Lord Sydney and the Creation of Sydney

Andrew Tink was the Member for Eastwood in Sydney from 1988-99 and the Member for Epping from 1999-2007. Since leaving politics, Andrew Tink has published a biography of Australian pioneer William Charles Wentworth and more recently a biography of Lord Sydney – Lord Sydney: The Life and Times of Tommy Townsend. On Wednesday 1 February 2012, Andrew Tink addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss the man whose name was given to Australia’s first city and the world of the eighteenth century that gave birth to a nation.

LORD SYDNEY AND THE CREATION OF SYDNEY

ANDREW TINK

To understand Lord Sydney is to understand the man behind the first European settlement of Australia. This settlement was to be the climax of Sydney’s public life. But Lord Sydney’s career had been moulded by one of the English speaking people’s seminal struggles – the American Revolutionary War.

For most of his life, Sydney had answered to the name Tommy Townshend. A member of the House of Commons from the age of just 21, Tommy was always full of bumptious ambition and self-confidence. Thanks to the political influence of the Townshends, who were one of the dominant Whig party’s leading families, he never faced a contested election in his entire career. And, from his entry into Parliament in 1754, he progressed steadily up the lower rungs of the outer ministry.

All that changed after George III assumed the throne in 1760. Determined to break the Whigs’ stranglehold on government, the young King set about destroying their power. This ushered in a period of great instability, when there were seven prime ministers in just ten years. All the while, Britain was struggling to digest her massive territorial gains from the Seven Years War.

For so long as France’s North American colonies, which stretched from New Orleans in the south to Quebec in the north east, answered to Paris, Britain’s colonists along America’s eastern seaboard were constrained by “the dread of France”. Following the Seven Years War, France lost these territories to Britain. At the same time, Britain struggled to pay off her own war debts.

As Britain looked to her American colonists for financial help and for a contribution to their own defence against Indian attacks, successive governments came up with schemes to tax them. These included the American Stamp Act and the infamous tax on tea, which ultimately led to the Boston Tea Party.

Although Tommy Townshend was strong in his opposition to the Stamp Act, he was less vocal about the tea tax. In and out of government during the politically turbulent 1760s, Townshend remained pragmatic. And it was only after being dumped from the lucrative post of paymaster-general of the army in 1768 that Townshend began to take a determined pro-American line.

Having struggled for ten years to find a prime minister strong enough to dominate the House of Commons and yet flexible enough to do his bidding, the King finally appointed Lord North, whose courtesy title allowed him to sit in the Lower House.

During the early 1770s, as the King and his prime minister took stronger and stronger measures against the Americans, Tommy Townshend became increasingly strident in his opposition. Out of a House of 558, he was one of only some 20 members to consistently do so. Given that the British public were strongly behind their government, this took political courage.

Following the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, Townshend’s attacks on the North government included allegations of treachery, corruption and incompetence. One overseas visitor predicted that Tommy Townshend would probably end up being imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Townshend was particularly incensed that, as he put it, “Parliament had been degraded into a mere engine of government.” During these challenging times, he sought inspiration from his distant uncle, Algernon Sidney, who had been beheaded for treason in 1683 after writing “the power originally in the people of England is delegated into the Parliament [and] we may therefore change or take away kings”.

A hero to America’s founding fathers, Townshend’s influence on the American Declaration of Independence was freely acknowledged by Thomas Jefferson. In Discourses Concerning Government , Sydney had written “nothing can be more evident than that if many [men] had been created they had all been equal”. In his Declaration, Jefferson asserted: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

The war with America ebbed and flowed for six years, culminating in a British army’s defeat by George Washington at the battle of Yorktown in 1781. Despite this, the King wanted to fight on, and with 30,000 troops still under his control at British strong points including New York, Savannah and Charleston, he had the means to do so.

It was the House of Commons, by now increasingly hostile to continuing the contest, which forced the King to give up. Among those playing leading roles was Tommy Townshend. In a series of ever tightening parliamentary motions, Townshend and other anti-war activists constrained the King by declaring that any of his ministers, generals or admirals who continued the fight would be committing treason.

Finally, in the face of a no confidence motion, Prime Minister North resigned and the new government, in which Townshend was soon Home Secretary, commenced peace negotiations with the “revolted American colonists” as George III  liked to call them. Upon becoming Home Secretary, Townshend assumed ministerial responsibility for these negotiations.

The new government was agreed on ending the war but it was split on whether to recognise American independence immediately or make it part of an overall settlement. Townshend favoured the latter course. Concerned about the fate of loyalists – those Americans who had fought for the King – he leveraged the question of independence to get the best deal he could for them.

When it became clear that the loyalists would not be safe in the newly created United States, Tommy sent a fresh British negotiator to Paris, who managed to push the proposed boundary between the United States and British North America (now Canada) further south. As a result, southern Ontario, including what is now Toronto, and the area now known as New Brunswick, remained British, providing safe havens for the loyalists to settle in.

Although this settlement remained intact, the government hopelessly divided over the peace treaty, did not and Townshend soon found himself back in opposition. However, a grateful King granted him a peerage for his work on behalf of the loyalists. Townshend chose the title “Sydney” in memory of his martyred kinsman Algernon Sidney – the slightly different spelling being due to the fact that some members of his family had a prior claim on the name Sidney.

In December 1783, Sydney again became Home Secretary in yet another new government. The most pressing problem in his portfolio now was what to do with the growing number of convicts who could no longer be transported to Virginia and Maryland. Apart from transportation somewhere else, his options included the continuation of a system whereby convicts were imprisoned on old ship hulks and/or the building of new “penitentiary houses”. But from the beginning, Sydney favoured transportation.

For the next two and a half years, as he struggled to find a new destination for the transportation of convicts, Sydney was guided by what today would be called small “l” liberal principles. One of his duties as home secretary was to present pleas for clemency to the ing, together with his own recommendations. And he was frequently criticised for his leniency.

Sydney was once even castigated by a minister of religion. “I am told that you have now obtained a pardon for a man convicted of the horrid crime of wilful murder,” the Reverend Charles Hardy said. “Do I now live in a country where a Secretary of State can in effect annul our laws?” To many, Sydney was a soft touch.

In December 1784, Sydney introduced a new Transportation Act which left it up to the cabinet to decide where convicts were to be sent. Wherever that was, the Act stipulated that convict overseers “could inflict…such moderate punishment…as may be inflicted by law on persons committed to a House of Correction”. Crude as it may have been by today’s standards, the government owed the convicts a duty of care and Sydney was under an obligation to find a place for transportation that was fit for purpose.

Prior to the American Revolution, convicts had been handed over to colonial farmers who took responsibility for them until they had served their time. Initially, Sydney sought a similar solution in Central America and then Africa, at one stage sending convicts to African forts as soldiers. For a variety of reasons though, these destinations did not work.

Mindful of his duty of care, Sydney wanted reassurance that proposed sites would be suitable and in the case of South West Africa, he sent out a survey ship. Only when that vessel returned with bad news, did the home secretary seriously turn his mind to Botany Bay. Because James Matra and Joseph Banks, who had been there with James Cook in 1770, vouched for its suitability, Sydney settled on that place without another survey, which would have taken up to two years, at a time when jails everywhere were overflowing.

Apart from ensuring that the First Fleet to Botany Bay was adequately provisioned, Sydney’s most important decision was the choice of Arthur Phillip to command it and to be the convict colony’s first governor. Although he was a captain in the Royal Navy, Phillip had never been fully appreciated by his superiors. Of less than average height, with an olive complexion, a long hooked fleshy nose and dark eyes which had a hint of the orient about them, the only thing Phillip shared in common with the typical British naval officer was a sharp and powerful voice.

When the First Lord of  the Admiralty heard that Sydney had appointed Phillip, he responded: “I cannot say from the little knowledge I have of Captain Phillips [sic] would have led me to select him for a service of this complicated nature.”

But Sydney, who was in charge of the Secret Service when Phillip was a part time spy, had come to recognise this junior captain’s abilities, also demonstrated when he had served on secondment in the navy of Britain’s ally, Portugal. As the editor of the Historical Records of Australia put it, “Sydney appears to have possessed the rare faculty of perceiving intuitively, the latent powers in the men with whom he came in contact.”

Sydney and Phillip also shared a vision for the unique convict settlement, one which left the crusty old First Lord of the Admiralty shaking his head in disbelief:

• There was to be no slavery;
• The convicts would be encouraged to redeem themselves through emancipation and land grants;
• The ordinary rule of law rather than military law would apply to them;
• The Europeans were to live in “amity and kindness” with the Aborigines;
• And the convicts on the First Fleet were to be as generously provisioned as soldiers going to the toughest outposts in the British Empire.

In all, Sydney spent £58,000 provisioning the First Fleet. Indeed, his largesse became a political issue within the cabinet. Following Sydney’s retirement in June 1789, his young successor, George Grenville, announced that he would transport the convicts of the Second Fleet “with least expense to the public”. As a result, the larger Second Fleet suffered ten times the death rate of the First.

Meanwhile, to offset the considerable cost to the government of convict transports making the long return voyage to England empty, Sydney had arranged for three of them to return via China where they would pick up cargoes of tea. In what turned out to be a very successful arrangement with the East India Company, Sydney had initiated Australia’s first public/private partnership.

Sydney had given Phillip the authority to make the settlement elsewhere, just in case Botany Bay turned out to be unsuitable. Arriving there on 18 January 1788, Phillip quickly determined that the bay was too exposed and lacked a reliable supply of fresh water for the 750 convicts and 250 military men under his command.

So three days later, Phillip set off with a small exploration party which sailed north. All the while, Aborigines shouted from the cliff tops “Walla Walla” (Go away!). After spending the night at Camp Cove, Phillip set out to explore the inner harbour.

Many years later, Phillip’s boat keeper, Jacob Nagle recalled landing on the western shore, of a small cove not far from a run of fresh water. While the others explored this stream, Nagle waited by his boat and began fishing:

I hove my line over…[and] hauled in a large black bream…The Governor coming down very much pleased with this cove…observed the fish I had ketched… “Recollect,” said he, “that you are the first white man that ever caught a fish in Sidney Cove where the town is to be built.”

Meanwhile back in London that same evening, Lord Sydney himself was holding a dinner at his townhouse in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, one of the city’s most exclusive addresses. Sydney’s guests included His Royal Highness the Duke of York, Prime Minister Pitt and George, Marquess Townshend.

However, whatever honour those gentlemen did Sydney that night, it was nothing compared to Arthur Phillip’s gesture of naming Sydney Cove after the Home Secretary, even though it took fourteen months for this news to reach him.

Although he planned to name the town which was built around this cove, “Albion”, Philip invariably addressed his dispatches to London from “Sydney Cove” or just “Sydney”. In this way, the Home Secretary’s name soon became the name of the town and later of the city itself. Now the massive metropolitan area stretching north to the Hawkesbury, south beyond Campbelltown and west to the foot of the Blue Mountains is known around the world as Sydney even though only a small part, the Sydney City Council area, officially bears that name.

Despite the fact that Sydney was a constitutional monarchist, he had in effect chosen a republican’s name for his title, out of respect for Algernon Sidney’s stand in favour of the supremacy of parliament over the divine right of kings to rule. So it is that, in a roundabout sort of way, the city of Sydney bears the name of one of the most influential republicans in the history of the English-speaking people.