William Augustus Miles (1796-1851) : crime, policing and moral entrepreneurship in England and Australia

204 Pages·2002·1.279 MB·English

by  David Philips

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as a by-product of work I have done on crime, law,
policing and punishment in early-nineteenth-century England and in
colonial Australia. I first encountered William Augustus Miles as a
commentator on issues of crime and punishment in England in the
1830s, and as a researcher for the influential Constabulary Force
Commission of 1836–9. When I subsequently started researching
issues of policing in colonial Australia, and discovered that he had
been in charge of the Sydney Police in the 1840s, I thought that he
would make an interesting subject for an article, which I was ideally
placed to research and write. However, once I began researching
Miles' life, I found it to be considerably more difficult to find
evidence, and the life itself to be considerably more mysterious, than
I had anticipated. As I doggedly sought out sources which might
throw some light on him, the mystery deepened. As I got to know
Miles I became aware that he was never a very likeable, happy or
successful person. But, once I had been able to go through the
considerable body of Miles Family Papers, held in private hands in
Normandy, and had begun uncovering the more bizarre and
fascinating details of his life, I found myself hooked on the mystery
of Miles, and was determined to put together, and make sense of, his
life. It became an obsessive quest, which I had to complete, to solve,
as far as possible, the mystery of William Augustus Miles. This book
is the result of that determination, or obsession.
Because virtually no private papers of Miles himself (as opposed
to those of the Miles family) have survived, this biographical study
has had to be put together largely from the outside of the man, from
official correspondence and publications; we have little direct
evidence of his thoughts and intentions. Research for this book had
to take the form of a detective quest for sources about the man,
followed by a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle in which one
tries to fit together and make sense of all the pieces. I freely admit to
enjoying this aspect of the research and writing; it is very time-
consuming, but it does provide considerable intellectual satisfaction.
A historical detective quest of this sort is only possible with the
aid of many libraries and archives. I owe a great debt to the very
helpful staffs of the following institutions:
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In England: The Public Record Office, in Kew; the Royal
Archives, Windsor; the British Library; the India Office Library; the
Manuscripts Room of the Library of University College, London; the
West Sussex Record Office; the Charity Commission.
In Australia: The Mitchell Library, Sydney, with particular thanks
for permission to reproduce the portrait of W.A. Miles which appears
on the cover and on page 156; the New South Wales State Archives.
Above all, the book would not have been possible, had I not been
able to use the large, uncatalogued collection of letters and papers in
private ownership, which I have called the Miles Family Papers. I am
extremely grateful to the people in whose possession the papers were
– to M. and Mme Blech and to M. Claude Waddington (a direct
descendant of the Reverend Charles Miles) – who gave me unfettered
access to the collection in the chateau of Anfernel, in Normandy, in
August 1988.
Work on the book was greatly facilitated by a grant from the
Australian Research Council for 1997 and 1998, for which I am very
grateful. I am also very grateful to the History Department of the
University of Melbourne, for providing a very supportive research
environment. I received some valuable references to evidence from
Professor Howard V. Evans, of Central Michigan University (from
whom I discovered the existence of, and possible means of access to,
the Miles Family Papers), and Professor Iain McCalman of the
Australian National University. And Bob Storch, my collaborator on
another book in which Miles played a small role, offered useful
comments about Miles and the issues.
Finally, let me record my strong thanks to those who accepted this
book and saw it through to publication: to Ron Ridley and the
Publications Committee; to Robin Harper; to Elizabeth Graham and
to Ann Standish. I owe them all a deep debt of gratitude for their
help, given quickly, cheerfully and efficiently; I hope that they are
pleased with the result.
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CHAPTER ONE
A Royal Bastard?: Birth and Early Years,
1796–1801
Throughout his life and career, William Augustus Miles was an
insecure and uneasy person – insecure in his employment and
financial position, uneasy about his status, and insecure emotionally
and in his relationships with others. That insecurity began early –
with the circumstances of his birth. Throughout his life, Miles lied
about his age and precise date of birth; he enjoyed the security of
being part of a close nuclear family for only a short period of his life,
and was then thrown out in traumatic circumstances; and the forms
of government employment which he obtained were generally
accompanied by lurid rumours about the facts of his birth and
parentage, which both helped and hindered his career.
Ostensibly, he was the eldest son of the man whose names he was
given, William Augustus Miles (1753/4–1817) – ‘Miles senior’, as
we shall refer to him. Miles senior had a career in government
service of sufficient importance to rate an entry in the Dictionary of
National Biography and some historical publications.1 Miles spoke
French fluently, and lived for a number of years in Belgium and
France before the outbreak of the French Revolution. Prime Minister
Pitt employed him as an intelligence agent in Europe from 1785, and
as a diplomatic intermediary with the revolutionary government
during the early years of the French Revolution. From June 1791, he
was paid £200 a year from Treasury secret service funds; in July
1793, Pitt added to that a pension of £300 a year.2Miles had lived in
France and had become friendly with some of the early revolutionary
leaders, especially Lafayette.3He strongly opposed Pitt’s decision to
go to war with France in 1793, which prevented his being able to
return to France. He remained a strong Europhile; he longed, in
particular, to return to France – but was frustrated by the long
duration of the war, from 1793 to 1814, with the break of only one
year for the Truce of Amiens.4 Failing a return to France, he hoped
for a government diplomatic posting to some other European city, so
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2 William Augustus Miles (1796-1851)
that he could return to the Continent. But he was to be frustrated in
these ambitions; in 1795, he broke with Pitt and thereafter became a
strong opponent of his government and supporter of the Opposition –
thus ending his chances of any further government preferment under
Pitt or subsequent Tory administrations.5
Despite his employment and his association with some powerful
political friends and associates of the Prince of Wales, however, the
origins and early life of Miles senior were obscure and ill-documented.
He was born in 1753 or 1754, apparently the son of Jefferson Miles,
a government official.6 According to Miles himself, his mother died
when he was 18 months old, and his father treated him harshly, so he
ran away at the age of ten.7 Jefferson Miles died in 1763, at around
the time that he ran away; after spending some time in America,
William Miles senior returned to England and was appointed to his
first official post in 1770. At some point in his life, the rumour
circulated that he was only formally the son of Jefferson Miles, but
that his biological father was William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland
(1721–1765), third son of King George II and ‘Butcher Cumberland’
of Culloden notoriety.8William Augustus Miles senior certainly bears
the same baptismal names as the duke, and may well have been
named after him; whether or not there was any truth in the rumour is
impossible to say. It does not appear to have had a major effect on the
career of Miles senior; but this suggestion of illegitimate birth, and of
royal blood in his heritage, was to be a major theme in the life of
William Augustus Miles junior. It is also in keeping with what seems
to have been a widespread sense, among the political class, that there
was something mysterious, or not quite right, about Miles senior.
The one thing which we can say for certain about the birth of the
younger William Augustus Miles is that his mother was not either of
the wives of Miles senior. Miles senior married twice. His first
marriage was in 1772; only one child was born to that marriage, a
daughter Theodosia, in 1773; in 1792, his first wife died. It is hard to
find what became of Theodosia; since she was 19 when her mother
died, she may have already been married and left home by that time;
certainly, her father’s second wife and his sons by the second
marriage never treated her as part of the Miles family.9Miles senior’s
second marriage came in 1803, and we shall deal with his second
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Chapter One – Birth and Early Years, 1796-1801 3
wife, Harriet and the five sons whom she bore to Miles senior, below.
But by the time of that marriage, William Augustus Miles junior had
already been born, some seven years before.
William Augustus Miles junior was born on 29 October 1796, but
was not baptised until 9 September 1801. The Parish Register records
his birth on 29 October 1796, ‘Son of William Augustus Miles and
Georgina Halker’.10 His place of birth was, apparently, a cottage in
Froyle, near Alton in Hampshire, where Miles senior was living in
1796.11He was baptised in Poole in Dorset, where Miles senior’s friend
Charles Sturt MP had a house on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour,
which he often lent to Miles for his own use. Just who Georgina
Halker was, and what her relationship was with Miles senior, is
impossible to discover. Why the baptism of Miles junior was delayed
until he was nearly five years old, and what happened to him between
1796 and 1801, are also unclear. During his life, Miles junior was
careful to conceal and obscure the exact date and circumstances of
his birth. And Miles senior’s wife Harriet and his youngest son
Charles Miles, who collected the materials for his father’s biography,
were also careful to conceal the circumstances of young William’s
birth and earliest years. The official published lives of Miles senior –
Charles Miles’ lengthy introduction to his published collection of his
father’s correspondence for the period 1793–1817, and the DNB
entry – list the five sons born to the second marriage, but make no
mention at all of a son called William Augustus (though Charles
Miles did let through into vol. 2 of the published correspondence a
few letters from the years 1812–1815, which refer to Miles’ ‘eldest
son’ William). In the Miles Family Papers, which were collected and
organised by Charles Miles, letters from Miles senior, until the early
1800s, were copied into a series of letterbooks; in those letterbooks,
passages from letters in the period 1796–1801, the period of the
birth and early years of William, have been carefully cut out.12
This leaves it unclear just what relationship Miles senior had with
young William for the first five years of his life; given that he was not
baptised till he was almost five, it is possible that he was not given the
surname ‘Miles’ or the names ‘William Augustus’ until then. We do not
know whether or not Miles senior acknowledged him publicly as his
son before 1801. Possibly he was left with his mother for those years;
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4 William Augustus Miles (1796-1851)
possibly she died in 1801. On this, we have nothing but speculation.
What we do know is that, in September 1801, Miles senior chose to
acknowledge himself as the father of the boy, to whom he gave his
own names. From then on, Miles senior treated young William as his
own son – his own eldest son, in the light of the second family of sons
which he was soon to father – and lavished a father’s affection on him
until young William’s destruction of his own career prospects in 1815,
closely followed by Miles senior’s own death in 1817. These matters,
of Miles’ obscure birth, parentage and early years, are of more than
merely antiquarian interest. Apart from the psychological effect
which those early years presumably had on the personality of Miles
junior, they were the source of the persistent rumours and stories
(some certainly encouraged by Miles himself, and used to further his
official career) that he was a ‘royal bastard’ or at least of royal blood.
Miles’ use of his alleged royal parentage or royal connections in
order to further his own career, will be dealt with at relevant points in
this book. For the moment, let us note some of the occasions
recorded, in which this issue was raised by people who had official
dealings with him, and the various versions of the story which they
offered in explanation. We have already noted that, in 1822, Miles
junior was given £150 by George IV’s private secretary, who took the
occasion to deny vigorously that this had anything to do with Miles
senior having allegedly been the illegitimate son of the royal duke,
William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland.13
Another, more colourful, version was recorded by Francis Place in
his diary in 1827, when Miles approached him for assistance in
‘obtaining employment in some government office’.14 Place, the
former tailor, was a veteran radical activist who had been a member of
the artisan-led London Corresponding Society in the 1790s; by 1827,
he was a more respectable associate of middle-class Benthamite
radicals and a whole-hearted exponent of the doctrines of Classical
Economics.15Miles senior, after his break with Pitt in 1795, had gone
into opposition to the government, and published some pamphlets
critical of the government.16 He became familiar, not only with
aristocratic and parliamentary leaders of the opposition, but also with
Place and other plebeian radicals such as the shoemaker Thomas
Hardy, who had been secretary of the London Corresponding Society.17
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Chapter One – Birth and Early Years, 1796-1801 5
Place began his 1827 diary entry by noting that Miles junior ‘told
me a story which he has more than once before told me, namely, that
The King occasionally gave him 100£ upon his application to him for
assistance, and that on one occasion gave an appointment in the West
Indies’. This money he received ‘at the Treasury, from a gentleman
who never spoke to him’. Place then went on to offer a remarkable
explanation for this royal benevolence towards Miles:
He founds his claim to the countenance of the King on a
circumstance which he probably thinks is correct, namely that his
father [Miles senior] is the son of the late King [George III] by the
Quaker woman whom it is said he married, and he talks of papers in
his father’s possession which would set the nation in an uproar. The
story told about the time this Wm Augustus was born credited at the
time, and believed by many to the present time is that he is the son
of the present King [George IV], and certainly as far as the marking
of breed in families goes he may claim to be a Guelph. He is a tall,
large man, with big limbs like the family he has the large features,
the goggle eye, the projecting pig likeform face, the low and rapidly
receding forehead which like the rest of them is bald to the crown of
the head, the small head [on] a large carcass, altogether the want of
intellectual appearance and the strongly marked animal character.
His father [Miles senior] was one of the profligate friends of the
Prince of Wales, and like other of his friends then and now even,
used to let the Prince (King) have the use of his wife and thus it is
said this Mr Wm Augustus was produced with the characteristics of
Royalty strongly marked upon him. (His father was a small man.) His
father like most of the Kings early friends was at lenth [sic] if not
discarded treated with coolness or contempt, as perhaps he deserved
to be and then he wrote a pamphlet against the Prince of Wales. It
had a prodigious sale. Some time afterwards he wrote another
pamphlet and this led to a compromise, Mr Miles was pensioned for
life and ever afterwards held his tongue.18
Much as one might be tempted to believe Place’s explanation, parts
of it do not, however, hold up to critical analysis. Since Miles senior
had joined the Opposition in 1795, it is possible that he could have
been ‘one of the profligate friends of the Prince of Wales’, since the
Prince was intimately associated at that time with Fox and others in
the Whig Opposition; but he could not have ‘let the Prince have the
use of his wife’ at the time at which William junior was conceived; in
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6 William Augustus Miles (1796-1851)
1796, his first wife had been dead for a number of years, and he had
not yet married his second wife; Georgina Halker, whoever she was, was
not a wife of Miles senior. Since Miles senior did not acknowledge
William junior and give him his names for nearly five years, it is
possible that he could have agreed to a request from the Prince to take
responsibility for the Prince’s bastard son19– but it is hard to see why
he should have done so. Certainly, he did not receive the sorts of
reward, in terms of money or place, from the Prince that such a favour
might merit; and, as we shall see, the strong and heartfelt love which
he lavished upon the young William in the years 1805–1815 is hard
to reconcile with the notion that William was not his biological son.
Nor can Place’s other major claim – that Miles senior was a close
friend of the Prince at the time that William was born, and that Miles
subsequently wrote his best-selling pamphlet attacking George as
revenge for the Prince discarding him as a friend – be sustained
chronologically. Pitt granted Miles a pension in 1793, when he was still
a supporter of that Prime Minster; and Miles published his original
Letter to the Prince of Wales,fiercely attacking the Prince, in May 1795,
when he was still a supporter of Pitt. That was more than a year before
the birth of William in October 1796. It is true that, by the time William
was born, Miles had broken with Pitt and become a supporter of the
Opposition; and he might then have been associating with the Prince
– but there was no subsequent pamphlet attacking the Prince because
he had discarded Miles as a friend. On the contrary, Miles’ second
Letter to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, published in 1808, is
friendly towards the Prince and very flattering about him. The flattering
second pamphlet may have been – as Place suggested – the result of
the Prince buying Miles’ friendship and silence; but William’s birth
cannot be made to have occurred before Miles’ virulent attack on
the Prince in his first Letter.
Yet, even if Place’s account falls down on careful scrutiny, he still
raises a real issue requiring explanation. Throughout his career, Miles
junior was able to receive royal handouts of substantial sums of money
when he was in trouble, and to invoke some sort of royal connection
to produce the necessary patronage to secure himself official positions.
Whether it took the form of some sort of blackmail for guilty royal
secrets (of which George IV and his brother William IV had a number,
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Chapter One – Birth and Early Years, 1796-1801 7
for which they paid substantial sums of money in blackmail),20 or
whether there really was some connection to an illegitimate son of some
member of the royal family, is not clear. But the story of being a royal
bastard gained wide currency. In 1829, Charles Greville (the famous
diarist and Clerk to the Privy Council) gave Miles a job for 18 months
indexing the Privy Council Registers. Greville subsequently recorded
in his diary: ‘I first employed a certain Wm. Augustus Miles, who
pretended to be a natural Son of one of the Royal Family (I forget
which) and who turned out a scamp and vagabond, and who cheated
me.’21In 1835, Sir Herbert Taylor, William IV’s Private Secretary, was
soliciting official positions on behalf of ‘Mr Wm Aug. Miles who was
a Protegé of the late King [George IV]’.22Edwin Chadwick, a man not
given to romance or fantasy, appointed Miles as Assistant Commissioner
to do the research for the Constabulary Force Commission in 1836;
writing about the establishment of the Commission in 1884, his
description of Miles was: ‘A natural son of George IV was introduced
to me who took up the subject with great ability.’23
In March 1836, Miles had an audience with William IV. Fifteen
months later, William IV died, and Miles claimed that ‘His late
Majesty thought of me in his Agony, & mentioned me to the good Sir
Herbert [Taylor].’ Miles subsequently claimed that the dying king
had ordered Sir Herbert Taylor to find Miles a suitable position, and
that the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, and his Home Secretary,
Lord John Russell, had promised to do so. Nor was this purely
fantasy on Miles’ part; Lord John Russell acknowledged, in a letter to
Sir Herbert Taylor: ‘I am well aware of the merit of Mr William
Augustus Miles and of the Interest taken in his welfare by the late
King.’ Miles kept pestering Russell and Melbourne to fulfil this
alleged ‘promise’, and eventually wrote Russell a letter in July 1839,
complaining bitterly of ‘any attempt to degrade me from the Station to
which my Royal Blood, my Education and my attainments’ entitled
him.24Even Lord Melbourne – irritated by Miles’s persistent requests
for money and patronage favours, and keen to pack him off to a position
on the other side of the world – noted testily in a memo in 1840:
He passes for a Natural Son of George the 4th & I suppose he is so,
tho’ I do not myself perceive his great likeness to the family. But the
late King [William IV] & Sir H. Taylor [?always] admitted it.25
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8 William Augustus Miles (1796-1851)
Even after his death, these claims of royal blood continued to be
made about Miles. The inscription on his gravestone, in Camperdown
Cemetery in Sydney (presumably chosen by his widow Sarah), begins:
WILLIAM AUGUSTUS MILES
Police Magistrate and late Commissioner of Police,
whose parentage was derived from Royalty.
Died 24th April 1851
Aged 53 years
Neglected and in Poverty.26
Note the awkward expression used here: ‘whose parentage was
derived from Royalty’ – which could imply either that Miles himself
was of royal birth, or that his father had been, thus neatly covering
both the versions which had been current during Miles’ lifetime. This
suggests that Miles had maintained to his wife, as well as to the
people from whom he solicited patronage, that he was of royal blood –
but whether through Miles senior, or directly from George IV, is not
here made clear. Note, too, the inaccurate age given, which would
have Miles born in 1798, or 1797 at the earliest, rather than the true
date of October 1796; this suggests either that he deliberately
falsified his age in order to conceal his true date of birth, or that he
was genuinely unaware of his own date of birth, having been kept
ignorant of it.
Finally, after his death, his widow Sarah, stranded without any
money in Sydney, appealed to Miles’ two surviving half-brothers back
in England for assistance. The eldest of the original five brothers,
Robert, wrote to the youngest (and, by 1853, only other surviving
brother), Charles, reluctantly agreeing to contribute £20 – but then
using the ‘royal bastard’ story as a justification for giving no more:
Sarah Miles must look to her own relations – and not to her husband’s
– for if the truth were told, he cannot be said to be related or connected
with us – being, as Lord Middleton often told me, considered to be a
natural son of George the 4th, when he was Prince of Wales! – he had the
eyes – the gait – the family likeness – and the manner of the Guelph
family – and but for the circumstances of our father’s having believed
him to be his own son, no blood relationship lies between us.27