Thomas Muir
Convict - "Scottish Martyrs." - Jacobeans - Constitutional Reform
The first political prisoners transported to Australia were convicted in Edinburgh and were known as the "Scottish Martyrs."
In the early 1790’s, "reforming" English intellectuals flirted with Jacobeanism. To enable such parsons, lawyers and pamphleteers to make contact with like-minded workers, discussion groups known as "Corresponding Societies" were formed. Their officers called themselves "Jacobeans" but were, in fact, reforming constitutionalists, who wanted to recall Britain's labourers and artisans to a sense of their ancient rights.
It was to this audience that Paine's Rights of Man sold most of its million copies in Britain. Tories, thinking of Jacobeanism in terms of the guillotine and the September Massacres, viewed the Corresponding Societies with horror and set out to break them up.
They would have liked to stage a crushing trial of some English Jacobeans in England, but they could not be sure a jury would convict them. So their blow against the Corresponding Societies was struck in Scotland, where juries were easily rigged.
It fell on a young blue-eyed Scottish lawyer named Thomas Muir (1765-1799), vice-president of a Jacobean discussion group in Glasgow. Muir was an ardent constitutionalist whose offence was to advocate yearly elections of Parliament and a broadening of the Scottish franchise.
He stood trial for sedition in Edinburgh in I793, and every juror was handpicked from the rolls of a Scottish Tory organisation known as the Life-and-Fortune Men, the equivalent of the Loyal Orange societies in Ireland.
The main charge against Muir was that he had lent out radical tracts, among them a copy of Paine's Rights of Man. Muir admitted the charge but claimed he could not receive a fair trial from the packed jury. The judge-Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland, brushed that aside. Braxfield's instructions to the jury could hardly have been clearer: It was axiomatic that the British Constitution could not be improved. Muir had been telling "ignorant country people" that it must be changed to secure their liberty-"which, if it had not been for him, they would never have thought was in danger." And what right did the "rabble" have to representation? None, for they had no property. "A government in this country should be just like a corporation,'' the judge declared, made up of the landed interest, which alone has the right to be represented. As for a rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? They may pack up all their property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye; but landed property cannot be removed.
The jury quickly and unanimously found Thomas Muir guilty and he was sentenced to 14 years' transportation.
A few months later another "radical" clergyman was tried in Perth, for circulating a "seditious" pamphlet questioning Britain's motives in her war against France and helping a Dundee weaver publish an "Address to the People" on the subject of parliamentary reform. This was Thomas Fyshe- Palmer (1747-1802), no Scot but an Englishman, a Unitarian minister and fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge, who had spent the past ten years preaching as a humble pastor in Dundee. He got 7 years' transportation.
These sentences caused apprehension in England. In October 1793, when the National Convention of British reformers met in Edinburgh, its two London delegates were middle-class dissenters, Joseph Gerrald (I760-1796) and Maurice Margarot (I745-1815). The Edinburgh sheriffs deputies worked hard to break up the other assemblies at which they spoke. William Skirving (d. I796), the Scottish secretary of the convention, was arrested at home and his papers impounded. Gerrald and Margarot were dragged out of bed in the dead of night, later to he released on bail. Braxfield's court tried Skirving, Margarot and Gerrald for sedition and sentenced each to 14 years transportation.
Palmer, Muir, Skirving and Margarot were shipped to Australia along with eighty-three less celebrated convicts in the transport Surprize in February 1794. Gerrald followed a year later.
On the voyage, Maurice Margarot seems to have had a nervous breakdown, and he denounced his comrades to the captain as parties to a mutiny plot. The indignant "Martyrs" spent the last five months of the voyage in the brig, on short rations. No wonder Muir wrote to a friend in London after their arrival to announce that "Palmer, Skirving and myself live in the utmost harmony. From our society, Maurice Margarot is expelled.
Transportation did not destroy the political beliefs of the Scottish Martyrs as one sees this reflected in "The Telegraph: A Consolatory Epistle," a poem Thomas Muir addressed to his fellow reformer Henry Erskine in Scotland.
It opens with the depressing landscape of exile, "Where sullen Convicts drag the clanking chain and Desolation covers all the plain." Muir reflected that he is still a Jacobean and that
The best and noblest privilege in Hell
For souls like ours is, Nobly to rebel,
To raise the standard of revolt and try
The happy fruits of lov’d Democracy.
The sacred right of Insurrection there
May drive old Satan from his regal chair
And the same honest means may raise perchance
A France in Hell, that raised a Hell in France.
Thomas Muir, managed to escape. Early in 1796 he contacted the skipper of an American fur-trading vessel, the Otter. As soon as the ship sailed, Muir stole a rowboat and hauled out through the Heads, at night; and was picked him up a few miles offshore.
Muir died inn Paris, in lamentable poverty, on January 26, 1799. His grave is not known. Two of the other Scottish Martyrs did not outlive him long, though they had no idea what had happened to Muir. Joseph Gerrald, the mild consumptive scholar, died of tuberculosis in March I 796. William Skirving followed him three days later. Both were buried in Sydney, and Skirving received the epitaph "A seditionist, but a man of good moral character."
Thomas Palmer finished his sentence in Australia, and went into the shipbuilding trade while he was serving it. He and his close friend John Boston, another "avowed Jacobean", who had voluntarily come with his wife on the long voyage to Sydney to keep Palmer company, had little experience of business, but they possessed a singular advantage: the only encyclopedia in the colony.
With it, they taught themselves to make beer. Then they learned how to make soap. Next they looked up "ship" and, after some trial and error, contrived to build a somewhat cranky but adequate small vessel for trading stores to Norfolk Island.
A 30-ton sloop, the Martha, followed it. Finally Palmer bought and refitted EJ Plumier, a decrepit Spanish warship, and tried to sail her to England via the East Indies. Near Guam, her rotten hull opened.
The survivors of the voyage, Palmer included, were detained in jail by the Spaniards. Palmer died there of cholera in June 1802. The Spanish priests, hearing of his radical opinions, refused his body Christian burial; and so the most civilized and liberal-souled gentleman to breathe Australian air in early colonial days was buried among pirates in a common grave on the beach, until an American captain (himself a man of reforming opinions) took the trouble in 1804 to retrieve Palmer's body and bring, it back to burial in a Boston church.
The only Scottish Jacobean who stayed on in Australia for a time was the erratic Maurice Margarot, who managed to lead a shadowy, ill-documented life as a double agent between the various colonial cliques. He seems to have reported to Governor Hunter on the financial doings and political discontents of the New South Wales Corps Officers; and some evidence suggests that he kept both Grose, Hunter's predecessor, and King, Hunter's successor, informed on the conversations of his own former friends the Jacobeans.
King believed he plotted rebellion with the Irish convicts in 1801 and again in 1804, but he also feared that Margarot was reporting on him to the Colonial Office in London. In 1810, after seventeen years' Australian exile, Margarot struggled back to England.
He died in London five years later, wretchedly poor, and politically broken, disliked and distrusted by the friends of his former radical associates.
Transportation had dealt effectively with the Scottish Jacobeans. It would continue to do so with representatives of nearly every English protest movement, industrial upheaval and agrarian revolt for the next half-century.