The Queensland Years of Robert Herbert, Premier: Letters and Papers

married.

PART I

Introduction

Early Career

The aristocracy of England emigrating to these colonies for the reasons which bring them do more harm than convicts do, wrote Robert Herbert from Brisbane, to his mother, in January 1865. It was during a period when he was inclined to be gloomier and more introspective than was characteristic of him. But his dictum was not intended as autobiography. He referred to those of his class who had been in fact transported for their social and family crimes, and sent to penal servitude till they [could] pay their way home again (Letter No. 31).

The manner of his own coming to Queensland, and his remaining six years as its leading public man, accounts in some measure for this touch of priggishness with which he regarded less worthy young men. He had become aware also of the extent to which the Australian colonies, perhaps Queensland in particular, held fair prospects for either experienced labourers or capitalists, rather than for such as he. Had it not been for a combination of exceptional circumstances and events, and his own ability to take advantage of opportunities when offered, he would not, it seems, have emigrated, let alone prospered in the colony. True, he admitted rather grimly not long before he left Queensland in 1866 that England will not hold all the men who have to earn their livelihood, and some of us must migrate; and this recalls what a writer in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alleged some nine years earlier, at a time when Herbert himself had indeed been out of a job.

The Australian colonies and New Zealand absorb many of the younger sons of the gentry, who despair of obtaining adequate employment at home, owing to the great competition and the overcrowded state of the learned professions.¹

But Herbert did not go primarily for the purpose which Blackwood’s commentator attributed to such emigrants—the employment of a moderate amount of capital in setting themselves up as would-be squatters, hoping to attain wealth by the multiplication of their herds and flocks. He went as an official, and became also a politician. Therefore he did not risk the fate he predicted for one group of gentlemanly optimists which called on him in Brisbane. I expect in a few months to have to lend them money, etc. etc. Half of them will then take to drinking, and ride up against trees, tumble into creeks, etc. (Letter No. 31.) However, he was not above seeking to increase his modest fortune by investment and speculation.

Once he had decided, about a year after arrival, to stay a while, he bought a number of land allotments in and around Brisbane, amounting to nearly 600 acres in all. Later he put £1000 into a company to grow cotton at Caboolture, some miles north, and £200 into the Queensland Insurance Company. Most notably, in 1863 he contributed £5000 to a squatting partnership with the three Scott brothers (of Rotherfield, Hampshire) and George Elphinstone Dalrymple, a Scottish gentleman-adventurer. Of all these, only the Brisbane land returned him a profit to take back to England, to pay expenses and to permit him to be independent for a while. The rest failed, more or less badly. He was glad to retrieve about half of what he put into the two companies. The squatting venture (the Valley of Lagoons, in which he was but a sleeping partner, but which is fulsomely praised and described in several letters collected in this volume) ended, as he tells it, most sadly.²

Herbert was far, then, from becoming a rich squatter, with leisure and a steam yacht—an ambition he jocularly mentioned to his family more than once. He did not depend on investments, but on his official salary, for his living; and it is not difficult to conclude that money or property was quite incidental to the main benefit which Herbert hoped to obtain, and did obtain, from his time in Queensland. This we can say knowing that his later career as a high ranking public officer in England was one for which his Queensland experience specially prepared him. Moreover, it will be seen that emigration fitted surprisingly well into the earlier pattern of Herbert’s life. He was born, as the only son of a younger son of an earl, not to property or rank, but with access to considerable opportunities. Socially, his background was impeccable; better still, as a result his connections were good, his education the best possible and his youthful intellectual achievements considerable. An official/political career was a natural, perhaps the highest, option available to him in mid-Victorian England. He showed early that he intended to take it. The interesting thing is that a colonial excursion formed part of it, for the colonies were by no means an obvious path to eminence. Why did he make this singular choice?

Herbert’s father, it could safely be assumed, had nothing to do with it. The Hon. Algernon Herbert was the fifth son of the 1st Earl of Carnarvon. Primogeniture ensured that he had no expectations of great inheritance, so he had to equip himself to earn a living, and he became a barrister. Having married a member of the Channel Islands family of Lempriere, he set up practice in Brighton, where his first child, Robert George Wyndham, was born in June 1831. But the Hon. Algernon had interests above his profession. When his uncle, brother of the Earl of Egremont, bequeathed to him the house and modest estate of Caldrees Manor, Ickleton, Cambridgeshire, in 1834, he retired there and made something of a reputation in rather eccentric literary and antiquarian pursuits. He sought, for instance, to prove that Stonehenge was not of great antiquity.³

Robert Herbert, though he shared his father’s love of plants and birds, did not follow this example. It is true that the letters published here show that he had a compelling desire for privacy. Also, his career in Queensland, a kind of adventure, ended in a clear decision to leave the hurly-burly of politics for a quieter, less exposed region of public life. His temperament was undoubtedly well-suited to the work of a civil servant. But Herbert was far from merely indulging himself. He exhibited earnestness and industry and public usefulness. So also did his second cousin, the 4th Earl of Carnarvon; and Herbert’s close association with Carnarvon, from their earliest years, must be recognized as of the first importance in helping to explain their remarkably parallel careers.

At some points this inter-action, benefiting Herbert especially, is quite evident. The two were not merely cousins but exact contemporaries. At Eton from 1844 to 1849, Herbert and Lord Porchester (as Carnarvon was styled until his father’s death in the latter year) shared some scholastic distinctions, sat together in class, and were together in the Rev. Edward Coleridge’s House.⁴ It can be assumed therefore that they measured each other’s abilities and discussed their future activities. And their house master was also an influence on their respective careers. A son of the poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a brother of Sir John T. Coleridge the judge, he was assiduous in assisting his brighter young men into public service. Moreover, though we must be careful not to read significance where there is none, Coleridge had taken a long and conscientious interest in the colonial church, particularly in Australia, of whose Bishop Broughton he was a friend and commissary. He inspired G.A. Selwyn, first Bishop of New Zealand, and his own nephew John C. Patteson, head of the House during Herbert’s time at Eton and later killed while Bishop of Polynesia. In short, it seems likely that Herbert and Carnarvon imbibed some special notions from Coleridge.⁵

After Eton, the differences in station between Herbert and Carnarvon were bound to tell. In Oxford, Carnarvon was of the lordly Christ Church, while his cousin was a scholar of Balliol. Each did rather well at University. Herbert, though he just missed his First Class in classics, won various university prizes, including the Chancellor’s Latin verse Prize (with an appropriately titled poem—Avium Migrationes) and was elected to a Fellowship of All Souls. In 1854 he took the degree of B.C.L. and began to read for the Bar at the Inner Temple. He attended, in other words, to his need to consider future employment. In contrast, Carnarvon that year took his seat in the House of Lords, having already entered upon his duties as head of his family and of his estates, and as a magnate of the county of Hampshire. Lord Aberdeen, to secure the young earl’s adherence to his Whig-Peelite coalition, persuaded him to move the Address-in-Reply in January 1854, and shortly afterwards nominated him as Constable of Caernarvon Castle.⁶ Herbert was in no such position; and yet his career at this point again exhibited a curious parallel to Carnarvon’s. The Chancellor of the Exchequer in Aberdeen’s ministry was that other eminent Peelite W.E. Gladstone, who, in November 1854, needed a replacement for one of his private secretaries. As was his custom, he asked his old Eton tutor Edward Coleridge for a recommendation. Herbert was suggested, and Coleridge made the approach on behalf of Gladstone. He had done as much, in the past, for others of his pupils, among them Stafford Northcote in 1842 and (though the offer was refused) Goldwin Smith in 1845.⁷

For Herbert, the 1 January 1855, when he took up his duties, was no doubt an exciting and important day. The post itself was not grand—and Gladstone went to some pains to warn Herbert that, in the public interest, he must expect a good deal of boring, mechanical work not necessarily suited to his intellectual abilities⁸—but it offered experience of the business not of an ordinary department of state, but of the Treasury itself, under one of the most notable statesmen of the age. Better still perhaps, Herbert had apparently gained a patron and the possibility, therefore, if he worked well, of being nominated to a permanent place in the Civil Service, with prospects a great deal better than those of any ordinary departmental clerk. Stafford Northcote, a Peelite/Conservative M.P. by 1855, and a notable public figure, had benefited in precisely this way from 1845-50. Unfortunately for Herbert, association with Gladstone at this time was an equivocal advantage, with the Chancellor’s political position being most uncertain. He was estranged from the Conservatives because of his unwavering support for Sir Robert Peel during and after the crisis of 1845-46 and by his subsequent association with Lord John Russell. But he was by no means a Whig, and his relations with certain of his coalition colleagues, especially Lord Palmerston, were poor. At the same time, he was not yet clearly of the Liberal camp to which he committed himself in 1859.⁹

These complications, and others, brought Herbert’s promising appointment to an abrupt end. The usual assumption, for which Gladstone himself provides some authority, is that Herbert suffered with his chief when the Aberdeen coalition fell in February 1855—Gladstone finding himself unable to serve the new Prime Minister, Palmerston. There is some suggestion however that Herbert resigned over a divergence of opinion with Gladstone himself.¹⁰ In the absence of corroborating evidence, one can only say that this is possible. There is no sign that Herbert was ever less than conservative in his views; and, in the ministerial and party disorder precipitated by J.A. Roebuck’s motion (23 January 1855) for a committee of inquiry into the conduct so far of the Crimean war, there was plenty of occasion for a political crise de conscience, even for a private secretary. If we knew precisely the date of Herbert’s severance from Gladstone it might help: for instance, might Herbert have found unacceptable his chief’s refusal to join Lord Derby in a new coalition on 31 January?

With his access to patronage inhibited, there is still no indication that Herbert had begun to think of emigrating. This is not to say that the colonies and colonial affairs were necessarily absent from his mind. They certainly had a place with some of his relatives. Cousin Carnarvon had shown a special regard for the colonial empire more than once since entering his House. Another second cousin and contemporary, Berkeley Basil Moreton, son of the 2nd Earl of Ducie, actually left for New South Wales during 1855, equipped, however, with a training from Cirencester Agricultural College to eke out his less practical education at Rugby and Magdalen.

Beyond this, we must notice that the 1850s go far towards exploding the old myth that Englishmen of the time were not interested in and took no notice of the colonies. Although this is no place to argue the point, one need but indicate the large number of articles appearing, in the great periodicals, on the empire generally, on India, or on particular groups of colonies of which British North America and Australia were obvious leaders. The Blackwood’s article already mentioned was no stray. The tone of such articles was often as striking as their number. For instance, as early as 1853 Fraser’s Magazine looked forward to a British North American union which would lead to Britain being the centre of the grandest empire the world has ever seen. By 1857 Viscount Bury, writing in the same journal, nominally in Notes on Canadian Matters, envisaged fulsomely an imperial confederation. J.A. Roebuck had speculated likewise in The Colonies of England in 1849. Particular interest groups were active also. From 1849 the Colonial Reform Society put on its own Magazine, the Australian and New Zealand Gazette began in 1850, and was joined in 1859, by will of the General Association for the Australian Colonies, by the Australian Mail. In these years appeared Mundy’s Our Antipodes and Westgarth’s History of Victoria, as well as such things as Lord Grey’s Colonial Policy and Arthur Mills’ Colonial Constitutions. This is all quite apart from the parliamentary and newspaper interest excited by such colonial phenomena as Australian gold and constitutional changes, war and territorial withdrawal in South Africa, and Canadian-U.S. reciprocity. The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny held the stage in their times. But each of these last two events was, in its way, shocking and repellent to Englishmen. The colonies of settlement were a distinct contrast. Those overseas extensions of the national polity must, moreover, have taken on new significance in a decade when Napoleon III was busy restoring a continental French Empire. It is easy to find, in these years, many of the elements of imperialism which we usually associate with the late nineteenth century and which is often called new.

After losing his post with Gladstone, Herbert returned to the old modes of his existence, as a Fellow of All Souls and a candidate for the Bar. He seems to have been in no hurry to complete his legal studies. His father’s death in June 1855 conferred greater independence, as well as increasing his family responsibility. Mrs. Herbert and her two daughters were well provided for in Algernon Herbert’s will, but a certain amount of income, and perhaps capital, came Robert’s way. He had rooms in London as well as in Oxford, and these he shared with John Bramston, son of an East Anglian M.P. who lived quite near Ickleton. Bramston also was a Fellow of All Souls; and it is clear that whatever the process of Herbert’s thinking about a colonial excursion, it was somehow shared by his friend: Bramston went to Queensland in 1860 hard on Herbert’s heels. Another Fellow of All Souls, Arthur Scott, went also to the colony, in 1862, to try his hand at squatting.¹¹

The decisive time for Herbert might have been late in 1858. He was admitted to the Bar in April, but he never practised, showing from the beginning a distaste for lawyers’ chambers and their occupations.¹² In any case, his chance for official employment had just then been revived. Palmerston was forced from office in February as a result of his uncharacteristic appearances of truckling to French demands in the matter of the Emperor and Orsini’s bomb. Lord Derby and his friends found themselves, much surprised, called to office. They failed to attract Gladstone as a colleague; but Lord Carnarvon, who was given the post of parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Colonial Office, was amongst those who did not despair of persuading him to change his mind. As a result of this optimism we get our first hint that Herbert was willing to consider an overseas appointment. Gladstone was offered the choice of the India Board of Control or the Colonies in the cabinet reshuffle of May. He again declined, and it was at Carnarvon’s suggestion four months later that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Secretary of State for the Colonies, co-operated in a scheme for urging the wayward Peelite into another kind of connection with the Conservative government. Remembering Gladstone’s philhellenism and his reputation as a Greek scholar, Lytton persuaded him to go to the Ionian Islands—a British protectorate at the time—as High Commissioner Extraordinary, to report on the constitution and recommend liberal reforms.¹³

Gladstone accepted this mission, and in the first days of November assembled a staff to go with him—a private secretary and a couple of attaches. He seems to have approached Herbert, through Carnarvon, for one of the latter posts.¹⁴ That Herbert declined should not be taken to show a reluctance to go abroad. For one thing, the post with Gladstone carried hardly any pay; for another, it was certain to cease by the end of January 1859, and Herbert had experienced such abortive employment before. Besides, Carnarvon knew long before November that two new colonies, needing governments, were to be created. British Columbia was one; but more especially, Lytton had confirmed his predecessor’s decision that the northern or Moreton Bay district of New South Wales was to be separated as a distinct colony, as had been the Port Phillip district (Victoria) in 1850.¹⁵ Carnarvon and Herman Merivale (the permanent Under-Secretary in the Colonial Office) consulted on this problem during October 1858. By the time of Gladstone’s mission, Carnarvon knew that during the following year the new Moreton Bay colony would place in the Secretary of State’s gift at least a governorship, and possibly (on Herbert’s level of expectation) a colonial secretaryship, a treasurership and an attorney-generalship. Had Herbert been told this, it might well have contributed to a decision not to go briefly to the Ionian Islands. An officer, below the governor, in a colonial executive could hope for between £600 and £1000 a year. In Moreton Bay, because of the almost certain establishment of responsible government, he would have to show political talents to keep his place; but the example of Robert Lowe in New South Wales in the forties showed what a wellborn, well-educated young man could do in colonial politics (to say nothing of real estate). And Lowe had returned to England in 1850, had entered the House of Commons in 1852 and was made a junior minister in the Aberdeen ministry.¹⁶

However, there was nothing cut and dried or assured about a Moreton Bay or any other colonial appointment for Herbert. The prospect of his return had to be considered, for it was little use for a man ambitious of holding office in England to remove himself wantonly and irretrievably from the metropolitan arena. In any case, the Secretary of State’s patronage was much less extensive than old radical hyperboles would have it. James Mill described the colonies as a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes, and he censoriously listed governorships, judgeships, and a whole train of etceteras. That was in 1824. By the late 1850s appointments in the gradually consolidating Colonial Service would as often as possible go as promotions to its own members. In the larger colonies moreover, responsible government had effectively diminished home patronage to the appointment of governors. Moreton Bay, a brand new colony, was a rare phenomenon; and even there it was for a time expected that all appointments, except governor, would be made locally. Again, Bulwer Lytton, not Carnarvon, was the dispenser of patronage. Indeed, the very creation of the colony depended on him, and he found other business more fascinating until quite late in February 1859. Not until the end of April was Moreton Bay re-named Queensland, which was Lytton’s re-shaping of the Queen’s suggestion of Queen’s Land; and a governor (Sir George Ferguson Bowen, K.C.M.G., formerly Chief Secretary of the Ionian Islands, who made the most of his classical learning and Gladstone’s visit) was appointed at the same time. A necessary Order-in-Council and Letters Patent were issued on 6 June. Still Herbert had no place, and time was running out for the Derby ministry. Defeated on its reform proposals on 1 April, the government had gone to the country. It just failed to secure the majority it hoped for, waited to meet parliament in June, was then defeated again in the House of Commons, and made way in the middle of the month for a new Palmerston Liberal ministry, with the Duke of Newcastle at the Colonial Office.

Oddly enough, Herbert had not lost his chance. In the colony-designate, opinions were by no means unanimous as to what sort of government should be established—Crown Colony or responsible—or as to what land and labour policies it should pursue. Nor was it at all clear who, amongst the few ex-N.S.W. politicians, had claims to office in Queensland. Lytton, Carnarvon and Merivale had gradually inclined to the view that options as to the form of government should be left open, allowing the colonists to decide whether or not they wanted responsible government. The Duke of Newcastle, coming to office, agreed. He accepted therefore that the first Colonial Secretary of Queensland should be a man independent of local influences and able to direct his whole attention to assisting the Governor in the execution of his duties, as in an ordinary Crown Colony.¹⁷ Late in July, he authorized Bowen to select for himself a private secretary who could also be commissioned as Colonial Secretary. Bowen consulted Gladstone and, doubtless, his friends in the Colonial Office. The statesman suggested, first, a journalist (whose name is indecipherable in the letter in the Gladstone Papers) who had been overtaken by pecuniary difficulty … from the failure of a bank where his fortune lay. Next he urged Bowen to try the Hon. James Stuart-Wortley, twenty-six year old brother of Lord Wharncliffe, who had been on his staff during the Ionian Islands mission. Bowen then told his patron that, failing to secure Stuart-Wortley, he had recruited Robert Herbert, a still better man.

There is no evidence as to how this came to pass. Perhaps Lytton (whom Bowen revered as having called Queensland into existence) or Carnarvon might have been asked to suggest a name. Perhaps they, before quitting the Colonial Office, left Herbert’s name with the permanent officials, Bowen’s friends. Gladstone, a member of the new ministry, might have mentioned his old protege: at any rate, at Bowen’s request he wrote to assure Newcastle that Herbert was excellent in every respect.¹⁸ Recommendations from any of these sources would have carried great weight with a new governor, especially one as anxious as Bowen. As for Herbert, whatever his calculations, from the middle of June 1859 it was clear that he was unlikely to receive a patronage appointment at home; nor was it likely that the Conservatives would soon return to power. During 1865 and 1866 Herbert wrote sadly about English politics and public life under the Palmerston government. He believed then that, as Premier of Queensland, he had been able to do more good in [his] generation than he could have done at home. His opinions do not read as though they had been recently formed. In July 1859 therefore, he might have seized a last opportunity to obtain reasonably favoured employment which would also help him to satisfy a curiosity about European civilization outside England.¹⁹ The official salary of £1000 a year would be welcome. In addition, he took funds to invest in the colony. He certainly hoped for a good return. What he got was more important to him—experience and reputation in the complementary spheres of colonial life and politics and imperial administration.

Colonial Secretary of Queensland

His capacity for making the best of opportunities served Herbert well. Indeed, so adept was he in Queensland at suiting his actions to public and parliamentary opinion, or to the availability of supporters, that he was thought by some to be lacking scruples, perhaps lacking principles. Plasticity in politics was judged in 1867 to have been his main legacy to the colony.²⁰ Essentially, this demonstrates that he was never able to overcome the envy he aroused by being, not merely the first Colonial Secretary, but the first Premier of Queensland. As Colonial Secretary, his temporary function was understood. But it was also known that the Duke of Newcastle had provided that he might be deprived of his place without pension rights, once a legislature was elected in Queensland and responsible government established. No existing colonist seems to have expected the new chum to be elected to the Assembly, let alone command a majority of votes in it. There were several separationists, including erstwhile members of the New South Wales parliament, who had hopes of political eminence in the new colony. Newcastle and Governor Bowen prepared for Herbert to revert, after responsible government, to being just the governor’s private secretary. Herbert himself was so unsure of permanence that he left private affairs to England in a state that, he claimed, required him to make a flying visit home during the 1862-3 Queensland parliamentary recess.²¹

It was some