Macquarie's inevitable downfall
Macquarie's downfall started ... well ... goodness, sometime. Well, we need to pick a time, I guess. Okay, 1788. Yep, we could go much, much earlier, but ... well ... what's the point? So, what on earth are we on about?
As touched on elsewhere in this site, Britain had a very highly stratified society. While not impossible, it was very difficult to move upwards, and if you did, you would generally not be regarded as equal by those born to whatever class you moved into. And, of course, it was easier to move downwards. And if you did, you would often find yourself used as an example of failure, often connected to some sort of lack of suitable godliness.
Each level in this society very jealously guarded itself against encroachments from below, while usually very assiduously tugging their forelocks, real and metaphorical, to those above them. If they ever thought about it, and those in the upper classes constantly threw up examples of their class who were incapable of thought, they justified this state of affairs as being ordained by god.
This meant that military officers, for example, and other free settlers in Australia, regarded it as an absolute, incontrovertible fact that they were better than anyone who is or has been found guilty of a crime and transported as a convict, and, of course, any descendant the convict may have.
Criminality was a deep, dark stain that could never, even over the generations, be washed out. Rather like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hands. This was an interesting view for people who, mostly, effected criminal schemes of all sorts, but had simply not been found guilty by a "good" British court. But self-awareness doesn't seem to have been a factor in these peoples' consciousness.
Okay, we've had a look at the lead-up to Macquarie's arrival. You will know that there were people of power and wealth in New South Wales, or, at least, their relatives, because several of them skipped the country just before Lachlan arrived because they rightly feared the possibility of being arrested by Lachlan's savage Scots and tried by Lachlan. Although the two main coup leaders, Johnston and the nasty, manipulative, egotistic, delusional Macarthur returned to the colony several years later.
And these people of wealth and power, known today as "exclusives", hated convicts and former convicts. And people who tried to help them, especially when the exclusives realised Macquarie intended to rule without them, the exclusives, wherever possible, therefore minimising their access to power and greater wealth.
And worse, Macquarie would do so using former convicts and their children, and even ticket-of-leave men who, strictly speaking, were still convicts. And even worse still, Macquarie intended to treat former convicts as human beings, as though they were of the same social status as those who were unstained with criminal backgrounds. Of course, they knew nothing of Macquarie's extremely humble background, nor of his own criminal proclivities.
However, Lachlan's first major crisis probably occurred within his savage Scots, or, more accurately, their officers. Aware, like the exclusives, of their social status, some of the officers protested at being invited to dine with the governor along with former convicts. One, Lieutenant McNaughton, only a lieutenant, for goodness sake, even stormed out of the governor's residence.
Although that might have been because the lieutenant apparently believed convict women were all right to have sex with and become obsessed with. To the extent that one could apparently beat one of her male friends, or perhaps alternative customers, to death with a fence pole.
However, McNaughton's fellow officers did the right thing and sentenced him to death for murder. Oh, hang on, I was thinking of what would have happened if the male friend had killed the lieutenant. No, they sentenced their fellow officer to six months in pokey.
One wonders if McNaughton's friends consorted with him upon his release now he was "stained", or didn't killing a former convict count as a staining? And did the now former lieutenant refuse to mix with his fellow convicts during his six months? Or did his views about consorting with former convicts undergo a miraculous change while he was forced to consort with current convicts? One just hopes the convict cooks peed in his gruel.
Macquarie was more than peeved when this upstart pipsqueak walked out of his dinner. But he was significantly more than angry when the same pipsqueak was not sentenced to death for murder. He had a problem. These rebellious officers were unprepared to accept the orders not only of a major-general, as Macquarie now was, but of the seat of all governmental authority, civil and military, as Macquarie also was.
The rebels began conspiring with the exclusives, and writing letters of complaint to anyone of importance they knew in England. As many of them were younger sons of important families, this began a stream of letters of complaint about Macquarie's improper social attitudes and "autocratic" exercise of power.
Fortunately for Macquarie, after several requests, the Black Watch was recalled in 1814, and replaced by a more compliant regiment headed up by an old friend of his from his India days, a bloke called Molle.
Except the old friend didn't share his attitudes towards emancipists, and the whole cycle started off again. Only this time they weren't recalled and the flow of letters back to England increased.
It didn't help when Macquarie's friends made libelous attacks on some of these creatures. His secretary, Campbell, was successfully sued for libel by the appalling Not-So-Reverend Samuel Marsden, the Hanging Parson, a nickname earned for the christian attitude of the court when he was sitting as magistrate, for suggesting Marsden got Tahitian girls drunk and gave them crabs of the non-marine variety. Marsden joined the letter writers, and launched a magisterial inquiry into Macquarie's activities.
William Wentworth wrote rather an amusing anonymous poetic attack on Molle, in which he accused Molle of publicly sucking Macquarie's whatnots, although, sad to say, he didn't use those precise words, while he, Molle, was stabbing the governor in the back.
Oh, yes, not to forget that he reckoned Molle was a fat, money-grubbing, anti-emancipist bigot, and drunken letch, which, frankly, could have very accurately described most of the officers and exclusive males in the colony.
Nonetheless, Molle's fellow officers offered a reward of £100 for the name of the poet. Of course, this just led to greater publicity of the content of the attack, and warned William to head off for a "business" trip to London for a while.
The officers published an attack on those who consort with emancipists, extolling the social virtues of their mess, which did not allow entry to them. Macquarie, rightly, regarded this as an attack on himself, and was duly incensed.
Eventually, Molle's men associated the name Wentworth with the libel, and Molle arrested D'Arcy, although by this time Molle seems to have known it was William who penned the piece.
As much for D'Arcy's safety as anything else, Lachlan ordered his friend, they were apparently still friends after the hospital furore, be locked up until Molle's regiment sailed away. In this way he was able to corral the problem until it didn't matter any more.
Okay, so much for the military. What about the judiciary? Well, Macquarie had some real luck there. A bloke called Ellis Bent had been appointed as New South Wales's Deputy Advocate General.
It's not entirely clear who he was deputy to, but his role was to act as a magistrate in the civil and criminal courts. Unlike anybody else in the colony, he was an experienced and qualified barrister. Well, unlike anyone else who had not been disqualified after being sentenced for whatever crime they were convicted of.
Bent travelled to Australia on the same ship as Macquarie, and the two became good friends. Ellis came up with a number of proposed reforms that Macquarie thought were pretty much the bees knees.
But there were warning signs. What a surprise! Lachlan doesn't seem to have been a very good judge of friends. Upon his arrival, Ellis refused to move into his designated house. It was, according to Ellis, no better than a pigsty.
So Macquarie arranged for him to move into a grand colonial house. But Ellis hated that, too. So Macquarie involved Ellis in the design of a third house, to be combined with a courthouse. Ellis moved into his great mansion, with the tiny attached courthouse, but then complained about that as well.
Bent demanded another, but by this time Macquarie's expenditures were being reduced by the London nabobs. But Bent blamed poor old Macquarie, and told him he was a turd, and he, Bent, didn't show respect for turds, although perhaps not in quite those words. He even stopped standing when everyone else stood when Macquarie walked into church on Sundays. Goodness!
In the meantime, while difficult about houses, he had agreed to allow three former barristers to act as "representatives" of their clients in court. There was, after all, no other way to organise representation, no other way for proper justice to operate in the good old English way. Or as close to it as they could get.
Ellis further, quite rightly, argued that he should not be subject to the governor's authority. But Macquarie, equally rightly, pointed to his commission as governor, where it said quite plainly that a person in Bent's position was to be subject to the governor's authority.
Such an instruction was quite contrary to the British constitutional concept of the separation of powers, although noting that this was nowhere near as clear or defined in Britain as it was in the United States. In theory, this concept provides for the executive (president, or prime minister, or in this case governor, and cabinet), the legislature (parliament, or congress, or in this case the imperial government), and judiciary (courts, or in this case Ellis) be as separate as possible so that one can't order the other to do anything, and one doesn't outrank the other.
But this was hardly Macquarie's fault. He was no constitutional expert, and besides he had his orders and was required, as a good military man, to follow them. Mind you, that wouldn't have done him any good at Nuremberg, not that that was any of his concern. And in a frontier community with a small free population and a high convict population, it's arguable that the separation of powers was fine in theory, but not practical in New South Wales. Especially as the British government was not completely enamoured of the idea anyway.
One of the reforms Ellis suggested was for the establishment of a Supreme Court, and for properly qualified barristers to be encouraged to sail for the colony. Following conversations with Bent, Macquarie recommended Bent for appointment to the court. Not Ellis Bent, but his elder brother Jeffrey.
This was more than a little silly of Ellis, however, as there was a consequent reduction in his caseload, with the inevitable following disaster of a drop in the part of his income made from charging fines. A great way to ensure the honesty and fairness of the court, that, giving the magistrate/judge part of the earnings from fines. I don't think. And Ellis was having financial difficulties.
The British government agreed to the court's establishment, and Macquarie's recommendation. And boy oh boy, what a disaster this was to be. Jeffrey (sometimes Geoffrey) Bent, was a total, unadulterated arsehole, with an extremely over-developed sense of his own importance. And that of his position as a judge. His first act was to proclaim long and loud upon his appointment that he should have been knighted. So he was in a foul mood about New South Wales before he even left London. Mind you, there's a very strong possibility he was in a foul mood all the time.
After this fuss, his next act was pretty inevitable. Upon his arrival in Sydney, he refused to get off the ship unless a proper cannonade salute was fired. If Macquarie had known what Jeffrey was going to do, he might have ordered the guns be turned on the ship.
Macquarie had ordered that part of the hospital be turned into a courthouse. But a larger area had been provided to the army. And Jeffrey just hated the greater deference shown the army over the law. And him. So he refused to use that place as a court. This must almost have seemed like a spot of déjà vu for Macquarie after Ellis and his houses.
And, of course, it got worse. Jeffrey exerted his influence over the younger Bent, and now Ellis began refusing to allow emancipist former barristers to appear in his court. While the British had managed to inveigle two barristers to travel to Sydney, only one had arrived so far. Macquarie pointed out that justice couldn't possibly prevail when only one party to a case could be represented. Bent said they would have to await the arrival of the other lawyer.
Jeffrey hated the fact that the army didn't have to pay road tolls, but he did. In the end, he refused to pay a toll, threatened the toll keeper with various consequences, and ended up appearing in the magistrate's court of D'Arcy Wentworth, who issued a fine. The matter appears to have been swept under the carpet.
In the year that followed, Jeffrey and Ellis made Macquarie's life hell. And Jeffrey only heard one matter before his court, an application by the three emancipist former lawyers to be permitted to appear before the Supreme Court. Almost needless to say, Jeffrey refused.
In the end, after that year, Macquarie had to tell London that either they went or he did. Perhaps unfortunately for Lachlan in the long run, the Bents were recalled. Except before the order arrived, Ellis died, leaving his wife and several children pretty much without a penny. Macquarie, despite his feelings about Ellis, asked that she be given a pension, which she was. Of course, Jeffrey blamed Macquarie for Ellis's death by giving him substandard accommodation.
Jeffrey, of course, took the opportunity not only to write letters complaining about Macquarie, but upon his return to London, he blackened Macquarie's name wherever he, Bent, went. Oh, and he insisted Macquarie be sacked and he, Bent, be appointed in his place. Bathurst, the Secretary for War and the Colonies, must have been building up quite a file on Macquarie. Or, roomful of files. But he wasn't silly enough to swap Lachlan for Jeffrey.
So, what else could go wrong for Lachlan? Well, Bathurst and his government had a view of New South Wales as no more than a convict colony, a convenient place to send all those lower class scum and criminally-inclined destitute returned soldiers from the French and American wars in 1815 who didn't seem to understand they were living in the best country in the world. Not to mention all those Irish rebels.
But more and more free settlers were travelling to New South Wales as well, and more and more former convicts were being released, needing something to do with their freedom. Macquarie, on the spot, could see disaster approaching if action wasn't taken to provide New South Wales with the infrastructure necessary to cope with this increasing population of free people.
So he built the hospital, roads, public buildings, parks, and so on, that a prison that was now becoming a colony needed for its population's amenity. But the British government didn't have the same understanding that New South Wales was or should move on from being a prison to being a colony.
Macquarie's cause wasn't really helped by the fact he believed in building to last. All of which cost money. But the government didn't want to spend money on what it regarded as a prison. And certainly not the amounts Macquarie was spending.
Of course, London was flooded with letters from exclusives complaining about Macquarie's "gross" over-expenditure on services for black hearted criminals, drunkards and general low-lifes and prostitutes.
Of course, Macquarie didn't do himself any favours when, probably illegally, he had three drunk free settlers whipped for breaking a hole in his fence around the common, presumably to get in and "party" with some women of low morals, or perhaps more likely, high need for cash.
These three were added to the list of letter writers and then personal complainants when they returned to London. They and their supporters don't appear to have recognised the hypocrisy of complaining about emancipist drunkenness and prostitution whilst getting drunk, vandalising government property, and consorting with prostitutes themselves.
But while Macquarie tended to build for quality, occasionally went overboard, and named heaps of things after himself, and a few after his wife, Elizabeth, he was on the spot. London wasn't. And he recognised what London was extraordinarily reluctant to accept. New South Wales might have been established as a convict colony, but if you were going to free the convicts at the end of their term, allow convicts and former convicts to breed, and we would all like to see them try to stop that, make it immensely difficult for former convicts to return to Britain, allow some convicts to be accompanied by their free families, allow former soldiers and their officers to settle freely, and allow free settlers to immigrate, then you could hardly be surprised that they would all require a level of infrastructure beyond that the British government was prepared to supply.
The exclusives were equally aware of this need, but as they had a whipping post to which they could tie Macquarie, they were going to use it for all it was worth. And perhaps Macquarie's hospital was his unwisest construction. No-one knows who designed it. Some point at Macquarie himself, and others even point at Elizabeth. Certainly, after it was built no-one was claiming responsibility. For very good reason. It was a well-meant, but absolute, disaster.
You can still see it today. It's lasted all this time. Perhaps fittingly, it's now used as the New South Wales parliament house. Initially, Macquarie was rather proud of himself, as he diddled a substantial amount of the cost out of D'Arcy Wentworth. Macquarie was supposed to be preventing the use of rum as currency, but this didn't stop him signing a contract with three would-be developers, one of whom was D'Arcy. One has to suspect that Macquarie was now using another doctor to treat his syphilis.
The deal was that they would build the magnificent hospital to the plans provided by Macquarie, from the unknown architect. To help, Macquarie would provide eighty oxen, twenty draught bullocks, and twenty convict labourers. Plus, and it's a big plus, the exclusive right to import 60,000 gallons (around 270,000 litres) of rum over the next three years. To Wentworth and co. this sounded like a fine deal indeed. But, although he didn't own a violin, Macquarie was a grand fiddler.
The "exclusive" right to import rum excluded booze shipments which had already been approved. And Macquarie knew, but Wentworth and his mates, rubbing their hands together in glee, didn't, that the British government had agreed to Macquarie's suggestion to allow unlimited booze into the colony. 76,000 gallons of the foul stuff was already on its way. The intention appears to have been to flood the market, thus making rum useless as a currency.
But, Macquarie didn't stop there. He also kept the right to import such rum as he deemed necessary for the government's own use. Lachlan deemed and deemed and deemed away until, all up, over 120,000 gallons of the stuff arrived, making Wentworth's investment worth comparatively bugger all.
So, for the cost of £4,200 worth of cattle and convicts, Lachlan had taken £9,000 in spirit duties and a £40,000 hospital. He had all the right to be very proud of himself, having both saved the British government a veritable fortune, and pretty much stopped the use of rum as a currency. And provided a top notch, modern hospital. Except ...
And it was a very big "except". The hospital was almost completely unusable. First of all he got a rocket in return for his proud report to London. He was accused of wasting thousands of pounds on worthless criminals. And not only that, he funded it with rum. A major international embarrassment, apparently.
Then, to top it off, the joint didn't have any toilets, so bedpans were slopped out the windows, food was prepared in the overcrowded wards because the kitchen was being used as a morgue, the patients couldn't be stopped having sex, so syphilis was added to whatever the patient came in with, and nurses threw warm meat at patients instead of serving it to them, allegedly to minimise contagion risks. And the staff were stealing medicines, bandages, and other supplies, to sell on the black market.
Frankly, as a hospital, this place stank. Literally.
Needless to say, this was all reported back to London. Often. And you can bet that Sydney's favourite name for the place, the Sydney Slaughterhouse, was passed on. Often, as well.
Eventually, Francis Greenway, an architect transported because he was a lousy forger, and yet another emancipist on the government payroll, fixed the Slaughterhouse at the developers' expense. D'Arcy hated him for evermore, but does not appear to have held the matter against Lachlan. Or perhaps he could see how unpolitic that would be for him in view of the fact the exclusives seem to have hated him more than they hated convicts and emancipists.
One final matter, at least for our purposes, that got up the British government's nose. Macquarie was actively encouraging the exploration of New South Wales. Sydney itself is pretty much hemmed in by the Blue Mountains, limiting access to potential farm and grazing land on the other side. Macquarie had a road built over the mountains, and sent explorers scuttling all over the place. Consequently, the potential agricultural wealth of New South Wales was effectively advertised to the world.
As a result, the rate of immigration of free settlers was increasing exponentially. Of course, so was bloody conflict with the Indigenous Australians, who, sadly, had no reply to the bloodthirstiness of the so-called civilised British, nor their guns. And this influx of farmers and graziers was most definitely not something the British government wanted. Again, this was to be a prison, not a colony with an apparently unchecked inflow of free immigrants.
So, Bathurst turned to his roomful of files containing letters from the angry and dissatisfied exclusives, pondered for not very long, and appointed a bloke called John Thomas Bigge as a commissioner of enquiry.
Lord Bathurst, concerned about the efficacy of using transportation to reduce the incidence of crime, the cost of maintaining the prison colony, the way the colony should develop (note the use of the word “colony”, and any faults with Macquarie’s rule, instituted a royal commission to enquire. He appointed John Thomas Bigge, former barrister and Chief Justice of Trinidad, aged just thirty-nine when he arrived in Sydney in 1819, as royal commissioner.
We know it’s an overly easy joke to make, except there’s really nothing funny about it, and that’s got nothing to do with the fact that if it was a joke it would contain little humour, but John Thomas Bigge was a small man, and that’s got nothing to do with his physical appearance.
Bigge’s final report, actually three reports, was not a completely negative, conservative, and destructive document. But his approach to his enquiry was worse than appalling, it was absolutely outrageous.
Bigge was not a senior member of the British élite, but he was part of it and was in total accord with its beliefs at a time when the Conservative Party, known as the Tory Party, representative of the conservative élite, dominated government. He was also a public servant, and he knew perfectly well his job was to implement everything he was instructed to do. And, of course, that was the only path to good promotion.
Lord Bathurst, the conservative, but allegedly not reactionary, Secretary of War and Colonies gave Bigge his commission documentation, and outlined his expectations of Bigge in three further letters. He was to investigate 'all the laws regulations and usages of the settlements', particularly the laws having an impact on civil administration,the convict system, the courts, the Church (note the singular, this meant the “established” church, the Church of England), trade, governmental revenue, and natural resources.
Transportation, Bathurst wrote, should be made “an object of real terror” and Bigge had to report whether Lachlan’s humanitarian, for the time, policies had caused the need for convicts and anyone likely to commit a crime to be terrorised to be weakened because of Macquarie's “ill considered compassion for convicts”. Where he reckoned the convict system was too soft, Bigge could recommend the establishment of a more terrible regime.
Disgracefully, there was to be no privacy for the highest and mightiest of New South Wales, both private sector and public sector people. The royal commissioner was to elicit anything he could about the private and public lives of these people, secret and/or supposedly private conversations, even when the participants were under the impression what they said was “off the record”, tittle tattle of all kinds, with no apparent regard for the relationships between the people being tittle tattled on and the tittle tattler, the British Government wanted to know it all.
So not only was Bigge to conduct his commission outrageously, but Bathurst instructed him outrageously. This was, quite simply, wrong.
On the other hand, perhaps we need to have some regard for the situation the nobs of Britain believed themselves to be in in the years after the French and American wars ended. The country was flooded with returning soldiers and sailors, quite a few of whom had suffered injuries that made it impossible to work, even if they could find work. And there was no welfare system, no pensions, no unemployment benefits.
With the end of the wars, the manufacturing industry took a nosedive and heaps of workers were thrown out of work. In the country, the replacement of people with sheep was still continuing, throwing more people out of work.
Inevitably, because crime almost inevitably follows poverty, crime was on the increase, and the need for transportation was increasing. Added to this was the fact that the opportunity to persuade convicted criminals to avoid various punishments, including transportation, if they joined the armed services had disappeared.
And the nobs didn’t just want to get rid of criminals by transporting them, they wanted the whole convict system to be so completely ghastly that would-be criminals simply would not. Well, good luck with that one guys, that’s just not how criminal decision-making works.
And, with the background of the American and French revolutions, civil disaffection was on the rise. And who could possibly be surprised. We've become used in Australia to the right of, apart from inmates of psychiatric hospitals and certain inmates of prisons, and a few other unfortunate people, all adults having the right to vote for members of our various parliaments.
But we tend to forget that when Macquarie was here only some 3% of the British had the right to vote, all white, male, wealthy, Protestant nobs. And of course many of that 3% didn't bother to vote, and many of the remainder sold their votes in what was an immensely corrupt electoral system.
And the significant majority of these men regarded the poor as nothing but a burden, a bunch of ill bred, innately stupid, immoral, criminally-minded, lazy people who refused to do the right thing and stop having sex after one or two children. After all, the wealthy mostly did so, sleeping in separate rooms. Of course, they tended not to mention that so many men were forced by their "nature" to resort to these immoral poor for sexual relief.
But these self-same poor were increasingly demanding more rights:
1812: The first and only Prime Minister to be assassinated in the United Kingdom's history was killed in Westminster, albeit by an unfortunate nutter. But the example was set, and who knew when another attempt would be made.
1810-1816: The Luddites were smashing machines, protesting at the loss of employment to them in both rural and urban centres. Of course, a bit of hanging, and sending the remaining leaders to New South Wales put a stop to that. And Prinnie's carriage had a window broken by stones in 1817, Prinnie being the mad king's grossly fat and immoral poor joke of a son who was effectively ruling in place of his father. Prinnie was hated by the general populace, for good reason. He was a rich waster at a time of great poverty.
1815: The first of the Corn Laws was passed, putting a tax on imported grain, forcing the public to buy the much more expensive and worse quality English grain. Unbelievable at a time of severe economic distress and starvation.
November-December, 1816: On 15 November a meeting of some 10,000 people met at Spa Fields. They put together a petition to be presented to the Prince Regent (commonly known as Prinnie, a massively fat, hugely wealthy waster with what the public regarded as grossly immoral habits, he was the son of Sad Mad King George III, and was king in all but name). The petition called for relief from suffering, universal male suffrage, annual elections, and the secret vote. Prinnie avoided accepting it.
On 2 December, another much more radical meeting was held at Spa Fields. The crowd headed for the Tower of London, apparently with the idea that taking it would cause the fall of the governmental system. They broke into a gun shop on the way, and unfortunately killed a pedestrian. This is referred to as the Spa Fields Riots. One of the rioters was hanged.
January, 1817: On the way to open parliament, or some say afterwards, Prinnie's carriage was stoned and a window broken.
March, 1817: March of the Blanketeers. The unemployed of Manchester, wearing a blanket, were to walk to London in groups of ten (any more was illegal), each with a petition tied to their arm. They were all arrested or dispersed on the way, except for one man who was ignored.
June, 1817: Pentrich Rising (or Derbyshire Uprising). This was an intended large-scale uprising which basically brought out one or two hundred men at most. Three men were hanged, and another thirty were transported, including a farmer who fed the few who actually marched. There was outrage when it became known a government spy with the pseudonym "Oliver" essentially encouraged the uprising, organising the plotters and telling them he had contacts in other towns who were all planning to rise. A government inquiry reported that it believed an uprising would not have taken place without Oliver's involvement. This did not apparently earn a return ticket for the transported men, or compensation for the families of the hanged men. What a surprise!
16 August, 1819: Peterloo, it was called, named after its location and the Battle of Waterloo. It occurred at Peterborough, on 16 August, 1819. A crowd of around 50-60,000 gathered, "policed" by the amateur cavalry of the yeomanry, who charged this entirely unarmed crowd of women, children and men with swords not only drawn, but flashing. And no back of the sword stuff here, nope. Sharp side only. They killed 11 (2 women), some sources say 15, and wounded around 400, some sources say 700, some of them very severely.
The government failed to take the hint and undertake some reform. Nope, the Conservatives took the opportunity to pass six extremely repressive pieces of legislation. They were frightened, and didn't want to hear that it was them, not the radicals who were the cause of the problem.
1820: Then finally, as far as the Macquarie/Bigge situation was concerned, was the Cato Street Conspiracy (the address of the meetings). This was a totally doomed attempt to kill the prime minister and his cabinet, who were believed to be gathering for a dinner. One has to wonder whether or not a government agent provocateur wasn't involved in this. There was no dinner, the meeting in Cato Street was handily raided before any harm could be done, and five men were executed, and five others were whizzed off to, you guessed it, Australia.
Concurrently to all this carry on in England, for the first five years Britain was fighting and concluding its long war with France, in 1814, and from 1812 to 1815 it was also fighting the Americans again, successfully preventing them from taking Canada (don't tell them this, they like to reckon they won!). Further, over the ten years or so, problems were extant in the other parts of Britain as well, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
So it's not all that surprising they were pooing their noble pants.
As touched on elsewhere in this site, Britain had a very highly stratified society. While not impossible, it was very difficult to move upwards, and if you did, you would generally not be regarded as equal by those born to whatever class you moved into. And, of course, it was easier to move downwards. And if you did, you would often find yourself used as an example of failure, often connected to some sort of lack of suitable godliness.
Each level in this society very jealously guarded itself against encroachments from below, while usually very assiduously tugging their forelocks, real and metaphorical, to those above them. If they ever thought about it, and those in the upper classes constantly threw up examples of their class who were incapable of thought, they justified this state of affairs as being ordained by god.
This meant that military officers, for example, and other free settlers in Australia, regarded it as an absolute, incontrovertible fact that they were better than anyone who is or has been found guilty of a crime and transported as a convict, and, of course, any descendant the convict may have.
Criminality was a deep, dark stain that could never, even over the generations, be washed out. Rather like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hands. This was an interesting view for people who, mostly, effected criminal schemes of all sorts, but had simply not been found guilty by a "good" British court. But self-awareness doesn't seem to have been a factor in these peoples' consciousness.
Okay, we've had a look at the lead-up to Macquarie's arrival. You will know that there were people of power and wealth in New South Wales, or, at least, their relatives, because several of them skipped the country just before Lachlan arrived because they rightly feared the possibility of being arrested by Lachlan's savage Scots and tried by Lachlan. Although the two main coup leaders, Johnston and the nasty, manipulative, egotistic, delusional Macarthur returned to the colony several years later.
And these people of wealth and power, known today as "exclusives", hated convicts and former convicts. And people who tried to help them, especially when the exclusives realised Macquarie intended to rule without them, the exclusives, wherever possible, therefore minimising their access to power and greater wealth.
And worse, Macquarie would do so using former convicts and their children, and even ticket-of-leave men who, strictly speaking, were still convicts. And even worse still, Macquarie intended to treat former convicts as human beings, as though they were of the same social status as those who were unstained with criminal backgrounds. Of course, they knew nothing of Macquarie's extremely humble background, nor of his own criminal proclivities.
However, Lachlan's first major crisis probably occurred within his savage Scots, or, more accurately, their officers. Aware, like the exclusives, of their social status, some of the officers protested at being invited to dine with the governor along with former convicts. One, Lieutenant McNaughton, only a lieutenant, for goodness sake, even stormed out of the governor's residence.
Although that might have been because the lieutenant apparently believed convict women were all right to have sex with and become obsessed with. To the extent that one could apparently beat one of her male friends, or perhaps alternative customers, to death with a fence pole.
However, McNaughton's fellow officers did the right thing and sentenced him to death for murder. Oh, hang on, I was thinking of what would have happened if the male friend had killed the lieutenant. No, they sentenced their fellow officer to six months in pokey.
One wonders if McNaughton's friends consorted with him upon his release now he was "stained", or didn't killing a former convict count as a staining? And did the now former lieutenant refuse to mix with his fellow convicts during his six months? Or did his views about consorting with former convicts undergo a miraculous change while he was forced to consort with current convicts? One just hopes the convict cooks peed in his gruel.
Macquarie was more than peeved when this upstart pipsqueak walked out of his dinner. But he was significantly more than angry when the same pipsqueak was not sentenced to death for murder. He had a problem. These rebellious officers were unprepared to accept the orders not only of a major-general, as Macquarie now was, but of the seat of all governmental authority, civil and military, as Macquarie also was.
The rebels began conspiring with the exclusives, and writing letters of complaint to anyone of importance they knew in England. As many of them were younger sons of important families, this began a stream of letters of complaint about Macquarie's improper social attitudes and "autocratic" exercise of power.
Fortunately for Macquarie, after several requests, the Black Watch was recalled in 1814, and replaced by a more compliant regiment headed up by an old friend of his from his India days, a bloke called Molle.
Except the old friend didn't share his attitudes towards emancipists, and the whole cycle started off again. Only this time they weren't recalled and the flow of letters back to England increased.
It didn't help when Macquarie's friends made libelous attacks on some of these creatures. His secretary, Campbell, was successfully sued for libel by the appalling Not-So-Reverend Samuel Marsden, the Hanging Parson, a nickname earned for the christian attitude of the court when he was sitting as magistrate, for suggesting Marsden got Tahitian girls drunk and gave them crabs of the non-marine variety. Marsden joined the letter writers, and launched a magisterial inquiry into Macquarie's activities.
William Wentworth wrote rather an amusing anonymous poetic attack on Molle, in which he accused Molle of publicly sucking Macquarie's whatnots, although, sad to say, he didn't use those precise words, while he, Molle, was stabbing the governor in the back.
Oh, yes, not to forget that he reckoned Molle was a fat, money-grubbing, anti-emancipist bigot, and drunken letch, which, frankly, could have very accurately described most of the officers and exclusive males in the colony.
Nonetheless, Molle's fellow officers offered a reward of £100 for the name of the poet. Of course, this just led to greater publicity of the content of the attack, and warned William to head off for a "business" trip to London for a while.
The officers published an attack on those who consort with emancipists, extolling the social virtues of their mess, which did not allow entry to them. Macquarie, rightly, regarded this as an attack on himself, and was duly incensed.
Eventually, Molle's men associated the name Wentworth with the libel, and Molle arrested D'Arcy, although by this time Molle seems to have known it was William who penned the piece.
As much for D'Arcy's safety as anything else, Lachlan ordered his friend, they were apparently still friends after the hospital furore, be locked up until Molle's regiment sailed away. In this way he was able to corral the problem until it didn't matter any more.
Okay, so much for the military. What about the judiciary? Well, Macquarie had some real luck there. A bloke called Ellis Bent had been appointed as New South Wales's Deputy Advocate General.
It's not entirely clear who he was deputy to, but his role was to act as a magistrate in the civil and criminal courts. Unlike anybody else in the colony, he was an experienced and qualified barrister. Well, unlike anyone else who had not been disqualified after being sentenced for whatever crime they were convicted of.
Bent travelled to Australia on the same ship as Macquarie, and the two became good friends. Ellis came up with a number of proposed reforms that Macquarie thought were pretty much the bees knees.
But there were warning signs. What a surprise! Lachlan doesn't seem to have been a very good judge of friends. Upon his arrival, Ellis refused to move into his designated house. It was, according to Ellis, no better than a pigsty.
So Macquarie arranged for him to move into a grand colonial house. But Ellis hated that, too. So Macquarie involved Ellis in the design of a third house, to be combined with a courthouse. Ellis moved into his great mansion, with the tiny attached courthouse, but then complained about that as well.
Bent demanded another, but by this time Macquarie's expenditures were being reduced by the London nabobs. But Bent blamed poor old Macquarie, and told him he was a turd, and he, Bent, didn't show respect for turds, although perhaps not in quite those words. He even stopped standing when everyone else stood when Macquarie walked into church on Sundays. Goodness!
In the meantime, while difficult about houses, he had agreed to allow three former barristers to act as "representatives" of their clients in court. There was, after all, no other way to organise representation, no other way for proper justice to operate in the good old English way. Or as close to it as they could get.
Ellis further, quite rightly, argued that he should not be subject to the governor's authority. But Macquarie, equally rightly, pointed to his commission as governor, where it said quite plainly that a person in Bent's position was to be subject to the governor's authority.
Such an instruction was quite contrary to the British constitutional concept of the separation of powers, although noting that this was nowhere near as clear or defined in Britain as it was in the United States. In theory, this concept provides for the executive (president, or prime minister, or in this case governor, and cabinet), the legislature (parliament, or congress, or in this case the imperial government), and judiciary (courts, or in this case Ellis) be as separate as possible so that one can't order the other to do anything, and one doesn't outrank the other.
But this was hardly Macquarie's fault. He was no constitutional expert, and besides he had his orders and was required, as a good military man, to follow them. Mind you, that wouldn't have done him any good at Nuremberg, not that that was any of his concern. And in a frontier community with a small free population and a high convict population, it's arguable that the separation of powers was fine in theory, but not practical in New South Wales. Especially as the British government was not completely enamoured of the idea anyway.
One of the reforms Ellis suggested was for the establishment of a Supreme Court, and for properly qualified barristers to be encouraged to sail for the colony. Following conversations with Bent, Macquarie recommended Bent for appointment to the court. Not Ellis Bent, but his elder brother Jeffrey.
This was more than a little silly of Ellis, however, as there was a consequent reduction in his caseload, with the inevitable following disaster of a drop in the part of his income made from charging fines. A great way to ensure the honesty and fairness of the court, that, giving the magistrate/judge part of the earnings from fines. I don't think. And Ellis was having financial difficulties.
The British government agreed to the court's establishment, and Macquarie's recommendation. And boy oh boy, what a disaster this was to be. Jeffrey (sometimes Geoffrey) Bent, was a total, unadulterated arsehole, with an extremely over-developed sense of his own importance. And that of his position as a judge. His first act was to proclaim long and loud upon his appointment that he should have been knighted. So he was in a foul mood about New South Wales before he even left London. Mind you, there's a very strong possibility he was in a foul mood all the time.
After this fuss, his next act was pretty inevitable. Upon his arrival in Sydney, he refused to get off the ship unless a proper cannonade salute was fired. If Macquarie had known what Jeffrey was going to do, he might have ordered the guns be turned on the ship.
Macquarie had ordered that part of the hospital be turned into a courthouse. But a larger area had been provided to the army. And Jeffrey just hated the greater deference shown the army over the law. And him. So he refused to use that place as a court. This must almost have seemed like a spot of déjà vu for Macquarie after Ellis and his houses.
And, of course, it got worse. Jeffrey exerted his influence over the younger Bent, and now Ellis began refusing to allow emancipist former barristers to appear in his court. While the British had managed to inveigle two barristers to travel to Sydney, only one had arrived so far. Macquarie pointed out that justice couldn't possibly prevail when only one party to a case could be represented. Bent said they would have to await the arrival of the other lawyer.
Jeffrey hated the fact that the army didn't have to pay road tolls, but he did. In the end, he refused to pay a toll, threatened the toll keeper with various consequences, and ended up appearing in the magistrate's court of D'Arcy Wentworth, who issued a fine. The matter appears to have been swept under the carpet.
In the year that followed, Jeffrey and Ellis made Macquarie's life hell. And Jeffrey only heard one matter before his court, an application by the three emancipist former lawyers to be permitted to appear before the Supreme Court. Almost needless to say, Jeffrey refused.
In the end, after that year, Macquarie had to tell London that either they went or he did. Perhaps unfortunately for Lachlan in the long run, the Bents were recalled. Except before the order arrived, Ellis died, leaving his wife and several children pretty much without a penny. Macquarie, despite his feelings about Ellis, asked that she be given a pension, which she was. Of course, Jeffrey blamed Macquarie for Ellis's death by giving him substandard accommodation.
Jeffrey, of course, took the opportunity not only to write letters complaining about Macquarie, but upon his return to London, he blackened Macquarie's name wherever he, Bent, went. Oh, and he insisted Macquarie be sacked and he, Bent, be appointed in his place. Bathurst, the Secretary for War and the Colonies, must have been building up quite a file on Macquarie. Or, roomful of files. But he wasn't silly enough to swap Lachlan for Jeffrey.
So, what else could go wrong for Lachlan? Well, Bathurst and his government had a view of New South Wales as no more than a convict colony, a convenient place to send all those lower class scum and criminally-inclined destitute returned soldiers from the French and American wars in 1815 who didn't seem to understand they were living in the best country in the world. Not to mention all those Irish rebels.
But more and more free settlers were travelling to New South Wales as well, and more and more former convicts were being released, needing something to do with their freedom. Macquarie, on the spot, could see disaster approaching if action wasn't taken to provide New South Wales with the infrastructure necessary to cope with this increasing population of free people.
So he built the hospital, roads, public buildings, parks, and so on, that a prison that was now becoming a colony needed for its population's amenity. But the British government didn't have the same understanding that New South Wales was or should move on from being a prison to being a colony.
Macquarie's cause wasn't really helped by the fact he believed in building to last. All of which cost money. But the government didn't want to spend money on what it regarded as a prison. And certainly not the amounts Macquarie was spending.
Of course, London was flooded with letters from exclusives complaining about Macquarie's "gross" over-expenditure on services for black hearted criminals, drunkards and general low-lifes and prostitutes.
Of course, Macquarie didn't do himself any favours when, probably illegally, he had three drunk free settlers whipped for breaking a hole in his fence around the common, presumably to get in and "party" with some women of low morals, or perhaps more likely, high need for cash.
These three were added to the list of letter writers and then personal complainants when they returned to London. They and their supporters don't appear to have recognised the hypocrisy of complaining about emancipist drunkenness and prostitution whilst getting drunk, vandalising government property, and consorting with prostitutes themselves.
But while Macquarie tended to build for quality, occasionally went overboard, and named heaps of things after himself, and a few after his wife, Elizabeth, he was on the spot. London wasn't. And he recognised what London was extraordinarily reluctant to accept. New South Wales might have been established as a convict colony, but if you were going to free the convicts at the end of their term, allow convicts and former convicts to breed, and we would all like to see them try to stop that, make it immensely difficult for former convicts to return to Britain, allow some convicts to be accompanied by their free families, allow former soldiers and their officers to settle freely, and allow free settlers to immigrate, then you could hardly be surprised that they would all require a level of infrastructure beyond that the British government was prepared to supply.
The exclusives were equally aware of this need, but as they had a whipping post to which they could tie Macquarie, they were going to use it for all it was worth. And perhaps Macquarie's hospital was his unwisest construction. No-one knows who designed it. Some point at Macquarie himself, and others even point at Elizabeth. Certainly, after it was built no-one was claiming responsibility. For very good reason. It was a well-meant, but absolute, disaster.
You can still see it today. It's lasted all this time. Perhaps fittingly, it's now used as the New South Wales parliament house. Initially, Macquarie was rather proud of himself, as he diddled a substantial amount of the cost out of D'Arcy Wentworth. Macquarie was supposed to be preventing the use of rum as currency, but this didn't stop him signing a contract with three would-be developers, one of whom was D'Arcy. One has to suspect that Macquarie was now using another doctor to treat his syphilis.
The deal was that they would build the magnificent hospital to the plans provided by Macquarie, from the unknown architect. To help, Macquarie would provide eighty oxen, twenty draught bullocks, and twenty convict labourers. Plus, and it's a big plus, the exclusive right to import 60,000 gallons (around 270,000 litres) of rum over the next three years. To Wentworth and co. this sounded like a fine deal indeed. But, although he didn't own a violin, Macquarie was a grand fiddler.
The "exclusive" right to import rum excluded booze shipments which had already been approved. And Macquarie knew, but Wentworth and his mates, rubbing their hands together in glee, didn't, that the British government had agreed to Macquarie's suggestion to allow unlimited booze into the colony. 76,000 gallons of the foul stuff was already on its way. The intention appears to have been to flood the market, thus making rum useless as a currency.
But, Macquarie didn't stop there. He also kept the right to import such rum as he deemed necessary for the government's own use. Lachlan deemed and deemed and deemed away until, all up, over 120,000 gallons of the stuff arrived, making Wentworth's investment worth comparatively bugger all.
So, for the cost of £4,200 worth of cattle and convicts, Lachlan had taken £9,000 in spirit duties and a £40,000 hospital. He had all the right to be very proud of himself, having both saved the British government a veritable fortune, and pretty much stopped the use of rum as a currency. And provided a top notch, modern hospital. Except ...
And it was a very big "except". The hospital was almost completely unusable. First of all he got a rocket in return for his proud report to London. He was accused of wasting thousands of pounds on worthless criminals. And not only that, he funded it with rum. A major international embarrassment, apparently.
Then, to top it off, the joint didn't have any toilets, so bedpans were slopped out the windows, food was prepared in the overcrowded wards because the kitchen was being used as a morgue, the patients couldn't be stopped having sex, so syphilis was added to whatever the patient came in with, and nurses threw warm meat at patients instead of serving it to them, allegedly to minimise contagion risks. And the staff were stealing medicines, bandages, and other supplies, to sell on the black market.
Frankly, as a hospital, this place stank. Literally.
Needless to say, this was all reported back to London. Often. And you can bet that Sydney's favourite name for the place, the Sydney Slaughterhouse, was passed on. Often, as well.
Eventually, Francis Greenway, an architect transported because he was a lousy forger, and yet another emancipist on the government payroll, fixed the Slaughterhouse at the developers' expense. D'Arcy hated him for evermore, but does not appear to have held the matter against Lachlan. Or perhaps he could see how unpolitic that would be for him in view of the fact the exclusives seem to have hated him more than they hated convicts and emancipists.
One final matter, at least for our purposes, that got up the British government's nose. Macquarie was actively encouraging the exploration of New South Wales. Sydney itself is pretty much hemmed in by the Blue Mountains, limiting access to potential farm and grazing land on the other side. Macquarie had a road built over the mountains, and sent explorers scuttling all over the place. Consequently, the potential agricultural wealth of New South Wales was effectively advertised to the world.
As a result, the rate of immigration of free settlers was increasing exponentially. Of course, so was bloody conflict with the Indigenous Australians, who, sadly, had no reply to the bloodthirstiness of the so-called civilised British, nor their guns. And this influx of farmers and graziers was most definitely not something the British government wanted. Again, this was to be a prison, not a colony with an apparently unchecked inflow of free immigrants.
So, Bathurst turned to his roomful of files containing letters from the angry and dissatisfied exclusives, pondered for not very long, and appointed a bloke called John Thomas Bigge as a commissioner of enquiry.
Lord Bathurst, concerned about the efficacy of using transportation to reduce the incidence of crime, the cost of maintaining the prison colony, the way the colony should develop (note the use of the word “colony”, and any faults with Macquarie’s rule, instituted a royal commission to enquire. He appointed John Thomas Bigge, former barrister and Chief Justice of Trinidad, aged just thirty-nine when he arrived in Sydney in 1819, as royal commissioner.
We know it’s an overly easy joke to make, except there’s really nothing funny about it, and that’s got nothing to do with the fact that if it was a joke it would contain little humour, but John Thomas Bigge was a small man, and that’s got nothing to do with his physical appearance.
Bigge’s final report, actually three reports, was not a completely negative, conservative, and destructive document. But his approach to his enquiry was worse than appalling, it was absolutely outrageous.
Bigge was not a senior member of the British élite, but he was part of it and was in total accord with its beliefs at a time when the Conservative Party, known as the Tory Party, representative of the conservative élite, dominated government. He was also a public servant, and he knew perfectly well his job was to implement everything he was instructed to do. And, of course, that was the only path to good promotion.
Lord Bathurst, the conservative, but allegedly not reactionary, Secretary of War and Colonies gave Bigge his commission documentation, and outlined his expectations of Bigge in three further letters. He was to investigate 'all the laws regulations and usages of the settlements', particularly the laws having an impact on civil administration,the convict system, the courts, the Church (note the singular, this meant the “established” church, the Church of England), trade, governmental revenue, and natural resources.
Transportation, Bathurst wrote, should be made “an object of real terror” and Bigge had to report whether Lachlan’s humanitarian, for the time, policies had caused the need for convicts and anyone likely to commit a crime to be terrorised to be weakened because of Macquarie's “ill considered compassion for convicts”. Where he reckoned the convict system was too soft, Bigge could recommend the establishment of a more terrible regime.
Disgracefully, there was to be no privacy for the highest and mightiest of New South Wales, both private sector and public sector people. The royal commissioner was to elicit anything he could about the private and public lives of these people, secret and/or supposedly private conversations, even when the participants were under the impression what they said was “off the record”, tittle tattle of all kinds, with no apparent regard for the relationships between the people being tittle tattled on and the tittle tattler, the British Government wanted to know it all.
So not only was Bigge to conduct his commission outrageously, but Bathurst instructed him outrageously. This was, quite simply, wrong.
On the other hand, perhaps we need to have some regard for the situation the nobs of Britain believed themselves to be in in the years after the French and American wars ended. The country was flooded with returning soldiers and sailors, quite a few of whom had suffered injuries that made it impossible to work, even if they could find work. And there was no welfare system, no pensions, no unemployment benefits.
With the end of the wars, the manufacturing industry took a nosedive and heaps of workers were thrown out of work. In the country, the replacement of people with sheep was still continuing, throwing more people out of work.
Inevitably, because crime almost inevitably follows poverty, crime was on the increase, and the need for transportation was increasing. Added to this was the fact that the opportunity to persuade convicted criminals to avoid various punishments, including transportation, if they joined the armed services had disappeared.
And the nobs didn’t just want to get rid of criminals by transporting them, they wanted the whole convict system to be so completely ghastly that would-be criminals simply would not. Well, good luck with that one guys, that’s just not how criminal decision-making works.
And, with the background of the American and French revolutions, civil disaffection was on the rise. And who could possibly be surprised. We've become used in Australia to the right of, apart from inmates of psychiatric hospitals and certain inmates of prisons, and a few other unfortunate people, all adults having the right to vote for members of our various parliaments.
But we tend to forget that when Macquarie was here only some 3% of the British had the right to vote, all white, male, wealthy, Protestant nobs. And of course many of that 3% didn't bother to vote, and many of the remainder sold their votes in what was an immensely corrupt electoral system.
And the significant majority of these men regarded the poor as nothing but a burden, a bunch of ill bred, innately stupid, immoral, criminally-minded, lazy people who refused to do the right thing and stop having sex after one or two children. After all, the wealthy mostly did so, sleeping in separate rooms. Of course, they tended not to mention that so many men were forced by their "nature" to resort to these immoral poor for sexual relief.
But these self-same poor were increasingly demanding more rights:
1812: The first and only Prime Minister to be assassinated in the United Kingdom's history was killed in Westminster, albeit by an unfortunate nutter. But the example was set, and who knew when another attempt would be made.
1810-1816: The Luddites were smashing machines, protesting at the loss of employment to them in both rural and urban centres. Of course, a bit of hanging, and sending the remaining leaders to New South Wales put a stop to that. And Prinnie's carriage had a window broken by stones in 1817, Prinnie being the mad king's grossly fat and immoral poor joke of a son who was effectively ruling in place of his father. Prinnie was hated by the general populace, for good reason. He was a rich waster at a time of great poverty.
1815: The first of the Corn Laws was passed, putting a tax on imported grain, forcing the public to buy the much more expensive and worse quality English grain. Unbelievable at a time of severe economic distress and starvation.
November-December, 1816: On 15 November a meeting of some 10,000 people met at Spa Fields. They put together a petition to be presented to the Prince Regent (commonly known as Prinnie, a massively fat, hugely wealthy waster with what the public regarded as grossly immoral habits, he was the son of Sad Mad King George III, and was king in all but name). The petition called for relief from suffering, universal male suffrage, annual elections, and the secret vote. Prinnie avoided accepting it.
On 2 December, another much more radical meeting was held at Spa Fields. The crowd headed for the Tower of London, apparently with the idea that taking it would cause the fall of the governmental system. They broke into a gun shop on the way, and unfortunately killed a pedestrian. This is referred to as the Spa Fields Riots. One of the rioters was hanged.
January, 1817: On the way to open parliament, or some say afterwards, Prinnie's carriage was stoned and a window broken.
March, 1817: March of the Blanketeers. The unemployed of Manchester, wearing a blanket, were to walk to London in groups of ten (any more was illegal), each with a petition tied to their arm. They were all arrested or dispersed on the way, except for one man who was ignored.
June, 1817: Pentrich Rising (or Derbyshire Uprising). This was an intended large-scale uprising which basically brought out one or two hundred men at most. Three men were hanged, and another thirty were transported, including a farmer who fed the few who actually marched. There was outrage when it became known a government spy with the pseudonym "Oliver" essentially encouraged the uprising, organising the plotters and telling them he had contacts in other towns who were all planning to rise. A government inquiry reported that it believed an uprising would not have taken place without Oliver's involvement. This did not apparently earn a return ticket for the transported men, or compensation for the families of the hanged men. What a surprise!
16 August, 1819: Peterloo, it was called, named after its location and the Battle of Waterloo. It occurred at Peterborough, on 16 August, 1819. A crowd of around 50-60,000 gathered, "policed" by the amateur cavalry of the yeomanry, who charged this entirely unarmed crowd of women, children and men with swords not only drawn, but flashing. And no back of the sword stuff here, nope. Sharp side only. They killed 11 (2 women), some sources say 15, and wounded around 400, some sources say 700, some of them very severely.
The government failed to take the hint and undertake some reform. Nope, the Conservatives took the opportunity to pass six extremely repressive pieces of legislation. They were frightened, and didn't want to hear that it was them, not the radicals who were the cause of the problem.
1820: Then finally, as far as the Macquarie/Bigge situation was concerned, was the Cato Street Conspiracy (the address of the meetings). This was a totally doomed attempt to kill the prime minister and his cabinet, who were believed to be gathering for a dinner. One has to wonder whether or not a government agent provocateur wasn't involved in this. There was no dinner, the meeting in Cato Street was handily raided before any harm could be done, and five men were executed, and five others were whizzed off to, you guessed it, Australia.
Concurrently to all this carry on in England, for the first five years Britain was fighting and concluding its long war with France, in 1814, and from 1812 to 1815 it was also fighting the Americans again, successfully preventing them from taking Canada (don't tell them this, they like to reckon they won!). Further, over the ten years or so, problems were extant in the other parts of Britain as well, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
So it's not all that surprising they were pooing their noble pants.