Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  Count de Las Cases’ Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (written after Lord Holland negotiated the return of his papers) had caused a sensation on the Continent. When the eight-volume translation (inevitably critical of Lowe) was published in England in late 1823, it resulted in yet another stir. It was hailed in France ‘as the greatest literary success of the century’.

  At last Balcombe received some good news. Bathurst offered him a newly created position, the first Colonial Treasurer of the distant colony of New South Wales. Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt’s intercessions on his protégé’s behalf had paid off. Balcombe’s granddaughter Bessie later suggested that Sir George Cockburn and even (but surely less likely) George IV had had some influence as well.4

  New South Wales would not have been Balcombe’s own first choice, which may have been a Caribbean posting. Formerly it would have been St Helena, but after Napoleon’s death, conditions on the island had dramatically deteriorated. The departure of Napoleon’s entourage, of Lowe and his establishment, and particularly the 2000 military and naval forces had led to a major collapse in economic life from which the island never recovered. Imports from the Cape, which had been the mainstay of Balcombe’s income from his naval victualling business, had virtually ceased.

  The colony of New South Wales was very far from home, and—founded as it was to take Britain’s criminal class—conditions were bound to be rough; Balcombe must have thought there would be little opportunity to enjoy a society life. But he was now in his sixth year without a paid position and would hardly have needed Sir Thomas’s counsel to know that he must be grateful to accept the one offered.

  He would certainly have gone to London to see Sir Thomas and to take advice at the Colonial Office. He learned that his new post had been created following recommendations by Commissioner J.T. Bigge. The colonial treasurer position was proposed to amalgamate revenue previously collected by other departments. Balcombe was told that he was likely to sail in November along with other newly appointed government officials.5 He must learn what he could to equip himself for the position, and he and his family should prepare themselves for the voyage and a new life in Australia.

  But Balcombe could not fully rejoice, because he had found his daughter Betsy in a desperate state. She was living south of the Thames in the poor area of Blackfriars. Edward Abell had recently deserted her and their baby girl. As he would later admit, he had never loved her and had only married her ‘under the hope of gaining something good’ through her father ‘and his exalted interests’. Instead he had found that the family lived in near-penury. As a final insult, he took all of Betsy’s jewellery as he fled.6 Under the law, it was not theft but his legal right as a husband to claim all of his wife’s property.7

  Balcombe would certainly have urged his daughter to leave the wretched lodgings and return with him to Saint-Omer, where a loving family awaited her and where her mother would care for her and the infant Bessie. He would have explained that they would not be leaving for New South Wales until November; it made sense for them to remain in France until then, with William at school in Boulogne, but when they sailed, she and the baby must accompany them. Betsy apparently agreed, but had her reasons for not wanting to leave Blackfriars immediately. While there was a remote chance that Abell might return she would wait, because she wanted something from him. Unable to persuade his daughter, Balcombe sailed for Saint-Omer to give his wife the very mixed news. Before he left, he apparently contacted the Frasers—who were visiting friends in Bath and Kent while they waited for James to finish courting in Scotland—and asked them, when next in London, to call on his daughter.

  In August 1823, the star attraction at the Waterloo Rooms in London was the horse Marengo, Napoleon’s famous white charger, which had survived many battles with his master, although not quite as many as were claimed for him. (Napoleon had gone into battle on several other horses as well.8) Edward Satchwell and Jane Fraser did not join the crowds queuing to see Marengo tossing his mane, ‘Admittance one shilling’. They had other business, as Jane noted in her diary of 22 August: ‘This day by previous appointment we were to go to Great Surry St Blackfriars to visit Mrs Abell, the Daughter of Mr Balcombe of St Helena—unfortunately married—and deserted by her Husband with an infant Child.’9

  I peered at maps of Blackfriars, unable to find Great Surry Street, until a helpful librarian at the British Library searched an old map of 1820s London and was able to tell me that Blackfriars Road, the high street today, was then called Great Surrey Street.10 A further search revealed that in 1823, Great Surrey Street Blackfriars was a district of working-class folk and small merchants. It was definitely not one of London’s more salubrious areas, and Betsy must have considered it humiliating, far beneath her expectations for herself.

  Jane Fraser may not have looked forward to the outing south of the Thames. It is apparent from her account that she was meeting Betsy for the first time: ‘Mrs A is a tall handsome elegant looking young woman with an amiable & pleasing countenance & very like her Father—She . . . with much cordiality & grace entered into her sad story of which she gave us the particulars & expressed herself much gratified with our visit & our attention to her mother & sister while at Saint-Omer. She brought her little infant, a lovely little girl, to show us & after sitting an hour with her we took leave . . . cast down with her unfortunate situation & agreeable manners. Still—there was such a lightness of manner, of almost levity or want of feeling—in her being able to recount & dwell on the circumstances of her Husband’s conduct & deserting her, as took somewhat from the deep feeling it would otherwise have inspired—but she is very young not much being over 20 & seems burdened to have been of a light, volatile character, tho’ very interesting.’11 Jane’s perceptive description of Betsy suggests that something of the wild, flighty girl of St Helena days, some almost manic quality in her personality, still remained, despite her recent personal hardship.

  The Frasers continued on their way and were never to see their friends the Balcombes again.

  Betsy had agreed to join her parents in Saint-Omer and seemed to have given up whatever expectation had detained her at Blackfriars, most likely a hope that her husband would return. If she had hope it would not have been fuelled by love (she must by then surely have hated him) but because she wanted something he could grant. She would have known of marriages where the couple frankly disliked each other but the woman found that preferable to lacking a protector; ‘Better a bad husband than no husband at all,’ the saying went.12 Abell, however, had proved to be very bad indeed and Betsy probably could not have endured the thought of living with him again. Yet she also knew that as a deserted wife she would barely have a position in society. She would be like one of the old maids who sat on the margins at balls. Unless she could marry again she would always be lonely, a burden to her parents, and without a protector she and her adored child could only look forward to impoverished lives. If she did earn a little money, her husband would always be entitled by law to come and take it. That was one advantage of going to the remote convict colony—it was very far away.

  It is reasonable conjecture that Betsy, above all, wanted to be a free woman again. She would have investigated how this could be achieved and discovered that it was almost impossible. A full legal divorce required an Act of Parliament and the costs ran into thousands of pounds—only a few very rich men had ever attempted it, and no woman ever had.13 An annulment was possible on the grounds of incest, lunacy or impotence (hardly to be argued when Abell had sired their daughter); however, another ground that was frequently used, and which may have interested her, was bigamy. She may always have had suspicions that Abell had left a woman behind in India; if he had actually married the woman and would admit to it, that would be the basis for an annulment—but as the penalty for bigamy was transportation for seven years, she must have known he would not acknowledge any such marriage.14 There was still one realistic possibility, the avenue most often used by ‘the middling and better sort’. If Abe
ll returned, perhaps she hoped to persuade him to agree to a ‘private separation’, which would allow her a degree of economic independence. It would even enable them both to marry again without being charged with bigamy, even though any new marriage would never be approved under strict ecclesiastical law.15

  Abell, however, did not come back. Betsy must have believed that he had left the country and returned to India—beyond the reach of her suspicions of an Indian wife or mistress and perhaps of children in Madras. What made Abell’s return to south Asia more likely is that his elder brother Charles, a former lieutenant in the Indian army, had died the previous year at his tea plantation in Colombo. The news may recently have reached Edward, initiating his flight. Charles had left behind a wife and a daughter, but Edward, always alert for advantage, may have had some expectations from his will.16 However, it seems that in his haste to depart from his wife and child, Abell had forgotten something: a promissory note for £120, allegedly owed to him by a Lieutenant-General Francis Torrens of Madras. Betsy hoped that she might retrieve that sum for herself.

  She packed up her few possessions, and with little Bessie, by then around eleven months old, crossed the Channel to France.

  General Sir Henry Torrens at the Horse Guards in London, by then commander-in-chief of the British army under the Duke of York, could scarcely have been pleased when a letter arrived from France from a Mrs Lucia Elizabeth Abell, asking if he would kindly honour the promissory note made out in India by his late brother Lieutenant-General Francis Torrens to Edward Abell Esquire. She would have explained that Mr Abell had proved to be a scoundrel, deserting her and leaving her almost penniless, and that she was about to embark with her family for New South Wales. General Torrens probably doubted the authenticity of the note, almost certainly aware that Abell had been a crony of James Patterson, the forger (since transported to Sydney) who had dared to contest his late brother’s will. However, General Torrens was both an officer and a gentleman. On 8 October he replied:

  My dear Madame—I have great pleasure in accommodating you . . . I therefore send you a Draft for £120—and I shall certainly procure the sum, which Mr Abell advanced for the late General Torrens. I received your letter from France with its mysterious Enclosures, & no doubt the Writer is the misguided Man with whom you are, unfortunately, connected. I beg to wish you all happiness & success in your intended voyage, and I remain, Dear Madam,

  Your most faithful Servant,

  H. Torrens17

  There is no record of the remaining period of the family’s time at Saint-Omer, but if William was wise he would have been reading the three weighty reports by Commissioner Bigge with their advice, in meticulous detail, on transforming New South Wales from a penitentiary to a functioning British colony.18 The reports had by then been approved and published in the British Parliament, and Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt could have obtained copies for him. Time existed on the voyage to study them in depth.

  In mid-October, the Balcombes and Betsy with her baby left Saint-Omer for London to prepare for their voyage. One significant date is on record: this Anglican family would never have countenanced the christening of Betsy’s daughter in a Catholic church in France. She was baptised in London on 23 October 1823 as Elizabeth Jane Balcombe Abell. The record would probably also have been required in order to register her for the voyage to Australia.19

  William and his family made their farewells to Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, no doubt with anguish on both sides, wondering if they would ever see each other again. The Balcombes were sorry they would be missing the grand celebrations for the official opening in November of the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railroad, Tyrwhitt’s great passion.20 (It would never be the successful business enterprise he had hoped and would end up bankrupting him.)

  It may well have been Sir Thomas who proposed to Lord Bathurst that a young gentleman, James Stirling Harrison, should accompany the family to Sydney as a tutor for the boys. Harrison was certainly well qualified—he spoke five languages—and Balcombe knew not to question the wisdom of his patron’s suggestions. Tyrwhitt was aware that Balcombe was inexperienced bureaucratically (at St Helena the office side of the business was handled by Fowler and Cole, while Balcombe excelled at trading, negotiating, and building personal contacts). As it happened, young Harrison was well conversant with bureaucratic and financial matters. His father was the former principal accountant at the Transport Office in London, and a possible relative was Sir George Harrison, the highly regarded under-secretary at the Treasury in Whitehall. It is likely that the designation ‘tutor’ for the young man was a ruse, avoiding any accusation of recruiting office staff before the approval of the New South Wales governor. If this was another contrivance of Tyrwhitt’s, Lord Bathurst, not unknown as a wily operator himself, might have been content to look the other way.

  Before leaving London, Balcombe met again at the Colonial Office with Wilmot Horton, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and had a useful briefing. No doubt he expressed gratitude: he had been lifted from penury and appointed to an important official position with many responsibilities. But it was typical of his confidence and insouciance that his last question to Horton was a request for a personal loan of £50, to tide him over for the voyage.21 He was virtually asking: ‘Can you lend me fifty quid, mate?’ Horton obliged and may have thought wryly to himself that the new treasurer was going to fit in well at the colony of New South Wales.

  At Plymouth the family, with all their luggage, boarded the small 430-ton transport ship Hibernia, commanded by Captain Robert Gillies. They made a sizable group: William, his wife, their elder daughter Jane, the three boys, and Betsy, a 21-year-old single mother, with her baby daughter. They were accompanied by the boys’ new tutor, James Stirling Harrison, and two unnamed domestics.

  On board they met the other significant passengers who would be joining the Balcombes for meals at the captain’s table: the new chief justice for Van Diemen’s Land, John Lewes Pedder, with his wife and that colony’s new attorney-general, Joseph Tice Gellibrand, all three to disembark at Hobart; the barrister Saxe Bannister, soon to become Balcombe’s colleague as the new attorney-general for New South Wales, was travelling with his two sisters. Captain Edward Macarthur, the eldest son of the colony’s leading landed family, would also have an honoured place at the table; a 34-year-old bachelor, he had served in the British army fighting Napoleon’s forces at Corunna and Sicily and in the Peninsular War, and had been with the army of occupation in France.22

  On 8 November 1823, the Hibernia weighed anchor at Plymouth and raised her sails; with the Balcombes on deck to watch the cliffs of England recede into the mists, they set off on their uncomfortable five-month voyage halfway around the world.

  PART

  THREE

  You tell yourself: I’ll be gone

  To some other land, some other sea,

  To a city lovelier far than this

  Could ever have been or hoped to be . . .

  There’s no new land, my friend,

  No new sea;

  For the city will follow you,

  In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly.

  C.P. CAVAFY

  CHAPTER 30

  SYDNEY TOWN

  It is difficult today to imagine the modest settlement around Sydney Cove where the Hibernia put down its anchor on 5 April 1824. It joined seventeen vessels in line for position at the two long wooden wharves beside a row of warehouses and a jumble of jetties and slipways.

  The Balcombes stood on deck, trying to get a sense of their new home: across the waters to their left (where the Opera House now stands) was Fort Macquarie guarding the cove, cannon on its low battlements and crenellated tower. Beyond it, the roofline of the rambling Government House could be glimpsed among the bushes and Norfolk pine on the rise.1 At the head of the cove a noxious stream, fenced against wandering cattle, disgorged its sludge onto the mudflats. To their right, through the forest of masts and rigging and the cargo being winched down, the bellowing cattle off-
loaded in netted cradles, beyond the warehouses were huddled shops, cottages and taverns squeezed against high sandstone cliffs, punctuated by a gun battery on the point. They were told that this area was The Rocks, where many convicts lived, a place not to venture, especially at night.2 Little could be seen of the streets of Sydney but for some fine civic buildings; a squat, blunt church tower; a graceful steeple in the distance; and, further still on higher ground, the sails of windmills turning.

  The labourers on the wharves were convicts, some wearing shirts and trousers of coarse yellow cloth, groups of them straining to pull heavy carts.3 Watching the activity was a group of dark-skinned Aboriginal people in ragged clothes. The scene would not have been entirely unfamiliar to the Balcombes: Sydney was clearly a far bigger settlement than Jamestown and it lacked the dramatic mountain backdrop, but a few of the Georgian buildings looked similar, the sunshine was as bright, the sea as blue, and they were accustomed to the presence of people of many different races.

  During the voyage there had been a grim tragedy for the Balcombe family. On the long haul between the Cape and Hobart Town they had lost Jane, the beloved elder daughter and Betsy’s sister and confidante. The cause of Jane’s death is not known and the captain’s log has not survived. She had never been in robust health and at St Helena had suffered a long illness, perhaps tuberculosis.4 She had been buried at sea, as was the practice, a Union Jack over the coffin during the funeral service and then her body released into the depths. It would take her parents and Betsy a very long time to recover from her loss. For her mother in particular, after her prolonged illness at Saint-Omer and Abell’s desertion of Betsy, the tragic death of her firstborn must have been almost impossible to bear.