12    The Exclusives Lose Their Dominance

William Cox’s activities acquired a new and philanthropic dimension in the 1820s, as did those of many of his Pure Merino contemporaries. These activities, even if often tinged with self-interest, might have continued colony-wide to the great advantage of the landed gentry. But by the 1840s the gentry’s influence had become so diminished by a variety of factors, not least their own intransigence and squabbling, that the benevolence only survived locally, much in the manner of that practised by English squires. This period proved to be one of the most disputatious of the colony’s early history, when the oddness of local conditions turned most of the gentry, most squatters and native-born ‘Australians’ into political activists.

Bathurst and Bigge had between them outlined a future for the colony in which the pastoralists would be dominant, employing convict labour, even if nothing that the civil servant Bigge proposed could be described as visionary. But, in the historian Michael Roe’s words: ‘Time and space and growth all undercut the Bathurst–Bigge design, yet its upholders fought back, demanding attention. Their failure was nearly as significant and as interesting as any success in Australian history.’1

William’s role during these years was not entirely typical of the gentry, because he was liberal minded and often – but not always – supported the emancipists’ aspirations. His liberalities had their limitations, for example the possibility of having ex-convicts potentially sitting on criminal juries, which he could not accept. Yet his experiences, together with those of Jamison and a few others, do cast a useful light both on his own character and on that curious period of history, with its internecine political infighting, before the gold rush of the 1850s changed everything again. Nor did anything stop William continuing to expand his estates and build his family dynasty, right up until his death. This was as well as executing government construction contracts and sitting as a senior magistrate, not to mention raising a second family with his new wife, Anna Blachford.

Up to the 1820s, the public role of the landed gentry had been held back by Governor Macquarie. If William’s great patron was ‘the father of Australia’, he was also capable of being an unyielding parent, especially where matters of the larger public interest were concerned. Local benevolent initiatives he fostered, colony-wide ones – except those promoted by the Church – he often prohibited. This was unrealistic, since long before he departed the leading landed settlers had become established as citizens of substance. As such they were natural leaders of the community. They had come to believe in their authority and rights, which Macquarie ought to have recognized. At the same time, so far as the overwhelming majority of them were concerned, the ownership of land was at the heart of everything. It certainly was for William and, to a slightly lesser extent, his sons.

The possession of land was not only associated, in the English gentry’s mind, with birth, political power and stability, it was the reason why so many of the exclusives had come out to the wide spaces of the colony in the first place.2 Land remained inextricably linked to progress and to the quarrel between the ‘ancient nobility’ and the new squatters, even though most gentry had engaged in squatting at some time or other themselves.³ The established gentry’s status was compromised by the squatter arrivals in two ways. The Pure Merinos had invested their money in acquiring land. The squatters simply took territory for nothing and invested only in stock, including some very small-scale farmers, often ex-convicts. Secondly, many among the larger scale squatters aspired to the same social standing as the gentry, which by origins and social standing they enjoyed at home, such as ex-officers. This complicated situation has already been explained.

The landed gentry’s wealth and status had indeed been greatly bolstered by the Bathurst/Bigge pastoral concept. From a sociological point of view it had adverse effects, at least from William’s liberal standpoint; the Bigge Report led immediately to the abandonment of Macquarie’s constructive views on the rehabilitation of ex-convicts, to which he subscribed. It was true also, although apparently not appreciated by many settlers, that the ex-convict emancipist population was certain to assume a much wider significance, fuelled by the ex-convicts’ belief that they had the right to the colony’s land, as William and others had observed to Bigge in 1819. Two decades later, in 1837, James Macarthur published his classic book New South Wales, its Present State and Future Prospects in London. In this he deplored that ex-convicts thought ‘the colony theirs by right, and that the emigrant settlers were interlopers upon the soil’.

Adding to this pressure, the emancipists’ free-born children were becoming a growing influence and one which, if the authorities had thought about it at all, had been inevitable once women convicts were sent out with the First Fleet in 1788. In all, some 12,500 female convicts were transported. In the 1820s those born before 1810 were coming of age. By 1828 one quarter of the population of New South Wales had been born in the colony.4 These young people were entitled to the rights of British subjects and they began to be joined in the 1830s by an ever increasing number of young free immigrant workers, encouraged to come out with assistance from the home government as part of Goderich’s plans of 1831. In the whole of the 1820s such free immigrants had totalled 6500, but between 1831 and 1840 over 40,000 arrived.⁵

To further this inflow Governor Bourke gave a bounty to settlers who employed their own agents to bring in mechanics or agricultural labourers; single men from 18 to 25 years old, unmarried females between 15 and 30, and couples under 30. This was on top of government-assisted schemes. Both offered real attractions for the immigrants, but little for the great landowners. Although, in practice, the wages paid were not as high as those proposed in 1831, workers’ pay was still high compared to the cost of employing assigned convicts. In 1833 immigrant female domestic servants received £8 to £16 a year, men more, and they also had to be housed and fed. 6 Thirteen years later, in 1846, convicts whose sentences had expired were being sent as labourers to Port Phillip and paid £20 a year, hardly a crippling increase.⁷

Although there was heated dispute locally about the character of the female immigrants, for both sexes the colony was a welcome change from the deeply impoverished state of rural southern England. Far from improving, this had became more intense since the 1790s. In November 1825 William Cobbett recorded that ‘the honest labourer’ is fed worse than a prisoner and existed ‘on 7d a day for six days of the week and nothing on Sunday’.⁸ In Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset there were rural riots in 1830, while the first would-be trade unionists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, were transported from Dorset to the colony in 1834. Thus immigration brought an influx of men and women who were already politicized from their bitter experiences in the home country. ‘Pastoralism encouraged militancy among the working class … many urban workers yearned to become yeomen and most free workers hated the thought of employment on outback sheep stations.’⁹ However, they usually seem to have put that old resentment aside when given new opportunities.

Under Bourke’s scheme the Macarthurs successfully ‘brought out forty one families between April 1837 and March 1839, together with a small number of single men … This was only possible because the late 1830s were a time of great economic expansion [in the colony]’.¹⁰ The Coxes do not appear to have done anything similar with whole families, although William’s sons imported craftsmen to build their elegant mansions at Mulgoa, where building progress was only checked by adverse economic circumstances in the 1840s.

In the 1820s and in the 1830s, more and more ‘gentlemen’ squatters arrived, also encouraged by the home government. Bourke’s Crown Lands Occupation Bill of 1836 systemized and extended the granting of temporary licences to be issued to persons of good repute on ‘runs’ beyond the official limits of occupation, effectively legalizing the squatting.¹¹ A decade later, in 1845, Gideon Scott Lang defined squatting: ‘The first principle of squatting is that the squatter shall have full power to settle without restriction wherever he can find unoccupied pasture, and to take possession of as much land as his stock can occupy’.12 Donald Carisbrooke writes: ‘Many of the immigrants with capital who came to Australia in 1838 did not intend to make it their permanent home, but to return to Britain with their fortunes made’.¹³

Some doctors and lawyers might have planned to return. But the exarmy and navy officers put out to grass by the recession which followed the Napoleonic War, and their half-pay brethren, were different. They had been allowed to commute their half pay into land purchases in the colony, especially in the Hunter River valley, and came to have considerable influence. Most considered themselves to be gentry, although Jane Austen, in her novels of that period, considered naval officers (who were unquestionably socially superior to those from the army) to be on the borderline. To read Austen’s Persuasion, for example, is to understand how intensely small distinctions were felt. A knight was considerably inferior to a baronet and an admiral was barely on calling terms with either. Her characters include naval captains of 30 who had been promoted due to others being killed in action, who were no longer employed. Men like these became squatters in New South Wales, where the English social distinctions were copied.

Some newcomers really were of the English gentry, or better. The Wyndhams, cousins of the Earl of Egremont, England’s largest landowner, and of a Secretary of State, were genuine aristocrats who built Dalwood in the Hunter.¹⁴ George Wyndham became a custodian of British ways in the Hunter. Governor Gipps called him a ‘gentleman greatly respected and of high repute for talents and education in the Colony’ when asking him to stand for the Legislative Council in March 1839 (which he declined on the ground of his private affairs requiring his undivided attention).¹⁵ Nonetheless, or perhaps because of it, Wyndham was seen by emancipists as a symbol of squatter arrogance. On that same occasion William Cox Jnr was approached by Gipps and also declined for similar reasons. This demonstrates one way in which the ‘the ancient nobility’, in Mudie’s pejorative phrase, were being asked to share their pre-eminence with relative newcomers.

An important point about these arriving families was that they were almost a generation younger than the original exclusives, whose natural political enemies they became, whilst – as happens with immigrants almost anywhere – they in turn became resentful of those who followed, because the more numerous the squatters the more competition there was for land and labour. In so far as the original landed gentry were concerned, squatting was only acceptable if it was brought within the framework of ownership and attachment to the soil. They were particularly hostile to the small squatters, who ran a few sheep or cattle and were accused of stealing sheep and sheltering bushrangers. These men were usually on unclaimed land within the county boundaries. The main squatter territory, the area around the Hunter River, was quite different to either the Cumberland Plain or the land west of the mountains, having terrain suitable for both grazing and agriculture.16 It spawned a different society, obviously different to the small opportunist squatters and also to the genuine gentry. They included the viciously reactionary ‘Major’ James Mudie (a former officer of the Marines who had been a lieutenant, never a major).

William Cox did eventually extend his interests to the Hunter too, although conflict between the old colonists and the new immigrants reached its worst proportions there, in an extreme reflection of the colony overall, where the free immigrants were generally disliked by both the native-born and their fathers, the emancipists.¹⁷ In the 1830s Chief Justice Forbes told Governor Bourke that ‘as he saw it there were two political groups in the colony – the immigrants and emancipists’.¹⁸ This was a simplification. Within the political stewpot there were also the increasing subsidiary groupings already mentioned; the emancipists’ native-born offspring; the squatters, the would-be gentleman immigrants and the increasing number of immigrant workers. They all contributed to the pressures on the exclusives.

Looking at it from their angle, the historian John Ward asks, referring to the Macarthurs, how the squatters could have a credible commitment to the colony, as against the ‘ancient nobility’ who ‘had been granted land or bought it, who by skilful breeding had improved the quality of the fleeces and who by immense expenditures had built up permanent homesteads and establishments’. Freehold ownership of land, according to the Macarthurs, gave independent gentlemen their title to political and social authority.19 By the end of the 1820s, before the squatters began to arrive in any number, the Macarthurs’ Camden Park incorporated over 60,000 acres. By then John had died and the family’s authority was being exercised by his thoughtful son, James, and his nephew, Hannibal, while William Cox’s authority was increasingly being wielded in conjunction with his sons in a family enterprise which would be of much greater eventual extent than the Macarthurs’.

It was against this increasingly agitated background that the landed gentry attempted to exercise ‘political and social authority’ from the 1820s onwards, once Macquarie had left. They were largely held together by the concept of respectability underpinning their position and they tried to shape society not only by participating in politics, but also through their role as economic men.²⁰ As has been observed, Macquarie had kept a close eye on any activities rivalling his own and limited what the established landed gentry could do. He had increased the muscle of the Sydney Benevolent Society and given his approbation ‘in the most flattering terms’ to a petition for trial by jury, the ‘valued inheritance of our ancestors’, as well as supporting the lifting of restrictions on the burthen of trading ships, explained below. But he stopped the formation of an agricultural society, which could have helped the farming community as a whole. Archibald Bell’s replies to Bigge’s questioning on 27 November 1819 show that it had been a genuinely disinterested idea, although with one qualification:

[Bigge] ‘Was any attempt made to form an agricultural society?’

[Bell] ‘Several attempts have been made & proposals offered … by the Gentlemen of the Colony, but the application was negatived’.

‘Can you recollect the names of the persons who joined in the application?’

‘Mr Cox, Mr Marsden, the two Messrs Blaxland, Sir John Jamison and I think the Judge Advocate, there were others who names I forget & I think it took place about two years ago … this was submitted to the consideration of the Governor with a request that he would become the Patron.’21

Bell also explained that there had been objections to the possibility of emancipists being allowed to join the society, which qualification the Governor disliked:

I heard that he [Macquarie] objected to it as persons who had been convicts were not likely to be admitted … the mode of admission was to have been by ballot & although no specific article was framed to exclude this description of persons, we [supported] the principle of their exclusion.²²

Nor until after Macquarie had left were the more intellectual Philosophical Society of Australia and the Sydney Institution able to come to life, and leaders like Sir John Jamison become free to launch new initiatives. Jamison himself, for many years an associate of William’s, was to prove an energetic liberal and supporter of the emancipists, becoming a contentious figure as a result.²³ Liberals like Jamison and Governor Bourke supported ex-convicts’ aspirations out of intellectual conviction, while William appears to have done so out of sympathy and understanding for their situation. It was also no coincidence that this energetic discussion of possible improvements came about after Bigge’s long visit in 1819–21. The Commissioner had been very concerned with improvements, which his report reflected.

The landed gentry’s inclination towards disinterested benevolent work had been evident long before Macquarie left and Bigge took his report to parliament. As might be expected, the magistrates appealed for help for the Hawkesbury community after floods, as they had done under Bligh. Thus in June 1817 William headed an appeal to the Governor about the ‘great distress occasioned by the recent inundations’, to which Macquarie responded on 17 June, giving relief.24 William also led the Hawkesbury Benevolent Society, jointly with magistrates Brabyn, Cartwright and Mileham. On 20 May 1819 Macquarie acknowledged a letter from them about a general meeting and replied:

For the interests of the Poor of the Districts of the Hawkesbury … I shall be happy to give the said Committee in trust for the support of the Benevolent Institution, one thousand acres of land in any part of the Colony where Crown lands remain still unappropriated.

The gift evidently paid results over the years. It was noted at Windsor on 3 December 1827 that:

Members of the Select Committee [of the Society] having perused and made ourselves fully acquainted with the Method adopted by William Cox, Brabyn and Bell Esqrs … the measures resolved upon are most conducive to the interests of the Society.²⁵

Income came from the sales of cattle bred from a donated herd. Since the stockholders were careful to cull their own herds of the worst animals when making donations, the society was reckoned to have ‘owned the roughest mob of Colonial cattle’.²⁶

Similarly, on 3 May 1823 several JPs, including William, wrote to Governor Brisbane about relief for aged persons ‘who have been discharged from the benefit of His Majesty’s stores [and] … are in the utmost distress, nearly the whole of them being incapable of labor and subsisting on the precarious bounty of their neighbours’. The oldest was 90 and the 20 included two soldiers’ widows of 60. Brisbane’s secretary, Goulburn, agreed to put them ‘on the stores’.27 William also made more directly personal efforts to help those in distress. On 2 February 1823 he asked Brisbane to be ‘graciously pleased to grant [a 78-year-old] a ration from His Majesty’s stores’. This was an ex-convict ‘oppressed with infirmities and [who] can no longer labour to procure a subsistence’, having been employed ‘as a labourer on my farm for the last fifteen years and conducted himself with the strictest honesty’. Brisbane replied: ‘Most strongly recommended to be admitted to the Benevolent Fund’, although William might have been expected to help a long-serving employee himself.²⁸

Overall, with government assistance, he and the other magistrates were often successful in combating the great poverty there had long been among smallholders on the Hawkesbury and, unlike Jamison, he was not in conflict with Brisbane. He resigned from the presidency of the Benevolent Society in January 1824. William Jnr, who lived at Richmond after he left the army, was elected treasurer in 1827. This was a small sign of the next generation of Coxes giving some thought to the society they lived in. As will be seen in the next chapter, they were more inclined towards simply living like gentlemen, whilst accepting the kind of local obligations that their parallel squires in England performed.

Such charitable activities were ones which Macquarie would have had little reason to impede. In the larger, colony-wide, sphere, resistance to his restrictions mounted. In January 1819 the Governor yielded to the extent of giving permission for a meeting of gentlemen, clergy, merchants, settlers and other free subjects to draw up a petition to the King, mainly on the subject of trade. The petition was formulated at a meeting on 12 February 1819 of ‘Gentlemen, Clergy, Settlers, Merchants, Landholders and other respectable inhabitants of New South Wales’, as the Sydney Gazette phrased it, and presided over by Sir John Jamison. William Cox was a signatory. The petitioners also requested a repeal of the weight limit of 350 tons burthen on ships trading between the colony and the Cape of Good Hope, over which the East India Company exercised a monopoly and which prevented small colonial-owned ships from operating. The petition was presented to the Governor with 1260 signatures and he forwarded it to London.29 The committee had included the emancipists Simeon Lord and William Redfern, thus uniting exclusives and traders, presaging alliances which William would later form in opposition to many of his own class. The following year Bathurst permitted the shipping measures, but not civil government. Changing the shipping measures would have suited the home government’s purposes, since in 1813 it had removed the East India Company’s monopoly of trade with India and was increasingly trying to regulate the way in which the company ran the subcontinent. 

The petition had also raised the extremely contentious subject of trial by jury, the institution of which it solicited from the home government. At the meeting of 12 February 1819 the petitioners had asserted that there was now a great number of free, respectable inhabitants competent to act as jurymen, although the politically charged question of whether they should include ex-convicts was not touched on. The petition was sent off by Macquarie on 22 March.³⁰ It can be seen as a landmark event in leading citizens making positive, if polite and respectful, efforts to change colonial policy. William would have been unlikely to have taken part if it had been at all extreme in its presentation.

Thanks to Macquarie’s restraints, the colonial landed gentry was only able to reach a form of responsible social maturity in the decade of the 1820s, in the middle of which the aggressive young W. C. Wentworth returned from England and began championing the emancipists through his Australian newspaper. The freedom of the press then became a major issue with Governors Brisbane and Darling, and not to the exclusives’ advantage either, even though James Macarthur had convinced both Darling and Whitehall of the importance of having an upper class of landed settlers and that government should be carried on according to the wishes of the dominant landowners.³¹

Conservatives usually sided with the governors, until Bourke, an Irish Whig, took the emancipists’ side. There was increasing agitation, promoted by Wentworth, for the controversial jury trials and an elected legislature. William had long before taken a cautious position on both in his evidence to Bigge. Now he sometimes sided with the emancipists. Bourke, perhaps reflecting this measured involvement, described him as ‘one of the many free emigrants of great wealth … who advocate liberal principles’. Others he named included Jamison, John and Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, James Macarthur and, rather surprisingly, in view of the evidence to Bigge, Archibald Bell.32 Bourke himself was described by the Reverend James Dunmore Lang as ‘capable of the most comprehensive views in matters of state-policy and civil government’.³³

Long before Bourke arrived, when Macquarie’s immediate successor Brisbane was governor, a potentially most significant initiative – in terms of the landed gentry’s status – was launched, with which William was strongly involved. This was the delayed creation of an agricultural society. Stimulating improvement in the colony’s farming methods might have been the vehicle for the exclusives’ greatest contribution to the colony’s development, since this was where their expertise lay. The enterprise it aimed to encourage was vital to the economic life of the colony, yet the way in which it gradually collapsed was symptomatic of the exclusives’ own decline.

Bell had told Bigge in 1819 that the objects originally proposed were ‘For the purpose of communicating our own experiments & information … in our practice of farming & to have an exhibition of live stock for the purpose of further general improvement’.³⁴ That was the potential for good. There was no apparent direct profit for the promoters, although as farmers they would be the first to benefit from any improvements. The bad outcome lay in the conflicts which rapidly enveloped the society, demonstrating how even the gentry’s most well-meaning initiatives could end up undermining their own standing.

The Hobart Agricultural Society had been inaugurated on 8 December 1821 and the Sydney one came into existence on 6 July 1822, with Jamison as president and William as one of four vice presidents, along with Mr Justice Field, the Judge of the Supreme Court, and Samuel Marsden. The Judge shared many of the exclusives’ views.35 A large committee, all but five of them JPs, included John Piper, John Blaxland, Archibald Bell, William Lawson and George Cox. It was very much a committee of exclusives, paying the substantial annual subscription of five guineas and immediately pledging to form a subscription fund to import ‘a more important breed of cattle, Horses, Sheep etc’.³⁶ The Governor’s patronage was hoped for, just as Macquarie’s had once been. This time there was no official objection to emancipists not being involved – most would have been excluded by the five guinea subscription anyway.

The society’s first dinner was held a week after its formation and the first show was held at Parramatta in 1823. The two brother societies ‘went beyond discussion of farm science and holding of shows to become quasipolitical organizations’.³⁷ Unfortunately, Jamison had issued a political statement in the Sydney society’s name, reflecting one of the Hobart society’s objectives, which was the protection of stock against felonies (i.e., bushrangers): hardly a disinterested purpose. William and others strongly objected to this at a special meeting on 20 August 1822.³⁸ They did not wish to set themselves up as arbiters of the community, which would not have been acceptable to the Governor. This resulted in Jamison’s immediate resignation, although according to one bowdlerizing history of the society, he resigned because he was going to visit England, from whence he did not return until 1825.³⁹

It was not until 1826 that Jamison did deliver a presidential address.⁴⁰ He was again president in 1827, by which time it had been renamed as the Agricultural and Horticultural Society. In that year he attempted to stand down, but was firmly re-elected by Cox and Marsden, so evidently the quarrel had been resolved. One factor must have been the pre-eminence which Jamison’s title and wealth gave him. The other vice presidents were now Hannibal Macarthur and John Blaxland.⁴¹

After his own return from England, in February 1824, Samuel Marsden addressed the Society on 15 July and attempted to brush aside the early political embarrassment. He complimented Field, ‘under whose direction our Society made rapid advances towards the accomplishment of our immediate objects of pursuit’. This would, Marsden hoped, excuse the delays that ‘had arisen out of the difficulties thus unfortunately encountered in the infancy of our Establishment’. It was now ‘acquiring the strength to ensure our prosperity as a public body. We hope by the nomination of a President to see the Society placed again in active operation’ and for ‘steady perseverance in maintaining the Rules laid down for our governance’.42

Since the Society’s articles specifically abjured political activity, which was where Jamison had offended, Marsden’s remarks might have been thought apposite. But Brisbane responded in fury, apparently because of the plaudit for Field, vividly illustrating the in-fighting which bedevilled public life in the 1820s and 1830s and which obstructed the efforts of the exclusives to play a leading role. The Governor claimed to Bathurst that ‘the manner this Address was got up proved that a party purpose was the sole object of the few members concerned’. He forbade its publication, which as governor he had the power to do.⁴³ He appears to have completely disregarded the fact that ‘over a thousand pounds was sent to England in 1822 in order to acquire more livestock, with another hundred pounds for fresh seed and agricultural textbooks … raised by the infant Agricultural Society’.⁴⁴

Brisbane next accused ‘Mr Field, late Judge of the Supreme Court’ of being behind attacks on him in letters to the (London) Morning Chronicle.⁴⁵ On 9 February 1825 he wrote to Bathurst transmitting ‘some hasty replies to many of the foulest, most unjust, ill timed and most unprovoked attacks on my character … in the Morning Chronicle of last August.’ There seems to be no proof that Field, by then back in England, did have anything to do with the letters, although he and the society were referred to in one of them, which attacked Brisbane’s ‘littleness of mind’ in suppressing Marsden’s address. Other letters in this long-distance dispute included a highly pertinent attack on the government being ‘occupied in the most ridiculous cabals and private intrigues’, while Brisbane was particularly stung by the accusation that he spent ‘the greater part of his time in the Observatory or shooting parrots’ (he had built an observatory at Parramatta).46

Thus in the colony Brisbane had contrived to offend both sides: the emancipists, whose influence he had undermined, and the landowners, who resented the rising economic power of the new settlers and denounced him to London.⁴⁷ When he was removed by Earl Bathurst, after badly mishandling the imposition of martial law at Bathurst in 1824, his valedictory despatch was critical of various members of the landed gentry. He reported that he would have had ‘difficulty in restoring’ Marsden to the magistracy ‘independently of his clerical office’. He had himself recommended Jamison for a possible legislative council, but ‘his character is so fallen in the Country that he is no longer respected nor in fact associated with by the better class of Colonists’.⁴⁸ Jamison had been one of the principals in accusing the Governor of having ‘improperly sent convict women to the penal settlement at Emu Plains for impure purposes’. His Regentville estate was nearby, on the other side of the Nepean River. The 260 or so convict workers lived in a variety of small cottages, which no doubt did contribute to promiscuity, while William’s road to the mountain ran across the Emu plains at an inconvenient angle in terms of isolating the settlement. But Jamison’s accusation seems to have been unjustified in terms of Brisbane’s intentions.⁴⁹

Under these intense and partisan pressures, the Agricultural Society lost its sense of direction and its activity lapsed in 1836, although it was reconstituted in 1857. It is now the Royal Australian Agricultural Society of New South Wales, bringing ‘expertise to rural, business and professional pursuits’.⁵⁰ In the 1840s local agricultural shows continued, however. In February 1847 George Cox won a prize for his Mulgoa wine at the Richmond Show, even when he was suffering financially in his main activity of stock rearing from the collapse of cattle and sheep prices.⁵¹ So the impetus for improvement was still there. But the larger issue for the Pure Merinos was that the pursuit of public interest goals, which had begun as the objective of some of their leaders, had been so discouraged during Brisbane’s intemperate governorate.

Throughout the 1820s the policy arguments became stormier. On 16 January 1827 Jamison, William Cox, Gregory Blaxland, John Blaxland, Archibald Bell, W. C. Wentworth and others wrote to Sheriff Mackaness requesting ‘that you will be pleased to convene a further meeting of the free inhabitants of the colony for the purpose of petitioning the King and both Houses of Parliament for trial by jury and a House of Assembly’. This Mackaness did and a deputation to the Governor told Darling that Gregory Blaxland ‘intends to proceed to England, and is charged with the petition to the two Houses of Parliament’. The petitioners felt it was within the competency of the colony to furnish the 100 members they proposed for the assembly, thus avoiding involving emancipists.52 A part of the objective was to control the powers of the Governor.

This démarche infuriated Darling, who promptly removed Mackaness from office as being ‘a Common Associate’ of Wentworth and Wardell (who had jointly founded the Australian newspaper at the end of 1824).⁵³ In his valedictory despatch, after receiving notice of his recall in July 1831, he later asked Goderich to make allowance for the ‘Persons I have had to deal with, Men I may say habitual Drunkards filling the most important Offices, Speculators, Bankrupts and Radicals … If it is your Lordship’s will that I should be the Sacrifice, I must submit’.⁵⁴ Those words speak for themselves of Darling’s extreme attitudes and self-pity. Nor did the removal from their posts of two fractious governors in succession (Brisbane and Darling) help the transition of New South Wales towards being a free colony, inevitable though that was, with emancipists and their offspring becoming a growing proportion of the population, as more convicts completed their terms of servitude and had more children.

As to the jury trial question, Francis Forbes, the Chief Justice, wrote in November 1827 that ‘it is now generally conceded that the colony is quite advanced to a state to fit it for this mode of trial, but … there must be a great number of details to arrange’. He then approached the delicate question of whether ‘persons who had been transported to this colony’ should be admitted as jurors, presuming that property would be the test of eligibility and that it would be set ‘sufficiently high’ to ensure respectability.55 On 18 April 1828 the petition, taken to London by Blaxland, was presented to the House of Commons. But MPs decided in July that the time was not ripe for either jury trials or an elected assembly. Those discussions continued until 1842, when an Act of Parliament did provide for a partially elected council. Two of William’s sons, William Jnr and George, were among those put forward in 1835.

Earlier, in 1827, Darling had felt that ‘the Colony was by no means prepared for such an Institution as a Legislative Assembly … which would be forcing it beyond its strength and powers’.⁵⁶ In fact popular agitation for one was limited almost entirely to Sydney, except that a large number of landowners were involved in the leadership of the campaign, including Jamison, John Blaxland and William. In fact they were principally concerned with the uncontrolled spending of public money.⁵⁷ But if they were active in asking Darling for financial reform, when in 1829 W. C. Wentworth attempted to have the Governor impeached over the death of a soldier named Joseph Sudds, who had been put in leg irons and an iron collar after committing a theft, Jamison, Blaxland, Cox and many others dissented. After all, Cox himself owed his career as magistrate and contractor to the authority of a governor.

Again, when Wentworth’s Australian virulently attacked Darling, the same Pure Merinos were among 115 landowners and merchants who sent an address to him on 4 July 1829 regretting that he had been ‘grossly vituperated by licentious public writers’. They somewhat slavishly asserted that ‘We are convinced that every act of Your Excellency’s administration has emanated from the purest motive’. The great majority of the signatories were identified as being ‘L.D.’ – landed proprietors – plus such merchants as Robert Campbell, now a considerable landowner as well. Their sons outnumbered them. The Blaxlands were represented by George, the Bells by John, plus Thomas Jamison, Charles Marsden, John Lawson, three Cox sons and many others.⁵⁸ William Cox was then 65 years old, John Blaxland 60, Jamison only 53, William Lawson 55, Simeon Lord 58 and John Piper 56. Even including their sons, the exclusives were still only a small group, even if now allied politically with such successful emancipists as Lord. When the Governor was challenged seriously, the sons also supported the legitimate authority.

Generally speaking, William appears to have trimmed his support between the authorities, his own class and the emancipist challengers. It might appear that a few exclusives lining up alongside emancipists, like Lord, would have potentially damaged them, but there is no evidence for that. More damaging was the active and growing presence of the ‘gentry’ of the Hunter Valley, whose settlers’ motivations were directed to their own immediate enrichment.

If public life increasingly involved the next generation, that involvement was most prominent on the emancipists’ side in the shape of Wentworth, the outspoken and populist lawyer son of William’s contemporary, D’Arcy. The young Wentworth did not intend to make matters any easier for the exclusives and a brief conspectus of the life of this unusual man will explain his motivations. The furore with Brisbane had coincided with his return to the colony in July 1824, after studying law at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, where he had coined the famous phrase prophesying Australia becoming ‘A new Britannia in another world’. This was in a poem written for the Chancellor’s Medal at the Cambridge Commencement, called ‘Australia’, although it only came second.59

Shortly after his return Wentworth founded the Australian, jointly with a fellow barrister, Robert Wardell, who had run a newspaper in London.⁶⁰ In January 1825, soon after it started publication, Brisbane told Bathurst that they had published the newspaper ‘shortly after the promulgation of the new Charter of Justice for the Colony’ and ‘These gentlemen never solicited my permission to publish their Paper’, but as ‘the opinion of the Law Officers was that there was no power to prevent it without going to Council, I considered it most expedient to try the experiment of the latitude of the full freedom of the Press’. He added that ‘I shall beg to decline for the present my opinion in regard to its effects’.⁶¹ One effect was to be unrelenting editorial attacks on the exclusives (which did not stop Wentworth acting as William’s legal counsel).

Wentworth’s mental outlook was greatly affected by his paternal origins. He was born illegitimate. His mother, Catherine Crowley, had been a convict sentenced to transportation in 1788, who had travelled out with his father. D’Arcy, once an officer in the Irish Volunteers, had trained as a doctor. He was going into exile after four trials at the Old Bailey for being a highwayman had ended in his discharge, and he agreed to go out as the assistant surgeon in the colony, in a kind of voluntary transportation. William Charles had been horrified when he discovered his father’s unpalatable background. Nonetheless the Wentworths were related to Lord Fitzwilliam, who had helped William Charles to become a lawyer in London in 1817, when he described himself as thereby ‘qualifying myself for the performance of those duties, that my Birth has imposed’.62

Wentworth had been mortally offended in 1819 when John Macarthur refused to allow him to marry his daughter, Elizabeth, after a quarrel over a loan. It was after this that he went to Cambridge University. The upshot was that, when he returned in 1824, whilst preoccupied with the greatness of his family and the glory of his country, he resolutely identified himself with the interests of the emancipists and their children. Effectively he went on fighting the battles of his youth throughout his life, despite rapidly becoming a highly successful lawyer and a major pastoralist himself.⁶³ When he retired it was to England, where, apparently coincidentally, he lived at the country estate of Merley, literally across the road from the Coxes’ Fern Hill in Dorset.

Inevitably Wentworth campaigned stridently through his newspaper for jury trials and an elected assembly. Both involved the highly charged question of whether emancipists should be allowed to serve as jurors, and if so only in civil cases (for them to sit in criminal trials was unthinkable). These were two questions on which William Cox displayed a particular interest, although he usually tried to keep out of politics. Under Macquarie such public questions had been put on hold. Now, on the question of an elected Legislative Council the exclusives were in conflict both with the governors and with the governors’ masters in Downing Street.

Jury trials and an elected assembly were seen as the birthright of Britons and were issues on which the exclusives might have provided leadership, had not so many been opposed to one or the other, or both. As time passed, the exclusives’ role in public life was becoming increasingly contentious, not least in opposing emancipists potentially serving as jurors at all. Meanwhile the arguments over press censorship which had begun under Brisbane rumbled on under Darling. The landowners and their sons became more and more drawn into political positions, to the detriment of their more enlightened leaders’ non-profit objectives. Indeed the exclusives’ initiatives were increasingly being propelled by their sons, who became more overtly political in pursuing their class interests. William himself had been proposed by Brisbane for the first (unelected) legislative council in 1824, after the ‘Black War’ related in Chapter 11, possibly because he avoided taking contentious positions. But the nomination was rejected by the Secretary of State, who chose only officials.

In September 1828 a major personal event disrupted William’s life. He fell ill with an irregular heartbeat. An article in the Sydney Gazette leaves no doubt about either the seriousness of the illness or how well he was regarded. ‘A Correspondent’ wrote that:

Cox has for a few years past been frequently subject to the disease, described by the Hawkesbury people as ‘a palpitation of the heart’ … by copious bleeding, cupping and the aid of cathartics, he is now considered to be out of danger … The sensation on the public mind … can more easily be accounted for by bringing to recollection, that very many of the inhabitants of the Hawkesbury enjoy sweet liberty under his auspices, hold land under his recommendation … have reared families in his employ … His humanity has been conspicuous.64

‘Cupping’ meant the use of leeches. The ‘palpitations’ must have been severe. Even allowing for a degree of journalistic excess, it is clear that William exercised a paternal authority in the community. One example had been when in June 1820 he had helped the ex-convicts William Lawrence and Andrew Scott to obtain smallholdings (although, as has been seen in Chapter 5, he also pressured ex-convicts to sell him plots).65

Nor was the collapse surprising. In July 1827 William had felt so unwell that he had declined the chairmanship of the Quarter Sessions.⁶⁶ He had been combining his duties as a JP with a demanding range of activities, not least in continuing to acquire land, albeit in collaboration with his sons George and Henry. The ‘Black War’ of 1824 had involved him controversially as both a stockholder and a magistrate. He was very active in benevolent works and with the Agricultural Society. If Anna made running his household easier, she was many years his junior and William, now in his sixties, was not only fathering a new family, as a young woman Anna required a social life. He kept her happy by building extensions to the house and using it for parties. Among occasions which the Sydney Gazette reported in 1822 and 1823 were those marking the christening of a son, a race meeting at Richmond and a ball attended by 60 guests at Clarendon. At one party the guests sang the popular (among themselves) ditty, ‘The Pure Merino’.⁶⁷

Pressures on the exclusives continued to build under the more liberal, pro-emancipist rule of Governor Bourke in the 1830s, when the movement for an elected assembly took on a new vitality. In 1833 a public meeting was held to petition the King and the House of Commons for a house of assembly. Atkinson observes that: ‘The names of Jamison, Wentworth, Robert Wardell, William Bland, Simeon Lord, Cox and Blaxland appear as usual’ among the 68 signatories. A subsequent petition for an elected assembly attracted 6025 signatures and was an extraordinary 17 yards long.⁶⁸ Those just named were liberal minded landowners, including Lord. A surprising signatory was the hardline ‘Major’ James Mudie of Forbes Castle on the Hunter, but that was for the partisan reason of wanting a council as ‘independent as possible of the Governor’.

Mudie’s antagonism to Bourke stemmed from the Governor’s Summary Punishment Act. This was intended to protect the convict ‘from the tyranny of his master and the local [settler] magistrate’.69 Mudie claimed that it undermined convict discipline. In his case it did not work, and culminated in the Castle Forbes revolt and the hanging of several of his servants. In fact he was expressing the views of many conservatives when he wrote that ‘a convicted felon is unworthy both of future trust and of mingling with and participating in … the social enjoyments of his former associates and fellow subjects’.⁷⁰ Although at the time Bourke’s Act was considered to threaten the colonial gentry, it was really an expression of the Governor’s liberalism.

The petitioners were also confronting the squatters, who the gentry felt should bring their land within the official framework of land ownership, but to whom the government gave way. In 1837 Bourke appointed a retired officer of the 62nd Regiment, Edward Denny Day, a squatter, as a magistrate. Bourke reported to Lord Glenelg that Day had ‘sold out to settle’, married in the colony, and was so highly respected that other residents had asked the Governor to enable him to ‘remain among them’ (why he might not have been able to was unclear). ‘This being out of my power,’ Bourke wrote, ‘I have named him Police Magistrate at Mussel Brook.’ It had been the repeated desire of settlers to have such magistrates in remote parts of the colony.⁷¹ This provides a good example of the dilemma facing the exclusives in objecting to respectable middle-class squatter arrivals. As Roe observes, the gentry, the nucleus of conservative power, were to be ‘destroyed by the new [squatter] movement’, although when the 1846 Land Act legalized their position the squatters’ attitudes changed. They began to settle and raise families and became politically conservative.⁷² This was what Day had done.

Further undermining the exclusives’ authority, and preventing what could have been a gradual broadening of their narrow social base, was the seemingly everlasting quarrel about how to define a ‘gentleman’. Even in the 1830s there was still bitter dispute over the extent to which a connection with trade was a disqualification. The Australian Club in Sydney, founded in 1838, had an upper membership limit of 300 and excluded anyone in trade, mimicking the snobbery in England. The unreality of the exclusives’ attitude was underlined by there having long been in Sydney, as Roe observes, ‘a handful of merchant princes having economic and social affiliations with the gentry’. Paramount among them was Robert Campbell, while another was the Australian Club’s founder himself, S. A. Donaldson, and of course Lord.73

A recent commentator, J. J. Spigelman, refers to ‘the social pretensions of an insecure upper class, desperately trying to mimic the social order and hierarchy of a distant aristocratic society’ and says that for ‘those who could not rely on the presumption of respectability conferred by … “breeding”, actual conduct alone revealed the character entitling one to gentry status’.⁷⁴ William Cox’s conduct and leadership, not least towards the convict labourers on the mountain road, had fully earned him that status. Furthermore, he had the ‘breeding’ which so many did not. Where Spigelman exaggerates, in this author’s view, is in suggesting that the English aristocracy was their inspiration, rather than the squirearchy. The true English aristocracy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was almost absurdly grand. If it inspired settlers, it was of the next generation when William Cox Jnr, for example, had his coat of arms painted on his carriage.

The most lucid thinking of that second generation’s thinking came from James Macarthur, John’s fourth son. Ward suggests that: ‘James Macarthur was our earliest systematic thinker on society. He wanted to build up in New South Wales a society and government based on a pastoral hierarchy with strong emphasis on the rule of law … the family and property’. But by the time he took over his father’s direction of family policy it was too late. ‘Politically his attempts were in ruins by the end of the 1850s.’⁷⁵ The liberalism which Bourke had first supported, combined with popular politics, had eclipsed the pastoralists.

If William Cox’s sons were giving thought to the society they lived in, as James Macarthur did, there is little sign left of it. William Jnr, the eldest, had been commissioned into the New South Wales Corps in 1808, survived its transition into the 102nd Regiment and been sent home with it. He fought in the Peninsula War at the siege of Badajoz and married the sister of a brother officer. He then returned to the colony to live as a gentleman, indeed somewhat as an aristocrat, developing an existing house at Richmond, called Hobartville, into an altogether grander mansion. His and his brothers’ lives are explored briefly in the final chapter.

The Macarthurs – led by James Macarthur – reached a peak of prosperity during the economic expansion of the 1830s. At the same time, despite the much disliked Goderich reforms, which only allowed land to be sold, not granted, William Cox and his sons never ceased expanding their estates. In 1834 James Cox began building his own magnificent Clarendon in Tasmania. In 1835 William Jnr ‘of the 12th Regiment of Foot’ was using his commutation (of half pay) to buy land, just as the ex-officers immigrants did.76 In 1836 William Snr bought 1100 acres in the Country of Roxburgh (near Bathurst) for £290. Even after he died, on 15 March 1837, his executors were dealing with an application for 2560 acres in the County of Ellis, Upper Hunter, originally made ‘during the administration of Brisbane or Darling’, for which he had paid £640.⁷⁷

William died on 15 March 1837. A brief family notice was printed in the Sydney Gazette of 18 March, which read

DEATH. At his residence, Fairfield, Windsor, on Wednesday morning last, the 15th instant, after a long and severe illness, William Cox Esq, aged 72, deeply regretted by his numerous relatives and friends.

Surprisingly the paper does not appear to have published any obituary. By that time the sunshine of the Pure Merinos’ day was already showing signs of fading. Whilst it has been easy for historians, from Samuel Bennett onwards, to explain their decline with the help of hindsight, the exclusives themselves do not appear to have realized that the pillars of their temple were cracking until it fell in the 1850s. If the gentry who survived the disastrous 1840s ‘no longer played by 1851 the undisputed role that they had twenty years before’ it was, to quote Dyster, due as much to ‘diversification in society as to defeat in the field. In their home districts they were still the men given pride of place.’78 Some of their descendants did fulfil the Victorian ideal of country squires, after which later generations simply became respected members of professions, such as the Coxes who pursued the law and medicine.

In William’s time the gentry had continued to fight their corner, against both the squatters and what many of them saw as dangerous democratic and emancipist influences, disfiguring their own reputations. Bennett, writing in 1867, observed that the:

early colonists indeed, to their honour be it spoken, in bestowing names upon their estates appear to have acted under the elevating ideas that they were not only the founders of families, but were helping to create ‘a new Britannia in another world’ … with whose glories they wished to identify themselves and their posterity.⁷⁹

Bennett exactly identifies their aspirations. Some, like Jamison and Macarthur, named their estates after their aristocrat patrons. William drew on his Dorset and Wiltshire heritage. Bennett also refers to W. C. Wentworth pouring ‘the vials of his wrath’ on that class (the exclusives) and to ‘the bitterness of the social and political quarrels which then raged in the colony’.⁸⁰

However, it was as much economic catastrophes as political ones which made the 1840s so disastrous for the landed gentry, when the great prosperity of the 1830s gave way to the colony’s first recession. The Bank of Australia failed in 1843 and the shareholders – who included members of the Cox family – had to pay up their shares of the default. The value of cattle and sheep collapsed and George Cox was forced into slaughtering his stock and boiling down the carcasses for tallow, which could be exported to England, as they had no other value. W. C. Wentworth had foretold this situation in his description of the colony as it was back in 1819. At that time, he wrote, ‘Good milch cows may be bought for £5 to £10, fine young breeding ewes from £1 to £3 … low as these prices may appear they are in great measure fictitious; since there is more stock of all kinds in the colony, than is necessary for its population’.81

George Cox, William’s fourth son, who established Burrundulla at Mudgee (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW)

Wentworth was proved right, if only three decades later. Although the Coxes survived, many pastoralists did not outlast the 1840s. In June 1848 John Blaxland’s Luddenham and Newington estates were in the hands of a trust company (he had died at Newington in 1845), their owner having ‘ignored the transient, but more profitable benefits of squatting’.⁸² The colony was almost littered with abandoned great houses, such as Aberglasslyn, overlooking the Hunter River near Maitland, whose builder, George Hobler, had been bankrupted in 1843, tried squatting and ultimately emigrated to South America. ⁸³ Many settlers had ‘their plans prostrated by the financial disasters … Castles in the air had suddenly faded,’ Bennett wrote.

However, in 1865 Bennett was still able to list 30 families who were ‘the landed gentry of that part of the colony’ within 30 miles of Campbelltown. The list included the Macarthurs, MacLeays, Wentworths, Jamisons and Coxes. He described the ‘little clique of exclusives … who regarded themselves as the only persons whose claims (to land, labour and social recognition) … ought to be considered for a moment’.⁸⁴ Bennett was writing with a degree of ironical contempt, if also of recognition. Despite their pretensions, the ‘ancient nobility’ still captured some imaginations, not least their own.

Bennett also remarked that ‘The fluctuating circumstances of colonial existence have always proved fatal sooner or later to the designs of those who have endeavoured to found a territorial aristocracy’.85 It had done, even though the colonial landed gentry had evolved into a model significantly different to its home country inspiration, which is another aspect of the colonial experience that has seldom been discussed. By the mid-nineteenth century those of their descendants who survived the crash of the 1840s did become recognizable squires, accepted as leaders of their local communities, as the Coxes were. William had established a dynasty. His family had both arrived and survived.