Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/299

 Men like Lord would have been excluded, but men like Fulton received.

During 1818 the hostility between Marsden and Macquarie culminated in the dismissal of the former from the magistracy; and the events leading up to his dismissal bore not only a personal but a political aspect of considerable interest. The bad feeling of the Governor towards the chaplain (for Macquarie seems from the beginning to have been the offender) had been much increased by Macquarie's mistake in attributing to Marsden Bayly's letter describing the treatment of the female convicts. It was further strengthened by the fact that Marsden, acting as a magistrate, had taken the affidavits of the public flogger and gaoler in regard to the flogging of Blake and Henshall in 1815. The Governor's sense of propriety was so far overcome by his bitterness that he allowed his secretary, who was a magistrate of the territory, to examine the gaoler on oath and try, without success, to obtain an admission that Marsden had solicited him to come forward and make his declaration. Marsden was also summoned to Government House, and in an official interview, in the presence of one of the chaplains and of Macquarie's personal staff, accused of seditious and turbulent conduct. At the same time the Governor strongly opposed Marsden's desire to retire from the magistracy.

A trivial incident was sufficient in such a state of affairs to bring about a crisis. In 1815, while Marsden had been in New Zealand on missionary business, Macquarie had established a Native Institution for teaching the children of the blacks. The school was at Parramatta, but nevertheless Macquarie did not include Marsden in the Committee of Management. To Marsden, the Principal Chaplain and Resident Magistrate at Parramatta, this presented itself as a deliberate slight, and he studiously avoided taking the least interest in its progress. Thus in 1816, when the Governor paid his annual official visit to the school, Marsden did not wait upon him. J. T. Campbell, the Governor's Secretary, who loyally detested his chiefs opponents, irritated by what he considered a discourtesy, inserted in the