had entered into competition with him, and in the last term of the old Civil Court, Chartres had appeared for the first time. J. H. Bent thus described the three men.
"George Crosley was struck off the rolls of the court of King's Bench and transported to this Colony for perjury. …[1] Eager has been transported here within the last six years for forgery, and has never, as far as I can learn, been admitted an attorney of any court. And Chartres has been sent here for a species of the crimen falsi within the last five years, and at the moment keeps a public house, and both,[2] are under the sentence of the law."[3]
The new judge had heard of these men from his brother before he left England, and had endeavoured without success to obtain a definite statement from Lord Bathurst "with regard to the practice of the convict attorneys".[4] In the Colony the divergent views of the Governor and the Bents were well known, and trouble was probably anticipated. On the 22nd April the first sittings of the new courts were summoned, and the Governor's precept appointing Hook and Brooks as members of the Governor's Court, Broughton and Riley as members of the Supreme Court, was published on the same day. The Supreme Court was to meet on the 1st May and the Governor's Court on the 8th.
The emancipist attorneys decided that to appeal straight to the courts was dangerous. They looked upon the Governor as a higher authority and sought his support first. Macquarie explained the situation in an official letter to J. H. Bent dated 18th April, 1815.
"I have," he wrote, "lately received memorials from some of those attorneys who have hitherto been allowed to practise in the line of their profession in the Courts of Civil Jurisdiction … who being now apprehensive that it is in contemplation to exclude them from that indulgence in the courts about
- ↑ See Chapter II. for reasons why King pardoned Crosley.
- ↑ i.e., Eager and Chartres. Both held tickets-of-leave. Eager received an emancipation a few years later and a free pardon in 1819. Chartres' license must have been in his wife's name.
- ↑ Bent to Goulburn, 1st July, 1815. R.O., MS.
- ↑ Letter to Goulburn, 25th June, 1815. R.O., MS. See also earlier in this Chapter.
