The fountain of my Eyes, which I believed to have been nearly dry, have been opened anew.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO EDWARD MACARTHUR, 17 MAY 1834
When Edward’s grief-stricken letters arrived, in September 1831, Elizabeth was in Sydney, caring for her daughter Mary, who had just given birth to her third child. Elizabeth bore the terrible news of her son’s death with a resigned fortitude, but everyone was deeply worried about how John would take it. He was confined again to bed with an attack of gout so severe that he needed assistance to dress. James and Emmeline, also in Sydney, drove with their mother back to Parramatta, and William joined them there from Camden. Emmeline had never met her brother John, and his sisters barely knew him, but the whole family entered into a long period of mourning.
John confounded his family’s expectations by accepting the news with ‘manly fortitude, blended with tenderness’ and ‘tempered with such Christian resignation to God’s dispensation’ that William, writing about the scene to Edward, said that ‘no words of mine can express how much I revered him’.1 John tried to hide the depths of his sorrow from Elizabeth and, as he recovered from his gout, he was once again out and about, attending meetings of the Legislative Council and making new plans for a grand family home at the Camden Estate. ‘Poor dear John,’ he wrote to Edward. ‘How often do I suffer when alone, indulge in a bitterness of grief no language can describe and this is perhaps more intense because I find it necessary to conceal from your dear mother what I feel.’2
Elizabeth wasn’t fooled. She knew how very deeply John’s feelings ran for his son. And she grieved too, in her quiet way. ‘How often my thoughts dwell on our loss, and on you, my dear Edward. I must not tell, nor will I give way to feelings of sorrow and regret, which can be of no avail.’3 Her husband had no such qualms. John spoke constantly about his beloved son, reading and rereading aloud all his letters. Elizabeth bitterly resented her husband’s behaviour, feeling that he was indulging his sorrow ‘at the expense of ours in talking of the dear departed continually’.4 Their son’s death further deepened the fault line in their marriage, with neither feeling they could lean on the other for support.
Elizabeth wrote as often as she could to her sons in England, whenever a ship was about to leave for England. In an age when the ‘enormous charge of postage’5 was paid by the recipient, based on distance travelled and letter size, Elizabeth attempted frugality by crossing many of her letters—writing across the page from left to right in the usual way and then turning the page at a right angle to write more lines across the existing ones. She seems to have written them on the fly, noting thoughts down as they enter her mind and then apologising. ‘This my dear sons you will say is a proper old woman’s gossipy letter.’6 In fact there is little or no gossip, and rarely a bad word to say about anyone. Elizabeth’s letters, especially after her son’s death, are full of warmth and love and family comings and goings.
John Macarthur seems to have favoured his son John over Edward, and probably over James and William too. John was the child with the shining intellect, with the burgeoning London career, with the parliamentary connections. It was John who was directly responsible for the successful prices received for Macarthur wool in English markets, John who established the Australian Agricultural Company, and John who whispered in all the right ears to ensure land grants and other perks flowed to Macarthur family members. As a father, John Macarthur loved all his children, but he was unlikely to have been subtle about any favouritism. Within a few days of his brother’s death, Edward told his parents that he wished he had been the one to die instead of John, given that Edward’s own life was ‘less valuable than was his’.7
It was now up to Edward to take on the role of family agent and fixer, and he was quick to point out that it meant ‘my destinies now seem fixed in England’.8 Edward was in no hurry to return to New South Wales. In the months following his brother’s death, a worried Edward wrote constantly from London to Parramatta. As the eldest son and his father’s heir, he assumed a patronisingly formal tone towards his adult siblings. ‘My dear Brothers and Sisters,’ he wrote, ‘It becomes your duty to bear up against this heavy calamity and to comfort and console our dear parents. Be assured that in all things I will do my duty here. I feel assured you will do yours at home.’ The question was, though, in the face of their father’s worsening mental state, what did duty entail?
John Macarthur was continuing to give his family plenty of cause for concern and seemed to have entered a state of mania. Elizabeth wrote to Edward:
It is the old story. Setting a variety of wheels in motion, with a Steam Engine power—planning—building—making believe to do so at least, digging up the Earth—altering—directing, driving about at all hours changing his mind continually and in short keeping his family in a perpetual worry.9
John became more and more restless, barely sleeping, walking out for miles and, with no regard for propriety, talking to anyone he encountered. It was clear to Elizabeth that John laboured ‘under a divergence of mind’.10 She had seen it before, but in the past John’s problems had not been quite so exposed to the world.
John soon fell completely into the abyss of paranoia. He accused Elizabeth of infidelity, his daughters of theft, and thought James and William had fled into the countryside. He claimed his son-in-law, Doctor James Bowman, was trying to poison him (which, given the quality of nineteenth century medicines, may not have been far from the truth) and took ‘a most unaccountable dislike to our friend Mrs Lucas’.11 In a frenzied climax at Elizabeth Farm, he rampaged through the house with pistols and swords. Doctor Anderson was fetched from the hospital in Parramatta. He was ‘a very worthy man’, who had been visiting John daily and who, according to Elizabeth, ‘quite understands the nature of his complaints’.12 John was eventually restrained and, in consultation with their doctors, the family confined him within three rooms of the newly renovated house, where he was looked after by longstanding and trusted servants.
Elizabeth, peremptorily ordered out by John, stayed in Sydney with Mary and her family, while her other daughters moved in with Penelope Lucas at Hambledon Cottage. Elizabeth bore her husband’s capricious demands with calm resignation—she would do whatever was necessary to help maintain his peace of mind and if that meant staying away from him then, as she wrote to Edward, ‘such is life’.13 John, although remaining confined, soon recovered his equanimity. He was in good physical health, Elizabeth was told, and appeared ‘cheerful and not at all unhappy’.14 Elizabeth and her children made the heartbreaking decision to have him declared insane.
Elizabeth had long anticipated John’s breakdown: ‘I cannot say that the blow—severe as it is—has come upon us without long previous apprehensions that sooner or later, that mighty mind, would break down and give way.’15 In Sydney she kept to herself and stayed within the family circle: walking in the newly planted Botanical Gardens; taking carriage rides with Mary and the grandchildren; accepting some callers but declining to visit in return. John recovered enough to visit his wife, just for the day, and Elizabeth thought him better ‘but still too restless’.16 Although she remained optimistic about John’s recovery, Elizabeth did not, then or indeed ever, make a return visit. Her marriage was effectively over. It is impossible to know whether the separation was simply a matter of acquiescing to John’s capricious demands, or because Elizabeth had finally had enough. Either way, it was a difficult time for everyone.
James and William, appointed as John’s guardians, took it in turns to stay at Elizabeth Farm. James, especially, found it emotionally gruelling. His father would rail against him, wrote Elizabeth to Edward, with ‘all the bitterness which your poor father can readily call to his aid’.17 But when James, hurt and distressed, left to return to Camden, his father would then demand his return. He wanted James with him all the time.
Almost a year after his initial confinement, there was some sense that he might be improving—and Elizabeth dared hope she could return home. John was able to walk into Parramatta, and there talk rationally and calmly with those he met. But he continually invited strangers home to dine with him, much to James’s dismay. One of his Bowman grandsons, little James, ‘was taken to see his poor grandfather’, wrote Elizabeth to Edward, and, much to everyone’s relief, ‘was kindly received’.18 But the improvement did not last, and Elizabeth and John did not reconcile. John continued to believe his family was conspiring against him, and he was causing havoc within the house.
In 1833 the family decided to move him to Belgenny Farm. One of the men John had stopped to chat with a few months previously witnessed his removal and, shocked and upset, wrote with alarm to the newspaper. When he had last met with John in the street:
I never in my life saw him look better, or converse more rationally, and he told me he was every day hoping to resume full management of his affairs. [And yet] passing through Parramatta a few days since, I was astonished to find that Mr John McArthur was hurried off to Camden against his will, the poor man loudly protesting against the violence.19
This meddling, anonymous ‘Observer’ called for an immediate inquiry. The family was, understandably, rather put out. James visited the newspaper editors to explain the situation and, according to Elizabeth ‘they all behaved very well’.20 They apologised for inquiring into a private matter, and John Macarthur’s illness was not mentioned in the press again.
Despite John’s apparent unwillingness to remove to Belgenny Farm, Elizabeth reported to Edward that she had been told he was ‘there enjoying himself very much, taking great interest in the building, the garden and horses. I do not hear that he makes any enquiries or notices anything relative to the sheep’.21 Elizabeth did not visit him. In the privacy of his estate at Camden Park, away from interactions with strangers, John regained his physical health and, in the later part of the year, was once more fully lucid. He took a lively interest in the building of the new family home although in practice it was William who oversaw the day-to-day operations.
John also recognised that the Camden property was no longer quite the jewel in the Macarthur crown. Overgrazing and drought had taken a toll on the quality of the grasslands. John’s will, which distributed the various Macarthur properties among his sons but marked Edward as the heir and chief beneficiary, now needed to be revised to ensure that James and William were still treated fairly. But John had drafted and signed his will before his sons assumed guardianship over him. In order to revise it now, James and William would have to revoke their guardianship and restore their father’s legal rights. Was John well enough for them to take the risk? To their credit, James and William maintained the guardianship arrangement and refused to allow their father to change his will in their favour, even as friends advised them against doing so. They trusted that Edward would treat them fairly. Despite these ongoing concerns John, for the time being, relaxed at Belgenny Farm into a better, calmer state of mind.
With John at Belgenny, Elizabeth was finally—after an absence of more than a year—able to ‘return to dear home’ at Parramatta.22 Before she moved back to Elizabeth Farm, her youngest daughter Emmeline (now twenty-six) spent some time putting the house ‘in better order’, perhaps to spare her mother the full evidence of John’s destructive outbursts. The emotional turmoil of John’s illness had taken its toll on Elizabeth, and once she returned to Parramatta she was increasingly unwilling to leave home. ‘I have plenty of exercise within the limits of our own estate and the looking about the gardens and grounds annexed keeps me amused,’ she wrote to Edward, ‘but the effort is to make visits abroad and the apprehension of coming in contact with strangers I have not been able to combat.’23 All those curious people asking after John, all the excuses she made on his behalf—it was too much. Easier by far to stay at home and receive visits only from those who knew her—and understood her current circumstances. ‘People in the world would think this is a foolish feeling,’ continued Elizabeth ‘and perhaps it is so.’24 But there was little she could do about it.
Elizabeth took comfort in her friendship with Penelope Lucas, and in her garden at Elizabeth Farm, which by all accounts included an impressive collection of plants from around the world. Edward regularly sent her seeds and seedlings, including a sample of corn. Penelope Lucas, knowing full well how much her friend liked to discuss her sons, would without fail comment upon the little corn plantation when they walked together in the grounds. There was a decorative pond near some willows and native cypresses, and although the water remained a little muddy, Elizabeth hoped it would clear when some rain fell.
Elizabeth’s eldest daughter, now known as Aunt Eliza, had an interest in the garden too. ‘She has a fine collection of bulbs from the Cape,’ wrote Elizabeth to Edward.25 Portugal laurel, hydrangea, iris—the garden was ‘very full of large & beautiful flowers…but the pride of the garden just now is the Magnolia’.26 Explorer Thomas Mitchell had spent a night at Elizabeth Farm in 1831, before setting out on one of his expeditions, and he wrote about its gardens: ‘There I saw the first olive tree ever planted in Australia; the Cork-tree in luxuriance; the Caper growing amongst the rocks, the English Oak, the horse chestnut, broom, magnificent mulberry trees…[and a] great variety of roses growing in beds, also climbing roses.’27
At sixty-seven, Elizabeth had for some time suffered from slightly inflamed eyes and was beginning to find it difficult to write to her children as often as she might like. Her eyes ached and she could not always see clearly enough to trim the end of the quill she used for writing. Edward sent out a pair of spectacles which, as Elizabeth wrote back, ‘answer exceedingly well’.28 She preferred to write by day, but sometimes wrote to Edward of an evening:
It is now candlelight, and I know you will hardly be able to make out my scribble…Emmeline is at the same table with me, writing to you also. She is not quite well, but nevertheless she writes. Elizabeth and our friend Mrs Lucas are in the adjoining room chatting with Dr Anderson and your little nephew and namesake has just been to kiss grandmother and Aunt Emmeline and bid goodnight.29
Elizabeth did not keep herself in total isolation. John’s nephew Hannibal, his wife Maria and their many children still lived just across the river and the two families were in regular contact. Her old friend Betsy Marsden visited, accompanied by her grown-up daughter. And Anna King, wife of the former governor King and mother to Hannibal’s wife, Maria, had returned to New South Wales after a twenty-four-year absence. She became a frequent visitor to Elizabeth Farm. ‘She desires her kind love to you,’ wrote Elizabeth to Edward. ‘She is very active and visits about in a most wonderful way for an elderly person.’ Mrs King was then sixty-nine—only a year older than the tongue-in-cheek Elizabeth.
Immediately prior to Mrs King’s arrival in New South Wales, Elizabeth was thinking about whether her friend would ‘be pleased with this altered community’.30 Elizabeth considered the colony wonderfully changed, with ‘ships arriving and departing continually. It has started forward into a degree of importance I had never expected to see it attain. Two or three stage coaches leave Sydney every day to Parramatta and one to Liverpool.’31 But in her current, troubled state of mind, there was so much rapid change in the community ‘that I could hardly feel myself at home in it. It is literally by keeping at home that I do feel at ease’.32 In March 1834 Elizabeth put away her fears long enough to travel to Sydney, to stay again with Mary. She wrote to Edward to say, ‘Yesterday your dear sister Mary was safely delivered of a fine little girl!’33 Finally a granddaughter, after three boys. Not that Elizabeth in any way resented those little boys, noting in the same paragraph that the second eldest, James, ‘is a very merry active little fellow full of frolic and merriment’.34
Hannibal Macarthur, with his mother-in-law’s arrival, not to mention the recent birth of his and Maria’s eleventh child, finally decided to commence ‘building a house on a very extensive scale and next to the present cottage’.35 The new house would be a two-storey building of Georgian Regency design, with a Doric colonnade along the ground floor. It very much resembled the house John had been building (and revising, and changing his mind about and revising again) at Camden Park since the mid-1820s. John’s enthusiasm for the new house, which would become the grand family seat, was such that he moved from the cottage at Belgenny into one of the partially completed wings. The family had ‘never known him in such good health—he eats, sleeps and looks well’.36 Of course, it couldn’t last.
In March, at about the same time as his first granddaughter was born, John descended again into illness and mental collapse. He was once more restrained, this time confined to the farm cottage at Belgenny. There, on 11 April 1834, John Macarthur died. It was three years, almost to the day, since his son John had passed away and two years since he had seen his wife.
Details of John’s final days are scant and the actual cause of his unexpected death is unclear. The newspapers of the day barely mentioned John Macarthur’s passing, and he was buried quickly and quietly at Camden Park, not in a churchyard but on a rise opposite and about a mile away from the still-unfinished grand house. More and more the colonial settlers were aping the English aristocracy by establishing family burial grounds within their own estates and in time John’s wife and children would be buried beside him. Elizabeth did not attend her husband’s funeral, but that was not unusual—funerals were routinely, at this time, male-only events.
Instead she stayed at home and wept. It was five weeks before she could bring herself to write to Edward. ‘I had fondly indulged myself with the hope,’ Elizabeth wrote to her son, ‘that it would have pleased God to restore the dear departed to a more sane state of mind & that he might have been at peace with his family.’ It was not to be. Now that ‘the shock arising—or rather increased by the suddenness of the event, is in some measure subsided’, she could only take consolation in her faith: ‘Thy will be done on Earth blessed God as it is in Heaven.’37
John Macarthur’s will, written in 1828, bequeathed Elizabeth Farm and all its contents to Edward. Elizabeth, as John’s wife, was to have the use of the property, and the contents, during her lifetime. He also left her his shares in the Bank of Australia and an annuity, to be charged on the estate. Similar annuities were provided for his unmarried daughters, and £100 each to the Bowmans and Mrs Lucas. John stipulated that his ‘esteemed friend Penelope Lucas spinster of Parramatta [was] to reside in the house and premises wherein she now lives during her life or so long as she shall think fit.’38 If Mrs Lucas were to leave, or die, then his eldest daughter Elizabeth was to have the use of Hambledon Cottage. Everything else—all of his considerable property and stock—was divided between Edward, James and William Macarthur. In an era of the primacy of the male first-born, John’s will seemed to Elizabeth and her family to be entirely appropriate and, anyway, in day-to-day terms, nothing changed. James and William continued to manage all the various estates on behalf of the whole family, with the profits pooled and drawn down only as required to meet everyone’s relatively modest living expenses.
Edward, in England, continued to be sent funds representing his share and he continued to do his best to fill his dead brother’s role as family agent. He procured the annual order of shoes for the family in Parramatta, ordered a riding habit for Emmeline and chose coloured muslins for his sisters’ summer dresses. He regularly sent out books, periodicals and furniture. There was occasionally some talk of his returning to New South Wales but, in his mother’s lifetime at least, it never eventuated.
Aware that his brothers had shouldered the entire burden of their father’s illness and that he was continuing to live in comparative ease as a result of their efforts, Edward did his best to cultivate powerful friends in England, who could further benefit the family, by bestowing gifts from New South Wales. A pair of black swans for his good friend Lord Cholmondeley; another pair for the duke of Portland. Brightly feathered parrot skins also made most acceptable presents, and Emmeline arranged to send him some more.
Edward had lobbied for a baronetcy for his father (which as eldest son he would inherit) but was unsuccessful. In a letter replying to Edward’s request, Lord Aberdeen noted that Edward’s father had ‘earned the appropriate reward of an ample fortune’ and implied that, under the circumstances, that was more than enough.39 Like his father and brother before him, Edward inspected the Macarthur fleeces arriving in England and pronounced them too dirty, not well presented, and with the colours too mixed. And as their mother had done before them, battling with dust and dirt and drought, Edward’s brothers duly ignored his advice.
Elizabeth continued to stay at home, receiving visitors but declining to pay them calls in return. She was not one to mope, and her eldest daughter reported that she was ‘quite well and in better spirits than could have almost been hoped for’,40 but Elizabeth was in the habit of sparing her family her true sorrows. It was not until January 1835, some eight months after John’s death, that she could bring herself to travel down to Camden Park. In the wake of their father’s death, James and William were planning to sell off several hundred acres of land to create a township, which would also be called Camden, near where the Cow Pastures bridge crossed the Nepean River. By 1840 the first 100 half-acre (2000-square-metre) allotments were for sale. But in the mid-1830s there was not even an inn nearby; colonial travellers passing through to places further inland routinely stayed with William and James. Elizabeth, still unable to face encounters with strangers, stayed away until she could be sure of her privacy. ‘I want to be quiet and alone when I make this first visit—which must excite feelings I would not forego but of too solemn nature for publicity,’41 she wrote, though she also said she regretted missing the shearing.
When finally, in January, Elizabeth did make the journey to Camden Park, she was accompanied by her daughter Elizabeth and her grandson Edward Bowman, now nearly nine. They stayed for three weeks. James came up from the properties at Argyle, further inland, and little Edward’s Uncle William went to some lengths to amuse and divert the boy, presumably so that Elizabeth could have some time alone. The fine new two-storey house, built a mile or so behind and out of sight of the farm buildings of Belgenny, was all but finished and Elizabeth admired it very much. ‘It is a handsome building,’ she wrote to Edward, ‘more of a Classic character than any other I have seen—spacious on the ground floor and indeed sufficiently so on the Chamber floor.’ But she couldn’t help thinking of her husband, so much the originator of the building and very present in every detail, who didn’t live to see it finished. Then one thought led to another and she ached for her missing children. ‘I cannot pursue this train of thought’ she told Edward, ‘you may be sure when weeping over his tomb I thought of and prayed for you also my dear son.’42
In time a memorial stone was erected above John’s resting place, which includes mention of the first little James who Elizabeth lost in 1797, before his first birthday. Her grown-up son John had his own tombstone at St Martin-in-the-Fields, in London. No stone, though, for Elizabeth’s first little girl, who died on the voyage out from England and was buried at sea.
While she was staying at Camden Park, Elizabeth missed—probably deliberately—a vice-regal ball and some lively meals at the Vineyard. Hannibal’s brother-in-law, Captain Phillip Parker King (son of Anna Josepha and the former Governor King; brother to Hannibal’s wife) was the former commander of schooner HMS Adventure. In company with another ship, King and the crew of Adventure had spent the years 1826 to 1830 charting the coasts of Peru, Chile and Patagonia, with King earning a promotion to post-captain along the way. In 1832 he had returned to his properties and wife Harriet in New South Wales (in a now familiar story, Harriet had been managing them in her husband’s absence). Now, on 12 January 1835, the Adventure was anchored in Port Jackson with that sister ship: HMS Beagle. The two vessels were in the fifth year of a scientific sailing expedition, and one of the scientists on board was twenty-six-year-old Charles Darwin.43
Darwin admired the bustling city of Sydney, but the great numbers of convicts and the limited number of bookshops (made worse because, apparently, those existing sold a low class of book) led Darwin to fear that Australia ‘with such habits and without intellectual pursuits…can hardly fail to deteriorate and become like…the United States’.44 He took a quick journey across the Blue Mountains to the newly settled Bathurst region, returning to attend a ball hosted by the governor on 26 January, to celebrate the forty-seventh anniversary of the First Fleet’s arrival at Sydney Cove.
Darwin was fascinated by the Australian wildlife but less impressed with the young ladies. Lunching with Hannibal Macarthur and his family at the Vineyard he heard, much to his patriotic horror, otherwise ‘very nice looking young ladies exclaim “Oh, we are Australians and know nothing of England!”’45 Darwin was equally disappointed in the state of the colony’s society, noting that: ‘The whole population, poor and rich, are bent on acquiring wealth; amongst the higher orders wool and sheep grazing form the constant subject of conversation.’46 Given that most of the ‘higher orders’ Darwin spoke with were Macarthurs, his observations are hardly surprising.
After her three weeks at Camden Park, Elizabeth returned home to Elizabeth Farm, no doubt to hear all about the visitors, now sailing for Hobart Town (Darwin’s expedition would take more than a year to return to England). Despite her grievous losses, Elizabeth, of course, carried on. Her daughter Mary and the Bowman family moved out of their rooms at the Sydney Hospital and into the fine new home called Lyndhurst that they’d built on nearly 40 hectares at Glebe, at the edge of the Sydney township. It looked across Blackwattle Bay to the Rocks area of Sydney Town. But within a year of their move Doctor Bowman was for some reason removed as inspector of colonial hospitals and, although he continued to receive his official salary for a further two years, the Bowman family may have begun to regret their expensive show home. In August Elizabeth had further cause for worry: her daughter Emmeline caught the measles, although she recovered to be, in her eldest sister’s opinion, in better health than she had been for years.47
Then in October 1835 Elizabeth suffered a further blow: her old friend Betsy Marsden died. Elizabeth turned to her sons at Camden Park for solace and in November she arrived for a longer visit. Despite losing Betsy, Elizabeth was recovering her equanimity and was less worried about socialising. For this visit she was accompanied by the latest governor, Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Bourke, and his married daughter, Anne, who wrote to her brother that ‘Old Mrs Macarthur and Emmeline went up [to Camden] and made it very pleasant’.48 Elizabeth described Anne as ‘a frank, lively little woman quite free from affectation and I should think very warm hearted. She has a delightful voice and having had the advantage of good tuition she sings most enchantingly.’49 When the governor and his daughter departed, Penelope Lucas came to stay for three weeks, followed by little William Bowman and his Aunt Eliza. Elizabeth returned to Parramatta in early 1836 ‘much better for this excursion’ and ‘blessed with good health’.50 It was just as well because in 1836 Elizabeth lost two more stalwarts.
The first loss was only temporary. Her son James sailed once again for London, this time to talk to Edward about the family business and to obtain a large loan to buy more land near Camden Park. He also wanted to find himself a wife, although on his last trip to England he had noted to his father that all the young ladies he met, through his brother John, were ‘in circles far too high to suit a Society so peculiar as ours’.51 James also worried about the dangers of marrying an English woman, who would be a virtual stranger, without the benefit of long previous acquaintance.
The second loss was far more difficult to bear. Mrs Lucas, esteemed and loved by the whole Macarthur family, passed away, aged sixty-eight. In time, someone—surely it was Elizabeth—arranged for a memorial to be erected in St John’s Church, Parramatta. A female figure engaged in teaching children is depicted in a delicate marble carving. Beneath is a loving inscription:
To the memory of
PENELOPE LUCAS,
More than thirty years resident in this colony,
Who, having contributed to its welfare by the
Example of her active life and benevolence,
Dying, bequeathed great part of her property
For the promotion of religious education
In this community.
In unavailing sorrow for her loss
This tablet is erected
To commemorate her great worth
And humble reliance for salvation,
Not on her own but on her Redeemer’s merits.
She died in 1836, aged 68 years.
Elizabeth wrote to Edward with much understatement that she would, ‘miss the solace of friendship the last of so many years’. In that same letter to Edward, written late in December 1836, Elizabeth thanked him for writing with discretion and care ‘about the death of my aged parent’.52 Elizabeth’s mother Grace Bond had died too, aged eighty-nine.
Grace was only nineteen when Elizabeth was born and forty-two when her daughter sailed for New South Wales. She never saw Elizabeth again. Perhaps that was not so unusual at that time, although Elizabeth certainly had had the means to visit, if not the will. Does it signify that none of Elizabeth’s daughters was named Grace? Some brief excerpts of Elizabeth’s letters to her mother survive, but none written by mother to daughter. We can never know how they truly felt about one another. Grace was buried by the Reverend Thomas Kingdon—brother of Elizabeth’s old friend Bridget—in the churchyard at Bridgerule, beside her third husband John Bond. Her first husband and her infant daughter Grace shared a grave nearby.
Less than a year later, the whole New South Wales colony was plunged into mourning when the news arrived of the death of King William IV, son of beleaguered ‘mad king’ George III. The king died in June 1837, having ruled for only seven years. William IV was succeeded by his niece, who had just turned eighteen. Her name was Victoria.