PEEL, Sir Robert

Autograph letter signed, to William Merry.

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Downing Street, 30 October London, 1810. Small folio, 2 pp., legibly written in brown ink; originalfolds, reinforced on central fold, tipped into a quarter morocco binding. An important letter relating to the trial of George Johnston and his fellow rebels in London. The letter, written only days after Bligh's arrival in London, shows the interest necessarily being taken in the case by no less a figure than Sir Robert Peel, who had been appointed Under-Secretary to Lord Liverpool, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, in 1810.

Peel's role meant that he took charge of departmental correspondence with the colonies - everything, he later said, from Botany Bay to Prince Edward Island. This position led him to be involved in the 1811 prosecution of the case against the mutineers in what has since become famous as the "Rum Rebellion". The letter is written to William Merry, a long-serving official of the British government, who had himself been appointed Deputy Secretary at War in 1809 (see his obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine for June 1856).

Peel writes:

'Captain Bligh late Governor of the Colony of New South Wales having represented to Lord Liverpool that the Persons named in the inclosed List have been brought from thence to be examined as Evidences in the Proceedings about to be instituted respecting the late Mutiny, and that it was necessary they should be subsisted, I have his Lordship's Directions to request you will move the Secretary at War to give orders that such amount of Subsistence as may appear reasonable to his Lordship may be issued to them respectively...'.

The actual list of defence witnesses for the George Johnston/William Bligh "Rum Rebellion" trial of 1811 referred to in this letter has not survived. However, the witnesses in Bligh's defence were nineteen in all and included leading New South Wales men such as Robert Campbell, Palmer, Fulton, Gore and George Suttor. As the ADB notes, since Johnston's defence was justification, the trial was virtually Bligh's as well: the former's conviction was the latter's acquittal.

This letter, written only five days after Bligh arrived in London from Sydney, is testimony to his troubled life and continued public humiliation.

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