Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s less than admiring father-in-law and the Great Reform Act

BACK TO NORTH WEST ENGLAND

To round off my posts on Edward Gibbon Wakefield, I want to return to his Cheshire and English connections.

These bring us back briefly to his underage heiress Ellen Turner, before turning to the political context of the election of her father William Turner as Member of Parliament for Blackburn in Lancashire. This also gives me an opportunity to make a comment on the overlap between English and Kiwi history.

Well, first to Ellen, who was described by observers as ‘a fine big romping girl - very womanly for her youthful years’.

Prior to her abduction by the Wakefield family, there had been a rumour that Ellen's matrimonial destiny lay not in the peerage, but among the local gentry: Thomas Legh of Lyme Hall "who possesses immense estates in Cheshire ...was on the point of paying his addresses to Miss Turner when she was carried off".

Magnanimously, Thomas Legh put aside any notion of Ellen’s possible defloration at the hands of Wakefield and their marriage took place on the 14th January 1828.

She was apparently a "youthful and lovely bride" in a magnificent silk wedding dress, and The Times noted that, with the union, "Wakefield may bid adieu to her fortune".

Back in 1960, I remember running in the Northern Schools Cross Country race across Lyme Park. It is magnificent and I can imagine Ellen enjoying the fine prospects and hilly slopes. Sadly I came about 123rd out of a field of around 600 runners in the race (but from my current vantage point in time, this doesn’t seem so bad).

Of Ellen, it would be nice to report that having met her charming and wealthy ‘Mr Darcy’, she went on to populate Lyme Park with (as the medieval chronicles report of the family) ‘as many Leghs as fleas’.

The reality though was much more gritty and representative of women’s real lives in the 19th century. She died three years after her marriage, in excruciating agony as the afterbirth from her third pregnancy failed to clear and she suffered septic shock - just short of her twentieth birthday.

WILLIAM TURNER AND THE STRUGGLE IN ENGLAND FOR DEMOCRACY

The Tory Duke of Wellington had become Britain’s Prime Minister in 1828 and served for two years, until the death of George IV on the 26th June 1830. The ‘Iron Duke’ as he had become known during his campaigns against Napoleon was an aristocratic authoritarian who had little respect for what he would have regarded as the Common People. He even called his long-suffering English soldiers ‘the scum of the earth’.

On the 23rd July 1830 Wellington dissolved Parliament and a General Election was called. After the counting the Whigs had gained 83 seats but that still left the Tories with a majority. The results though were badly warped by the peculiarities and inequities of the old parliamentary system where the constituency boundaries and electors lists were a ramshackle legacy from the Middle Ages.

On the 15th of November 1830 Wellington was defeated on a motion to examine the accounts of the Civil List, by 233 votes to 204, the following day he resigned and the Whig, Charles 2nd Earl Grey was asked to form a government.

In March 1831 Lord Russell outlined a Parliamentary Reform Bill to the House of Commons and on the 23rd of March the Bill was passed by just one vote. However, the House of Lords rejected the Bill and Earl Grey dissolved Parliament on April 23rd.

After fresh elections held between April and June the Whigs were returned with a majority of 136 and the Reform Bill was reintroduced, and again passed by the Commons by 367 to 231.

In October the House of Lords once again rejected it.

After this show of obduracy and defiance by the Lords, rioting occurred throughout the country.

For the third time on the December 12th the Commons passed the Reform Bill, only to see it fail once more in the Lords.

Drastic action was now needed if the Bill was to be passed and the King was asked to create enough Whig peers to see the Bill through. This however was not necessary, as the Tories who did not relish the idea of more Whig Peers the majority abstained and the bill was passed by 106 to 22, thus allowing the Bill to become law, and so, on the 7th of June 1832 the Reform Act received the Royal Assent.

This new Bill now gave men who owned or rented property with an annual rate of £10 or more the vote.

BLACKBURN ELECTIONS OF 1832


The Reform Act, by removing most of the rotten boroughs and creating new, larger ones such as Manchester - which up to then, like Blackburn, had no Parliamentary representation—gave the franchise to many more people and made Parliament more representative than it had ever been.

Initially it was recommended that Blackburn should send one Member to Parliament, but by the time the Reform Bill was passed it was decided that the town would be entitled to two MP’s.

The census of 1831 shows Blackburn to have had a population of 27,091, with 4,594 occupied houses and 208 empty giving a total of 4,802, there were 623 houses with a rateable value of £10 or more. When the list of electors was made in 1832 this had risen to 627.

On the 3rd December 1832 Parliament was dissolved, this was to be the first election under the new Reform Act. It would be Blackburn’s first chance to send two MP’s to the House of Commons.

On the day of the nominations, three principal candidates came forward, including:

‘William Turner of Mill Hill, Blackburn and Shrigley Hall, Cheshire Whig - proposed by John Hargreaves, coroner, seconded by Thomas Dugdale’.

As the day for nominations drew near William Turner entered the fray, “almost like a bomb shell, offering himself to the Free and independent electors of both parties”.

The Turner family was very popular in Blackburn and William was a much-liked employer at his calico printing mill.

Outside the Old Bull Hotel on Church Street in front of a large crowd of working men he set up his political stall as follows:

“Gentlemen, They said I wouldn’t come; but I am come, and will be here at the day of the election. I’ll stand the contest. It rains; it will wet you and will wet me. Good night. Give us three cheers.”

Turner then went into the Old Bull Hotel and bought barrels of beer for the crowds.

A local commentator observed that “barrels of beer were rolled into the yard of our ancient parish church, the ends were knocked out and the people were debauched with drink and over the very graves which contained our forefathers.”

At first the Tories resisted this type of electioneering but they finally succumbed to it and it was said that money was being left in pubs by the Tory Fielding and the Whig Turner to buy drinks for the undecided, amounts between £60 and £200 pounds were mentioned as being laid out.

As for the election, ‘the populace before the announcement was made [of the result] had exhibited symptoms of violence and several stones and other missiles were thrown from Tacket’s field in Ainsworth Street, by which many individuals were slightly wounded and some panes of glass broken’.

Whilst closing the proceedings at the hustings were going on, another portion of the populace were employed in breaking the windows of the old Bull Inn, and several skirmishes took place between the mob and the special constables; wherein some of the latter were seriously injured.

At his point the fourth and more Radical candidate Dr Bowring bitterly conceded his loss, noting of William that:

“Mr. Turner had absolutely no recommendation whatever, but that he had wealth and was willing to spend it to obtain the honour of a position which he was about as fitted to fill as to quadrate the circle, to calculate an eclipse, or to give a lecture on Plato.

He had (though) the distinction though of being the father of the young lady who was abducted by Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

His success was due, and could only be due, to a fixed purpose, to accomplish his objective by the drunkenness and demoralization of the people”.

However, the reality was that Turner was also a generous and public spirited man who was naturally popular.

For example, in 1833 William and his wife Jane erected Almshouses on Bank Top Blackburn for indigent women. They consisted of 6 single storey dwellings and Turner endowed them with 3s per week for maintenance. They still exist and were listed as being of historic significance in 1974.

William Turner died at his home in Mill Hill on July 17th 1842 and was buried in St. Johns churchyard Blackburn.

POSTSCRIPT

Most Māori chiefs signed the Māori-language version of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840 or further north and at Auckland.


A recent translation from the Māori version is as follows:

Article: The First
The chiefs of the Confederation and all the chiefs who have not joined that Confederation give absolutely to the Queen of England forever the complete government over their land.

Article: The Second
The Queen of England agrees to protect the chiefs, the sub-tribes and all the people of New Zealand in the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures. But on the other hand the chiefs of the Confederation and all the chiefs will sell land to the Queen at a price agreed to by the person owning it and by the person buying it (the latter being) appointed by the Queen as her purchase agent.

Article: The Third
For this agreed arrangement therefore concerning the government of the Queen, the Queen of England will protect all the ordinary people of New Zealand and will give them the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England.

It is a matter of some interest as to how far Maori really understood anything of the contemporary state of governance in England. Did they have any understanding that even the relatively recent Reform Act only enfranchised those holding property with ‘annual rates of £10 or more’.

Assuming that £1 (1840) = £85 (2000) and that £1 = $2, we have a rates threshold on the property franchise of $1,700, applying then to those with titles on houses worth more than $350,000 in today’s terms – not exactly generously democratic.

But there again, the Maori chiefs may have been all too well aware of these kinds of nuances and quite disinterested in the rights that they were signing away on behalf of other members of their iwi.

I do feel though that it is something of a shame that New Zealand was first settled by a land agent like Edward Gibbon Wakefield rather than an industrialist like William Turner. Under the latter we might have had a better start in generating the special 'X' factor that embodies innovation, enterprise and productivity.

And William seems a more genuine sort of man than Edward.

One can only surmise that if Edward had successfully married Ellen and her father had travelled out from England to see his grandchildren, William would have had little difficulty in making better friends with Maori chiefs like Te Rauparaha.

I imagine William toddling down from 90 The Terrace, escaping from his snobbish and egocentric son-in-law, off to the Thistle Inn in Pipitea Street to share a drink with his old mate 'TR' – and 'shouting' the rest of the Ngati Toa a barrel of beer or three on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Birthday.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield – New Zealand’s Seedy Founding Father

WALKING UP FROM THE HARBOUR TO WAKEFIELD HOUSE

My previous posts on the re-development of Wellington’s waterfront have kicked me into writing about New Zealand’s early settlement – and the attempted imposition by the founding fathers of shabby gentility and conformity at the expense of enterprise and innovation.

When I kept a workplace in town, I used to regularly walk up from Lambton Quay (the shoreline in 1840) by way of Woodward Street to my office in Wakefield House on The Terrace. The existing 8-storey Wakefield House stands on the site of the house that was built by one of the city’s earliest and ostensibly illustrious citizens 'Colonel' William Wakefield.

It was he who commanded the first fleet organized by the New Zealand Company and, having been a soldier with Portuguese & Carlist armies in the period 1832 - 1837, he built his house on the sandy heights that commanded a direct view of the comings and goings in the harbor. It was also strategically placed opposite the Maori Pa at Kumutoto but separated from it by a ravine and stream (the line of which is now followed by Woodward Street).

The house was as near as Wellington ever came to having its own fort or castle knoll.

Whether by accident or design, the local Maori did not take to the new building or their new neighbour and their numbers soon became depleted.

And it was in the house though that William’s brother Edward Gibbon Wakefield died on 18 May 1862. He even trumps his brother in reputation and has been credited as being New Zealand’s ‘Founder’, no less.

So I was walking in the footsteps of a great man, up from the old beach at the harbour’s edge to the sandy terrace above – at least according to the conventional history books (and I have to say that the New Zealand histories appear to lead the way here searching desperately for a hero - albeit a reputedly repentant kidnapper).

Well, I have at least two gripes about the hagiography. In the first place, it seems to me that he was an unreformed swindler who merely substituted virgin lands for virgin heiresses. And secondly, I have a strong objection to the shoddy land development policies that he espoused, which purported to deliver structured societies in settler colonies at the expense of battler backwoodsmen (and which rode slipshod over native land rights).

There again, I have to admit also to a certain amount of animosity stemming from a Northerner’s distrust of parvenu toffs from the South of England, as the heiress that he abducted was a Cheshire wench.

And it is perhaps remarkable that first-footer Northern Lad and Whaler-Trader Dicky Barrett piloted the first ominously-named settler ship ‘Tory’ past the reef that now bears his name - without deliberately wrecking it.

Dicky could, I feel, have been forgiven for regaling Colonel Wakefield with the words that were overheard back in a pub in Melbourne in the 1960s, as a Northerner responded to an effete Southerner fronting up to the bar with:

‘I’ve come twelve thousand bloody miles to get away from bastards like you – and I still can’t!’

So let’s start by getting the kidnapping on the table.

THE CHESHIRE CONNECTION - THE SHRIGLEY ABDUCTION

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a London land agent's son (good start eh?), was born on March 20, 1796.

Even his grandmother Priscilla had her doubts from the start, writing in one letter: “My mind is painfully engaged with the perverseness of dear little Edward – his obstinacy if he inclines to evil terrifies me’.

He was unsurprisingly a poor student and was expelled from his school in Edinburgh, with influence being exerted to get him a job in the Foreign Service in 1814. However, his sponsor wrote:

“I can tell you very little respecting Edward Gibbon Wakefield; his conduct is wholly inexplicable. He despises his father’s advice, he laughs at his opinions; he talks largely of being in his own hands, and independent of his father…. I wish his father could make up his mind to see only a common man in him”. [Francis Place, (1815)].

At the age of twenty he eloped to Scotland with a 17-year-old heiress, Eliza Pattle. Luckily for him, her parents accepted the marriage and settled £70,000 on the young couple. However, Eliza died four years later after giving birth to her third child in 1820.

Then Edward tried to break his father-in-law's will and was suspected of perjury and forgery.

In February of 1827, 31-year-old Edward then conspired with his brother William Wakefield to get his hands on the person and inheritance of a 15-year-old schoolgirl Ellen Turner by lying to her and her guardians at her school in Liverpool.


He apparently based his plan to marry Ellen on the expectation that her parents would respond as Eliza's had.

Ellen was the daughter and only child of William Turner, a wealthy resident of Pott Shrigley, Cheshire, England, who owned calico printing and spinning mills in Blackburn, Lancashire. At the time of the abduction, Turner was a High Sheriff of Cheshire. He lived in Shrigley Hall, near Macclesfield (see pictures below).

Ellen was told that her father William Turner had become paralyzed and wished to see his daughter immediately. Later Wakefield informed Ellen that there was an agreement between two banks that some of her father's estate would be transferred to her or, to be exact, her husband.

He also said that his banker uncle had proposed that Wakefield marry Ellen, and that if she would agree to marry him, her father would be saved. Ellen allowed them to take her to Carlisle. There they met William Wakefield, who claimed to have spoken to Mr. Turner and that Mr. Turner had also agreed to the marriage.

Wakefield then married Ellen at Gretna Green and took her off to France, telling her that she would meet her father there.

But unfortunately for Wakefield, William Turner was made of sterner stuff than Eliza Pattle’s father. He had apparently expected that William Turner would accept the marriage rather than face a public scandal. Instead, Turner went to London and asked for help from the police.

There he learned that his daughter had been taken to the Continent. Turner sent his brother to Calais, accompanied by a police officer and a solicitor. There they soon found the couple and Ellen expressed pleasure at seeing her uncle, subsequently discovering the truth of the whole affair.

However, Wakefield claimed that since they were legally married, she could not be taken from him by force. In spite of this the French authorities interviewed Ellen and finally let her leave the country with her uncle. Wakefield, trying to make the best of his situation, wrote out a statement that Ellen was still a virgin and left for Paris.

The consensus of society was that:

“His sole motive was of the most sordid and vulgar description. In order to possess himself of the fortune of a mere girl, whom I had never seen, he did not scruple to employ falsehood, fraud, cruelty and the vilest hypocrisy, in feigning a passion he could not have entertained” [‘The Kaleidoscope’ (1827)].

BROUGHT TO HEEL

The English police issued warrants for the Wakefields' arrest and William was arrested in Dover a couple of days later. William and the Wakefield’s stepmother Frances were taken to Cheshire and then committed to Lancaster Castle to await trial.

The trial of William Wakefield began on 21 March 1827 with great publicity - but without Edward Wakefield, who was arrested later. On 23 March 1827 all three defendants were put on trial in Lancaster. The jury found all of them guilty the same day. They were committed to Lancaster Castle a day later.

On 14 May the Wakefields were taken to the Court of King's Bench in Westminster Hall in London for sentencing, where William claimed that he had been working under the guidance of his brother. Both were put in prison for three years, with Edward being incarcerated in Newgate prison and William in Lancaster Castle.

Since the marriage apparently had not been consummated, Parliament annulled it immediately.

POSTSCRIPT

Somewhat subdued by his experience, Wakefield appears to have transferred his affections from maidens to the virgin lands of the colonies (of which more later).

However, he did pause to write about prison reform and the desirability of abolishing the death penalty, noting the succession of prisoners at Newgate who were executed for minor offences.

From a modern stance, one can only marvel at the blatant bias in the judicial system that condemned men to death or transportation for offences like petty theft or poaching while the wealthy and influential suffered minor sentences. Wakefield did not comment on this anomaly.

It is perhaps something of a shame then that he was not transported for seven years to New South Wales to gain some first-hand colonial experience. And that he did not then settle as a trader like Dicky Barrett and become a friendly ‘Pakeha’ who abducted but then successfully married one of Te Rauparaha’s daughters. Wow that really would have been a risky venture but it would have given him a sounder claim to have been New Zealand’s 'Founding Father'!

As it was, I fancy that Edward spent his declining years at 90 The Terrace mulling over his various falls from grace. I suspect that he would have happily swapped his bungalow in a colonial backwater for Shrigley Hall but that would have required an altogether more fortunate outturn from this “tale of anguish, deceit and violation of the domestic hearth”.