since been included in any issue of pardons under the Great Seal. Stay of proceedings was allowed for eighteen months in order that Field might procure from England an office copy of the record of conviction.[1]
In the Supreme Court it had been adjudged "That persons arriving in this Colony under sentences of transportation and afterwards receiving instruments of absolute and conditional remissions … were not thereby restored to any civil rights of free subjects unless and until their names should be inserted in some general pardon under the Great Seal of England; but on the contrary that they still remained convicts attaint, incapable of taking by grant or purchase, holding or conveying any property real or personal, of suing in a Court of Justice or of giving evidence therein—and upon the sole ground that the name of the plaintiff did not appear in any general pardon under the Great Seal of England, decreed that the plaintiff … could not maintain his action. …"[2]
The emancipists obtained Macquarie's permission to hold a public meeting and to petition the Crown to remove these disabilities. The meeting was duly advertised in the Gazette on 7th January, 1821. Field and Wylde, who were on the point of sailing to Van Diemen's Land on circuit, at once wrote to the Governor, thinking it their duty "to apprise your Excellency that if you had been pleased previously to such sanction, to have consulted us upon the law, we could have demonstrated … that none of the civil privileges of the above mentioned persons (the emancipated convicts and expirees), have been affected by any rules of law lately pronounced by us; and we beg to add that we make this declaration with no view of interfering with any measure of your Excellency's Government, or on the ground of any objection on our part to the meeting proposed, but solely for the purpose of absolving ourselves from any consequences which the convention of such a meeting may occasion, during a probably three months' closure of the Courts of Civil and Criminal Judicature."[3]
- ↑ See Petition of Emancipists, enclosure D., 22nd October, 1821. R.O., MS.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ See letter, Appendix, Bigge's Reports, 7th January, 1821. R.O. The advertisement of the meeting stated that it was called for the purpose of petitioning the King and Parliament for relief from the consequences of certain rules of
