Mariners’ wives had to be capable of a more than usual measure of independence and responsibility, because their husbands were so often away. During Milbourne’s absences at sea, Elizabeth Marsh senior ran their household in the New Buildings and its finances by herself.67 She also had to cope at intervals with the harshness and enforced intimacies of living aboard ship. Both of their sons, Francis Milbourne Marsh and John Marsh, the latter Elizabeth Marsh’s favourite and confidant, seem to have been born at sea. Giving birth to the elder, Francis, may indeed have been what confined Elizabeth Marsh senior to the Cambridge in Portsmouth harbour – that is, several miles from shore – for several weeks in 1741, and what tempted Milbourne to ‘borrow’ supplies of navy bedding ‘till my own was fit’.68
In the normal course of events, none of these mixed influences on their daughter Elizabeth Marsh would have mattered very much. When her father left the sea in 1744 after the Battle of Toulon, his and the family’s prospects were modest, and would have appeared predictable. One of the attractions of working in naval dockyards, as distinct from a commercial shipyard that paid higher wages, was that they allowed skilled employees a job for life. Once he came ashore in 1744, Milbourne’s income declined slightly, from £50 per annum to around £40, a sum that placed the family at the bottom of England’s middling sort at this time, ‘the upper station of low life’, as Daniel Defoe styled it.69 But at least there was security. It seemed likely that Milbourne would build and repair a succession of warships until he was pensioned off, that his two sons would in due course become shipwrights in their turn, and that ultimately his only daughter would marry a man of the same trade. But this was to reckon without changes that crossed continents, and the second influential man in Elizabeth Marsh’s life: her uncle George Marsh.
Born in January 1723, George Marsh was the eighth and penultimate child of George Marsh senior and Elizabeth Milbourne. This position in a large artisanal family may have made him slighter in physique, and more susceptible to illness – he seems to have suffered sporadically from epilepsy – but he was as driven as any eldest child. Initially sent to sea in 1735, because his father was not ‘able to purchase me a clerkship’, he soon moved to an apprenticeship to a petty officer in Chatham dockyard, and by 1744 was working as a clerk for the Commissioner of Deptford’s naval dockyard.70 His next break came almost immediately. In October 1745 the House of Commons demanded a detailed report on how naval expenditure in the previous five years, when Britain had been at war with Spain, compared with that in the first five years of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–07). As he was ‘acquainted with the business of the dockyards, and no clerk of the Navy Office was’, George Marsh was ‘chosen … to perform that great work’. Labouring at the Navy Office in London ‘from 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning till 8 or 9 o’clock at night from October to the end of January’, mining a vast, unsorted store of records for the requisite figures, and organizing and writing up the usable data, exacerbated his epilepsy. He suffered intermittent attacks of near-blindness and dizziness, and ‘fell several times in the street’, he recorded much later, ‘and therefore found it necessary to carry constantly in my pocket a memorandum who I was and where I lodged’. He nonetheless produced the report ‘in a few months’.71
This episode suggests some of George Marsh’s qualities: his ferocious capacity for industry, strong ambition, and utter belief in paperwork. It also suggests how – through him – Elizabeth Marsh was connected to yet another aspect of modernity and change. The circumstances of her birth and upbringing had already linked her with slavery, migration, empire, economic and industrious revolutions, the navy and the sea. But it was primarily through her uncle George Marsh that she connected with the expanding power of the British state at this time, and with an ever more conscious mobilization of knowledge and paperwork in order to expand that power. To paraphrase the economist J.R. McCulloch’s later verdict on the East India Company, Elizabeth’s father, Milbourne Marsh, was caught up with the power of the sword, Britain’s fighting navy; but it was her uncle, George Marsh, who exemplified the power of the pen and the ledger.72
And he was unstoppable. He rose early every morning, drank only water, confined himself to two meals a day, took regular exercise, spent little on himself, and worked very hard. In 1750 he moved from the provinces to the tall pedimented brick building that Christopher Wren had designed for the Navy Office in Crutched Friars by the Tower of London. From 1751 to 1763, George Marsh was the Clerk in charge of seamen’s wages. He then spent almost ten years as Commissioner of Victualling, before becoming Clerk of the Acts in 1773. This was the position that Samuel Pepys had occupied after 1660, and used as a power base from which to transform the administration of the Royal Navy. Pepys, however, had been able to draw on aristocratic relations and on high, creative intelligence. George Marsh possessed neither advantage, yet he retained the Clerkship of the Acts for over twenty years, and ended his career as a Commissioner of the Navy. At his death in 1800, this shipwright’s son was worth by his own estimate £34,575, over £3 million in present-day values.73
The contrast between his remarkable career and his evident personal limitations reduced some who worked and competed with him to uncomprehending fury. George Marsh, complained his own Chief Clerk in 1782, was
totally unfit for the employment as he can neither read, spell, nor write. This office has in my memory been filled with ability and dignity … but the present Clerk of the Acts has neither, and we should do ten times better without him, for he only perplexes matters.74
Yet, as this denunciation suggests, some of the criticism George Marsh attracted at different stages in his career was rooted in snobbery, and he was always able to exploit people’s tendency to underestimate him. In reality, he wrote all the time, privately, and not just in his public capacity. His papers also confirm that he read widely and that, like his parents and his niece Elizabeth Marsh, he enjoyed constructing stories. More than any other member of his immediate family, perhaps because he spent virtually all of his life in a single country, George Marsh seems to have been conscious of the scale of the transformations through which he was living, and he sought out different ways to make sense of them. He was the one who stayed behind. He was the spectator, the recorder, the collector of memories and eloquent, emblematic mementoes. Most of all, George Marsh was someone who relished facts and information, and knew how to deploy them: ‘I am sensible my abilities fall far short of some other men’s,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but [I] am very certain no one knows the whole business of the civil department of the Navy better or perhaps so well as I do.’75 This massive, cumulative knowledge gave him an element of power, as did his acute understanding of how patronage worked.
As his correspondence with successive aristocratic First Lords of the Admiralty reveals, he was both unctuously deferential in his dealings with his official and social superiors, and capable sometimes of hoodwinking them. In private, and like his parents, George Marsh tended to be critical of members of the aristocracy, writing regularly about the superiority of ‘the middle station of life’, and of those (like himself) who had to work seriously hard for a living. But he was adept at the patronage game, which necessarily involved him paying court at times to ‘the indolent unhappy nobility’, and he was interested in securing advancement and favours for more than just himself. He ‘always had a very great pleasure’, he wrote, in ‘doing my utmost to make all those happy, by every friendly act, who I have known to be worthy’.76 Chief among these worthy beneficiaries were the members of his own family. It was George Marsh’s willingness and ability to use his power and connections to promote his family that transformed Elizabeth Marsh’s expectations, and that separated her forever from the life-trajectory that might have been anticipated for a shipwright’s daughter. Having as her uncle