The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  This marked the end of Elizabeth Marsh’s marriage in more than a physical sense. Even when she arranged to set out on the York, probably still unaware that James Crisp was mortally ill, it does not seem to have been with the intention of returning to live with him in Dhaka. By the time she landed in Madras in June 1780, her former husband had been dead for more than six months, and virtually all the worldly goods of their life together in the subcontinent had been dispersed. To her mind, James Crisp had conspicuously failed in his duties, in a manner that seemed particularly reprehensible given her maritime background. The men of her clan looked after womenfolk in their wills, and were expected to make some reliable provision for them in life. Yet Crisp had died intestate, leaving her penniless for a second time. Once again, their home and their belongings had been lost, right down to her ‘cruet stand compleat with silver tops’. Whatever scruples Elizabeth Marsh may have felt about her own diverse lapses from marital duty, this probably wiped them out. If James Crisp’s unlucky creditors left any of his papers behind in Dhaka, neither she nor her children seem to have troubled to preserve them. His name would not even appear on Elizabeth Marsh’s gravestone. Burrish Crisp could afford – or perhaps chose to afford – only one item at the auction of the family’s effects, a silver cup that may have been a christening present. He paid out 172 rupees for his father’s funeral, about £17. If James Crisp was buried at Dhaka, and if a monument was ever erected to him there, it no longer exists.74

  When Elizabeth Marsh and Elizabeth Maria eventually returned to Bengal from Madras, they took refuge in Hooghly, in a small house prepared for them by Burrish. Hooghly was a place of forgetting, a centre of opium production, fortified, waterlogged, and twenty-five miles north-west of Calcutta and relatively inexpensive. The two women ‘lived very happily together’ there, George Marsh was informed, with Burrish looking after the bills, and paying extended visits whenever he could get away from his Company duties in Dhaka.75 Yet if the three of them now felt moderately secure, successfully exorcising memories of the missing member of their family quartet, they were still only imperfectly settled. Burrish Crisp’s Company earnings, together with what he made by trading on his own behalf, were sufficient for him to support his mother and his sister. As an only recently appointed Writer, and a neophyte trader contending with the commercial repercussions of rampant war, he was in no position to augment Elizabeth Maria’s modest inheritance from Milbourne Marsh into the more substantial dowry that ideally she required.

  Given the paucity of young single white women in Calcutta, Elizabeth Maria, who was sixteen in 1780, was unlikely to lack for masculine attention. Especially since she had inherited the good looks of both of her parents, as well as her mother’s musicality. George Marsh, whose only daughter died of consumption in her teens, and who relieved some of his grief by doting on Elizabeth Maria, memorialized his niece in his Family Book as ‘well educated and accomplished [and] very handsome’.76 She was ‘a young lady of the most amiable and accomplished manners’, wrote Edmund Burke, the Member of Parliament and political philosopher, when recommending her later to the attention of some aristocratic friends. Elizabeth Maria was already into middle age when the Indo-Persian traveller Abu Talib Khan encountered her in Ireland in 1800. He subsequently paid tribute in print to her ‘remarkable … mildness of disposition, elegance of manners, skill in music and sweetness of voice’. Behind this graceful, accommodating façade, a mode of self-presentation and self-concealment that was initially dictated by disadvantage and need, there was an ‘uncommonly sensible’, even forceful temperament.77 But none of these qualities was sufficient to resolve the dilemma she confronted – and that Elizabeth Marsh confronted on her daughter’s behalf – in the immediate aftermath of James Crisp’s destruction.

  The nature of Elizabeth Maria’s dilemma was made clear in issues of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, a scabrous weekly newspaper published in Calcutta by a one-time surgeon, James Augustus Hicky. Until Warren Hastings closed it down in 1782, Hicky employed his paper to scarify and expose prominent members of the ‘European’ community in Bengal. Drawn to devote space to Elizabeth Maria Crisp on account of her looks and her social impact, he relished probing and divulging the nature of her predicament. He published some of the bad, even indelicate verses that were submitted to the paper by her many admirers:

  Come push about the bottle, my bucks let’s be brisk,

  Let’s toast the fine girls that grace India’s soil.

  Here’s a health to the matchless, and pretty Miss C—p

  All beauties to her, are no more than a foil.

  After all, this was a relatively poor, unprotected young woman, someone who was scarcely in a position to retaliate:

  Dear me, how I long to be married,

  And in my own coach to be carried!

  This, Hicky suggested in print, was what Miss Crisp was invariably and privately thinking as she dutifully did the rounds of Calcutta’s balls and suppers, chaperoned sometimes by her mother, and sometimes by her brother, but always arriving and leaving in someone else’s transport. She evidently needed a husband, and she required money and a secure status even more. But even Hicky took note of Elizabeth Maria’s caution as well as her suppressed desperation, of the social distance and conventions she worked hard to preserve: ‘Miss C—p,’ he reported punningly of her performance at a masquerade in 1782, ‘was in a Geor gain [i.e. George-gain] dress called hoity toity.’78

  Elizabeth Maria Crisp’s task was to identify and secure an eligible male who would be affluent enough to rescue her from Hooghly, and from the insecurity her mother had experienced, and willing to marry her, a woman from a compromised family with scant financial resources. Moreover, she had to accomplish this under close scrutiny, without compounding her family’s already mixed reputation by seeming to behave rashly, and in a place – Calcutta – that for all its size, populousness, occasional architectural grandeur and extensive, unequally distributed wealth, was still very much a frontier town. Female virtue and female safety here, both among those regarding themselves as whites and among non-whites, could be vulnerable to more than usually ruthless pressures.

  Obtaining a suitable spouse for her daughter in these circumstances constituted Elizabeth Marsh’s penultimate ordeal. This was what progressively obsessed her as deteriorating health, limited funds, widowhood and war constricted her mobility and her options. It seems a trite, irremediably domestic conclusion to a thoroughly original and venturesome odyssey. Yet Marsh’s actions and schemes had usually been driven both by the basic imperative to survive, and by a desire to change and enhance her own condition. Getting her remaining unprovided child well settled, which in the case of a daughter could only mean a good marriage, would have seemed a continuation of these ambitions, not a departure from them. The project turned out anyway not to be a purely domestic one at all. Securing a husband for Elizabeth Maria was rather the last discrete episode in Elizabeth Marsh’s life in which her personal circumstances and familial ambitions became interlaced with public events, and with an array of conspicuously polyglot actors.

  George Shee, the man who ultimately married Elizabeth Maria, was born in Castlebar, County Mayo, in western Ireland in 1754. He was the eldest son of a minor Catholic landowner, and his mother was related to Edmund Burke. It was Burke’s influence that obtained Shee a Writership in the East India Company in 1770, initially in Bombay. Burke liked the young man and took the trouble to send him out regular parcels of books from London, and to encourage his political journalism.79 So when Shee moved to Bengal in September 1776, during the last full year of James Crisp’s salt agency, he was already at a different level from the family of his future bride. Of landed background, and a covenanted servant of the East India Company, he was expected to climb rapidly in the service, was ‘much liked, and well received in the first houses’ in Calcutta, and seems to have had money to spare. ‘His present occupations’, wrote a friend shortly after Shee’s arrival in Bengal, ‘are divided betw
een military storekeeping, music, and riding the finest horse in India.’ Shee also involved himself in political debate and partisanship. Unapologetically committed to ‘the interests of Britain in the East’, he liked to believe that he was also concerned about ‘the security and happiness of [Britain’s] sixteen millions … subjects’ in Bengal. Any disdain for the Mughal Empire’s achievements here and elsewhere in the subcontinent, he would come to argue, was profoundly misplaced:

  This censure … I could with ease repel. We [the East India Company] have never succeeded to a Mahometan government in the possession of any territory that we did not find the country populous and rich. We have never acquired territory [in the subcontinent], that the length of our possession has not been marked by the progress of its decline.80

  The individual in Calcutta to whom George Shee chiefly owed such arguments and perspectives was Philip Francis (1740–1818). The two men were initially attracted to each other by their common Irishness, and soon by a mutual attachment to Edmund Burke. And they shared a taste for politics, albeit with very different levels of expertise, and from very different levels of power. Fourteen years older than Shee, Philip Francis was a Dubliner with experience in diplomacy, government bureaucracy and vituperative journalism. In 1773 he had been appointed to the new five-man Supreme Council in Calcutta, and on his arrival there swiftly became Warren Hastings’ fiercest and most dangerous critic within the Company. Francis was intellectually sophisticated, a natural, vivid polemicist, and a politician characterized by an unusual, ultimately self-defeating mix of high ambition and determined radicalism. Over the course of his career he came to support the American Revolution, the abolition of the slave trade, and the French Revolution – and as this suggests, he thought in geographically expansive terms.81 It was clear to Francis, for instance, that there were significant parallels between some of Britain’s troubles in its American colonies, where he himself owned land, and the failures and iniquities of the East India Company’s rule on the other side of the world. ‘The loss of America’, he wrote some weeks after the Declaration of Independence – and it is suggestive that he anticipated even then that it was lost – ‘is only the forerunner of the loss of Bengal.’82

  A sinuous political shark to George Shee’s eager, unaware minnow, Philip Francis soon came to characterize the younger man as ‘part of my family’ in Calcutta, enjoyed and fostered his rashness (‘you are a violent gentleman’), tossed him useful pieces of Company patronage, and exploited his admiration.83 It was important, Francis had written in a private memorandum before embarking for Bengal:

  to encourage the resort of young people to me, from whom I may learn the current opinions with respect to persons and things. Their openness will more than make good their want of judgement.

  In Calcutta, he and Shee collaborated on political schemes and journalistic enterprises. The two men also seem to have pursued women and pleasure together: ‘You and I’, wrote Francis on one occasion, ‘… are agreed that we are sure of nothing but our sensations.’84 It was partly because of this intoxicating, unequal friendship with one of the most powerful political actors in Bengal, that George Shee, prosperous, ambitious, well-connected and highly eligible, became instead someone whom Elizabeth Marsh could secure as a son-in-law.

  About 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 8 December 1778, a man called Meerun saw ‘a strange thing’, a peculiar ladder propped against the compound wall of a red house in a fashionable district of Calcutta. He reported it to the jemadar, the establishment’s chief servant. As the two men were studying the bamboo contraption, which had ‘movable steps to it inside’, they noticed a tall figure dressed in black slipping out of the house. The jemadar recognized him ‘by his figure, his face, and his colour’ as ‘Mr Francis the Counsellor’, a friend of his own employer George Grand, who was a Franco-Swiss servant of the East India Company. The jemadar also knew that Grand was away from the red house at his club, and that his sixteen-year-old wife, Catherine, had been left alone in her apartments. ‘Give me that thing,’ Meerun remembered Francis saying in Hindustani as the two Indians seized hold of the ladder; ‘I will give you money. I’ll make you great men.’85

  Philip Francis. Etching by James Sayers, 1788.

  Instead, they hustled him into the house, ‘in the part that leads to the upper part; there is a lanthern there and a staircase’. Francis continued to press coins on the two men, and even in the semi-darkness they knew from the ‘light sound’ that these were gold mohurs, not rupees. They forced him into a chair, and the jemadar put his ‘hands on the arms of the chair to keep him there’. When Catherine Grand came downstairs and ordered the servants to set Francis free, the jemadar refused: ‘I will not hear you,’ he told her. ‘You may go to your room.’ Meerun was dispatched to fetch George Grand. While he was away, two Europeans broke down one of the doors to the house. One of them was George Shee. He threw the jemadar to the ground, but was promptly wrestled to the floor himself by another Indian servant. In the confusion, Philip Francis escaped, but Shee was seized and tied to a chair. They would not let him go until George Grand returned and saw it all.

  These events in Calcutta became for several months, as Philip Francis subsequently complained, ‘the clamours of this cursed place’.86 As far as Elizabeth Marsh and her daughter are concerned, what happened on the night of 8 December 1778 helps to explain why the business of finding a husband in this city could seem to them a more than usually delicate and perilous business; why Elizabeth Maria Crisp, as an unmarried, troubled young woman venturing into what passed for Calcutta’s European high society, felt obliged to be watchful and to practise the arts of ‘hoity toity’. In the legal action that George Grand subsequently brought in Calcutta’s Supreme Court, both indigenous and European witnesses were agreed that Philip Francis had long been attracted by, and had paid conspicuous attention to, Catherine Grand. But no conclusive evidence was produced that she herself had known of, ‘or previously consented to’, Francis’s illicit evening visit, ‘for any purpose, much less for the purpose of adultery’. Her lack of proven complicity made no difference. George Grand immediately repudiated his wife.87

  There were significant respects in which Catherine Grand’s position in 1778 resembled that of Elizabeth Maria Crisp at the time of her entry into Calcutta society two years later. Both women were very young and very attractive. Both had suffered multiple physical and cultural uprootings, since Catherine Grand was born of French parents in a Danish settlement in southern India (Tranquebar), and had been transplanted to British-dominated Calcutta on her marriage to the Franco-Swiss George Grand. And both women were potentially vulnerable: Elizabeth Maria because she was without a father, had little money, and came from a substantially ruined and disordered family; and Catherine Grand because – at a time when Britain and France were at war across continents – she was a French Catholic living in British-dominated space, and married to an older, seemingly unstable and violent man.88 The predatory behaviour of Philip Francis, and the intemperateness of George Grand’s subsequent response, which left his wife with her ‘character entirely destroyed’, and with little choice but to agree subsequently to become Francis’s mistress, indicate how perilous Calcutta might be for the weak and the inadequately guarded – even if they were viewed and viewed themselves as European, and even in higher-ranking households. They also suggest how much, at this time, Calcutta was still a frontier town.89

  This point is underlined by the contrast between the manner in which Philip Francis felt he could behave in Calcutta, and how he normally presented himself in London. Like most political revolutionaries in the former American colonies, and like most future French revolutionaries, Francis, in both his British and his Indian politics, combined an abstract commitment to extensive liberty and radical change, with a belief that women were necessarily a special case. A student of Montesquieu and Rousseau, he took it for granted that free, well-governed societies ‘required of women a particular gravity’. ‘If the time should ever
come when there shall be no prostitutes in London streets,’ Francis subsequently wrote in a set of observations intended for his son, ‘depend upon it, it will be a sign of a general corruption of woman, and a prelude to the decay of the empire.’ Prostitutes, in his view, were the necessary sewers that enabled decent women to remain clean and virtuous: ‘we sacrifice a part to save the rest’. And safeguarding virtue among decent females was an essential public and political good – at least in certain favoured locations – since ‘where there is no female virtue, there will soon be no male virtue left’.90

  Accordingly, Francis had been careful before leaving London in 1774 to instruct his wife on her own conduct and on the proper upbringing of their daughters, stipulating what books they should read, what plays they might appropriately see, and how few people ideally they should mix with: ‘Let the girls be taught a grave, modest, reserved carriage,’ he insisted. ‘I dislike hoydens.’ Once en route for Bengal, however, he allowed himself to write to a male friend of his craving for ‘the command of half the beauty’ in the ship, champing against the ‘state of privation in one of the most essential articles of life’.91 This hungry, sexual aggressiveness, which was more than hypocrisy, and was linked both to his polemical style and to his political beliefs, was given much freer vent when he arrived in Calcutta, not just at the expense of some native women, but – as on his voyage out – in regard to some Europeans. Catherine Grand was the formerly respectable, too-young wife of a fellow East India Company official. It did not stop him.

  Those who were chiefly responsible for stopping Philip Francis’s initial pursuit of Catherine Grand, and for catching out George Shee in the process, so that he was driven temporarily out of polite Calcutta society, and thus became available for Elizabeth Marsh’s daughter, were labouring Indians. It was some of George Grand’s house servants, men whom he referred to approvingly as Rajputs (a traditionally warrior grouping), who made sure that Shee was ‘seized and thrown down’ when he tried to free his friend and patron. Immediately after, Shee left Calcutta abruptly on Francis’s instructions in an attempt to avoid having to give evidence in the Supreme Court; and it was ‘one of the peons in the service of the Sheriff of Calcutta’ who helped to track him down and bring him back. ‘Shaike Doornah’, as he appears in the East India Company’s records, along with other officials, eventually discovered the Irishman hiding in a house at Chandernagore.92 Shee had adopted this desperate strategy because what had begun as an undignified sexual escapade was evolving into a serious political scandal. Warren Hastings made sure that Philip Francis’s embarrassing conduct was regularly discussed in Calcutta’s Supreme Council, and that the Company’s directors in London were kept well informed of the progress of the affair. When the trial opened in Calcutta’s Supreme Court on 8 February 1779, a succession of Grand’s native servants gave their names, and told their stories of the night of 8 December, among them Meerun, who was a kitmutgar or table servant, the jemadar, who was literate and, unlike the rest, could sign his testimony, and Catherine Grand’s mixed-race maid, Anne Lagoorda.93