Illuminating Lives

by Vivian Bickford-Smith

  It is somewhat surprising that Montagu left no account of his part in the day’s events, but in an era when many people who were not at Waterloo claimed to have been there – such as George IV, who memorably asked the Duke of Wellington to confirm that he had led the charge of the 10th Hussars in the battle – Montagu, at least, had been present. This has been confirmed by various histories and by Sir Harry Smith, himself a veteran of that battle. It is important to emphasise this fact, for a constant accusation of Montagu’s detractors is that he was untruthful. One South African historian has written this of Montagu: ‘Born into one of Britain’s leading families, or so he claimed, Montagu had fought as a young man at Waterloo.’9 This statement manages to cast doubt on everything about the man. Even more damning is the opinion of an Australian historian who was researching the governorship of Sir John Franklin in Tasmania: ‘I have found Franklin scrupulously honest and Montagu to have a reckless disregard for truth. In adjudicating between an honest man and a liar it does not seem to me impartial to give equal weight to the statements of each party.’10 This depiction of Montagu as a liar, albeit occasionally challenged, has proven to be enduring. Why?

  Part of the answer lies in a description of Montagu’s character as a child, provided by Newman, who wrote that once Montagu had decided that he should serve his country in arms, ‘then his restlessness became energy, his daring ripened into the eager heroism of the young soldier, and the disregard for truthfulness, which had for some time rendered his mother extremely anxious on his behalf, gave place to an honesty of purpose, and a decided straightforwardness of action which through the subsequent years of his public life were the marked features of his character’.11 Montagu’s critics have emphasised the parts of this characterisation that suit their purposes, while failing to note that the anecdote is about the transformation of a negative quality into a positive one and that it refers to a deracinated and fatherless boy becoming a remarkable man. They are happy to insinuate that the child was father to the man and that both were dishonest. They also fail to mention another anecdote provided by Newman. After the Battle of Waterloo, the young ensign became heavily indebted as a result of injudicious gambling. Determined to honour his obligations, he asked his regimental commander to dock a portion of his pay every month, while he restricted his living expenses by dwelling in a tent, on frugal fare, for six months.12 The significance of this story becomes clear in the context of Montagu’s later life: contrary to insinuations, he paid his debts.

  Following Waterloo, Montagu was promoted to a lieutenancy on 9 November 1815. In April he joined the 64th Regiment and found himself on half pay, as a captain, in November 1822. An army career in peacetime Europe did not offer an ambitious young officer many prospects, and Montagu, like many other British officers in the post-war world, looked to the colonies for advancement. Whether this decision was made before or after his marriage to Jessy Worsley, daughter of Major General Edward Vaughan Worsley, in April 1823, is unclear. But Jessy happened to be the niece of the lieutenant governor elect of Van Diemen’s Land, George Arthur, and Montagu and his wife travelled together with the Arthur party to Hobart on the Adrien, arriving on 12 May 1824. At this time, Montagu had transferred to the 40th Regiment, now posted in Van Diemen’s Land, which was then administratively part of New South Wales. Montagu’s responsibilities were not to his regiment, however, but to Arthur, whose secretary he became.

  George Arthur was a hugely significant figure in Montagu’s life, exerting an influence on him that was both exemplary and paternalistic. Arthur was, by conviction, a devout Calvinist evangelical. He applied his beliefs to the fulfilment of his instructions, which were to make the convict system in Van Diemen’s Land both more efficient and more dreadful. This does not mean that Arthur was a sadist. He held fairly advanced ideas for the times about the possibilities of reforming criminals through ‘firm and determined, but mild and constant supervision’.13 The British government viewed Van Diemen’s Land primarily as a jail, a vision that Arthur shared as he set out to make the island into a model open-walled panopticon.

  The methods that Arthur adopted were ones that Montagu would later employ as colonial secretary in the Cape when reforming the convict system there, including meticulous record-keeping and an interest in religious and educational instruction. Montagu gained first-hand experience in the challenges of practical penology by taking over much of the paperwork and administration of the system himself – an expansion of his duties from that of personal secretary to de facto colonial secretary and regulator of the administration’s accounts. This was testimony not only to Montagu’s energy and abilities but also to the trust that Arthur placed in him as a family member.

  Arthur had inherited a penal system that was based on the assignment of convicts, as labourers, to free settlers: the Assignment System. To humanitarian critics, the system seemed perilously close to slavery, an institution that was no longer acceptable to the British public. On the other hand, to those who were concerned with the efficacy of transportation as a punishment for crimes committed, assignment appeared to be a dubious deterrent. There also seemed to be no way of ensuring that the punishment would fit the crime, for a felon might be assigned to a kindly master in circumstances far superior to those experienced by propertyless unfortunates in industrialising Britain, or, alternatively, to the tyranny of a backwoods tyrant. Assignment was thus perceived as an arbitrary system, which was as likely to be a reward as a punishment for criminal behaviour. Arthur’s remedy for these deficiencies was to ensure that most convicts remained assigned to settlers but to keep them, and their masters, under close scrutiny through the surveillance of magistrates, police officers and local worthies. A detailed set of records monitored the progress and conduct of each individual in their labour of self-improvement. Those assigned convicts who failed to be obedient and willing labourers might find themselves in a government work gang, sometimes in chains, or in the penal settlement of Port Arthur, a specially constructed internment camp on the Tasman Peninsula for serious offenders. Here they would endure a harsh regime of punishment, stringent discipline and forced labour. Well-behaved convicts, on the other hand, might be rewarded with tickets-of-leave, enabling them to seek private employment, or even a pardon in certain circumstances.

  The system seemed open to abuse in that it gave Arthur extraordinary powers of patronage through his ability to apportion labour (and land, in the early years of his rule) to favoured free settlers. Arthur thought it quite legitimate that his family and supporters should benefit from preferment, but, at the same time, he took care to appoint only competent officials and to fire corrupt and inefficient ones. One of the beneficiaries of the system was certainly his ‘nephew’, John Montagu.

  Soon after his initial application to serve as colonial secretary had been turned down by the Colonial Office in London, Montagu began to serve as clerk of the Executive and Legislative Councils. The Colonial Office once again disapproved of this appointment, but Arthur kept his protégé on the job and took care to insert Montagu as his eyes and ears on a variety of local committees and commissions. In 1828, Montagu’s loyalty was rewarded with a provisional land grant of 2 560 acres. This depended on receiving permission to retire from the army. When this failed to arrive, Arthur allowed Montagu to take a year’s leave in London on half pay to sort out the problem. Not only did he do so, but he also got the Colonial Office to confirm his appointment as clerk of the councils. By the time he returned to Hobart in 1831, he had been recommended for a further land grant, and more prizes were to follow. Within the next four years, he was made acting colonial treasurer, had earned extra money by reorganising the postal department, and finally, in 1835, had become the officially appointed colonial secretary of Van Diemen’s Land.

  A great deal of Montagu’s unpopularity, in Australia at least, may be ascribed to his association with Arthur and those close to him, the ‘Arthur faction’. Arthur was not, and is not, a popular figure in Australian history owing
to his association with the convict regime at its most severe, with the eponymous Port Arthur, which is now enshrined as the Golgotha of the penal system in both Australian popular memory and the convict heritage industry. Equally, Arthur’s policies towards the Tasmanian Aborigines hastened the destruction of these societies as he sought, by force and negotiation, to remove them from areas of settlement and to isolate them offshore on Flinders Island. Though Montagu did not initiate these policies (and was, in fact, on leave in England for most of the Black War against the Aborigines), we may assume that he was familiar with their details and abetted them through his assiduous administrative work. Until recently, however, Arthur’s crimes against humanity (in Peter Carey’s words describing Australian settler colonialism, which employed concentration camps and genocide) have not excited as much criticism as have his dubious financial dealings. Insinuations of economic impropriety have also attached themselves to Montagu.

  Arthur certainly did manage to amass a tidy fortune from his dealings in Van Diemen’s Land, as recorded in detail by his biographer. The same cannot be said of Montagu, who invested disastrously on his own behalf (as well as Arthur’s) in land speculation in the Port Phillip District (Melbourne). Montagu also experienced a ruinous involvement with the Derwent Bank of Hobart, which was in liquidation by 1849. He would spend the rest of his life paying off his debts. These events are significant because they demonstrate that, in the long run, Montagu did not benefit financially from his association with Arthur.

  Arthur’s successor, Sir John Franklin, was of a very different mould. Though he had won renown as an Arctic explorer and had had a distinguished career as a naval officer, Montagu very quickly assessed his new boss and found him wanting. He recorded his impressions of Franklin in a letter to Arthur in December 1837. ‘The high qualities which were so conspicuous in Sir John … at the North Pole have not accompanied him to the South.’14 Nor was it Montagu alone who formed a poor opinion of Franklin. An American prisoner named Miller, sent to Van Diemen’s Land, ironically, because he and fellow rebels had tried to invade Arthur’s new posting of Upper Canada, described Franklin as grossly corpulent, some 300 pounds of blubber, and as being ‘an imbecilic old man … a paragon of good nature, with an excellent opinion of himself and little wit to uphold it’.15 After his governorship ended, Franklin perished, along with all his crew, while leading a disastrous expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, a fate that, somewhat strangely, is thought to enhance his reputation in Australia. In truth, however, much of his posthumous fame and popularity there is due to that tireless promoter of his reputation – his wife, Lady Jane Franklin.

  Lady Franklin occupies roughly the same position in Australian history as Lady Anne Barnard does in South African history: she is the nation’s First White Lady. Jane Franklin was intelligent, articulate, ambitious, adventurous and progressive. Montagu and Lady Franklin quickly recognised each other as able competitors for political influence and initially treated each other with cautious respect. But Franklin was always going to favour his wife’s views over those of his colonial secretary. In Lady Franklin’s private correspondence, she noted that though Montagu had ‘much talent for business and … great local knowledge’, she thought him to be rather cunning.16 It is more likely, however, that what she took for cunning was the tense cordiality or politeness that Montagu was forced to adopt in the somewhat trying company of the Franklins. ‘It is painful beyond description’, wrote Montagu to Arthur, ‘to act under a Governor who has no firmness of character, and is a tool for any rogue who will flatter his wife, for she in fact governs.’17

  The very public feud between the Franklins and Montagu is the major reason Montagu has such a bad reputation among Australians and Australian historians. As early as 1852, John West, the first historian of Tasmania, wrote an account of Montagu’s relations with Sir John that portrayed Montagu as insolent, underhanded and ambitious, exultantly betraying his superior and destroying his career.18 Subsequent historians elaborated on this unflattering portrait. Most damaging of all was the account by Robert Hughes in his bestselling history of the Australian convict system, The Fatal Shore (1987), in which he presents Montagu as the ‘able and insidious … Iago of the Derwent’ (Hobart, the Tasmanian capital, is on the estuary of the River Derwent), who spread lies and calumnies about Franklin and his wife, and who, out of jealousy, engineered the supersession of Franklin’s private secretary Alexander Maconochie, the one enlightened penal reformer in Australian history.19

  It is certainly true that Franklin found himself to be dependent on Montagu’s knowledge of local government and that he allowed his able and energetic colonial secretary to do most of the administrative work. But this is a function that Montagu would later perform for governors in the Cape, without necessarily antagonising them. All would probably have been well if Franklin had allowed Montagu and the Arthur faction to continue to govern Van Diemen’s Land as they had been doing for the past twelve years. Two factors, however, made a continuation of the status quo impossible. The first was the perception in England that the convict system needed to be reformed. The second was that Lady Franklin was not content to see her husband reduced to the position of a mere cipher in the hands of the Arthur faction.

  There is only space here to summarise the thoroughgoing reform of the convict system during the governorship of Sir John Franklin. Essentially, however, the Assignment System was abolished and replaced by something known as the Probation System. Instead of convicts being assigned to private individuals, they were now placed in government-supervised labour gangs to work on public works. Good conduct could result in the convict being released on probation to seek employment outside of the convict system. Though the impulse for reform came from concerned reformers in the British government, Montagu’s crucial role in designing the Probation System has recently begun to be acknowledged.20

  It was Montagu who convinced the British government that it would be possible to construct a new, improved, post-Assignment convict system in Van Diemen’s Land. Montagu’s critics suggest that his real motives in advocating reform were to ensure the continuation of the transportation of convicts to the island, since his own prosperity depended on the free supply of convict labour. More realistically, Montagu believed that convict labour could benefit Van Diemen’s Land as a whole, and his advocacy of continued transportation was popular among the island’s free settlers.

  It was after Montagu’s return from leave in London in March 1841, with instructions to help Franklin implement the Probation System, that the inevitable breakdown in relations between Montagu and Lady Franklin occurred. Briefly, in the first instance, Montagu refused to instruct the Legislative Council to approve of Lady Franklin’s request for £15 000 of government money to build a college for higher education. Secondly, when Montagu dismissed a surgeon for neglecting his duties, Lady Franklin launched a petition for the doctor’s reappointment. And finally, in January 1842, Sir John accused Montagu of using the government’s newspaper of choice, the Van Diemen’s Land Chronicle, to place articles injurious to the government. Montagu not only denied having had anything to do with articles that were disparaging of the governor, but he also reminded Sir John that the Chronicle had ceased to be the government’s mouthpiece since August 1841. His letter proved to be too much for Franklin to accept passively:

  But I trust your excellency will also pardon me from submitting to you, – and I beg to assure you that I do so under a deep conviction of the necessity of supporting my statement, – that while your excellency and all the members of your government have had such frequent opportunities of testing my memory as to have acquired for it the reputation of a remarkably accurate one, your officers have not been without opportunity of learning that your excellency could not always place implicit reliance on your own.21

  On receipt of this ‘insulting imputation’,22 Franklin suspended Montagu from office on 25 January 1842, and shortly thereafter Montagu and his family returned to England. U
nwisely, Sir John gave Montagu an excellent letter of reference to present to Lord Stanley, the secretary of state. ‘Sir John is perhaps the only man who ever accompanied a dismissal with eulogy,’ commented historian John West, ‘and the result of his candour will probably prevent its imitation.’23 In London, Montagu would so successfully argue his case that he was appointed as colonial secretary to the Cape of Good Hope – a promotion. He also ensured that a copy of his defence was circulated, together with supporting documentation – known as ‘Montagu’s Book’ – among his supporters in Van Diemen’s Land. Franklin, on the other hand, was censured for his unjust dismissal of an exemplary official and for having allowed a subordinate to gain such an improper ascendancy over him. His recall was imminent. Despite Lady Franklin’s help in penning a substantial justification of his own conduct – ‘A Narrative of Some Passages in the History of Van Diemen’s Land’ – Franklin remained disgraced, and he would subsequently seek redemption in that ill-fated expedition to the Arctic.

  Our focus so far has mainly been on Montagu’s poor reputation in Australia. We may add that he was subsequently also blamed for the failure of the Probation System after he left Van Diemen’s Land in 1842. But the system’s failure cannot realistically be blamed on him. Once it had been installed, the British government ceased the transportation of convicts to New South Wales and shipped them all to Van Diemen’s Land. The convict population there grew beyond the capacity of the island’s economic resources to support it, especially in a time of economic recession. Men on probation could not find employment, and the convict barracks allegedly became hotbeds of homosexuality. Above all, however, the system failed because Montagu was no longer there to manage it.