Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/283

 such conduct on your part cannot fail to call forth from His Royal Highness the strongest marks of displeasure."

Angry though he felt on the receipt of this letter, Macquarie gave orders for the payment of Moore's salary, and in 1820 he offered him a grant of 1,000 acres. He acted too precipitately in reinstating him, for Bathurst, after reading Macquarie's despatch of November, 1817, decided that Moore should be dismissed. What chiefly influenced him was Moore's untruthfulness in trying to save his brother's grant by telling Macquarie that he had signed the brother's name to the petition without his knowledge—a statement utterly without foundation. As affairs had been settled before this despatch reached Sydney, Moore retained his position. Macquarie was completely puzzled by the censures he had drawn upon himself. "If, my Lord, I had prevented, or even thrown any obstruction in the way of any of His Majesty's subjects under my Government addressing the House of Commons on any subject whatever, I am aware I should have merited the royal censure and displeasure which your Lordship has conveyed to me; but when I feel that my conduct has not only on this, but on every other occasion, exhibited the reverse of such arbitrary and unconstitutional exercise of power, I am at a loss for language sufficiently strong to give adequate expression to the regret I feel in the consideration that either my former communication should not have been sufficiently explicit, or that it should have induced His Royal Highness and your Lordship to conceive that I meant to prevent or restrain the general right of British subjects to address Parliament on any real or imagined grievance whatever." This despatch was certainly written with perfectly serious intentions, and Macquarie was honestly unaware that in allowing Vale to take the petition home with him he was not doing all that could be required of him.

He understood just as little the position of Lord Bathurst in regard to Vale. The Secretary of State wrote: "Upon a