AFTERMATH: SEWELL'S LATER CAREER
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AFTERMATH:
SEWELL'S LATER CAREER
AFTER he left New Zealand in 1856 Sewell never managed to keep so careful a record as he did in his early colonial days. Some parts of his later career are well-documented, and between 1859 and 1866 he kept a sporadic Journal, portions of which may warrant publication at some future date. Meanwhile, a brief survey of Sewell's later career is added here to put his early role in perspective.
He went home in 1857 in the hope of securing a position in England which would permit him to live in modest comfort. Elizabeth, his wife, did not like New Zealand, and with one son at Oxford and another at Radley, he did not want to uproot his family. He still had no regular income. Nearly £1000 was due to him from the Canterbury Association and he had an expense allowance as a member of the Ministry, but as yet he had made no profit from New Zealand land. In fact, he was £500 worse off from his Canterbury excursion. As in the past he went to Lord Lyttelton and explained his financial worries and his aspirations. He certainly borrowed some money from this source, but it is not clear what prospects, if any, were open to Sewell in England. Within six months he was talking of returning to New Zealand. He now hoped for some judicial post, preferably in the South Island. During his stay in England he made no permanent home but stayed with his brothers at Radley or at New College, Oxford, his sisters at Bonchurch or his wife's sister at Waresley vicarage, twenty-four kilometres from Cambridge. As he wrote to Stafford, 'My mind rolls backwards and forwards between uncertainty here and uncertainty in the colony.' Sewell was still, of course, a member of the New Zealand Executive Council and was a sort of proto high commissioner in London. Formally charged with representing the views of the colonial ministry to the Imperial Government, he was authorised specifically to seek a Treasury guarantee for the half-million pound loan envisaged in the 'Compact', to arrange for a mail steamship contract, and to make various purchases of equipment for the
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colony. He was also asked by Stafford to look into the possibility of a system of land transfer by registration in New Zealand, to secure wider powers of amending the constitution, and to make discreet inquiries about a new chief justice.
In all these matters Sewell succeeded. He lobbied hard for the loan guarantee and appeared before a select committee of Parliament on 2 July 1857. There he insisted that the loan was vital to ensure North Island and South Island adherence to the 'Compact'. 'Each was willing to have a part of the loan applied to the other, provided it got its own share.' A Treasury guarantee was secured for the loan, and the Constitution Amendment Act passed on 17 August 1857. He made arrangements with Pearson and Coleman's of Hull for a mail steamer service. In association with the Imperial and Colonial Governments this firm formed the Intercolonial Royal Mail Steamer Packet Company, to provide a monthly mailboat from Sydney to Nelson, New Plymouth and Auckland, with a branch service from Nelson to Wellington, Lyttelton and Dunedin. Land registration was a subject close to Sewell's own heart. He arranged for the report of an English royal commission of 1857 to be published in New Zealand and, with the help of a famous English conveyancer, drafted a possible bill for the Assembly. He sought the advice of Mr Justice Coleridge about filling the chief justiceship and the colony secured the services of a well-known barrister, George Alfred Arney, who had been at school with Sewell.
All in all Sewell served the colony well. But he stayed away longer than expected. And (although under pressure from colleagues he had offered his services gratuitously) he insisted on asking for a salary as well as expenses. The House voted him an honorarium of £1000. He left Britain in October 1858, met Stafford, the Premier (who was travelling in the opposite direction), at Sydney, and reached Auckland in February 1859.
With the Premier abroad, much of the burden of work had fallen on Sewell's successor as Treasurer, Christopher Richmond, who was also Native Minister, handling the Ministry's relations with the Governor over Maori affairs. As both Richmond and the Governor were about to travel south Sewell resumed the treasurership on 25 February 1859. But he found himself at odds with his Cabinet colleagues and resigned after two months.
The precise reasons for his political estrangement--the first of a series of switches of allegiance which would earn him the reputation of a political chameleon--are not clear. He felt he had 'lost influence' with his party, that they were indifferent towards him. He may have detected some lack of cordiality in Stafford, who was a notoriously bad correspondent. In Sewell's prolonged absence
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Stafford brought Henry Tancred of Canterbury into the ministry, which made Sewell feel that he would, himself, be 'a superfluous Member'. Sewell wanted to settle in Nelson, where he was offered (but turned down) the editorship of the Examiner, and where he also had been asked to act as adviser to the steamer company for a year at £400. Some of his Cabinet colleagues felt this would be incompatible with membership of the government, especially the treasurership. Stafford, who had kept Sewell's Cabinet seat warm for two years, was annoyed by the defection and put it down to Sewell's well-known habit of vacillation.
The main trouble was the conduct of Maori affairs. This was the aspect of administration in which responsible government was still limited. It was becoming the issue of greatest sensitivity for ministries because of the rise of the Maori King in the Waikato and continuing Maori feuding in Taranaki. Sewell, of course, had always been concerned about race relations. Ever since he had first heard news, while in England, of the Maori King Movement he had sympathised with it and felt it should be fostered by the Government as a way of winning the trust of important Maori communities. While he accepted that Maoris should be given Crown titles for their farming and residential lands and be encouraged to sell the surplus, he did not like the policy of individualisation of tenure, direct purchase and circuit courts authorised by the 1858 Assembly. Of 26 million acres in the North Island, about 19 million were retained by 57,000 Maoris and the continuing efforts of land purchase officers to buy this land had become the great flash-point of race relations.
Sewell had always recognised that ending the Maori title to the vast lands of the central North Island held the key to New Zealand's future colonisation. He now supported the idea of Governor Browne that the matter should be put into the hands of a permanent Native Affairs Council, nominated by, and responsible to, the Crown. Even though he left the Ministry, he drafted a bill to this effect, which Browne put to the Colonial Office to be enacted by the Imperial Parliament. Sewell envisaged a new type of 'systematic colonisation'. Maoris would be induced to sell more readily, and piecemeal European settlement would be deterred. Once a block of land had been purchased, two-tenths would be re-conveyed to the Maori occupants under European titles and one-tenth would be retained as reserves. The revenue from re-sale to European settlers would be used to repay loans incurred for purchase and to set aside fixed endowments for schools, churches and facilities for 'moral and social improvement' among the Maoris. This new, biracial system of colonisation would be supervised by the independent Crown
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Council. The old Land Purchase Office, which had met a virtual standstill of Maori sales in the late 1850s, would be closed.
Sewell and a few other of Browne's supporters thought they had a scheme which could avoid racial explosion. The Colonial Office treated the matter as urgent and the bill got as far as passing the House of Lords in 1860. But it was too late. The tiny Waitara land purchase in Taranaki, which Sewell said 'nobody supposed' would lead to trouble, led to the outbreak of war in Taranaki in March 1860. And during this traumatic crisis for New Zealand, Sewell was back in politics. Shortly before the outbreak he had agreed to nomination for a by-election in his old Christchurch electorate. He was in the House as a self-confessed 'independent member' when the Government faced the General Assembly at the end of July 1860.
Although Sewell accepted the Governor's and the Ministry's joint case for action in Taranaki, he was alarmed at their lack of a positive policy in the much bigger issue of the Maori King Movement. He therefore adopted a characteristic course of action. He made a three-hour-long speech on 10 August 1860, proposing a set of resolutions which laid out a long-term policy of race relations. He did not dwell on the 'miserable war' in Taranaki, but sought some means of preventing other regions from being drawn into 'its vortex'. He concentrated on the King Movement, which he regarded as 'the effort of a people seeking for government and law. ... It is the fermentation of the Native race into a state of organisation. Viewed in that light I cannot regard it as an unhealthy indication. It is an effort of nature by which a people are struggling to effect for themselves what we have failed or neglected to do for them.'
He approved of the growing activities of Maori assemblies (runanga) in Waikato and elsewhere. 'I believe this kind of institution is suitable to the genius and habits of the people.' He urged the government to accept the principle of self-government for Maori communities within a framework of British law. He proposed, now, a General Maori Council--perhaps building on the idea of the Kohimarama Conference, which met in July 1860--and provincial and district Maori Councils. He wanted to suspend the work of the Land Purchase Office and adopt Browne's idea of a Council for Maori Affairs, which he compared with the newly formed Council for India in London.
These resolutions certainly embodied Sewell's ideas, but were designed primarily as a tactical device to force the Government into stating a policy. A long and bitter debate followed in which Richmond sarcastically attacked Sewell and produced alternative
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resolutions. Then, having goaded his former colleagues into action, Sewell withdrew his own resolutions and proceeded to amend the Government's. He also chaired the Assembly's Waikato Committee, which favoured the introduction of civil institutions in the King Movement region.
As the session drew to a close Sewell felt 'more and more estranged' from his former colleagues. He felt there was no place for men 'who held middle opinions'. He decided not to seek re-election in general elections called for early 1861. He wrote to Lord Lyttelton in England insisting that armed force was not the solution for race relations in New Zealand. 'The one thing we must . . . confess', he said, is that the Maoris 'have more of right on their side in this Question than we have'. But he saw little future in trying to hold a middle way in Parliament. He also had another motive for retiring from politics.
Before the session closed New Zealand's first Land Registry Act passed, authorising the creation of provincial registries and the granting of land titles by registration. It also provided for the appointment of a Registrar-General of Lands. This was obviously Sewell's job. Registration had been the starting point of his interest in New Zealand. He had had a hand in the preliminary drafting of the bill. He clearly hoped he would get the post, although he feared the worst because of his recent political stand. However, Stafford approached him on 18 November 1860 and Sewell was gazetted Registrar-General of Lands on 6 December. It should have been a high point of his career, but he must have found it frustrating. There were defects in the legislation and the imperial law officers demanded revisions. Registration became possible, but was not compulsory, and wartime was hardly the moment for land reform. Sewell did draft the first regulations under the Act and he inaugurated the first land registry in Auckland in 1863. But before this was achieved he was back in the Government, continuing as Registrar-General without salary.
Soon after the new Parliament met in July 1861 Stafford resigned after a no-confidence motion. It was the first real change of ministry since responsible government had become effective in 1856. Peace had been made in Taranaki, but overshadowing everything was the possibility of a bigger war in the Waikato because King Movement supporters had fought in Taranaki. Governor Browne, indeed, had issued a proclamation calling upon the Waikato Maoris to submit to the Queen's authority. Sewell was horrified by this belligerence. He hated the sight of the British regulars brought in for the Taranaki war. On 6 May 1861 he wrote again to Lord Lyttelton suggesting that the King Movement was 'an effort of despair for self
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preservation', not an outbreak of disloyalty. He was 'sick and indignant' to hear demands for Maori loyalty and allegiance. 'They owe us nothing.' He must have approved when his old friend and political rival Fox made similar views the basis of his no-confidence motion and declared that Maoris should be offered 'large powers of self-government in all their own affairs'. And Sewell must surely have fumed at the spectacle of his successor as member for Christchurch, the old Indian civilian, Cracroft Wilson, calling for three regiments of Gurkhas to 'cut his way through the country from Auckland to the Cook Strait'. Fox formed a ministry on 12 July 1861 and asked Sewell to become Attorney-General.
There now began a four-year period of reluctant, intermittent, but dutiful, office-holding. It is hard to decide whether Sewell still had political ambitions or whether he was simply re-enacting those agonies of uncertainty for which he was well known. At first he turned down Fox's invitation, only to give in at the end of the month. He took a seat in the Upper House on 2 August 1861. Later in the year he had a large part in evolving the 'New Institutions' designed to give local self-government to Maori communities, on the basis of traditional councils supervised by civil commissioners. The 'runanga scheme' is usually represented as the policy of Sir George Grey, who came back as Governor in September 1861 and who probably intended to undermine the King Movement by it. Sewell was one of the few proponents who hoped, optimistically, that it would divert the King Movement into positive channels-- 'self-government but subordinate to the paramount authority of the Queen'.
Fox's Ministry did not last long. After little over a year he was challenged by Frederick Weld to explain the relationship of his Ministry to the Governor. The old qualification of responsible government was again at issue. Fox sought approval for the version of dyarchy he had arranged with Grey, who had allowed the ordinary conduct of relations with the Maoris to come under the Ministry's control. Fox lost on the casting vote of the Speaker and resigned on 29 July 1862. What should Sewell do? Grey approached Stafford, then FitzGerald. The latter suggested that Alfred Domett might lead a coalition, which should include Fox. Sewell was thinking along the same lines and put a possible list to Domett. He felt it was the duty of all public men 'without regard to personal or party consideration to unite'. But he insisted Fox must be in a coalition, and, since Fox would not yield precedence to Domett, Sewell refused to continue as Attorney-General. But not for long.
Duty as a public man became possible again when Stafford proposed that the Attorney-Generalship should become a non-
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political office (as in New South Wales) and that a separate Minister of Justice should be appointed. Thus when Sewell was approached again by Domett he agreed to serve as Attorney-General without a seat in the Cabinet. This meant that he would not have to support Domett's legislation (notably the Native Land Court Bill) but Sewell made a further important condition. Once the session was over he would join the Cabinet. Domett was agreeable, but some of his colleagues were not, and when the time came for Sewell to hold Domett to his promise, there was a crisis. Sewell dug in his heels: a Cabinet place or resignation! Domett made an offer in writing on 12 September 1862. But two other members of the Cabinet, Thomas Russell and Dillon Bell, threatened to resign and the Premier gave way. Sewell sent in his resignation. But they could not find a replacement and he 'perforce had to hold on' until a successor could be found, which was not until 1 January 1863 when Frederick Whitaker became Attorney-General, to 'perform only the duty of a Law Officer of the Government'.
It meant that Sewell was out of the Government (though still Registrar-General) during the climax of the Anglo-Maori Wars. Fighting resumed in Taranaki in March 1863 and the invasion of the Waikato followed in the second half of the year. Naturally he was saddened by the colony's resort to aggression. The only aggression he approved of, as he told Lord Lyttelton, was with the pick and the spade to make 'roads through the length and breadth of the Country'. When a new ministry had to be formed at the end of 1863 because Domett could find no minister from the Upper House, Sewell was shocked by the sequel. Fox, who had been asked to create a coalition, produced a ministry with Whitaker as Premier and himself as Colonial Secretary and Native Minister.
Sewell was horrified by the new government's policy. As bills authorising martial law, suspensions of habeas corpus, confiscation of land and colonisation by military settlers were rushed through the Assembly, Sewell joined his old official rival, Swainson, in voting against them in the Upper House. He regarded the Suppression of Rebellion Act as an 'atrocious proposal', the 'production of Madmen'. Far from ending Maori resistance, he said, it would make rebellion 'a chronic disease'. He did all he could to show disapproval. He resigned his post as Registrar-General in protest on 9 November 1863 and, soon after, he wrote a hard-hitting pamphlet, The New Zealand Rebellion, attacking the Government.
The bitter period of racial repression meant political estrangement for Sewell and he deserted the North Island. During most of 1864 he returned to the law in Christchurch. He also had a piece of 'good luck' with land. Fifty acres, which he had recently acquired on
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favourable terms, began to yield a good return. He commenced the subdivision of the Christchurch suburb of Addington (for which he donated the land for a church and parsonage) and, at last, found his financial position 'comfortably easy'. Buying at £30 an acre, he was soon selling at £100 an acre. But his political retirement was brief.
He went back to Auckland for a short session of the Assembly in November 1864 and when Frederick Weld, now also a Canterbury runholder, formed his Ministry pledged to the 'self-reliant' policy of full colonial control of Maori affairs and the removal of British regulars and imperial interference, Sewell again became Attorney-General. Naturally some eyebrows were raised at the sight of 'crablike old Sewellus' side-stepping again to join yet another group of political associates. It meant compromises, of course, like administering the confiscation policy, but the basis of 'self-reliance'--removal of imperial forces and full responsible government in Maori affairs--accorded with Sewell's consistent wishes. And, as ever, he made himself indispensable. A by-election in New Plymouth gave the Ministry the chance to bring him back into the House of Representatives. Then with Weld, the Premier, and other ministers ill, more and more work fell on his shoulders. In the end it was an exhausted Ministry, including a tired and disillusioned Sewell, which resigned in October 1865.
Four turbulent years had taken their toll and Sewell's thoughts turned again to England. For a while his life was brightened by the presence in New Zealand of his eldest son, Willie, now an Anglican minister, but Willie left early in 1866. As Sewell contemplated the political scene he saw only the striving of log-rolling provincial combinations. Yet, as ever, he found it hard to make up his mind. He planned to go home. Then he allowed his name to go forward as candidate for Lyttelton in the 1866 general election. But a local man won and that settled it--Sewell went home.
This time he did not go as an official representative of New Zealand and it is not known whether he was seeking a job in England. Income from the Addington subdivision was probably sufficient to remove his financial worries; he was steadily repaying his debts to Lord Lyttelton. If he contemplated a permanent change, it was not for long. Within three months he was writing to Harry Atkinson: 'I find that my affections are more Colonial than English. I do not feel as if I could take root again here.' What he did over the next two years is obscure, but he kept in touch with the colony. He protested in 1868 to Sir Charles Adderley (a former Canterbury Association collaborator, who was now parliamentary under-secretary for the colonies) about the treatment of the old Maori reserve in Dunedin. In the following year he was in the thick of the colonial
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agitation in London about the withdrawal of the last British troops from the colony.
Relations between New Zealand and Britain went through their worst crisis ever in 1869. The reason was simple. Self-reliance, which also fitted in with the British policy of withdrawing battalions from self-governing colonies, broke down. Maori resistance had continued and spread in the later 1860s--as Sewell predicted. By 1868 Titokowaru's guerilla in southern Taranaki and Te Kooti's murderous incursion at Poverty Bay had convinced most colonists that British soldiers were needed after all. But as Stafford's Government refused to pay the price, the British placed their last remaining battalion under orders to quit. It seemed as if the Mother Country was abandoning the colony at the worse possible moment. There was a bitter controversy and even talk of separation from the Empire.
It happened that Sewell was not the only member of the old self-reliant ministry of 1864-5 who was in England at this time. Both Parliament and the press were badgered into an awareness of the New Zealand crisis. On 16 June 1869 Sewell was a member of the delegation made up of Sir George Grey (who had been removed from the governorship in 1868), Sir Charles Clifford (the former Speaker of the House), Frederick Weld, Harry Atkinson and Logan Campbell, which went to the Colonial Office to plead with Earl Granville (the Secretary of State for the Colonies) and William Monsell (his parliamentary under-secretary). They got scant satisfaction. Granville told them bluntly that the British Cabinet had decided to withdraw the imperial troops from New Zealand and that henceforth the British Government would not interfere in the colony's internal affairs. After this rebuff the delegation sent to The Times a letter which was published on 18 June. Sewell, who appears to have been acting as secretary, wrote a private letter to Monsell. Ostensibly it was to seek approval of a minute reporting the meeting, but he added some forthright warnings that a movement of secession from the Empire could be expected in New Zealand. 'You have, in fact, resolved upon abandoning the Colony.' Sewell had always argued that a colony should protect itself 'to the utmost of its ability'. He had never wanted imperial troops. But in cases of 'extreme peril' he believed the Mother Country had an obligation to help. Promises of assistance against external enemies were beside the point, he argued; 'such a tie may equally well be created by treaty, if the Colony were an independent State; indeed better for the interests of the Colony, because she would be able to make stipulations, and, with the right of peace and war in her own hands, she could avoid risks and make alliances'. To be abandoned at such a
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moment was 'not the treatment which a child would expect from its parent'.
This onslaught against the Colonial Office and the British Government was part of a more general colonists' movement in which angry Australians, Canadians and Cape Colonists also took part. At a meeting in the Royal Colonial Society's rooms on 4 August 1869 Sewell became one of three joint secretaries on a committee which sent a circular to the governments of all the self-governing colonies suggesting a general conference of colonial representtives in London early in 1870. The New Zealand crisis was only the worst of a series of impasses in the relations between the first Gladstone Government and the colonies, which led to various ideas about colonial representation in Parliament, an imperial congress, colonial diplomatic representation in London, or a colonial board of control being mooted. The proposal for a colonial conference was rejected by the British and colonial governments so the organisers went ahead with their own unofficial conference--a series of weekly meetings in the Cannon Street Hotel between November 1869 and February 1870. Sewell went with another delegation to Granville on 15 December 1869 and, having been rebuffed again, he signed another joint letter to colonial governments pointing out that they had been virtually invited to secede from the British Empire. Probably the whole unhappy episode helped to generate within Sewell a sense of colonial patriotism and to direct his steps again towards New Zealand. By March 1870 he was expected back in the colony.
From near hysteria in London he returned to growing euphoria in Wellington. Fox was Premier again, now at the head of a ministry pledged to colony-wide economic development by Julius Vogel's project for massive borrowing. After his recent rejection by imperial officers Sewell was, perhaps, attracted by the nation-building potential of Vogel's scheme. Although he was now sixty-three, Sewell joined the government after turning down an offer of the Registrar-Generalship, and on 14 June 1870 he became the first Minister of Justice. He was found a seat in the Upper House. Here he soon gave an indication of that political waywardness which many had come to expect of him. In the debate on a resolution designed to censure the Imperial Government for its conduct in the garrison crisis he had, as a Minister, to be circumspect about the resolution itself. But he departed from caution and closed his speech by stating a personal view that New Zealand should face the constitutional implications of independence. That the country was hardly prepared for it, he readily admitted, but 'a small state is practically as safe as a large one'. Nor was he frightened about the
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colony's debts. In a revealing aside he declared 'there is great happiness about indebtedness ... no man ever died of indebtedness, and states are not likely to do so any more than individuals'. (Sewell of all men knew!) He closed with these striking words in favour of independence:
There is, in my opinion, the great advantage of comparative immunity from danger in the case of a foreign war. There is the advantage of greater freedom as regards our commerce. But besides that, as an independent country, we should hold a position of higher dignity relatively to the outside world, and I think it would evoke a spirit of patriotism amongst ourselves. We should assume a position of manhood, as it were, with its great responsibilities and its higher aims. . . . and, speaking as an individual, I should, under existing circumstances, prefer assuming the risks and responsibilities--the privileges and immunities--of a free state, to continuing in our present precarious position of semi-independence.
These are sentiments worthy of the self-conscious seekers after an independent foreign policy a century later.
Sewell also showed his independence when he had the task of introducing a new Land Transfer Bill to settle the Torrens-type of land registry system which he had helped to pioneer a decade before. As it turned out, he gave up charge of the bill in the Upper House so he could be free to make some personal amendments. Most of these were not successful. But during the debate, Sewell in the Legislative Council, and Fox in the House, recalled Sewell's pamphlet of 1846 which Professor John Burrows has called a 'most cogent, well-reasoned argument in favour of land registration'.
The big issue of the 1870s, however, was borrowing for development. On 28 June 1870 Vogel introduced his scheme for borrowing £10 million over ten years and Sewell supported it in the Upper House. He told Fox, on joining the Government, that he supported borrowing if it was 'directly and financially reproductive'. But when Vogel returned from London and San Francisco in 1871 with certain railway-construction and steamship contracts, opposition became evident. Stafford cried caution in the House. Sewell claimed he had not been fully consulted and refused to introduce the Immigration and Public Works Bill of 1871 in the council. Fox had to choose between Sewell or Vogel. On 30 October 1871 he asked for Sewell's resignation.
It led to Sewell's last political shuffle. He had not objected to borrowing for colonisation as such--after all, his compact of 1856 had been based on the same principles. What he objected to were Vogel's grandiose schemes, which he felt the colony could not afford. He was therefore willing to join Stafford's short-lived government in October 1872. After a thirteen-year estrangement he
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was back with his old leader. He even toyed with the idea of helping Stafford to organise a colony-wide political party with an anti-Vogelite platform, but at the end of the 1873 session he retired from politics.
The Sewells finally went back to England in 1876 because of Elizabeth's health. Henry was now sixty-nine. They retired first to Romford, Essex, where Willie was curate; then to a villa on Station Road, Cambridge, where Sewell's eldest daughter joined them. There he died on 5 May 1879. His second son Henry, of the Indian Civil Service, was due on leave and Sewell was looking forward to seeing his two grandchildren. But they were a week too late.
He was buried in the churchyard at Waresley, beside the large vicarage, where Elizabeth went to live with her sister. She outlived Henry by only a year and was buried beside him. Waresley is an isolated place. The vicarage still stands, but the graveyard has long been disused. Their grave remains today, overgrown with brambles.
