Early Australia: Nobles And Convicts In The Age Of Liberty – Kirsten McKenzie

Kirsten McKenzie has a BA (Hons), an MA from the University of Cape Town and completed her D Phil at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1997. She began teaching Australian history at the University of Sydney in 2002. Her research interests include comparative British colonial identity in the Cape Colony and New South Wales, scandal and gender, and the construction of celebrity. On Tuesday 17 November 2009, she addressed The Sydney Institute to explain how the antics of a mysterious and brazen swindler known as John Dow – the subject of her book, A Swindler’s Progress – reveal the tension in Australian colonial society between rank attained by birthright and status earned by merit.

EARLY AUSTRALIA: NOBLES AND CONVICTS IN THE AGE OF LIBERTY

KIRSTEN MCKENZIE

A Swindler’s Progress begins just a stone’s throw from where we stand tonight. In the autumn of 1835, a slender and balding man with a Scottish accent was recounting the unfortunate story of his life before a rapt audience. Under sentence of transportation, he claimed, he had taken a fictitious name “in order that the spotless honor of my family might not be sullied by my disgrace.” He appealed repeatedly to his powerful father for help, but in vain. At the final hour he was abandoned by a noble friend whose evidence would have acquitted him: “fate had ordered it otherwise – he would not attend – I was convicted.” And thus “through the malignity of my parent, the being of all others, to whom I naturally looked for clemency” was he “thrown, a stranger and destitute of the ordinary comforts of life” on the shores of a far and savage country.

The fantasy drew on the style of popular melodrama. Yet this tale was not enacted in a theatre, but in that equally entertaining auditorium of colonial life, the Supreme Court. And the fantasist who was enthralling a capacity crowd – the courtroom was packed to the gills – was not merely acting a part (although he was a practised performer) but defending his own person. The judges, however, remained unimpressed by his eloquence. After lengthy deliberations the prisoner was sentenced “to be transported out of the Colony for the term of his natural life.”

The man being tried for fraud was an ex-convict sentenced under the name of John Dow. Yet he refused that name. “I have sworn before my God,” the prisoner intoned in Sydney, “that I am Edward, Lord Viscount Lascelles, the eldest son of the Earl of Harewood, and heir apparent to that illustrious name.” It was well known, claimed Dow, that Edward Lascelles had disappeared from England. Now he could reveal the secret behind his fate – he had taken a false name to hide the shame of transportation.

My very first encounter with the mysterious John Dow and his aristocratic alter ego was in the reminiscences of an Austrian Baron, Charles von Hügel. During a visit to New South Wales, von Hügel came across the story of a former convict who seemed to be making a pretty good living defrauding others while passing himself as “Lord Lascelles”. Showing a suitably aristocratic disdain for the antipodes, the Baron found it “highly characteristic of the country in which it took place”. Reading von Hugel’s account, I could imagine it as an obscure, somewhat entertaining footnote in a book that charted the emergence of Australian egalitarianism from a too-slavish regard for the social hierarchies of the mother country.

But as I began my detective work – as I started to track the lives of John Dow and Edward Lascelles around the world – it soon became clear that this was far more than just an Australian story. Or, to put it another way, Australia’s story needed to be seen as part of a much bigger global transformation.

John Dow was indeed a swindler, a con-man, and serial impostor. The voluminous convict records allowed me to track him to Scotland. Indeed many people in Sydney had remarked upon his Scottish accent. In Edinburgh, my hands stained black with soot-covered documents unopened since the early nineteenth century, I found the details of the crimes for which Dow was transported to Australia. Impersonating high status men was his stock-in-trade – he had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land for seven years for claiming to be the son of a Scottish baronet. In reality – the evidence suggests – he was the son of a Scottish coal miner. But for all his habitual lies, Dow was telling the truth when he said that Edward Lascelles had disappeared.

This was the second mystery of the book – the real identity of Edward Lascelles and the reasons he had vanished from British society. This became one of the central twists of the plot. For the Lascelles, it transpired, were newly-minted aristocracy. And they were no less imperial opportunists than the settlers of Australia, albeit on a vastly larger scale. Having amassed a spectacular fortune in the slave economies of the West Indies, the Lascelles had spent the best part of a century in a ruthless campaign to buy their way into the ranks of the British aristocracy. They had built the requisite stately home, Harewood House, in Yorkshire. They had employed the usual suspects of eighteenth-century design – Robert Adam, Thomas Chippendale and Capability Brown. They ensured that they, and their house, were painted by the luminaries of the age – Turner, Hoppner, Thomas Lawrence. They wielded the necessary political influence both by controlling pocket boroughs and by representing the county of Yorkshire. In 1807 they had shown just how much they were a force to be reckoned with when they fought one of the most celebrated political campaigns of the day – a battle over the Yorkshire county seat in which they spent over £100 000 (around six million dollars in today’s terms). It was an amount that stunned contemporaries and captured the attention of the nation. The chief of their two rivals was the son of Earl Fitzwilliam – the same Earl Fitzwilliam who sponsored D’Arcy Wentworth’s departure for Australia.

Edward Lascelles then, was heir to one of the largest fortunes in Britain, but he was also heir to an aristocratic name which had not yet shaken off a certain consciousness about its origins. The 1807 Yorkshire election showed this only too well. In a year in which the country was celebrating the abolition of the slave trade, the Lascelles family was pilloried by their opponents for both their slave-derived wealth and their parvenu social position. In yet another unexpected twist, the third candidate in the Yorkshire contest was none other than William Wilberforce, the great antislavery campaigner himself.

Edward Lascelles’s grandfather had been born in Barbados, but in 1812 he was created first Earl of Harewood. The dynasty seemed assured. But six years later the heir to this spectacular fortune threw it all away. On 12 November 1818 Edward’s father received an anonymous letter informing him “that a plan was in agitation to strike a severe blow at the honor of the House of Harewood, by the marriage of the Honorable Edward Lascelles to a person of low situation with whom He had kept up an illicit connexion for some time.” Edward had eloped with Ann Elizabeth Rosser, a working-class woman from Hereford with whom he (and, it seems his brother also) had been having an affair. His father was livid and fired off a letter to Edward. With no salutation, it simply begins like this: “As you have thought proper to disgrace yourself and distress your family by marrying a common prostitute I think it right to make the following communication to you. You and your heirs will be totally cut off from the succession to any part of this property. The only means you will have of subsistence now, or hereafter, therefore depends upon me.” It was signed simply “Lascelles”.

A separation between Edward and Ann was negotiated. She was to hand over his letters, he was never to see her again. She would receive £300 per annum, paid quarterly. Edward was packed off to the continent in the care of a minder, one John Russell. Rumours, however, were rife, and Edward’s disappearance was tailor-made for serial impostor John Dow, arrested for fraud in Scotland six years after Edward’s disgrace. In a Scottish courtroom, the judge urged Dow to “reflect that he was going to a country where a more strict watch would be kept over his conduct.” In fact, the antipodes offered generous scope for his penchant for aliases. In a society where “criminals” and “innocents” lived side by side, where social and political power was in flux, shrugging off one life and taking up another was part of marking out a new society. If anyone could understand the rules of that game, it was a serial impostor.

Dow was already claiming to be Lascelles on the boat out to Van Diemen’s Land. Once his seven year sentence was ended, he could embark on a series of swindles using Edward’s identity. He had only the barest knowledge of the real Edward Lascelles, but that didn’t actually matter – he didn’t have to persuade anyone who knew Edward personally. What he was performing in Australia was not a particular person but the idea of a Viscount. He was suitably haughty with his victims. He went around with a great swag of gold chain about his neck. He carried a mysterious box of papers. He ate his way through the poultry yards of the luckless settlers with whom he stayed. He made them eat in the kitchen while he dined alone in the parlour. In the aftermath of a convict rebellion in the Hunter Valley, he claimed to be a Government Commissioner sent to investigate the conditions of assigned servants, and he got plenty of free board and lodging acting in this role. The issue of convict discipline was amongst the hottest one of the day and the final chapters of the book show how Dow got caught up in a battle between various colonial factions over convict transportation and political rights.

It took almost two years, but eventually Dow overreached himself and was arrested for forging a promissory note to pay for some horses. A sensational trial in Sydney produced evidence from the Lascelles that John Dow was an impostor (though Lord Harewood was very careful to conceal the real reason why Edward was not in Britain). Dow was sentenced to transportation once again, ending up in the notorious penal settlement of Port Arthur.

This is a book about how one man vanished and another stole his identity. But it is also a book about a world coming into the modern era – where rank based on birth was battling rank based on merit, where people were reinventing themselves in Britain no less than in its colonies. In the midst of what I have called “The Age of Liberty”, British and colonial societies were bound together in debates over what it meant to be free.

The backdrop to Edward and Dow’s story involves big picture events with which we are familiar. The industrial revolution was transforming Britain’s economy and population. Europe was convulsed by the French Revolution and its aftermath. As the tide of public opinion turned against them, British slavery and convict transportation were abolished. The franchise was expanded to encompass increasing numbers of men. What was it like to be buffeted by such forces? We might think that a convict society on the farthest side of the world was a very different place to the aristocratic bastions of British power. But this was an interconnected world, one where battles over social status and political power were being fought out on multiple fronts. Impostors show us the paradox at the heart of this age of liberty. They show us that freedom could mean the freedom to lie.

Endnotes

R. v. Dow or Lascelles, Sydney Herald, 14 May 1835.

R. v. Dow or Lascelles, Sydney Herald, 14 May 1835.

Charles Von Hügel, New Holland Journal, November 1833 – October 1834, translated and edited by Dymphna Clark, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), p. 298.

Notes by Lord Harewood’s Agent, undated. Harewood House.

Henry Lascelles to Edward Lascelles, 26 November 1818. Harewood House.

Dumfries Weekly Journal, 3 May 1825