Was my convict ancestor innocent?

When I learned my ancestor was a highway robber, I felt a bit of a thrill! I imagined a Robin Hood sort of character. A rogue with a heart of gold. Sadly, the truth wasn't quite as romantic - just four villains robbing an inn- keeper travelling by post-chaise. There was something unusual about Charles William Beasley, however, and I wanted to know more.  

Charles was sentenced to death in 1793 for stealing  a “wainscot case with a glass front and containing divers watches”[1] and highway robbery - fairly sophisticated criminal behaviour for a 16-year-old stocking weaver  "with brown hair, grey eyes and a fresh complexion".[3] Luckily, Charles' sentence was commuted to transportation but he was no poor, uneducated boy, driven by despair to a life of crime. 

In 1798, after several years on a prison hulk  he was shipped to New South Wales, where he quickly became a successful businessman and pillar of society! While still in his early 20's! Shockingly, for this granddaughter of Irish convicts, Charles joined the Sydney Loyalists Society, a militia group raised to help the soldiers suppress Irish convicts!  He even took part in the famous, (or infamous, depending of your point of view) Battle of Vinegar Hill, which quelled a convict uprising in 1804. 

Charles William, I discovered, was the child of a successful, respectable family. He was born in Kibworth, Leicester, the eighth of eleven children, to the Reverend Henry Basely and his wife Susannah.  His father and grandfather, Thomas Basely Esq. were landholders[8] and his father and brother were educated at Oxford.[9]  

A fellow fourth great granddaughter, Lynette Robinson[10], wrote that Charles was baptised by his father [11] on 6^th December 1776 at the ancient St Wilfred’s Church, which is connected to Merton College, Oxford.  When he was about 11 years of age, his father died but, by and large, the family managed. His brother, Thomas, was at Oxford, studying to become a clergyman and another, Henry, had been articled to an attorney. A third brother was an apprentice carpenter and his sister, 7-year-old Mary, attended the Lisson Green School for the orphaned children of clergymen.12] 

So how did Charles become a highway robber? 

Or did he?

There are some deeply unsatisfactory features of Charles’ arrest and trial. He was captured, then released for lack of evidence, on the night of the robbery by a watchman who had heard that one of the thieves was wearing a hat. Charles seems to have been arrested because he was walking along the road that night wearing a hat:

“…on 18^th July there was an alarm come down, that a gentleman had been robbed in a postchaise; between eleven and twelve o’clock this Beazley come down with a hat and I stopped him and put him in the cage”[4]  

He was recaptured several times by the Bow Street Runners[5] (a mercenary band of “thief catchers”) and released for lack of evidence. When he was eventually tried, the chief witness was hardly credible. Daniel Driscoll testified against his alleged accomplices in return for his own life. A self - described member of the medical profession, “reduced by a number of circumstances”, he had written a book about all the robberies he had committed (“I suppose the work is not quite finished” quipped the prosecutor). 

The only other evidence against Charles was given by an inn-keeper who said that she had seen one of the robbers, a man named Randall, with three others before the robbery. She couldn’t positively identify Charles, and she stood to get a reward if a conviction resulted from her testimony.

The statement of 16–year-old Charles is rather sad: ”At first, when I was brought up at Bow-street, there was nobody could swear to me then at all, and I was let at liberty, and then they apprehended me again. At the time I was first taken, I was coming out of Windsor, I had been to see my brother at Windsor. I have got nobody to prove it here. I have no friends here”[6]

Charles met 21-year- old Mary Thomas soon after she arrived in New South Wales in 1803.  She was also a convict and may have been chosen by or assigned to him at the dockside. She had been sentenced to transportation for 7 years for petit larceny.[13]

Charles and Mary’s first daughter, Ann, was born in January 1804 and their second, Sarah, arrived in 1806. I'm descended from their first son, Charles Henry, who arrived in 1808, followed by a daughter, Jane, in 1809.

Also in 1809, Governor Paterson granted Charles some farming land in Toongabbie.  He and his young family were living in the Windsor area, on the Hawkesbury River at the time. But he wasn’t a man to put all his eggs in one basket.  In 1810, he was granted a publican's licence for premises in Bell Row Street, Sydney, known as “The Sydney Inn”. He was one of the first 50 publicans appointed to ensure that the lower classes had “ plenty of good wholesome beer, brewed for their drinking”[15].

In 1811, the year that daughter, Edna, was born, Charles was granted a “conditional pardon” (which granted convicts complete freedom, so long as they stayed in the Colony). He was, by now, a self-employed small ship builder and operator.  His ships carried grain, timber and other supplies along the Hawkesbury and around the coast to Sydney and Newcastle. Beasley’s Wharf still exists at the bottom of Fitzgerald St, Windsor.

In 1814 a second son, Henry, was born and Charles and Mary finally married at St. Matthew’s Church, Windsor, in 1815. Their last child, Elizabeth, arrived the following year but a run of bad luck was imminent. There were devastating floods along the Hawkesbury in the years 1816 - 1818 which ruined Charles, financially, and he petitioned the governor for a spirit licence to augment a ‘commodious dwelling house with ten rooms and outbuildings’ necessary for the accommodation of travellers, which he had erected in Windsor. In support, nine locals:

“certified the accuracy of a petition by Charles Beasley, a Windsor publican and dealer.  Beasley’s petition stated that he arrived in May 1798 aboard Barwell and had been a free subject now for ten years. From the flood inundations of the past three years, he had suffered losses totalling nearly £2,000, arising from the destruction of his own crops and the extension of credit to settlers incapable of making repayments.  In these floods he had used his own boat to help save the lives and property of his fellow creatures.  Although his character was irreproachable, his financial losses meant he was unable to pay his suppliers and his house had been taken from him, depriving him of support for his (first) wife and seven infant children.  For eight years at the Hawkesbury and four in Sydney he had held a spirit licence without complaint.”[16] 

The petition succeeded and Charles was soon licensed to sell wine and spirits at an inn in Windsor

By 1820, Charles and Mary had seven children, a spirit licence, 130 acres of land, three horses, 70 cattle, 50 pigs, the shipping business and several inns.  They had become productive residents of the colony. Sadly, Mary died in December 1821, aged only 39 years. Charles remarried and followed his sons over the Blue Mountains. He lived out his days in the inland before joining Mary in the cemetery at St Matthews, Windsor, in 1837.[17]

Before he died, Charles had tried, unsuccessfully, to have his conditional pardon made absolute. Perhaps he wanted to return to England to clear his name!

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[1] Charles W.B. London Lives. Home Office. Criminal Registers of Prisoners in Middlesex and the City, HO/CR 1st September, 1974

[2] Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 4th December, 1793 p.40

[3] Court records for Charles Beasely, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 4th December, 1793, pp.40 - 43 ; https ;//www.oldbaileyonline.org. Ancestry, England and Wales Criminal Register, 1791 – 1892. England, Middlesex, 1794

[4] Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 6^th December, 1793, testimony of Edward Richards.

[5] Olive Emsley, Tim Hancock and Robert Shoemaker, Historical Background – “Glossary” Proceedings, Version 7.0, 05 Ma7, 2018

[6] Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 6^th December, 1793

[7] Ancestry, England and Wales Criminal Registers

[8] Ancestry, Land Tax Assessment, for Warwickshire, Kingston Hundred, 1783; Ancestry, Beazley, Rev Henry, Gartree Hundred, p.32;

[9] Oxford University Alumni, 1500 – 1886, 1715-1886, Vol 1 > B, p. 71.

[10] Lynette Robinson,” Highwayman Born in Kibworth,” Australia, July 2013, pub. Kibworth Historical Society, www. Kibworth.org/allsorts.html. Extensive searches have not revealed a birth or baptismal record, Charles’ date of birth is corroborated by England and Wales Criminal Registers, 1791 – 1892. Class HOI; Piece 4; page 11., and the New South Wales and Tasmania, Australian Convict Musters, 1806-1849, Class HO; Piece:19; Web. Australia, Convict Records Index 1787 – 1867. State Library of Queensland, Australia; Australian Joint Copying Project. Microfilm roll 87, Class and Piece Number HO 11/1, p. 228.

[11] Ancestry, Birth record for Henry Baseley, Warwickshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1535 – 1812 : Parish Monks Kirby, 1850 -1774

[12] Records of the “Society of Stewards & Subscribers for maintaining and educating poor orphans of Clergyman til of age”, cited by Lynette Robinson ibid.

[13] RootsWeb:AUS-Convicts-Re:[Aus-Con] Glatton 1803 NSW, http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/AUS-CONVICTS/2007-06/1180955930; [13] Ancestry, Court Record for Mary Thomas, at Cumberland Quarter Sessions at Carlisle, Cumberland,13th April 1801

[14] Convict Women to NSW 1788-1828 – Glatton 1803, http://members.iinet.net.au/~perthdps/convicts/confem28.html

[15] Public Notice dated 21 July 1810 issued on behalf of the Governor and signed by the Judge Advocate, Ellis Bent.

[16] Wilson, Louise, B.Ec Sydney, Paul Bushell – second fleeter.  

[17] Ancestry, Death record for Charles Beasley, Australia Death Index, Vol no V18372991 21, 2010 ;