Love and pie crusts

A colonial love story | author Alison Lloyd's newsletter #50

Once upon a time there was a dashing captain and a pretty young woman…

Can you guess how this goes? Yes, this Scroll brings you historical heartbreak from colonial Australia, with one of the meanest, offhand break-up lines ever spoken. But don’t delete the email yet! Since 14th February is a day to celebrate love, that’s not where the story ends. There’s a second chance romance too.¹

Sincere Intentions

In 1822, 17 year old Sarah Cox was earning a living as a milliner’s apprentice, in Sydney. New South Wales was still a penal colony — convicts clinked along Sydney’s streets in chain gangs. But a recent Governor (Macquarie) had boosted the ramshackle colony’s respectability. Several new Regency-style buildings now graced the colony. Fortunes were being made in wool and whaling, and grand estates were under construction. As the colony developed, so did the colonial sense of self-respect and propriety.

Vaucluse House, Sydney, built 1803-1839. Picture: nsw.gov.au

Sarah’s family teetered on the edge of respectability. She was not a convict, but both her parents had been. Her parents weren’t married either. Sarah’s father had been separated from his first wife and children when transported, and he set up a new family in the colony.

In 1822 a Captain John Payne started courting Sarah. Captain Payne had business that often took him to Van Diemen’s Land, so he and Sarah wrote letters to each other.

Believe me Dear Sarah my Affections for you have not been sudden nor precipitant. I have fostered them some time within my breast… it is my sincere intention to make you a Companion of my future life…
I remain Dear Girl Your Most Affectionate
Jn Payne

Promises, promises. In 1824, Sarah found out her beau had instead married a rich widow.

Promises and Pie Crusts were made to be Broken

‘Promises and pie crusts were made to be broken,’ Captain Payne told Sarah’s mother. Ouch. Broken-hearted and angry, Sarah wasn’t going to stand for that cavalier attitude. ‘I intend inforcing you to keep your promise,’ she wrote to Payne. ‘Indeed Sir I do.’

Sarah found an outstanding young lawyer named William Wentworth. A loud, tall, confident public speaker, he was willing to take on her case. Wentworth was much higher up the social scale than Sarah. His father was a ship’s doctor with aristocratic connections, and Wentworth had studied at Cambridge. But his mother was a convict, so he had that in common with Sarah. He was adventurous too — in 1813 he and a party of explorers became the first Europeans to cross the rugged Blue Mountains west of Sydney, thus opening inland Australia to colonisation.

Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, named after William Wentworth.

That wasn’t Wentworth’s only claim to fame. He established the colony’s first private newspaper, against the wishes of the Colonial Office. He also wrote the first publication by an Australian-born author.²

L: A sketch of William Charles Wentworth (1790-1872), by an unknown artist c1848; R: the frontispiece of Wentworth’s 1819 publication.

Making History

Wentworth obviously liked breaking the mould. He agreed to take Sarah’s complaint against Payne to court, in the colony’s first breach-of-promise case. In the nineteenth century, it was an offence to promise to marry someone and then not go through with it. Interestingly, this type of law suit was almost always brought by women.

In the highly publicised hearing, Wentworth argued:

“By your verdict, Gentlemen of the Jury, you will send her [Sarah] forth to the world free from taint. If such among you, as are fathers, consider what your feelings would have been, you will award that degree of compensation as will in some measure recompence (sic) her for the injury she has sustained.”

The jury returned a verdict in favour of Sarah Cox. They awarded her £100 damages. She was indeed sent forth ‘free from taint’, from the Captain Payne relationship.

Second Chances

However, Wentworth should have taken his own advice, as author Cecily Paterson points out. (Cecily’s blog, posting research for a historical novel, gives more detail.) Sarah scandalised Sydney by giving birth to Wentworth’s child six months after the trial.

If, in contrast to the Captain, Wentworth had honourably married Sarah after the court case, then we could wrap up this story in a big Valentine’s day bow. But real life relationships are often more complicated than we’d like. Wentworth didn’t marry Sarah — not until 1829, when she was 8 months pregnant with their third child. We don’t know what finally made him do the honourable thing. From his public statement of his feelings (coming up below), it seems to have been his love for her.

After their marriage, William Wentworth continued to notch up a long run of achievements. He was involved in drafting the 1853 NSW Constitution, and founding Sydney University. Sarah, however, was ostracised from public life. Visiting English Lady Jane Franklin described her as ‘very handsome, lady like and amiable, but of course not visited.’

That’s the nineteenth century version of cancel culture. Socially devastating.

Sarah Wentworth,1853, by William Nicholas.

Despite this, William and Sarah Wentworth’s marriage lasted until William’s death. They built a beautiful home at Vaucluse (see the pic above) and reared 10 children together.

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, let’s give the last word to Wentworth. This poem was published in his newspaper in 1829, when he flew in the face of social norms to marry Sarah:

To Sarah
For I must love thee, love thee on
Till life’s remotest lastest minute
And when the light of fire is gone -
Thou’ll find its lamp had thee within it.

Happy Valentine’s Day ♡♡♡ If you have a partner, stoke that fire of faithfulness.

If you don’t, or you just like romantic short stories, here’s a link to the Valentine’s Day story I wrote last year.

You are welcome to send this email to a friend:

1. I came across this story in Courting: an intimate history of love and the law. Author Alecia Simmonds, a lawyer and academic, says it was written ‘from the archival remains of broken hearts’. It’s an excellent read — not as gloomy as it sounds. It won the Australian history prize in the NSW Premier’s History Awards last year.

2. He was patriotically Australian, and gave his work a cumbersome, but brash and cocky, title: A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen’s Land, With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States of America. Unfortunately Wentworths’ vision for the future of Australia didn’t extend to indigenous peoples.