The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History. Linda Colley

outside the walls of Portsmouth’s naval dockyard, so that shipwrights and other workers could arrive punctually for their thirteen-hour day. Although he worked sometimes in the dockyard, and sometimes at sea, Milbourne organized his life so as to spend as much time as possible with his family. He deployed his customary tactic of using his specialized skills to lever himself into a new job whenever the current one became inconvenient. In September 1735, the month he became a father, he abandoned the Kingston and, armed with a recommendation from Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle, moved back as a ship’s carpenter on the Deal Castle. The latter was classed only as a sixth-rate warship, and therefore unlikely to be sent into the thick of battle in the event of war. Small vessels like this could still however be dispatched on missions in foreign waters; and when the Deal Castle was ordered to South Carolina in 1739, Milbourne jumped ship again. He took himself off to the Cambridge, an eighty-gun warship undergoing conveniently lengthy repairs in Portsmouth harbour.⁴⁵

      Partly as a result of her father’s ingenuity, these early years in Portsmouth were the most stable of Elizabeth Marsh’s life. Yet, for all that this was a far more secure and healthy environment, Portsmouth shared certain important characteristics with Jamaica. It was vitally involved in empire and organized violence; it was a place of pioneering industrialization; and it was markedly cosmopolitan, and caught up in intercontinental trade and migration. Not for nothing was Portsmouth sometimes described – and sometimes condemned – as England’s equivalent to Port Royal before the earthquake: ‘If that was Sodom, this is Gomorrah.’⁴⁶

      At first sight, the town appeared an ancient, walled place of some six hundred houses, occupying part of the island of Portsea, and linked to the mainland by a system of gates and bridges. But the gates and bridges were closely guarded, because Portsmouth was Britain’s premier military town, and the Royal Navy’s main operational base and dockyard. There were six naval dockyards in England at this time, all of them situated along its southern coast. On the Thames there were Deptford and Woolwich, both small dockyards. At the mouth of the Medway in Kent there was Sheerness, and twelve miles up the river the much bigger yard of Chatham. Then there were the so-called western dockyards, Plymouth and Portsmouth. By the 1730s, the latter had overtaken Chatham as the most important.⁴⁷ Hidden behind high walls, inconspicuous to casual travellers arriving by road, Portsmouth looked utterly different when approached from the sea:

      A spacious harbour, and the great ships lying at their moorings for three or four miles up, and the harbour for a mile at least on each side covered with buildings and thronged with people; the water covered with boats passing and repassing like as on the Thames … The prospect from the middle of the harbour gives you the idea of a great city.⁴⁸

      The dockyard’s specialized warehouses and rope-, mast- and rigging-houses were some of the biggest, most expensive constructions of the time dedicated to secular purposes. Almost 2200 skilled workmen were employed here in 1735, who were divided into twenty-three different categories, and tolled into work at morning and out at night by bells. A further 259 men were attached to the dockyard’s ropeyard. In what was still a primarily agricultural economy, this represented an extraordinary concentration of labour. Even a hundred years after this, it was still rare for industrial establishments anywhere in the world to employ more than five hundred men.⁴⁹

      Surrounded by sea, but always short of fresh water, wreathed in coal smoke from the dockyard’s many forges, and full of the noise of metal on wood, Portsmouth, then, was a prime site of state power and imperial projection. But, as indicated by the pair of seven-foot-high dragon-headed pagodas from China erected by its dockyard in the 1740s, and by the mixture of coins and languages in use in its streets, the town was also a magnet for outsiders and alien influences. Portsmouth was where most foreign diplomats made landfall in Britain before taking the London road to present their credentials at court. It was the main British depot outside of London of the East India Company. Ships from Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Canton unloaded textiles, spices and ceramics in Portsmouth, as well as passengers and occasional Asian seamen. This was also a garrison town, and companies of soldiers marched through it en route for, or returning from, overseas expeditions; and Portsmouth was a commercial port as well as a naval base. There were Arab traders arriving from the Levant, seamen and fish-dealers from Hudson’s Bay and New England, Baltic suppliers catering to the Royal Navy’s ceaseless appetite for timber, so-called ‘Port Jews’ eschewing the distinctive life of their people in order to trade and lend money, and smugglers from nowhere in particular.⁵⁰

      Elizabeth Marsh’s early exposure in Portsmouth to the sights and sounds of difference and diversity, and simultaneously to the Royal Navy and to the force of the British state, has to be factored in if we are to understand how she came to be the person she was, and to lead the life that she did. But she was also shaped of course by her family. ‘I was the daughter of a gentleman,’ she once wrote.⁵¹ The truth was more interesting.

      While almost everything about her mother remains unclear, her father’s background is remarkably well documented. Milbourne Marsh had been christened in St Thomas church in Portsmouth in October 1709. His father, George Marsh (b.1683), was also a ship’s carpenter with the Royal Navy, which was typical enough, since shipbuilding was a closely guarded trade, customarily passed on through the males of a family over generations. Milbourne’s mother, who was born Elizabeth Milbourne in 1687, possessed her own link to the maritime, though a significantly different one. Her father, John Milbourne, ‘an excellent pen man’, was employed after 1713 as clerk to Sir Isaac Townsend, the Resident Commissioner at Portsmouth naval dockyard.⁵²

      This blood connection with someone who worked with pen and paper was important, and the careful perpetuation of his mother’s surname in Milbourne Marsh’s own first name shows that his family was well aware of this. Both of Milbourne’s parents were literate, and both took pleasure in using words. As would be true of Elizabeth Marsh, they were compulsive storytellers. From his father, George Marsh, Milbourne heard tales about his grandfather, yet another mariner, called Francis Marsh. On a voyage from Lisbon back to Southampton in the early 1690s, this particular Marsh was wrecked off the Isle of Wight. ‘The ship and everything in it but himself were lost,’ but Francis Marsh – or so Milbourne and his siblings were told – plunged into the sea with his banknotes and valuable papers wrapped up in an ‘oil skin bag’, together with ‘a small family bible, not above 7 inches long, 4 or 5 inches broad and about 1 inch and a half thick’, and was ‘miraculously saved on shore on the beach’. Milbourne’s mother’s favourite tales were of her grandfather, a Northumberland-based dealer in Scottish cattle called John Milbourne. In May 1650, she claimed, he had risked his life hiding the Scottish royalist hero James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, when he was on the run from the Scottish Covenanters who were allies of Parliament. Only when Montrose left this plain man’s sanctuary, and went seeking help from a nearby landowner, was he betrayed and handed over to his enemies and execution.

      Tokens of these and other past family dramas were carefully preserved. George Marsh senior and his wife kept a print of the Marquess of Montrose on a wall in every lodging house they occupied. As for Francis Marsh’s providential Bible and prayer book, what passes for this volume still exists today, its battered pages bearing annotations by one of George Marsh senior’s sons. The content of these family legends, and the tenacity with which they were held, suggest the eagerness of Marsh family members to view themselves as something more than mere skilled artisans. Milbourne Marsh and his siblings were brought up on ‘a slender income by good management and prudence’, but the stories he and they listened to, and that he passed on in turn to his own daughter, Elizabeth Marsh, evoked a rather different status. God, these family romances proclaimed, had intervened to preserve one of their ancestors by a ‘wonderful deliverance’. Yet another ancestor had performed an act of signal service to the cause of Britain’s monarchy. Moreover, as Milbourne Marsh’s