THE STIRRING OF POLITICAL ASPIRATIONS. 281 



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 re- 

 missions . . . 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, in- 

 capable 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 dis- 

 abilities. 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 inter- 

 fering with any measure of your Excellency's Government, or 

 -on the ground of any objection on our part to the meeting pro- 

 posed, 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." 8 



1 See Petition of Emancipists, enclosure D., 22nd October, 1821. R.O., MS. 



3 See letter, Appendix, Bigge's Reports, yth January, 1821. R.O. The 

 advertisement of the meeting stated that it was called for the purpose of petition- 

 ing the King and Parliament for relief from the consequences of certain rules of 



