‘I must write a pamphlet, or I shall burst’

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XIX, Issue 1, 1 May 1986, Page 37

‘I must write a pamphlet, or I shall burst’

JUNE STARKE

In this way Sarah Selwyn, wife of the Bishop of New Zealand, opened her letter of 30 August 1860 1 to her cousin and regular correspondent in Leicestershire, Mary Anne Palmer, quoting .Dr Arnold’s usual state’. 2 She quickly wrote:. ‘I do not intend a pamphlet, leaving that to my betters, but I must needs talk about our most troublous public matters.’ Conversation between family and friends left at home could only be carried on by correspondence; ‘the tyranny of distance’ looms large in many letters from New Zealand especially when there was disagreement with the actions of the colonial government and when contentious events occurring in the colony were reported in British newspapers and discussed in public places. Sarah’s vehement outburst on this occasion concerned the effect on the Maori people of the government’s purchase of land for European settlement at Waitara in Taranaki, an action which brought Maori and settler into open confrontation and gave rise to a pamphlet war. In fact a pamphlet containing this letter was to be published in 1861 while Sarah Selwyn was in England. The publication of such information reflected the stand taken by Church of England clergy and others, led by her husband, who aligned themselves on the side of native rights against the actions of Governor Gore Browne and land hungry settlers.

Apart from five letters from Sarah Selwyn, Extracts of Letters from New Zealand on the War Question. . . 3 (discussed in more detail later) contains three letters from Mary Ann Martin, wife of New Zealand’s Chiefjustice, Sir William Martin, and one from Caroline Abraham, whose husband Dr Charles Abraham was Bishop of Wellington. Mary Ann, the daughter of the Rev. W. Parker, prebendary of St Paul’s, had married William Martin, Selwyn’s friend and contemporary at St John’s College, Cambridge, shortly before he embarked for New Zealand in April 1841 to prepare a home for his invalid wife. Mary Ann followed in the care of Bishop and Mrs Selwyn on the Tomatin which sailed from Plymouth on 26 December 1841. Almost a decade later in 1850 Dr Charles Abraham, assistant master at Eton, fulfilled a longstanding promise to Selwyn when he accepted the post of chaplain and principal of St John’s College, Auckland. The Selwyns’joy was compounded by his marriage to Sarah’s cousin, Caroline Palmer. These three

women shared their problems and loneliness and supported each other through the trials of colonial life and, bound by distant experience, remained very close after their return to England.

Many of their letters have survived, the writers revealing all facets of their life in New Zealand and discussing in detail letters, newspapers and books sent out from England. Sarah and Mary Ann both compiled memoirs towards the end of their lives: Sarah’s ‘Reminiscences’ drawn from her letters were written at the age of eighty-three in 1892 for her family, while Lady Martin’s Our Maoris ‘gathered from diaries kept by the writer during a residence of thirty-four years in New Zealand’ 4 was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in the year of her death in 1884. Many details in the lives of these pioneer women are absent from these two memoirs each written for very different readers, but they have their place in assessing the characters, roles and lifestyle of wives of public figures in an infant colony ‘where we were all young. . . as were the great body of settlers’. 5

Sarah Harriet Selwyn, daughter of Sir John Richardson, a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, was born on 2 September 1809 and spent her childhood in London. Her reminiscences suggest a reserved, observant personality, musical and artistic, with considerable sensitivity to her surroundings. In July 1839 she married George Augustus Selwyn whose future seemed to lie in ‘preferment and prosperity in England’. 6 Sarah enjoyed life at Windsor and Eton where in 1840, their son William was born. However as early as August 1839 Selwyn was writing to a friend ‘about a new colony in New Zealand, and strong wishes are expressed that the Church should be well established at first on a good footing’. 7 Two years later in July 1841 he was offered the ‘Episcopal Office in New Zealand’ which he accepted in the full knowledge of his wife’s approval ‘for they had married with that understanding’. 8

Sarah’s life in New Zealand began on 24 June 1842 at Paihia where the family was welcomed into the busy, hospitable home of the Rev. Henry Williams. Within a fortnight she had moved to her first home at Waimate and the Bishop had departed for six months on a tour of inspection through the North Island to Wellington and Nelson leaving his chaplain the Rev. W. C. Cotton in charge of the youthful party of catechists who had accompanied him from England. As Sarah reflected:

. . . when George is really gone and I am left with all this charge on my shoulders I shall feel more thoroughly alone than ever I did in my life before: but people are used to being alone in N.Z. and it seems so clearly the most helpful thing for me to do, to keep things strait [sic] and going forward at home, that I doubt not it will be well one way or another. 9

She considered it a duty to help George’s young staff in homey ways lest their influence should be lowered. So we assembled in evening attire at our tea without milk and our bread without butter and made ourselves agreeable according to our lights and behaved “pretty” as the nurses used to say." 1

She turned her attention to the local Maori people and was soon in high favour as they responded to her ‘cheerful eye, and friendly face’ and bestowed upon her the title of Mata Pihopa (Mother Bishop). She looked forward to the organisation of regular and serious contact with them as she busied herself learning the

language and attending to the sick ‘in a very humble way’. Although she has little to say on the matter, the stress of keeping things ‘going forward at home’ and the anxiety of the Bishop’s long absence took its toll on Sarah’s health. She felt that she was living in a box ‘. . .ceiled walled and floored with Kauri wood’. Her need for quietness is obvious when she writes of slamming doors and the chattering of Maori visitors in and out of her home at all hours, of carpenters making rooms upstairs for the students of St John’s College. She looked forward to migrating ‘to a less noisy corner of the house when they have vacated the lower rooms’. She had accepted that ‘a public life was to be mine from the day I landed’ but life at St John’s College which officially opened in January 1843 must have been a scarcely endurable ordeal for her. Sarah became ‘utterly helpless and suffering from severe nervous headache’. The Bishop took her to Kororareka to the care of Mrs Burrows and set up a retreat in the stone store at Kerikeri ... in the cathedral library and another room of equal size in the lower story [sic]; where the quiet is as unbroken as the most nervous person could desire; and in this respect entirely different from the inevitable noise of wooden buildings. 1 '

In October 1843 the Selwyn family left for Auckland to spend the summer with Mary Ann Martin while the Bishop made another long Visitation journey which took him as far south as Stewart Island. The depth of the accord between the Selwyns and the Martins is perhaps epitomised in Mary Martin’s comment as she recalled the voyage to New Zealand:

One thing. . . had been clearly impressed on my mind by my husband, . . . namely, that the aborigines of our new country were to be cared for and worked for, and this lesson was by example as well as by precept daily brought before all of us on board by Bishop Selwyn. 12

Mary Ann Martin was ten years younger than Sarah who had enjoyed the young invalid’s lively company on the Tomatin. On her part Mary Ann found the Bishop’s wife ‘. staid and so very good’ which probably reflects Sarah’s contentment in remaining quietly in the background in the presence of her husband’s forceful personality. 13 Mary Ann’s letters are strong and practical and she speaks of Sarah’s need, now that she was pregnant, for a quiet, comfortable and congenial home where, removed from all domestic responsibilities, she could be cared for:

And this is a comfort in a strange new land, for it is the lack of sympathy that is the most trying part of a woman’s lot. People fancy at home that our sufferings are to be of a more material order—salt pork and dampers and the like. . . No—the

ordeal at first, is the loss of so many of the blessed home charities, that were more to us than meats and drinks, and though so far from wishing to hinder the noble spirits we are linked to, we would urge them on, and strengthen their hands, yet the poor frail nervous body, sinks under hours and weeks and months of loneliness. 14

In December 1844 St John’s College was translated to Auckland and the Selwyns lived for a time at Parnell within half a mile of the Martins. Sarah’s health had improved after the birth of a second son John in May 1844. During the following year she ‘enjoyed quiet and her husband’s society both of which are rare enjoyments to her’ 1 5 at Otaki while Archdeacon Hadfield lay ill. Over the years she accompanied the Bishop on a number ofjourneys by land and sea in New Zealand and to the Melanesian Islands but she spent many long months watching and waiting for his return. Mary Ann Martin, who could measure her husband’s absences in weeks, shared her loneliness as their friendship grew; Sarah wrote:

Dear Mrs Martin and I have much talking, much laughing and some reading together. . . She has an excellent understanding, and so cultivated a mind, such strong feeling and such a merry heart, that she can suit a grave, a wise, or a lively mood. 16

In June 1846 the Bishop moved his family to St John’s College at Bishop’s Auckland (Tamaki). In addition to keeping things ‘going forward at home’ which included the supervision and training of the married Maori couples and their children living there, Sarah took charge of the primary school for children of the local working people, which involved the compiling of reading books: ‘Lady Martin helped much in this, and indeed we flattered ourselves that our respective reading books were distinguished performances.’ 17 They proof-read translations of parts of the Bible and a Maori Grammar by the Rev. R. Maunsell produced at the College Press—‘A rare help in the language for me’. The friends were joined by Caroline Abraham in August 1850. Sarah’s hopes were high at the prospect of the arrival of the Abrahams,

—true yokefellows—people who take in a large idea. . .willing to give up something to carry it out —people sharing the work to whom one can talk—not as throwing words to a dead wall—people who will be ready to correct what is amiss in tone or practice, and not merely content themselves with abuse of what they do not like, as has been the case with many. 18

But the measure of the support and relief that Dr Abraham and his wife gave to the toilworn Selwyns is reflected in Sarah’s comment

two years later: You can hardly fancy a more cosy and happy party than the two pair of Husbands and wives, when we do get an opportunity of a little esoteric talk together. We are so entirely happy and comfortable in all relations one to another, as spouse to spouse, as friend to friend, as cousin to cousin, as clergyman to Bishop. . . The warm co-operation and ready sympathy always at hand are so great a support to my dear Husband who has for the most part been little understood and less supported. . . in truth it is hardly a less satisfaction to his wife, to see him appreciated—his plans warmly taken up and faithfully carried out and to feel that the spirit of the thing is so entirely entered into by both Charles and Caroline. . . [who] put up with the squeezy house as they do with its overflowing fullness and with the innumerable matters English folk must detect as a want, or as an incubus. 19

The Abrahams’ letters are distanced in their attitude to the issues, insofar as they came to New Zealand almost a decade after the Selwyns and Martins. They were fully aware of the criticism both in England and New Zealand directed against the Bishop’s aspirations and methods, and at the same time were deeply concerned at the health of both Sarah and the Bishop. They both commented on the busy life in a ‘motley household’ and Caroline soon came ‘. . . down from her aesthetic heights to our level of divine drudgery’ teaching the community’s children with ‘a mind ever alive to the best way of making a stew —or boiling bones to jelly to feed hungry lads’. - The women were also to become involved in the issues which engrossed their husbands’ plans and actions ‘for laying the foundations of the Government and the Church in New Zealand’ with the welfare and rights of the Maori people very much at heart. Mary Ann Martin expressed the thoughts of all when she wrote to the Rev. E. Coleridge in 1846:

Sometimes it seems, as if one must start off express to England, and talk to the good men there, and tell them with the truthful earnestness of an eye-witness, how such and such things really stand. But this is a regular woman’s thought, . . . and so I go “fizzing on”, as dear Sarah says, talking almost as freely to you, as if you were sitting here. 21

Mary Ann and Sarah ‘used dutifully to listen (and with much edification)’, for example, to the discussions on the proposed system for Church government and Constitution founded on voluntary compact which Selwyn and Martin formulated over several years. That it was informed listening there can be no doubt when Mary Ann writes that she and the Judge had been reading together Tertullian and other theological writings ‘rather than to take the words and assertions of others on so important a portion of Church History’. 22 Sarah, on her part, professing not to understand the subject, reports:

the Judge laughs at me and says that the Governor counts me a deputy Bishop in George’s absence. I only think it pleasant and thankworthy to find him (Sir George [Grey]) and the principal laymen taking so earnest an interest in these matters. -

But the issue which was to arouse Sarah’s active response was the Waitara Purchase, leading to the New Zealand Wars of the 1860 s. In March 1860 Governor Gore Browne, responding to settlers’ pressure for land, enforced the purchase of Maori land in Taranaki based on the principle of individual ownership which was contrary to all principles of Maori land tenure recognised by the Government since 1840. The clergy were acutely conscious that their role was to stand aloof from politics but Bishop Selwyn sent ‘a solemn protest’ to the Governor. Formal public statements by other public figures and missionary organisations, published in pamphlet form, 24 were responded to by politicians and landowners seeking to justify the action of the New Zealand government. Extracts of Letters from New Zealand was part of this pamphlet war. Drawn from private communications they throw ‘much inner light’ on the reaction of Bishop Selwyn and his friends to the situation. The letters were written directly to Mary Anne and Louisa Catherine Palmer in England or as correspondence between their sister Caroline Abraham in Wellington and their cousin Sarah Selwyn in Auckland. The first letters report the clergy’s reaction to the outbreak of hostilities and state that a policy of intimidation would never succeed in New Zealand. They deplore the state of Taranaki —‘the country laid waste, hundreds ruined, women and children sent off by order of the Commander-in-Chief, to live off the bounty of strangers’—and record the unrest in Auckland and the Waikato. There are also personal anecdotes such as a comment of‘a clear-headed old Maori who asked why the Governor did not follow his own advice to the Maori people to settle disputed land peaceably by arbitration’. 25

Mary Ann Martin opened her reply to a letter from M. A. P. (28 August) with the comment that she did ‘. not wonder at your difficulties about beginning at once to agitate’ which reveals that the writers knew that the information they were sending would be made available to influential people in England. 26 This accounts for Sarah Selwyn’s outburst written two days later and for the personal and detailed accounts of events which make up these two letters. Amongst other things Mary Ann wrote that the Auckland triumvirate 27 had much talk and reported that the Bishop, ‘disliking all private communications to people in power’, shrank from the proposal that he should write home officially to the Duke of Newcastle and Gladstone. In fact an approach was made to the Colonial Secretary through Sir John Patteson, father of ‘Coley’ Patteson,

Bishop of Melanesia. 2 * Sarah’s letter stresses that the Bishop’s main objection to the Governor’s actions lay in the purchase of Maori land based on individual instead of tribal right, a change in policy that departed from the land guarantee of the Treaty of Waitangi, but added that she did ‘. . . not pretend to justify the Maories in all that has followed’. Selwyn was gravely concerned about the result, that the Government had

. . . rushed into a bloody quarrel without trying all other methods of settling the dispute first; assuming that the natives are rebels before they have done one single thing to prove themselves to be so, and denying them the ordinary privileges of British subjects, which the Treaty of Waitangi declares them to be. . . Oh! we are sinking so low in the eyes of the Maories. Where is our good faith? Where our assurances that the Queen would never do them wrong? ... it goes to our hearts to see a noble race of people stigmatized as rebel, and driven to desperation, by the misrule of those who are at the same time lowering their own people in their 29 eyes.

The theme of the Governor’s loss ofimpartiality runs through all the letters as does the belief that things could only be put right by direction from the Imperial Government: The Governor is strong in the support of the Ministry, the House, and the voice of the foolish people outside. . . and if the Government at home judge by these things, and by the Governor’s despatches, they will hesitate before they remove him. 30

The letters of 3 and 5 October report satisfaction at the Home Government’s refusal of troops but on 30 October Sarah reports a potentially explosive incident near Auckland which the Bishop defused and the fear that ‘they have adopted at home the government views about the inevitability of the war’. Mary Ann comments on a good article in the Saturday Review of 25 August on the New Zealand Bill but is concerned that ‘. . . the Times calls these fine people “savages” and the Guardian dismisses them with ajaunty sentence, to be exterminated like all “savage races”!’. Torn between her wish to be with her husband at a time when the Bishop and clergy were experiencing ‘great odium by the part they have taken in the matter’ 31 and her desire to be with the two schoolboy sons she had not seen since 1855, Sarah Selwyn sailed for England in the troopship Boanerges on 5 February 1861. Before she arrived in Portsmouth in May a debate had taken place in the House of Commons in which Charles Selwyn 32 made a ‘feeble defence’ of the clergy’s stand which drew Caroline Abraham’s comment indifference of the Govt and the Public dumped all our hopes from England. It is clear that the truth is known —the wrong acknowledged but it is now addopted [sic] and supported. ,33 In this climate

it was a small step for Sarah and her friends in New Zealand to publish private letters first written to provide influential people in England with the information they needed to champion their cause.

From the beginning of her life in the new colony Sarah Selwyn saw her role as ‘to follow suit, not to choose and then see the best side of things’, 34 but clearly she, and her two close friends, were quite prepared to express openly their own opinions on broader matters. A tribute from Archdeacon J. F. Lloyd 37 ’ sums up the measure of her contribution to her husband’s endeavour: I do not think I have ever met anyone equal to Mrs Selwyn. She is an admirable woman, though you do not find out her worth until after a long and intimate acquaintance with her. 36 In 1868 Selwyn was appointed Bishop of Lichfield where Sarah spent the remaining years of her long life. She died on 24 March 1907; her tranquil portrait hangs in the Lady Chapel dedicated to her memory in the Cathedral. Worshippers today still speak to interested visitors of her ‘gentle Christian influence’. 37

REFERENCES All manuscript sources referred to are held by the Alexander Turnbull Library, with the exception of the G. A. Selwyn papers held by Selwyn College, Cambridge. Reference to the latter is by reel number of the microfilm held by the Turnbull Library. 1 Published in Extracts of Letters from New Zealand. .., p. 21 (vide infra, note 3). 2 Dr Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 1857-1867. His reports on the state of education in Europe and its deficiencies in England attracted much attention as did his application to Scripture of the methods of literary criticism. 3 Extracts of Letters from New Zealand on The War Question; with an article from the New Zealand Spectator November 3rd, i 860; and a copy of The Native Offenders’ Bill (London: Printed for Private Circulation only, 1861). 4 M. A. Martin, Our Maoris (London, 1884), p. 1. 5 Sarah Selwyn, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 53 (qMS sequence). 6 From W. E. Gladstone’s letter to The Times, 17 April 1878, at the time of Bishop Selwyn’s death, in H. W. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn, D.D. (London, 1900), v. 1, p. 54. 7 Ibid, p. 55. 8 Ibid, p. 66. Selwyn accepted the post without hesitation and said that he could answer for his wife. 9 Sarah Selwyn to Mary Anne Palmer, 24June-1 July 1842 (Micro MS 613, reel 9) 10 Sarah Selwyn, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 39.

11 Selwyn to Rev. E. Coleridge, 7 October 1843, in Tucker, op. cit., v. l,p. 152. 12 M. A. Martin, Our Maoris, p. 1. 13 Her reserve was later noted by casual visitors who met her in New Zealand including Charlotte Godley and the wife of a newly arrived missionary, Eliza Blackburne, when welcomed in Auckland by the Selwyns in December 1859 (G. A. Selwyn, Papers, fldr 8 (MS Papers 88)). 14 Mary Ann Martin to Rev. E. Coleridge, 23 February 1844 (‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn and others, 1847-67’, v. 4, p. 663-4 (qMS sequence)). 15 Mary Ann Martin to Coleridge, 10 October 1845 (‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn. . . ’, v. 4, p. 681). 16 Sarah Selwyn to Fanny Selwyn, 21 November 1845 (Micro MS 613, reel 9). 17 Sarah Selwyn, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 65. 18 Sarah Selwyn to Mrs Coleridge, 27 May 1850 (‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn. . . ’, v. 3, p. 587). 19 Idem, 3June 1852 (‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn. . . ’, v. 3, p. 591). 20 Mary Ann Martin to Coleridge, 21 May 1852 (‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn. . . ’, v. 4, p. 699). 21 Idem, 1 December 1846 (‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn. . . ’, v. 4, p. 691). 22 Mary Ann Martin to Coleridge, 11 August 1845 (‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn. . . ’, v. 4, p. 685). 23 Sarah Selwyn to Mrs Coleridge, 27 May 1850 (‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn. . . ’, v. 3, p. 589).

24 Including Sir William Martin, now retired. By his wife’s description The Taranaki Question (Auckland, 1860) was ‘a very clear, though very legal’ pamphlet setting down the principles of native land tenure and concluding with an analysis of the consequences of the Governor’s action. 25 Mary Ann Martin, 21 May 1860, in Extracts. . . , p. 6. 26 Copies or extracts of the Selwyns’ letters were circulated among family and friends including the Rev. Edward Coleridge. He may well have been the means of informing influential friends and was perhaps involved in the compilation and publication of Extracts. . . See Micro MS 613, reels 3 and 9. 27 Bishop Selwyn, Sir William Martin and W. Swainson, Attorney General. 28 See J. Starke, ‘The Waitara Purchase’, Turnbull Library Record, 6 (n.s.), no. 1 (May 1973), 15-24. 29 Sarah Selwyn to Mary Anne Palmer, 30 August 1860, in Extracts. . . , p. 21, 256. 30 Sarah Selwyn to Caroline Abraham, 4 August 1860, in Extracts. . . , p. 13. 31 Rev. J. F. Lloyd to Ellen Lloyd, 4 February 1861 (J. F. Lloyd, Correspondence (MS Papers 1786, fldr 2)). 32 A lawyer and Member of the House of Commons for Cambridge University.

33 Caroline Abraham to Sophia Marriott, 9July 1861 (C. A. Abraham, Letters to Mrs G. Marriott and Sophia Marriott (MS Papers 2395)). 34 Sarah Selwyn, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 96. 35 Bishop Selwyn wrote often of his ‘two trustworthy presbyters’, Abraham and Lloyd. The latter arrived in Auckland in August 1849 where as fellow of St John’s College his particular responsibility was the training of Maori clergy. He became vicar of St Paul’s, Auckland in 1853 and Archdeacon of Waitemata in 1865 before returning to England in 1870. 36 J. F. Lloyd to Ellen Lloyd, 4 February 1861 (MS Papers 1786, fldr 2). 37 Compare an earlier reference in the Bishop of Lichfield’s sermon of 31 March 1907 to her ‘. . . long period of widowhood spent in this Cathedral Close, making no display, seeking no publicity, yet showing her keen and intelligent interest in events past and present, she exercised her gentle Christian influence on those who came to her’ (quoted in J. H. Evans, Churchman Militant (London, 1964), p. 203).