or needed an additional sum.37 These five thousand rupees were probably the largest single cache of money that Elizabeth Marsh received in her life, though since she was a married woman, ultimate control over it and any other money she might be bequeathed belonged by law to her husband. Characteristically, James Crisp seems to have allowed his wife to use the bequest as she wished. But, together with her husband’s loss of a reliable Company salary, Johanna Ross’s generosity prompted Elizabeth Marsh to begin thinking more concentratedly about money and about the future.

  The determination she exhibited from now on in this regard had several roots. She was driven in part by memories of Crisp’s bankruptcy in 1767 and what this had meant: an eventual loss of home, precious objects and social status, and her and the children’s enforced reliance on her parents in Chatham in the aftermath of her husband’s flight. Her instinct to take action in the wake of Crisp’s new economic difficulties owed more, however, to her own temperament and to the nature of her family background.

  The seafarers’ womenfolk in Portsmouth amongst whom Elizabeth Marsh had grown up – like their counterparts in other ports – were obliged to hold rather different attitudes to money, marriage and woman’s sphere of action than the generality of females whose menfolk worked on land. By the conventions of English common law, which also applied to incomers to Bengal, a husband and his wife were accounted one legal person, and that person was emphatically the man. Legally, a wife was enmeshed in and defined by her dependence on her spouse.38 But these legal fictions made absolutely no sense in maritime communities, where women might have to cope on their own for months or even years on end, while husbands, fathers or brothers were away on voyages from which they might never return. Consequently, seafarers’ womenfolk had often strenuously to make do. This might involve them taking some kind of paid employment, or petitioning the navy or civilian ship-owners for access to a male relation’s back pay, or getting their menfolk in advance of setting sail to confer on them power of attorney. Men who went to sea frequently came under community and family pressure to cooperate with these female expedients. Sailors’ sexual loyalties might waver in distant ports, but in regard to making some provision for their women back home, they were expected not to be unduly feckless. For how else could women who were linked to such a dangerous trade through their men possibly survive? Elizabeth Marsh had come a long way from Portsmouth, geographically, socially and culturally. But in her responses to the potential economic dangers facing James Crisp and herself in Bengal after 1777, she was influenced by this maritime tradition of women taking the initiative, and shifting for themselves.39

  Her mother, Elizabeth Marsh senior, had died in Chatham in January 1776 (the family’s surviving letters on this event reveal sorrow, but nothing more about this lost woman).40 Elizabeth only received the news after her return to Dhaka in July of that year, and she made no effort at this stage to return to Britain to comfort her father or pay her respects. For the rest of this year, and for much of 1777, she seems to have remained in Dhaka. James Crisp was sometimes present, and sometimes away on business; and she was in a position to reflect on their situation, and on the regular, six-month-old letters she received from members of her family in Britain and Spain. Over the months these would have informed her of her father’s courtship of another, younger woman, and eventually of his remarriage. Once again, Milbourne Marsh had sought out a bride with money, marrying a respectable, propertied widow called Katherine Soan in December 1776. He may have sought out this new wife as a nurse, since Elizabeth’s correspondents informed her that Milbourne too was now beginning to fail: he was ‘in a very declining state of health’.41 By contrast with her mother’s demise, these two subsequent family developments – her father’s remarriage and his physical deterioration – determined Elizabeth to attempt the voyage back from Bengal to Britain. She had been back with James Crisp in Dhaka for barely a year. Now she determined once again to set out without him.

  Elizabeth Marsh’s decision to attempt another protracted sea passage, which she may have paid for out of Johanna Ross’s bequest, was influenced by her family’s characteristically maritime attitude to women and money. Inured to work, risk, and conspicuous mobility at sea, the Marsh clan exhibited over the generations a marked commitment to providing its women with some independent source of income. In their wills, men of the family often named their wives as their sole executrix and legatee. George Marsh senior, for instance, the ship’s carpenter who was Milbourne Marsh’s father, left all of his very modest fortune to his wife when he died in 1753, named her as sole executor, and got two other women to witness this.42 The strength of the family’s adherence to the maritime code of safeguarding female survival is suggested by the fact that even those of its members who did not work at sea still demonstrated a testamentary concern for women’s independence. Thus when Elizabeth’s brother, Francis Milbourne Marsh, an army officer, left money in his will to an illegitimate daughter in 1782, he was careful to specify that this was ‘for her own sole and separate use and not subject or liable to the debts, engagements or control of any husband she may marry’.43 By the same token, when men of the family divided their property among legitimate children at death, they rarely did so according to the conventions of male primogeniture. Instead, a recurring phrase in the family’s wills is ‘share and share alike’. Not always, but very often, Marsh fathers left each daughter the identical sum they bequeathed to each of their sons.

  Fully aware of these family strategies, and pondering the likely consequences of her father’s remarriage and physical decline, Elizabeth Marsh was bound to feel anxious about the likely provisions of his future will. What if Milbourne Marsh were to die and leave his estate entirely or substantially to his new, younger wife, Katherine? Given his profound attachment to his family and its traditions, this was scarcely likely. But it was probable that Milbourne would act according to Marsh family custom and, having made a decent provision for his second wife, leave his remaining estate to be divided equally between his three children, Francis Milbourne Marsh, John Marsh, and his beloved only daughter, Elizabeth herself. In that event, she might well be a substantial beneficiary on paper. Any such bequest to her, however, would naturally fall under the authority of her husband. And this time, given the pressures he was under in Bengal, and the commercial repercussions of expanding warfare, James Crisp might not be willing to let such a windfall go.

  Elizabeth Marsh’s worries about her possible inheritance were not simply on her own account. It scarcely mattered how Milbourne Marsh bestowed his money as far as her son Burrish Crisp was concerned: his formidable language skills were expected soon to secure him a Writer’s position with the East India Company, the first step on the career ladder of its civilian hierarchy. But while Burrish could be le
ft to look after himself, the same could not be said of her daughter, Elizabeth Maria Crisp, who was thirteen in 1777. Since returning from India five years earlier, she had lived on Milbourne’s charity in Chatham, receiving an expensive female education. Who would support Elizabeth Maria when Milbourne died, and where would she go? How were a suitable dowry and husband to be found for her, if James Crisp’s commercial ventures failed again? There were other issues to do with mortality crowding in on Elizabeth Marsh’s mind. Most incomers to the Indian subcontinent from Europe died prematurely, and often very suddenly. If James Crisp were to perish, what of her? And, since she herself was now over forty, and had already suffered serious illness, what if she were to die in the near future? Who would take care of Elizabeth Maria then?

  Seeking out solutions to these questions against a background of transcontinental warfare would preoccupy Elizabeth Marsh for most of her remaining life. She set sail from Calcutta some time in late 1777 or early 1778, arriving in Portsmouth promptly enough to see her father and to settle arrangements with him.44 The new will that Milbourne Marsh signed several months before his death on 17 May 1779, at the age of sixty-nine, followed family tradition in displaying a markedly creative concern for his womenfolk. He asked to be buried ‘in the same manner as my late dear wife … and in the same grave’, but he also gave thought to his widow. Since the new Mrs Katherine Marsh would be unable to remain in the fine Agent Victualler’s house in Chatham, which belonged to the navy, Milbourne had purchased some houses and land in nearby Rochester to guarantee her a regular income. In addition, his will allowed Katherine the choice of all of his linen, china, plate and household goods, his ‘best furniture’, and the interest on £700 of consols, government stock. Francis Milbourne Marsh, his eldest son, was to receive the interest on £900 worth of consols, while John Marsh was to be forgiven the bulk of an extensive debt he owed his father.45

  By contrast, Elizabeth Marsh herself received nothing: but this was exactly what she and her father had planned and agreed on together, since any money left directly to her might pass to James Crisp, or to his creditors. Consequently, in her case, Milbourne’s will skipped a generation. Leaving Elizabeth out, it provided instead for £300 to be inherited by her daughter, Elizabeth Maria, when she was twenty-one. If Elizabeth Maria married sooner than this, Milbourne’s executors were instructed immediately to pay her ‘the said three hundred pounds trust and all arrears of interest’. Nor was this the only provision that Milbourne Marsh made in his will for Elizabeth’s daughter. When his second wife died, all of the stock and property he had bequeathed her was to be divided equally between his two sons and his granddaughter Elizabeth Maria, according to the family convention of ‘share and share alike’ between menfolk and womenfolk. In other words, one of Elizabeth Marsh’s concerns – though not her own future security – had begun to be addressed. She had managed to ensure a modest dowry for her daughter, with the possibility of more to come.

  Wills are compact autobiographies, condensed accounts not just of individuals’ levels of wealth or poverty, but also of their primary concerns in life, of their networks of intimates, and of intimacy’s limits. The silences in Milbourne Marsh’s will – its omission of anyone by the name of Crisp except for his granddaughter Elizabeth Maria – are eloquent testimony to his lack of confidence and trust in his striving, erratic son-in-law, who was now geographically as well as temperamentally far away. By contrast, the length of his will (four pages) as well as its content make clear Milbourne’s own substantial success in life. The victualling post he had occupied at Chatham since 1765 had been unchallenging, too much of a retirement job for a still creative and energetic man. He had nonetheless designed and built a new wharf in Chatham’s victualling yard, set up a new seventy-two-foot-long storehouse, extended and improved many of the yard’s other offices and, at the onset of the war, promptly organized a system of offshore defences.46 And not being so stretched at work had meant that he was able to devote more time to consolidating a respectable fortune. In the 1720s, his mother had received just five shillings from her father’s will. Half a century later, Milbourne Marsh left behind investments and property worth more than £5000 (close to £500,000 in today’s purchasing power). There was also a sense in which he was fortunate to die when he did, in advance of the end of the war. By the Peace of Paris in 1783, negotiated between Great Britain and the new United States and its Continental European allies, Menorca was returned to Spanish rule. Saffron Island was also handed over to the Spanish, along with its spare, immaculate, expensive new naval facility, Milbourne Marsh’s brainchild and masterwork.

  The contribution that Milbourne made to his only daughter’s welfare over the years had been extensive: it had indeed been a constant in Elizabeth Marsh’s life. He had sacrificed his work on Saffron Island in order to return to England so as to be nearer to her in 1765. The legal papers regarding her and James Crisp’s East Florida enterprises reveal how frequently Milbourne subsequently made himself available as a witness, and doubtless too as a lender of money.47 It was Milbourne who had given securities for Elizabeth Marsh’s first passage to India in 1770; and it was Milbourne who paid for her son’s lonely voyage to the subcontinent in 1771, and who supported Elizabeth Maria Crisp in Chatham when she returned from there the following year. Elizabeth Marsh had also regularly had recourse to Milbourne’s naval contacts, drawing on them for introductions in different ports and continents, and in order to gain free or cheap access to ships.

  But now her father was dead. Her husband was on the other side of the world, in Bengal; and war separated her from her two closest remaining male relations. Her elder brother, Francis Milbourne Marsh, was by now a major in Britain’s 90th Regiment of Foot. Viewed within the family as a ‘sensible man and a good scholar’, Major Marsh had been shipped out with his regiment to the Leeward Islands (which included Antigua, St Kitts, Montserrat and Nevis), an expedition that brought about his death in 1782.48 Her younger, closer, brother John Marsh was also tightly enmeshed in war, though in a civilian capacity and in a different part of the world. Since 1768 he had been British Consul at Málaga, on the southern Spanish coast. As most consuls did at this time, he had raised his own salary there by carrying out commercial duties and by engaging in trade himself. In addition to the services they rendered to incoming ships and individuals from the states they represented, Consuls were also professional magpies, men whose brief it was to snatch pieces of intelligence from as many sources as possible. Even before the formal outbreak of the war, John Marsh was mutating into a spy and spymaster. Six months before the Declaration of Independence he was transmitting reports to London of how American merchant ships off the Spanish and French coasts were already endeavouring ‘to carry on their own commerce independently’ of the navigation laws passed by Parliament. He also corresponded regularly with the British Embassy in Madrid, and with the authorities in Gibraltar about any information he could glean about developments in Spanish and Portuguese America; and he set up strings of agents and informers in some of the leading Iberian and French ports, Seville, Cartagena, and Toulon, who smuggled him political pamphlets and occasional philosophical texts as well as secrets. So Elizabeth Marsh’s younger brother was able to keep his political masters informed of some of the processes whereby the Continental powers prepared to enter the war, and thus dramatically extend its scope. How, in April 1778, ‘a large supply of warlike stores and four thousand infantry supposed bound to North America’ had been shipped out from Toulon; how the bakers in ‘Seville and other places’ were working ‘day and night, making ships biscuit’ in readiness for a Spanish naval offensive; how ‘warlike stores, such as battering guns, sand bags and implements commonly used for throwing up entrenchments, were preparing on the coast of Catalonia’; and how the Dutch Consul in Málaga had let slip to him ‘in a confidential manner’ that the States General in The Hague was also giving ‘orders for equipping thirty sail of men of war’.49

  It was not until July
1779, when Spain formally declared war on Britain, that John Marsh was forced to leave Málaga. Even then, he remained in Portugal gathering intelligence for some months; and so he too was unavailable to aid his sister in the immediate aftermath of Milbourne Marsh’s death. Instead, Elizabeth Marsh turned to yet another male relation undergoing the transformations of war. She turned to her uncle George Marsh.

  Before 1776, George Marsh had never travelled overland outside southern England, or made more than very brief maritime journeys off its coast. It was this relative stillness that allowed him to act as custodian and chronicler of his family’s history. Traditionally, it has often been women who have taken on this archival and memorializing role within families, because their more restricted lives have given them the time to bear witness, and perhaps a desire, in this indirect way, to impose a stamp and form on past events.50 Although George Marsh’s form of sheltered sphere was essentially masculine – dealing with the global reach of a paramount navy, but only with pen and ink and paper – it still cordoned him off from the disruptions and extensive journeys experienced by so many of his relations. Safe and busy on shore, he enjoyed quoting (inexactly) some lines from De Rerum Natura by the Epicurean poet Lucretius: ‘It is pleasant to see a shipwreck, which we are not in fear of.’ A more accurate translation was beyond his reach, since George Marsh possessed no Latin, but it would have encompassed his philosophy more comprehensively: ‘Sweet it is, when on the great sea the winds are buffeting the waters, to gaze from the land on another’s great struggles.’ A landlubber in a thoroughly maritime dynasty, ‘content in an easy chair, fortune in our pockets’, as he liked to remark, George had only once before 1776 contemplated voyaging overseas. As a still-struggling naval clerk in his twenties, he had briefly considered advancing his career by going to work in Antigua.51 This venture did not materialize, and he had remained contentedly and profitably at home. But now, the onset of extensive warfare forced him outside his customary regime and posture.