by Richard Cox
Yet, when the sales were all over, William still owed the Army Agents £7898 16s 4½d. Furthermore, although he had paid a dividend to Robert Campbell, he was to be pursued for debt by him until 1831. In spite of having appeals rejected by first the Governor and then the Privy Council in London, Campbell persisted, refusing to recognize that by accepting the ‘dividend’ from William many years before he had invalidated his action. It was settled in William’s favour by W. C. Wentworth, whose hastily scrawled opinion was preserved in the family papers and is now in the Mitchell Library. Wentworth wrote:
It appears to me notwithstanding the decision of the former Supreme Court of Judicature in this Colony and the confirmation of that decision both by the Court of Appeal and the Privy Council in England that Mr Campbell first by receiving a divided of 15/- in the £ and next by constituting an action against Mr Cox for the recovery of the balance … on the merits of the case Mr Cox could not fail to obtain a verdict.48
This was to say William won, for which Wentworth charged five guineas. The fee was worth roughly 21 acres of farmland, at the going price of 5s per acre. Quite extraordinarily, Campbell had much earlier lost the actions when he tried to obtain payment for three other bills owed to Scott and co., of £700, £500 and £1000, on which William had paid a 15s in the pound dividend on 30 July 1809, when he was still in England. Long before Campbell’s final attempt William had paid 27s 6d in the pound on some debts. There was no explanation for Campbell’s vindictiveness, but the effect it had on William was obvious enough: he never gave up seeking the government construction contracts which gave him an income independently of farming.
By 1804 William ought to have been in a trough of despair, despite his confident letter to Piper. Most of his land had been sold, his household possessions had been sold, and his house inevitably would be. But he did have King’s 200 acre joint grants. With Rebecca’s support he began again, with the same determination which a decade later would characterize his road building through the Blue Mountains. The move represented both the nadir of his land ownership and a fresh start. From this small beginning the farm which he named Clarendon developed over the years into a major estate, although the choice of its name is a minor mystery. As was explained in Chapter 1, the Royal Park of Clarendon near Salisbury had only the most tenuous connection to the family ancestry.
When his other sons had prospered enough to build their own grand houses in the 1830s, they too called them after family-connected places in Dorset, such as Fernhill and Winbourne.49 Their father must have coached them in these antecedents. Indeed the use of the Dorset names suggests that William was consciously trying to recreate the family’s long-lost status in his new home, having lacked the money and influence to do so in England. James Cox also gave the name Clarendon to his great mansion near Launceston, in Van Diemen’s Land, in 1834.
However, all this was for the future. In the present time of 1804 what must have preyed on William’s mind was the action to be taken against him by the army. A curious light is shed on this by a letter written on 9 November 1803 by John Macarthur, now out of the army and in England, to John Piper:
Orders are issued to try Cox by a Court Martial, and a reference has been made by the Secretary at War to the Commander in Chief on the propriety of bringing [Colonel] Paterson forward as a party, and as abetter of Cox – the general opinion is he will be broken or be obliged to retire on half pay as a matter of favor. I have seen the Secretary at War’s letters to the Duke [of York] and to be sure it is a most severe one.50
This letter suggests a deal of intrigue over the case. There may have been someone else in the Corps who coveted the lucrative office of paymaster, and alerted the War Office. Or possibly a staff officer in London noticed both William’s past record and that courts martial in the colony never seemed to convict the panel members’ brother officers (and brothers they may well have doubly been, in the sense of being Freemasons, too).51
At all events, the Duke of York finally did order Lieutenant Colonel Paterson ‘to send Mr Cox, the Paymaster of the Corps, home for “malversation”’.52 The office copy of a letter from the Deputy Secretary at War, Francis Moore, to a Colonel Clinton, who drafted the Duke of York’s letters, makes it clear that William’s prosecution was being demanded at a high level. Moore wrote:
To acquaint you for the information of H R H the C in C that for the sake of example it seems expedient that Mr Cox should be tried by a General Court Martial for malversation in the office of Paymaster; and if such trial cannot conveniently take place in New South Wales Mr Bragge [the Secretary at War] would advise that Mr Cox should be sent home to be tried … [there is] sufficient evidence of his having disobeyed the orders contained in His Majesty’s regulations, by drawing far greater sums than the services of the Corps actually required.
Ironically the Secretary of State, Charles Bragge, MP, later (in 1809) successfully pursued the Duke himself for corruption in having sold army commissions through his mistress in 1806, forcing him to resign, although the Duke managed to get himself reinstated a few years after. To achieve this against the King’s own brother illustrates the change in public morality which was gradually taking place and which William largely ignored throughout his life.
Clinton’s letter shows that disobeying orders was a greater offence than the malversation. It had concluded by saying that any evidence which would counter a plea of necessity on Cox’s part ‘might be useful’: such ‘necessity’ might have been the difficulty any junior officer experienced in supporting a family on his pay. The wording of the letter implies that the trial being held in England was to avoid William being acquitted by his brother officers in Sydney. On the other hand, the incriminating evidence of the regimental agents, Cox (no relation) and Greenwood, was in London. An earlier letter of 7 December 1803 attributed some blame to Paterson for not ‘discontinuing Mr Cox’, but this was not followed up. The overriding impression given is that the War Office could no longer tolerate the venal behaviour of the New South Wales Corps officers. The marker that this set down has passed historically unnoticed because of the great furore created a few years after over the trial of Major Johnston for his part in the Bligh rebellion of 1808.
Although Moore’s letter had been written in January 1804, it was August 1806 before William boarded the Buffalo at Port Jackson ‘under arrest’, leaving his family behind. The new governor, Bligh, recorded William’s recall dispassionately, informing Secretary of State Windham, ‘In consequence of orders which Colonel Paterson received … Mr Cox … [returns] in the Buffalo to answer such charges as will be brought against him’. This was the ship on which Governor King was returning. Due to his illness she did not sail until 10 February 1807 and then suffered great delays. Rounding Cape Horn on 15 March she was struck by lightning and only left Rio, after repairs, on 12 August, reaching Falmouth on 5 November. The voyage had taken nine months.
Major Abbott wrote to Piper on 28 May 1808 remarking that had the ship arrived earlier ‘then there was a chance of Cox being able to state his affairs’. That dim hope collapsed, since William was ‘dismissed the service’ on 9 April 1808, presumably after a trial.53 A detailed search of the fragile courts martial records at the British National Archives has failed to locate the record, although D’Arcy Wentworth’s and other proceedings are there. Normally the date of dismissal would have been the date of the verdict. William was described as ‘Paymaster’, which is how he was listed in the Army List. As mentioned earlier, his subsequent use of the rank of captain annoyed his former fellow officers. Family memoirs claim that William returned because his sister Anne had died. She had indeed, in 1807, but after he had sailed. The statement was part of the veil of respectability determinedly thrown over the less creditable aspects of his career by his descendants.
William had received no pay since his suspension as paymaster in 1803. He had still not received any by December 1808, even though onethird of the pay due had been authorized.54 Government departments were noto
riously slow in making payments, from which both King and Macquarie suffered. This explains why he was so long in returning to the colony. He does not seem to have lodged with his brothers-in-law at Red Lion Street, since War Office letters were sent to him at 7 Roberts Row. He did not receive the arrears of pay until the summer and only arrived back in the colony on 17 January 1810, on the Albion, via the Derwent, continuing from there on the Union, as reported by the Sydney Gazette on 21 January 1810. Meanwhile Rebecca was still being promised supplies from the government store in January 1810, when William was back. She was obviously on the margins as far as feeding her family was concerned.55 For all that he returned to family holdings on the Hawkesbury, William must have felt his future was in serious doubt.
Port Jackson as seen in 1817 by James Taylor (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW [XVI/ ca. 1817/1])
4 Rehabilitated as Macquarie’s Protégé
There had been an unanticipated silver lining to William’s long absence from New South Wales. He was away throughout the interregnum of the officers’ revolt against Governor Bligh, when he could not have avoided taking sides. Happily, too, Rebecca and her sons had been leading signatories of loyal addresses from the Hawkesbury people thanking Bligh for his help after the 1807 floods. One address, led by James Cox (then 17 years old) attracted 546 signatures at a time when the entire population of free settlers was only 703 (although one must assume that many signatories were in fact emancipated convicts).1 These family actions in support of the legitimate authority, albeit before the officers’ coup d’état, may well have helped William to re-establish himself, just when the privileges of the corps he had belonged to were being overthrown by the new governor, Colonel Lachlan Macquarie.
A tumult of governmental orders followed Macquarie’s arrival. January 1810 was a month few free people in the colony were likely to forget. The Governor immediately asserted his authority. Officers of the New South Wales Corps, now renamed the 102nd Regiment of Foot, were replaced by officers of the 73rd, which Macquarie had brought with him, both in military roles and as magistrates. Thus the detachment at Parramatta changed hands on 7 January. Officials dismissed by the rebels were reinstated, as when the merchant Robert Campbell was appointed a magistrate in Sydney and restored as a member of the Orphan School and Gaol Fund Committee. Lieutenant Colonel Paterson was ordered to close the accounts for his time in charge of the colony (which included his land grant to young Edward Cox). Bligh was to be reinstated as governor for 24 hours and then to hand over formally to Macquarie.2 Annoyingly for the new governor, this well-intentioned move backfired, because Bligh then embarked on a supply ship, the Porpoise, pulled rank as a commodore to take command and, after sailing to Hobart and back, went through a charade of investing Sydney harbour before finally being persuaded to leave. By late February Macquarie was inveighing against the evils of ‘illegal co-habitation’ in a lengthy proclamation – an ineffective argument, because ex-convict women were well aware that marriage would cost them all their rights, including those to property.3
Against this memorably tumultuous background, William wasted little time in rebuilding both his local standing and developing the businesses of private farming and a new one as a government contractor. These were figuratively three corners of the same triangle. To take farming first, he and his sons started to buy farm tools and to acquire stock, although they did not seem to have done this significantly until the following year, perhaps because the rebuilding of his status mattered more, even though Clarendon became the foundation stone of everything he did. Thus on 12 February 1811 he acquired nine of the late Andrew Thompson’s shoemakers’ knives for 9s each, while his son George bought a foal and a young colt for £60. On 14 February William bought 25 sheep and on the 25th he paid £6 for a cask of gunpowder and James bought 20 sail needles for 3s. In March William disposed of 100 sheep and goats for £83 5s.
These activities were among other unrecorded moves which set Clarendon on the way to becoming a self-sustaining community and in which William’s lifelong aide, the ex-sergeant James King, must have participated. Holt recorded that King had been ‘the clerk or steward over the stores’ at Brush Farm ten years before.4 Presumably King had stayed loyal to the family throughout their travails. Although William’s purchases cannot be dated easily, it is clear from his will that he bought even the smallest parcels of land, if they became available, while the development of estates beyond the mountains as part of a family enterprise eventually followed and was an integral part of the way in which he established a family dynasty.
Here a comment from a historian of the nineteenth-century English squirearchy is unexpectedly applicable to New South Wales, fitting the pattern of William’s and his contemporaries’ lives: ‘the landed gentry came in a bewildering variety of size and shapes … but they formed a reasonably homogenous group … they were the untitled aristocracy’.5 The exclusives of the colony included John Macarthur, the son of a hosier in Plymouth, Samuel Marsden, the son of a blacksmith, John Piper, the son of a doctor, Sir John Jamison, William Lawson, an army officer trained as a surveyor, John and his younger brother Gregory Blaxland, middle-class landowners from Kent with considerable social pretensions and, of course, William Cox himself, heir to armorial bearings and little else.
Disparate as these settlers’ origins were, they came to form an identifiable group, to which the ex-convict traders Simeon Lord and Samuel Terry, despite becoming major landowners, could never truly belong. Apart from their being emancipists, this was also due to the interminable quarrels about what constituted a ‘gentleman’. One instance of this was the supposition that since in England a squire was a gentleman and so qualified to be a JP, in the colony the reverse must be true and therefore a JP was by definition a gentleman – except that Lord, despite being appointed to the bench by Macquarie, was not.
This question of gentlemanly status was implicit in William’s rehabilitation. Disgraced or not, he was still ‘an officer and a gentleman’ and it seems that the expansion of Clarendon only got going after William had firmly established this status among the Hawkesbury’s inhabitants. He may well have been short of money, despite selling produce. Advertisements in the Sydney Gazette show him acting as a collector of the debts of the failed business of a Mr Lyons on 17 February and as the intermediary in letting a farm at Richmond Hill on 7 April 1810, as he was over selling a farm at South Creek on 13 October and again in March 1812. On 8 March 1810 he was the foreman of the jury at an inquest.6 On 1 August he was a joint signatory of a convict’s request for a document of emancipation, a move likely to gain him support from local emancipist smallholders.7
Less happily, at this time the trader Robert Campbell had taken advantage of the return of legal authority (with Macquarie) to warn that debts due to Messrs Campbell were to be ‘immediately liquidated’ and, so that settlers on the Hawkesbury and Nepean should have no excuse, he would accept payment in wheat to a representative at the Green Hills.8 William would have been prominent among such debtors, despite having paid a 75 percent dividend. As was seen in Chapter 3, Campbell finally lost his case in 1831. But in 1810 the generalized warning must have reminded William that he needed a stable income. It came in an unexpected way.
The first major step in William’s rehabilitation came on 27 October 1810, following the death of the emancipist magistrate Andrew Thompson, when Macquarie appointed him to the bench on the Hawkesbury with a salary of £50 a year.9 It is extremely unlikely that the Governor would have done this had he considered there to be any stain on William’s character. As explained in an earlier chapter, Macquarie himself had profited from the ‘management’ of regimental funds when he was paymaster in Bombay in 1795. His character and enthusiasms proved crucial to William’s career, although at times inhibiting. As a colonel and later major general he often viewed what were intended to be constructive criticism or proposals as disobeying orders. He kept a near-relentless grip on everything that happened in the colony but ended – as his last p
ortrait reveals – a broken man (a farewell portrait commissioned by William on behalf of the Hawkesbury residents has never been traced).
Macquarie in 1822, ‘the Old Viceroy’ but a broken man (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW [ML 36])
Macquarie had come up the hard way. He came from an impoverished minor Scottish clan and in 1777 had obtained an ensigncy in the second battalion of the 84th Regiment, or Royal Highland Emigrants, commanded by a cousin. This taught him the value of patronage, connections and money. Through most of his army career he lacked them and was short of cash. He is said to have remarked that Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington), who possessed all three advantages, reached the rank of colonel in nine years, whereas it had taken him thirty. His beloved first wife, Jane Jarvis, died in India in 1796. He was married again, to a cousin, Elizabeth Campbell, in 1807, who was to be a considerable force in New South Wales, not least in her classical architectural taste.
Macquarie’s becoming governor was accidental. He was the lieutenant colonel of the 73rd Regiment when its commander, a major general, was chosen to replace Bligh as governor, ending the short tradition of appointing naval post captains. The general turned the appointment down. Macquarie wrote to Lord Castlereagh asking to go instead and, after chancing on Castlereagh walking through London’s Berkeley Square, was given the job. His instructions from the Secretary of State emphasized improving the morals of the colonists, encouraging marriage, providing for education, prohibiting the use of ‘spirituous liquors’ and increasing the agriculture and stock of the colony.10 What the instructions did not cover, but which came to concern Macquarie greatly, was the layout of towns and the erection of handsome public buildings, over the expense of which he frequently dissembled to the Secretary of State. These improvements regularly involved William Cox as a contractor, helping to create William’s fortune. But what was seen in London as their extravagance was part of the reason for Commissioner Bigge being sent to the colony in 1819 to find out what was going on.