The World, The Flesh and the Devil: The Life and Opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765-1838
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The World, The Flesh and the Devil: The Life and Opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765-1838
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| ISBN-13: | 9781775587088 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/24/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 968 |
| File size: | 31 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The World, the Flesh & the Devil
The life and opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765-1838
By Andrew Sharp
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2016 Andrew SharpAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-812-1
CHAPTER 1
A West Riding man's place in the social and economic world of England
I Marsden's rise and Edward Eagar's contempt
In 1822, Edward Eagar, a convicted, transported, but freed Irish forger living in New South Wales, wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in Downing Street that Marsden was 'a man descended from the lowest ranks of life, brought up in the trade of a blacksmith, of coarse, vulgar habits and manners, accustomed to no better society than the original unimproved society of New South Wales, and to whom no one feature of good feeling or respectability belonged, other than what he acquired by the mere circumstance of being Chaplain to the Colony'. Eagar obviously considered that he outranked Marsden and was entitled to speak disparagingly of him. Before he uttered a forged bill and was convicted to transportation he had been brought up among Irish gentry of Killarney and had been admitted as a solicitor and attorney in Dublin. He was a gentleman, Marsden was not.
For his part, Marsden shared Eagar's view of the worldly importance of rank, status, office and wealth even though he did not share Eagar's view of Eagar's own position in the world – he thought the forger and fraudster had lost that forever. Nor did he think polished manners and appearance were the marks of true eminence. He had been formed in obscure working families in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Others could see in his manners and hear in his voice where he had come from and at times sneered at him. Yet though he was never ashamed of his origins he delighted in his eminence in New South Wales. In 1796, two years into his life in the Colony, he wrote to Rev. Miles Atkinson, an English clerical mentor and friend of his living in Leeds, also in the West Riding. In the course of asking whether he should take on the additional task of being a magistrate or JP as well as a clergyman, he marvelled at his worldly ascent in life:
When I take a retrospective view of the various changes through which a kind Providence hath led me for some years past I am lost in wonder and astonishment. I am not born of noble birth, nor heir to any great inheritance, but with only the prospect of hard labour and toil before me. I cannot without being guilty of the greatest ingratitude complain of any hardship in my former humble situation. ... God hath highly exalted me from my low situation and rank to minister before Him in holy things. This is so great an honour and favour conferred on me, so mean and bare, as I hope will always reconcile my mind to bear patiently whatever trials I may meet with in line of my duty.
God's providence had raised him; he was not about to deny that providence; he would live a life among the eminent of the new land.
Though his worldly status and wealth were very welcome to him, he knew they were gifts of God which might be withdrawn at any time. In 1812 he wrote to that effect to Mrs Mary Stokes, the matriarch of an evangelical family in London and an intimate friend of his and of Elizabeth, his wife: 'I have no cause to complain of the Divine Goodness. He has blessed me in my going out and my coming in, in my basket and in my store we have all good things now to enjoy [Psalms 121:8; Deuteronomy 28: 5; 1 Timothy 6:17]'. As Mrs Stokes knew, this was no simple rejoicing on his part in his good fortune. He had already deferred to the greater wisdom of his creator when two of his children had died in accidents when they were toddlers in 1801 and 1803. He had written to her that they were 'not lost, in that glorious morning of the Resurrection of the just [Luke 14:14], we shall all meet again – Parents & Children shall see each other if numbered amongst the Saints they part no more for ever'. Worldly adversities as well as prosperity were the Lord's will, and she would have known that this was how to understand her younger friend's sentiments. In the passage from 1 Timothy to which he referred, the Apostle Paul had enjoined his followers to Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy (Deuteronomy 28:5; 1 Timothy 6:17).
But if Marsden thought he could live in the light of that injunction, not everyone looked on his rise and professed otherworldliness so kindly or in so biblical a way, and it is not to be denied that he rejoiced in his rise in the social world, or that there was often in his mind a tension between his enjoyment and his indifference to it. The object of this chapter is to evoke something of his life in the social and economic system in England before he went to Botany Bay: 'the world' which had plenty of the flesh and the devil in it, whose values he was to learn and largely digest, and in a version of which he was, slightly uneasily, to thrive on the far side of the world.
II Early years, 1765–93
Samuel was born to Thomas and Bathsheba Marsden, on 25 June 1765 in the tiny hamlet of Bagley, six miles west of Leeds, and baptised at St Wilfred's parish church at nearby Calverley, on 21 July. According to the meagre records and to family tradition, Thomas was a butcher who also worked either as a farm labourer or else was tenant of a small farm, perhaps both; but as was typical of an area labelled 'manufacturing' in a contemporary map,he and Bathsheba were predominantly engaged in weaving wool for the merchants of Leeds. They were poor but could sign their names and could probably read what they would most want to read as devout Wesleyan 'Methodists': the Holy Bible. Before Samuel turned three the family moved from Bagley to Farsley, a few minutes' walk up a hill.
Marsden's West Riding, 1765–c.1788
Farsley was the eastern section of the twin village of Farsley-with-Calverley. The two settlements were scarcely a mile apart but (as a local historian was to put it 100 years later) 'in many respects they might have been unconnected and at a great distance from each other'. Many of the inhabitants of Farsley, though they were Protestant Christians, did not eagerly conform with the rites of the Church of England or wish to subject themselves unthinkingly to its discipline: to the traditional system whereby the country was divided into parishes, tended to by vicars or their curates appointed by the higher reaches in a hierarchy of churchmen, and often only tenuously concerned with the eternal souls of their congregations. Thomas and Bathsheba may probably be counted among those of such opinions – common fame two generations later had them to be 'Methodists' – though they retained their Church connections at the very least to the extent of having their children baptised into the Church. Nor was the common connection between Church and landed or mercantile gentlemen to be found in Farsley as in Calverley. There was certainly no 'squarson': no parson who lived rather more the life of a country gentleman and JP than a poor cleric devoted solely to his pastoral duties. 'Unlike Calverley', Farsley had 'long contained many small freeholders, who, not being tied to the skirts of some lord of the village, territorial or commercial, have in past times somewhat demonstratively exercised the privileges their holdings gave them'. The villagers shared certain characteristics though. In both settlements there was much talk of the preparation of wool for the market; thrift was a greatly prized virtue; banks were so distrusted that savings went into teapots and not into the coffers of financiers.
From the straggling main street of Farsley where they lived in a cottage in Turner Fold, the Marsdens could see north over the fields to the tree-lined River Aire running below them down its broad glacial valley. Beneath them and slightly to their right on their own side of Airedale was Bagley where they had come from. Over the far side of the valley on the rounded hillcrest a mile or so away sat Rawdon and Horsforth, the two villages where Samuel was later to live. Deep in Airedale the river moved swiftly under a stone bridge. Close to and in parallel with it lay the sedate, uncompleted Leeds–Liverpool canal, awaiting its final push into Lancashire and so to the Irish Sea. Leeds was downstream, and there the Aire flowed sedately enough to be a navigable part of a larger canal system. Still further east the river was joined by the Calder at Castleford. The Aire-Calder Navigation then took its slow course across the alluvial flats of the Humberhead Levels into the East Riding to merge with the Ouse and Humber. The wide and muddy river finally joined the German Ocean near the town of Kingston-Upon-Hull, where Marsden was later to be schooled, and where Elizabeth Fristan, his future wife, was brought up.
Samuel was the first of six children. His mother died at 36 in 1779 when he was twelve, leaving her husband with the responsibility of caring for the family. This was not the end of the family's trials. Two of his siblings died within two weeks of one another in the winter of 1782, probably of some infectious disease. Seven years later, in 1789, Thomas followed Bathsheba and his dead children to the grave, probably after returning to his home town of Rawdon where his then 69-year-old mother was to continue to live until well into her nineties. Samuel and his three remaining siblings may have lived with their father and grandmother at Rawdon for some time, but not much is known of his early life except that despite the deaths in his family he called himself 'happy' in his youth. A memorialist and family member who tried to prepare a publication on him soon after his death remarked with regret that he 'seldom or ever dwelt upon his family or early life'. It is more certain, though, that he worked in his uncle John Marsden's blacksmith shop at Horsforth, perhaps as an apprentice and very possibly from the time of his mother's death.
But, whatever the precise rhythm and shape of his early life and how it was with his uncle John and aunt Hannah, its course was to change radically. Following the example of his parents Samuel had been 'religious' from an early age; he neglected no opportunity to hear and spread the gospel when he could. Though his parents (and probably he himself) had Methodist sympathies – more interested in the pure message of the Bible than in deferring to the constraints of hearing it only within the confines and according to the rules of the established Church – in 1786, aged about 21, he began to think of undertaking 'ministry' in that very Church. In 1787 he was plucked from the forge and groomed by a group of evangelical clergymen for a higher calling than that of a blacksmith. He was to be a clergyman of the Church of England. He was to be educated at a parish school at Rawdon, at Hull Grammar School, and finally at the University of Cambridge. By 1793, vastly more educated in men and manners, he would become a priest who mediated between God and the laity, a pastor to the congregation of his parish, and a professional preacher of the Word of God. He would come to be known as 'Reverend' and in virtue of that title and those tasks be admitted to the rank and status of a gentleman.
III The West Riding
The Yorkshire that Marsden left behind him in 1793, having risen in status and having learned some of both the simple and more complex arts of civil life, was the largest and most populated county in England, divided because of its size and population into three thirds or 'Ridings'. The two Marsden families lived in the West Riding. The first census of Great Britain, taken in 1801, showed that the West Riding alone had a population third only to that of two great undivided counties, Middlesex and Lancaster – and those two contained the great and growing urban agglomerations of London and Manchester. The West Riding had grown from about 300,000 in 1751 to 460,000 in 1781, to 580,000 in 1801. As it was throughout Great Britain, the population was predominantly rural and Marsden would have known a significant group of its inhabitants face-to-face. Until he was 23 years old he lived within the limited compass of four villages, none more than two and a half miles from any other. In 1801 Calverley had 1127 inhabitants, Farsley 954, Horsforth 2099, and Rawdon 1115. Conjecture, based on the fact of his being a prodigious traveller in the antipodes and a young man greatly interested in religion, suggests that he probably travelled around the Riding following revivalist preachers, free from the discipline of having to attend to a settled parish. Within an easy day's return journey on foot there were Leeds (53,000), Bradford (8500), Halifax (8500), Wakefield (8000) and Huddersfield (7000). He may even have visited the tiny Moravian settlement at Fulneck, famous for sending its missionaries to Greenland; it was only an hour and a half's walk from Horsforth. From the late 1780s, though, he certainly came to know Leeds well, together with the major North Sea port of Hull (29,500). He would have seen the wool business in Leeds, Bradford and Halifax, and in Hull observed the workings of the Baltic trade in timber and furs, the operations of arctic whalers from their home port, and the multifarious business of a thriving coastal trade. In his last years in England he also came to know the university town of Cambridge (10,000) and the great metropolis of London (1,000,000) which had been connected with Leeds by Royal Mail coach the year after he was born.
Samuel's life before his education for the ministry was that of the son of a small farmer, weaver and butcher, moving a little higher within the ranks of artisans by way of his uncle's blacksmith's shop. His earliest impressions of life would have been those derived from a growing and 'improving' agricultural and manufacturing economy. In 1800 an English guidebook spoke of Leeds as 'the little metropolis of the woollen trade'. It also spoke of how 'the dispersed state of the manufactures in villages and single houses' was 'highly favourable' to the 'morals and the happiness' of the locals. The merchants who bought and sold the untreated wool at source and the finished cloth at the end of the long production process in cottages and water mills could find working families in villages like Farsley: settled, housed, and well set up for spinning and weaving. The heads of households were 'generally men of small capitals, and often annexed a farm to their other business. Great numbers of the rest have a field or two, to support a horse and a cow; and are, for the most part, blessed with the comforts, without the superfluities of life.' Thomas, Samuel's father, was probably one of 'the rest'.
'Industrialisation' – that is, the mechanisation of production using coal power and the concentration of the workforce in imposingly large 'manufactories' (later called factories) – did not occur during Marsden's early years in Yorkshire. Cottage industry together with small shops in the towns and mills on streams were the norm; the occupational structure of Leeds and its surroundings was remarkably stable until the 1820s. In the four villages the first coal-powered flax mill was not opened until 1791; the first woollen mill in 1792. The young Samuel knew water mills much better; there was one on the stream near their house at Bagley. But social disruption and change were sometimes evident within the Arcadian scene. In 1786, three years after the end of Great Britain's unsuccessful war with the Thirteen Colonies in North America, a West Riding JP spoke of 'all the different kinds of vagrants ... idle, and wandering soldiers, and mariners' as 'most troublesome to deal with'. The surgeon Dr William Hey, FRS, Mayor of Leeds in 1787 and 1788, and mentor of Marsden's for many years, spoke eloquently not of the 'morals and the happiness' of the town but of the vices of all classes: the brutality and licentiousness of the poor and the luxurious profligacy of the rich.
London, soon to be famously baptised the 'great wen' (a festering boil) by the journalist William Cobbett, had long been known as a sink of vice. The famous philanthropist, anti-slave trader and Christian moralist William Wilberforce, MP for Yorkshire, put his own gloss on the theme in 1800:
London is the gangrene of our body politic, and the bad humours it generates corrupt the whole mass. Through the medium of the great clubs, &c., one set of opinions, manners, modes of living &c. are diffused through the vast mass of the higher orders. Domestic relations, and family economy, and order, are voted bores, while ... aided by the increasing wealth and the prevailing sentiment of the age, whatever ways of thinking, speaking, and acting become popular in the higher classes, soon spread to every other. Hence respect for our nobility, and even for the king himself, instead of being regarded as a Christian duty, is deemed antiquated prejudice.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Introduction The life and opinions of Samuel Marsden,
Freight from England, 1765–1793,
Chapter 1 A West Riding man's place in the social and economic world of England,
Chapter 2 The gospel, c. 1780–93,
Chapter 3 The callings, duties, trials and mission of an evangelical minister, c. 1780–93,
Chapter 4 The voyage to Botany Bay, 1793–94,
A Rising Man in New South Wales, 1794–1807,
Chapter 5 A clergyman's role in New South Wales: Richard Johnson's example, 1788–1800,
Chapter 6 Living in an unregenerate Colony, 1794–1800,
Chapter 7 Churches and schools, 1800–07,
Chapter 8 Magistrate, 1800–07,
Chapter 9 Farmer, 1800–07,
Chapter 10 Missionary beginnings, 1800–07,
Chapter 11 'The flogging parson' and the Irish troubles, 1800–07,
Chapter 12 Family and ambitions: order, civilisation and evangelism in the antipodes and South Seas,
At Work in England, 1807–1809,
Chapter 13 The social reformer and mission advocate abroad, 1807–09,
Tribulations and Triumphs in the Antipodes, 1810–c. 1828,
Chapter 14 Jealousy of office: a narrative of disputes between Marsden and Macquarie until the Philo Free libel, 1810–17,
Chapter 15 The mission in the Society Islands until the publication of Philo Free in 1817,
Chapter 16 The mission to the New Zealanders planned and delayed, 1808–c. 1817,
Chapter 17 Intentions revealed and troubles emerging in the Bay of Islands, c. 1814–17,
Chapter 18 Marsden's 'character': amour-propre and the works of the devil in New South Wales, 1817–21,
Chapter 19 Marsden, Macquarie and their fight to the reputational death, 1817–26,
Chapter 20 Weakness and disunity in the Bay of Islands, 1817–23,
Chapter 21 Moses and the twelve spies: expulsions from the Promised Land, 1821–23,
Chapter 22 Missionaries abroad and at home, and a gentleman sinner: New South Wales, 1821–c. 1830,
Towards a More Peaceful End, Until 1838,
Chapter 23 The routines of colonial life, c. 1821–30,
Chapter 24 Civilisation and the Prince of Darkness: New Zealanders, their civilisation and evangelisation, 1814–30,
Chapter 25 Law, government, settlement and empire in New Zealand, 1814–38,
Chapter 26 Final years, c. 1830–38,
Chapter 27 The last judgment,
Appendix Marsden's character in the hands of others, 1838–2014,
Notes,
Selected Sources,
List of Figures,
Index,
Plates,