The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  The reverberations of these Indian acts and testimonies in Calcutta in late 1778 and early 1779 affected many more people than just Elizabeth Marsh, a fading widow in Hooghly burdened with an unmarried daughter. On 5 March 1779, the Supreme Court found Philip Francis guilty of ‘criminal conversation’ with another man’s wife, and fined him fifty thousand rupees (about £5000). The episode undermined his political standing in Calcutta, and further embittered his relations with Warren Hastings, and in December 1780 he returned to Britain. A disgraced Catherine Grand had already left Bengal for France, where she eventually became the wife of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, Napoleon’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, while George Grand ended his career working for the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope.94 But as far as Elizabeth Marsh and her daughter were concerned, it was the scandal’s impact on George Shee that mattered most, and that changed everything. Forcibly brought back to Calcutta, and with his conduct already outlined and denounced by a succession of Indian witnesses, Shee was obliged to testify to the city’s Supreme Court. He confessed that Philip Francis had told him in advance of his plan of ‘going to Mr. Grand’s house’. He admitted to receiving and looking after the black clothes that Francis had worn for camouflage on the night of 8 December 1778. He even described to the court how his powerful friend had told him ‘he would take it as a particular favour if I would get a ladder made for him’. A ‘black carpenter’ had duly built the contraption – Meerun’s ‘strange thing’ – in the compound of George Shee’s house. As a Company servant who knew him subsequently recorded: ‘Mr. Shee … cut an awkward figure, the Chief Justice observing that his behaviour had been reprehensible as it was derogatory to the character of a gentleman.’95

  As a result, George Shee too was forced into retreat and into motion. As some recompense for favours owed, Philip Francis secured him the post of Resident and Collector of Revenues at Ferruckabad (Farrukhabad), ‘a city on the western bank of the Ganges, not very far south of Delhi’. The position enabled Shee to make a considerable sum of money from his salary and from trade, but it took him for a while out of Calcutta’s more fashionable circles and its partisan Company politics. ‘This,’ as Francis advised him, ‘is the time for you to be humble.’96 Shee does not seem to have returned to Calcutta until early in 1782, and almost immediately Hicky’s Bengal Gazette began reporting his pursuit of Elizabeth Marsh’s daughter:

  In [Elizabeth] Maria’s praise what a song could I write,

  Would the muses but lend me their aid;

  For in Maria’s form all the graces unite,

  And every perfection displayed.

  In her bosom fair virtue, and sweetness of soul,

  Wit, judgement, and modesty shine;

  No vanity vexes, no passions control.

  But all is serene and divine.97

  Elizabeth Marsh seems to have owed the beginnings of her and her daughter’s acquaintance with Shee in part, like so much else, to one of her relations. By now her younger brother John Marsh had moved to a new government post in Cork, a major port in the south-west of Ireland, where he oversaw the transport of victuals and supplies to British and allied troops in North America and the Caribbean. For all that he was a cog in the war against America, John Marsh’s utter efficiency and conspicuous lack of corruption in this post brought him to the notice, and swiftly into the favour, of Edmund Burke, who had political interests and close family associations in Cork – and who was a kinsman and still devoted patron of George Shee.98 So it was natural that, when a badly compromised and subdued Shee finally drifted back to Calcutta, he should have gravitated towards the company of Elizabeth Marsh and her daughter, people who were also damaged in their own way, and who were glad and willing to receive him. But it still took the two women over a year to secure him. ‘Were I to deny that the superior and most uncommon merit of Miss Crisp has made a strong and lasting impression upon me,’ Shee admitted in March 1783, ‘the whole tenor of my conduct towards her would flatly contradict my words.’ But he had been held back by concern about ‘the contracted scale of my fortune, and uncertain state of my prospects’.99 He might have added, but did not, that Elizabeth Maria’s own very limited fortune and prospects were also a drawback.

  ‘You will then ask,’ he wrote to Elizabeth Marsh in a long, indiscreet letter outlining the evolution of his sentiments, ‘why this consideration did not at an earlier period influence my conduct.’ With a wholly characteristic blend of naïveté and ruthlessness, and a genuflection to ‘the unreserved candour you permit me to use’, Shee admitted that initially, and ‘for some time’, his attentions to Elizabeth Maria had been ‘without meaning’. But now, ‘Should fortune befriend me, there is no farther gift I should so anxiously desire of her as a certainty or essential proof that I possessed the good opinion of your daughter.’ Should she, Elizabeth Marsh, ‘think my presence at Hooghly likely to cause a continuance of that anxiety you have felt’, however, he would desist and retire. So she was obliged to be patient and play him, while Elizabeth Maria Crisp had to ensure that ‘the difficulty’ that George Shee ‘found in restraining my inclination’ did not entrap her, that she did not suffer the sort of ruin (temporarily) experienced in Calcutta by Catherine Grand. On 2 August 1783, the two women achieved their aim. In a private ceremony in the house at Hooghly, George Shee married Elizabeth Maria and became Elizabeth Marsh’s son-in-law.100

  It was a substantially compromised achievement, and an act of some desperation. Just as Burrish Crisp had been dispatched to Persia as a ten-year-old boy, so now Elizabeth Marsh married off her still under-age daughter to a man of questionable reputation, out of economic need and ambition. Yet, to those who were his friends, George Shee could still seem ‘possessed of … great activity of mind and highly prepossessing manners’, full of ‘uprightness and integrity’ even; and at this stage he was a driven man capable of political idealism.101 After marrying Elizabeth Maria and taking up a Company judicial post in Dhaka, he busied himself collecting information about Warren Hastings’ administration in Bengal, determined to visit upon him some of the scandal and ruin he himself had experienced. Shee would dispatch this intelligence sometimes directly to Philip Francis in London, sometimes to Edmund Burke, and sometimes to his own uncle, John Bourke, a City merchant who acted as link-man between these two politicians. Shee thus became a minor player in the subsequent campaign against, and Parliamentary impeachment of, Warren Hastings, the most sustained public inquisition up to this point into the East India Company’s conduct in the subcontinent, and – in Edmund Burke’s mind – a much broader assault on some of the practices and assumptions of empire, and on what he styled ‘geographical morality’. General Richard Smith, another of Elizabeth Marsh’s kinsmen, also took part in the prosecution of Hastings, and so, in a secretarial and advisory capacity, did the newly married Elizabeth Maria Shee. ‘You draw pictures to admiration,’ wrote Philip Francis to George Shee at the close of 1786, having received from him yet another packet of Bengal information:

  As long as the scenes shift, pray let your pencil be employed … Observe you are never to show this letter to anybody but Mrs. Shee, on whose friendship and discretion I place a particular dependence. The prosecution of your friend Mr. Hastings will be revived with a renewal of vigour as soon as Parliament meets.102

  How much Elizabeth Marsh was aware of her new son-in-law’s political ventures, or cared about them, is unknown. She would have known and cared that, by his own estimate, before marrying, George Shee was making ‘a certain income of between two and three thousand pounds a year’, mainly by means of trade in saltpetre and opium in the subcontinent and with China.103 The former Elizabeth Maria Crisp was thus more than amply provided for; and since Shee was a covenanted Company servant, not a private merchant acutely at the mercy of external events, his new wife was assured of a measure of both status and security. So, if this matrimonial outcome was flawed, it was also far more than Elizabeth Marsh could have dared to hope for. War in sectors of the Ameri
cas, Asia, Africa and Europe, and some of the issues bound up in it, had combined to alter and divide members of her own birth family, and to destroy her husband, James Crisp. She had been first imperilled, and then widowed and reduced to want; and she had been obliged to have recourse again to her own inventiveness and ruthlessness, to her extended family, and to transoceanic journeying. But now, as a result of a scandal involving both miscellaneous Asians and miscellaneous Europeans, her remaining dependent child was safely married to a rich man, in a ceremony attended by John Shore, Elizabeth Marsh’s former fellow passenger on the Goodwill, and a future Governor General of India. Surely a happy ending was finally in prospect.

  Ending – and Continuing

  ACCORDING TO GEORGE MARSH, it was only a short period after her daughter’s marriage in August 1783 when Elizabeth Marsh first noticed ‘a violent cancer’ developing in one of her breasts. He set down this piece of information in old age, when the passage of time had probably become telescoped in his memory, but it does seem that Elizabeth became ill in 1784, and that she concealed her ailment and tolerated the pain for several months. Burrish Crisp would later try to sanitize this phase of his mother’s life, and soften his own memories of it, by characterizing her as ‘the patient martyr of a cruel and unrelenting malady’. In reality, she was probably not patient in the face of her cancer at all: merely in terror of the only available alternative to passive endurance and pretence. By early 1785, though, she had summoned up ‘resolution enough’ to take action. She waited until a day when both her son and her daughter were away out of town, and then she called in the surgeon.1

  It was still common for incomers to the Indian subcontinent from Europe, women as well as men, to resort to indigenous physicians, particularly in the smaller settlements.2 But Elizabeth Marsh seems to have had her mastectomy in Calcutta, where Burrish had a house; and thanks to him and her son-in-law, George Shee, she was now affluent enough to afford a European doctor. The ritual of a Western-style mastectomy without anaesthetic was designed to preserve some decorum amidst surgery that was at once drastic and almost unavoidably possessed of sexual overtones. The patient would usually remain fully clothed, except for her exposed breast. She might be tied or belted to a chair. Her arm would be held up throughout in order for the pectoralis major muscle to lift the offending breast. Servants, or the physician’s assistants, would also endeavour to keep her neck and shoulders pressed as firmly as possible to the back of the chair or the mattress of a bed. The surgeon meanwhile would straddle the patient’s knees, and set to work:

  I began a scream that lasted intermittently during the whole time of the incision … When the wound was made, and the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp and forked poniards, that were tearing the edges of the wound – but when again I felt the instrument – describing a curve – cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left – then, indeed, I thought I must have expired. I attempted no more to open my Eyes, – they felt as if hermetically shut, and so firmly closed, that the Eyelids seemed indented into the Cheeks. The instrument this second time withdrawn, I concluded the operation was over, – Oh, no! presently the terrible cutting was renewed – and worse than ever, to separate the bottom, the foundation of this dreadful gland from the parts to which it adhered … yet again all was not over … I then felt the Knife rackling against the breast bone – scraping it!3

  Fanny Burney’s famous account of her mastectomy in 1811, which lasted twenty minutes from the first incision to the dressing of the wound, is an exceptional testimony, and not just because of its gruesome detail and literary power. Women who underwent this operation during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rarely survived long enough, or were left in any condition, to write about their experience. Some succumbed immediately to the pain and shock. Far more died of infection, even though surgeons might cauterize the wound with a red-hot iron. But, as may have been true in Elizabeth Marsh’s case, what most caused these operations for breast cancer to fail was that, for obvious reasons, women tended to put them off for too long. As a result, the cancer often spread to the lymph nodes, far beyond the reach of even the most heroic surgery at this time.

  Elizabeth Marsh survived the ordeal of her operation. ‘In it, she suffered excruciating pain’, confirmed George Marsh unnecessarily, which she endured – her children were later informed – ‘with heroic constancy’. After it was finished, the surgeon, whoever he was, took out his medical scales and established that the excised tumour with its attaching breast tissue ‘weighed upwards of five pounds’. It is a measure of her physical toughness that, despite the encroaching heat of a Calcutta spring, Elizabeth lived for ‘a few months’ after this.4 It was probably also a measure of her powerful will to keep going. She was only forty-nine, and she had recently acquired an additional stake in the future. In July 1784, her daughter had given birth to a son, who was named George Shee after his father. So, as grandmother to ‘one of the finest urchins you ever saw’, Elizabeth Marsh had good reason to live, and she managed to do so until 30 April 1785.5

  No account exists of her death, or of who was with her at the end. The day after, they buried her in what later became known as South Park Street cemetery, a forested area about a mile south from the old town of Calcutta. It seems to have been her son Burrish Crisp who composed her epitaph. He described her as ‘the best of mothers’, and recorded her steadfastness in the face of ‘one of the severest chirurgical operations’. But he made no mention of Elizabeth Marsh’s travels or writings. Nor did he refer in her regard to any single place, or nation, or religion, or to James Crisp. This only partially appropriate memorial scarcely signified. Like most modest tombs erected in South Park Street cemetery – as distinct from the elaborate monuments of the rich and the powerful – the gravestone of Elizabeth Marsh has long since disappeared.6

  Resurrecting this obliterated life has been absorbing. It has also been challenging. More even than is true of the generality of biographical subjects, there is no possible owning of all the facts of Elizabeth Marsh’s existence. Some of her life-parts, like her bones, like her image, are gone forever. How then should she be seen? And what came after?

  It was more than ten years after her death that George Marsh began compiling his Family Book, a random assemblage of anecdotes, observations and stories about himself and his relations. He was in no doubt that he and they had lived through a world of change and a world still in change, and he experimented with various devices in order to represent the scale of these changes on paper. Understandably, given its significance for connecting different portions of the globe, and his own involvement with it, the first index of transformation he seized on was the rapid growth of the Royal Navy. The vellum-covered Family Book opens with a page of statistics. In 1741, George noted, there had been 740 admirals, captains, masters and commanders, and lieutenants serving in the navy. By July 1756, the month in which Elizabeth Marsh set out from Gibraltar on the Ann, the number of naval officers had already risen to 929. By 1790, he calculated, there were close to three thousand.

  He also summoned up the more violently interconnected world that he and – far more directly – his niece had inhabited, by describing in the Family Book a succession of objects and artifacts. Some of these were items that he kept near him, on shelves in his house and office. There was the ‘£70 worth of Dresden china’ he had bribed the customs officers to ignore on his return to England from Hamburg in 1776. There was the ‘silver hammered punch bowl made by an Indian’ he kept in his study, that had originally been given to Milbourne Warren by the crew of the Norfolk after his goods were swept overboard on the voyage back to Madras from Manila in 1764. Then there was Nicholas Owen’s manuscript account of slave trading in West Africa, which George Marsh had acquired duri
ng his time at the Navy Board. And in addition to these items, that he could see and touch, there were others he had only heard of from others, or that were lost. He recorded Elizabeth Marsh’s description of the bracelets ‘which were of silver and more like horse shoes than anything else’ that Sidi Muhammad’s women offered her in Marrakech. He recalled the ‘vast and continued expense’ of an Arab stallion, which had been dispatched as a present from Cairo to a Marsh relation in Menorca, but had somehow ended up with him in London. He remembered the plans and provisions that he himself had prepared in readiness for John Byron’s voyage to the Pacific in 1764 and, less happily, the plats of East Florida land that had tempted him into investing (and losing) £1000 in the colony.7