He suggested that it might be well to send
"no more violent republican characters for some time, and particularly the priests, of whom we have now three. . . . With our present numbers I see no ground for alarm, and I shall do my utmost to preserve that peace and good order so necessary for the prosperity and even well-being of this colony."
Margarot would have derived no satisfaction from knowing how confidently King looked upon the situation. He consoled himself in May by recording that a vessel had brought "nouvelle que les Russes ont exterminés la marine Anglaise." This joy was again dashed by remarks in June that King proclaimed with "grande rejouissance Union avec Irlande," and that in July, "Semper idem King revint de Parramatta."[1]
More conspiracies were formed in 1802. King subsequently represented to Lord Hobart (9th May, 1803) the strain put upon the local government by the continual infusion of Irish convicts.
"The list of fourteen men condemned lately to die was caused by one of those unhappy events that happen more or less on the importation of each cargo of Irish convicts. The excesses those people committed during the short time they were at large is an earnest of what their conduct would be if not closely watched. Your Lordship will observe that only two were executed, and the rest pardoned. These wild schemes are generally renewed by this description as often as a ship from Ireland arrives, and when checked nothing more is heard about it till the next arrival. It is the people who arrive by the last ships who make similar attempts, and not those who have been here any time."
The Governor's plans for enrolling volunteers were approved in England: "Continue (Jan. 1802) by every means within your power to encourage the Armed Associations, in which it is the indispensable duty and obviously the best security of every respectable inhabitant to enrol himself.[2]
- ↑ Margarot, who was agent in Scotland for an English Revolutionary Society, wrote in his Sydney Journal:—"At Pennycuick there are 174 men for a reform and four against it, viz., the parson, the precentor, the excise-man, and the schoolmaster."
- ↑ King kept the mechanism of the Associations available, but did not distract the settlers by calling them from their avocations in a body. In Feb. 1803 a Public Order declared that his "unbounded confidence in the loyalty and activity" of the New South Wales Corps prevented his enrolling the Associations otherwise than by "appointing their officers." In Dec. 1803, however, on the resumption of war in Europe, "counting on the zeal and loyalty of all His Majesty's subjects . . . as well as on
