I am perfectly aware, my beloved wife, of the difficulties you have to contend with, and fully convinced that not one woman in a thousand, (no one that I know) would have the resolution and perseverance to contend with them at all, much more to surmount them in the manner you have so happily done.
JOHN MACARTHUR TO ELIZABETH MACARTHUR, 3 AUGUST 1810
None of Elizabeth’s letters to John during this his second absence in England have survived. Elizabeth, though, carefully kept the letters she received from John. And from those she learned that he was miserable in England. From his career zenith immediately after the rebellion, when he more or less ran the colony, he plummeted into a depressive nadir. In London he was a nobody with no easily discernible future, surviving on the limited funds Elizabeth could provide. He was regularly unwell, tormented with digestive complaints, debilitating gout, ‘nervous affliction’ and ‘seized with violent spasms in my side’.1
His sandalwood trading enterprise, for which Hannibal had travelled to China, had amounted to nothing. A ship he part-owned was lost at sea and his sealing ventures resulted in a ‘considerable loss’.2 Several men who owed him money could not (or would not) pay. John would have liked to do a favour for Doctor Redfern, to thank him for restoring young Elizabeth to health, but he lacked the finances to make any meaningful gesture. ‘You must,’ he wrote to Elizabeth, ‘exert yourself to remit me all you can.’3
John worried, too, about his ‘beloved Wife’.4 He fretted about ‘the many adverse circumstances to which you have been exposed, and the extraordinary trials that you have borne’, and he was impressed and grateful that Elizabeth coped ‘not only without sinking under the accumulated pressure, but with the most active fortitude and good sense’.5 It was impossible, he wrote, for him to fully express the admiration he felt and equally impossible for him ‘to repress the pride which I feel in having to boast of such a pattern for Wives and Mothers as my own’.6 John’s peers may have found him arrogant and haughty but, in London at least, he was full of self-doubt. He saw much of himself in his son Edward, in Edward’s ‘independence’ and ‘obstinacy’ and John noted to Elizabeth that when he observed ‘the too prominent parts of [Edward’s] character which he derives from a person you well know he makes me shudder for his safety on the voyage of life’.7 Perhaps writing these letters helped John to feel better but they cannot have given Elizabeth any peace of mind.
At one point in 1810, John seriously considered a seat in the English parliament. ‘The expense will be great, but the prospect of benefit from it is still greater.’8 This plan, like many others he hatched at around that time, came to nothing. John was despondent and his letters home were full of sorrow and complaint. He prayed for the health and happiness of his wife and daughters every day and worried that Emmeline, only a year old when he last saw her, would not know him. ‘Kiss my sweet cherub Emmeline and teach her to love me,’ he wrote plaintively.9 He took some ‘unexpected gratification’ though, from seeing a list of naval promotions in which many officers with less seniority than Bligh were promoted above him. John took this as a sign ‘that Government view his conduct as it deserves’.10
John, deeply anxious about the forthcoming trial, tried to curry favour with friends (and friends of friends) in high places. But until the court martial of the rebel officers was completed, John’s well-placed patrons would do nothing for him. Major Abbott summed up the situation when he wrote from England to Captain Piper about their mutual acquaintance John Macarthur: ‘Mack makes a very little figure in this part of the world.’11 There was little Elizabeth could do or write, from so far away, to lift John’s melancholy.
Yet the 1811 trial of the rebel officers was, in the end, an anticlimax. While it was Lieutenant-Colonel Johnston who officially stood trial as the leader of the rebellion, the focus was also on the activities of civilian John Macarthur and his nemesis Bligh. None of the three men emerged very cleanly from the treasonous mire. Bligh was in the witness stand for three and half days and managed to lose his temper several times, confirming the defence’s argument that he was too easily provoked into ungentlemanly behaviour. And Macarthur himself began with his usual confidence and bluster, but soon discovered that while his dissembling, evasions and outright contradictions might have served in a colonial court, they soon dissolved in the face of fierce and intelligent cross-examination. John Macarthur was out of his depth and it showed.
Johnston was found guilty of mutiny but instead of being sentenced to a prison term, or death, he was dishonourably discharged from the army and sent on his way. His miraculously light sentence has long been considered an acknowledgment that he was never the true leader of the rebellion: John Macarthur was.
John had resigned his army commission nearly ten years earlier and, as a civilian, he could not be subject to a court martial. Nor, it was eventually determined, could be he tried in England when his alleged crimes were committed in New South Wales. Tellingly, Governor Macquarie’s orders for Macarthur’s arrest on charges of high treason were not revoked after Johnston’s trial, so while he remained a free man in England, he was effectively and indefinitely prevented from returning to Sydney. If he did, he would be arrested the moment he disembarked. And he could not risk a trial at home where, if found guilty, he would face a gaol sentence or possibly even the noose.
So, while other rebel leaders left the army to gradually and quietly resume their lives in New South Wales, John was forced to recalibrate his future. He wondered if he and Elizabeth could make enough money from their New South Wales activities to support the whole family in England, calculating that they would need at least £1600 a year for a comfortable life.12 John estimated there might be enough capital to establish a small estate in England. At this point he bravely wrote to Elizabeth and told her of his new plans. She would have to sail to England without him, but if she had ‘the smallest dread or apprehension of coming home alone’ she need only to say so, wrote John, and he would ‘sacrifice every other consideration and come out for you’.13 In this he seems to have underestimated his stoic wife. Sailing to England in the company of her daughters and trusted servants was unlikely to raise too many apprehensions for a woman who travelled and worked alone on the edge of the colonial frontier. Any dread Elizabeth may have felt was far more likely to arise from her understanding of the financial risk if they left New South Wales.
The sentiment in John’s letter is quite romantic but Elizabeth’s concerns were wholly pragmatic and, from John’s subsequent letters, we can infer that Elizabeth’s response was adamant. There would be no selling up. The family’s future lay in New South Wales, not in an ignominious and impecunious return to England. The brouhaha surrounding the trial would blow over soon enough and John would surely be able to negotiate his return. Clearly Elizabeth had faith in his ability to turn the situation around, although it seems she also included some sharp words about financial speculation. Elizabeth was definitely no silent partner when it came to crucial decisions about the future of the family.
John accepted Elizabeth’s decision, and subsequently thanked her for it:
I have the greatest reason to be thankful to God, that your good sense enabled you to resist the temptation of coming to England, had it not been so—into what an Abyss of misery would you and my beloved Children have been plunged—dearest beloved Woman, how great are my obligations to you!14
Then once again he turned his mind to the family business. His letters become full of advice and suggestions about the flocks, much of which Elizabeth could safely ignore. She was too busy getting things done.
In 1812, along with Reverend Marsden and pastoralist Alexander Riley, Elizabeth exported a commercial quantity of wool to England. It was the first time anyone in New South Wales had been able to do so. Riley, buoyed by the success of that venture, subsequently ‘paid Mrs Macarthur 108 guineas…for six merino rams’.15 John Oxley and William Lawson were inspired to buy sheep from Elizabeth too. Under her discerning eye, the Macarthurs’ pioneering breeding regime, for fleece rather than for meat, was finally paying dividends. The Blaxland brothers were similarly enthusiastic about the prospects for sheep, but it had been the publicity surrounding John’s 1804 purchases of rams from the King’s flock at Kew that had prompted them to buy some royal rams of their own to bring with them as free settlers in 1806. In 1813 Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth were feted for finding a way to cross the Blue Mountains that surround the Sydney basin; they were driven to do so almost entirely by a desire to find new grazing land for their sheep.
Elizabeth received excellent prices for that first shipment of wool, in 1812, but it was otherwise a difficult year. Her letters to John were delayed, or lost, and he went without hearing from her for two whole years. He still wrote to her though, long letters full of doubts and fears. Elizabeth knew from these letters that her own had not reached him. What questions had she asked him? What advice might she have been waiting to hear? And all the while worrying about her husband and sons at a time of war. With Edward soldiering on the continent, John took an active interest in the activities of Napoleon, who he described as a ‘Ruffian’ and ‘the great disturber of the World’.16 In November 1812, when the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars was far from settled, even John realised that ‘Never was there a more important period than the present…For my own part I cherish the most sanguine hopes that [Napoleon] can never escape out of Russia’.17
Meanwhile, any financial gain made by Elizabeth was lost by John. His mercantile misadventures had ‘swallowed up all the money I could command, and left me considerably in debt’,18 he wrote to Elizabeth. His financial wounds were further salted when he went to some trouble, ‘indeed to part with my last guinea and to depend upon my credit’, to advance £400 pounds to rebel leader George Johnston so that he could afford to sail home. Elizabeth could be forgiven for exclaiming with indignation as she read this, given how hard she worked to make their businesses successful, and to keep John in funds. John went on to write that he subsequently discovered that Johnston had been advanced an additional £1200 by another New South Wales colleague and was sour. ‘This is all perfectly consistent with the whole of his conduct towards me,’ wrote John, as if he expected Johnston to somehow feel grateful to him for instigating a rebellion for which he, Johnston, took the fall.
But, unlike John Macarthur, in late 1812 Johnston was allowed to sail home to New South Wales, and to return to his Annandale farm. In an echo of Elizabeth’s circumstances, Johnston’s convict partner Esther had been ably managing the family properties—and raising their seven children—in his absence. It would be entirely understandable if Elizabeth also felt sour seeing Esther’s de facto husband return so soon. A year after Johnston arrived back in the colony, in November 1814, he married Esther and legitimised their relationship. Most historians argue the marriage occurred at the urging of Governor Macquarie but I wonder if, free of the burdens of upholding regimental honour, Johnston simply and finally followed his heart.
While Elizabeth continued to wait for John’s homecoming, in 1812 John’s nephew Hannibal (aged twenty-four) returned to New South Wales with his bride Anna Maria King (aged nineteen). Maria, as she was usually called, was the daughter of former governor King, and John was full of praise for her. He wrote to Elizabeth of the London wedding, confident that the new bride would ‘soon entitle herself to your warmest regard, since to know her was to love her’.19 The beleaguered King had died within a year of his return to England. Since then, John Macarthur and Hannibal had visited the widowed Mrs King, who having tried, and failed, to extract a pension from the government was living in straitened circumstances.
Within days of the wedding, Hannibal and Maria set sail for New South Wales aboard the Isabella, overseeing a mixed cargo of retail items of Uncle John’s to be sold in Sydney. This was yet another venture that did not go well, and a year later John wrote to Hannibal to say he hoped the affair would be a lesson to him. In truth, the colony was at that time enduring a commercial depression and its effects were widely felt. Hannibal was unlucky rather than incompetent, although John may have believed otherwise. To continue John’s own run of bad luck, the Isabella was shipwrecked on her way back to England, off the Falkland Islands, although the cargo, crew and passengers were saved.20 Hannibal, wrote John as the newlyweds departed, was as ‘blunt, honest and unsophisticated as when he left Parramatta’,21 but he sincerely hoped his presence would relieve Elizabeth from ‘the necessity of attending to the laborious and more disagreeable part of an undertaking that not many men would be capable of conducting so successfully as you have done, so much to your own credit, and to the advantage of your Family’.22
No doubt Elizabeth warmly welcomed Hannibal and his wife in Sydney in August 1812. Apart from being pleased to see them, the extra assistance the couple could provide on the farms and in the house was much needed. Maria came equipped with her sunny disposition and a book-length letter from her godmother with enormous detail (and numerous recipes) about how best to entertain at home including menus, the placement of dishes on the table and crucial details like ‘you must have 2 boats of Fish Sauce, for you have no idea how soon it is ladled away’.23 However, Maria would have little chance to take this advice—she would give birth to eleven children over the next twenty years and, probably as a result of all those pregnancies, would be an invalid for much of her life.
By the time Hannibal and Maria arrived, Elizabeth had some interesting wedding news of her own—her fully recovered eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was to be married too. Miss Macarthur (aged twenty) had accepted Mr John Oxley (aged twenty-eight), a handsome, dark-haired naval officer and long-time family friend. Unfortunately, though, the couple had become engaged without John Macarthur’s permission, and Oxley had subsequently departed for England, seeking a civilian appointment to the role of New South Wales’ surveyor-general as well as John’s consent. John gave it, albeit hedged with many provisos about marriage settlements. He knew Oxley was heavily in debt and while noting the young man’s good nature, he doubted his financial prudence and economy. Without knowing Elizabeth’s or his daughter’s views on the matter, but wishing that he did, he left it all up to his wife to determine. ‘In whatever way you decide upon this momentous question of the happiness of our dear Child, be satisfied my beloved wife, I shall be sure to approve your decision.’24
But within a year, and still without hearing from Elizabeth about whether or not the marriage had gone ahead—or was even agreeable to his daughter—John discovered the true extent of John Oxley’s debts and promptly retracted his consent, forbidding the marriage. As a result, Oxley withdrew and the marriage did not go ahead. It was all very well for John to make the principled decision, but it was Elizabeth who had to break the news and then comfort her daughter in her disappointment. There is no happy ending here; daughter Elizabeth never married—she lived out her life in her parents’ home. John Oxley eventually married in Sydney and had two sons. Before then he had two daughters with one woman and a third daughter by another.25 Perhaps that news had also reached John and influenced his change of mind. Oxley served the colony in various senior positions, earning a handsome wage and accumulating land grants, but when he died in 1828 at the age of forty-two he was ‘much embarrassed in his pecuniary circumstances’.26 His one-time fiancée was, as Elizabeth noted in a letter, deeply affected by his death.27
In 1813 Hannibal and Maria, expecting their first child, paid £160 for a property on the opposite bank of the Parramatta River from Elizabeth Farm. Hannibal confessed to his uncle that he was not suited to be a merchant and that farming was, anyway, much more profitable and a less expensive way to live.28 In a nice piece of historic coincidence the property was purchased from Captain Henry Waterhouse, who had imported the first Spanish sheep from Cape Town nearly two decades earlier. Hannibal and Maria called their new home the Vineyard because, back in the 1790s, it had been the site of the colony’s first grapevines.29 While Maria established her own household, Hannibal continued to help Elizabeth. There was no shortage of work for them both.
Elizabeth started keeping records in an old book that John had used for keeping accounts in the long-ago days when he was the regimental paymaster. Now that she was working with Hannibal there was a need to share information. Elizabeth used the old register to make fortnightly reckonings: how many sheep in each flock; how many killed, sold or butchered; how many new arrivals at lambing time; which rams were joined to which ewes. In effect, Elizabeth was establishing Australia’s first merino stud book. But her management skills did not end there.
She also seems to have learnt from her previous experience to be firmer about collecting debts. There was still very little currency circulating in New South Wales and so it was impossible for Elizabeth to run her businesses on a cash basis. After John left for England in 1809 she essentially became a sole trader, and in 1814 she was in court several times, suing for debt—not only on her husband’s behalf, but also in her own name. Elizabeth Macarthur was the only married woman of the period who is recorded as suing in her name alone. It is possible that there were others, but the incomplete marriage records leave the marital status of some female litigants unknown. In allowing Elizabeth’s suit, the magistrates of New South Wales had no single English standard to follow. There was great variation between the counties and boroughs, and even within London, on the right of a woman to trade and sue in her own name. Common law gave way to local practices and in New South Wales the legal system swung in Elizabeth’s favour.30
The precious Spanish rams and ewes, about one hundred of them, were kept close at Elizabeth Farm. The other crossbred sheep, which at the beginning of 1813 numbered 4033, lived with their shepherds on the outlying properties in flocks of about 300, each with four or five rams. With no fences surrounding the outlying pastures, shepherds were a necessary precaution against straying, dingoes and theft. The sheep at Elizabeth Farm were effectively inbred, to maintain purity, but surplus Spanish rams were taken to the properties at Cow Pastures to improve the flocks there. The relative isolation of Cow Pastures ensured that the Macarthur ewes were safe from stray, inferior rams.
As well as the flocks, Elizabeth was overseeing fifty-five horses (including a dozen quality broodmares) and two herds of horned cattle totalling 312.31 The livestock necessary to feed the household—the dairy animals, pigs and the poultry—were so numerous and so unremarkable as to be not worth including in the record book. But they still needed to be managed, as did the extensive orchards and vegetable gardens. Elizabeth also grew wheat, barley and oats and made hay, not a common practice then but another indication of Elizabeth’s forward thinking and farm management acumen. Elizabeth’s friend Elizabeth Macquarie (the governor’s wife) also cut hay, and the two women seem to have been among the first in the colony to do so.
‘We feed hogs,’ wrote Elizabeth in 1816, to her goddaughter in England, ‘we have cattle, keep a dairy, fatten beef and mutton and export fine wool. A variety of avocations arising from these pursuits keeps the mind pretty busily employed.’32 Elizabeth was a master of the modest understatement. She travelled so far and so often to oversee her numerous properties that she wore out her barouche (a light, four-wheeled carriage with a driver’s seat high in front, two double seats inside facing each other, and a folding top over the back seat). Elizabeth didn’t mention the worn-out barouche to John in her letters, but Hannibal wrote to tell him that his aunt was ‘much inconvenienced for want of it’ and suggested John send out a carriage.33
The only indication that John complied with the request lies in a lampooning poem that circulated in the colony at around this time. It described a landau—a carriage slightly larger than but similar to a barouche—with the Macarthur coat of arms (invented by John) emblazoned on the doors. ‘Three fair ladies’—Elizabeth and her two eldest daughters—were ridiculed in the poem for admiring those decorated carriage doors with ‘exalting pride’ despite being the ‘humblest, lowest, basest born’. The owners of the carriage were described as ‘An expert Staymaker once he, An humble Mantua Maker she’.34 This seems a sly reference to John’s father and brother, with their draper and mercer business in Plymouth. The description of Elizabeth as a mantua maker, or professional dressmaker, is mere slander. Clearly the Macarthur family’s successes were not appreciated by all in the colony. All Elizabeth could do was ignore it and, with Hannibal’s help, get on with her work.
Elizabeth and Hannibal were not working alone of course. In addition to the convict shepherds, they engaged various labourers, tradesmen and servants on a full-time or an as-required basis. They were also ably assisted by overseer Thomas Herbert, a horseman and ex-convict who worked for them from 1806 until his death in the 1840s.35 In 1811, Elizabeth had successfully requested the governor grant land to Herbert and to another of her workers. This was the first, but not the last, example of Elizabeth combining kindness with an intelligent view of a long-term advantage. It was in everyone’s interest—including Elizabeth’s—to reward her best and most enterprising servants. Other servants were encouraged to work hard that they might be similarly favoured and, because the grants were almost always awarded to family men and because their land grants adjoined her own, Elizabeth gained a loyal cohort of neighbours whose families could be drawn on for labour at busy times.36
With so many people to supervise, producing fine wool must have sometimes felt like the least of Elizabeth’s concerns, but the prices she could obtain locally for beef and mutton were consistently falling as more and more farms were established in the colony.37 ‘My cares are many and anxious’, wrote Elizabeth to Eliza Kingdon in Bridgerule.38 Wool now became critical to keeping her widely dispersed (and expensive) family financially afloat.