MACQUEEN, Thomas Potter (1792-1854), of Ridgmont House, nr. Woburn, Beds.

Macqueen’s father, a Scottish doctor who retired in 1807 and took up agricultural improvement on the south Bedfordshire estate brought to him by his wife, was credited with the following aphorism on

the character of the people of different countries in respect of economy. He said it is in this proportion: of ten men who possess this disposition, there may, perhaps, be found one Irishman; there will be two Englishmen, and seven Scotchmen. Farington Diary, xiv. 4917.

He settled his property in Bedfordshire and Kent on Macqueen before his marriage into a prominent Norfolk family in 1820. Macqueen, the sole executor and residuary legatee of his will, which he proved under £5,000, a month after his death, 24 July 1829, was no chip off the old block, for he spent copiously and carelessly in pursuit of the restless ambition which drove him to eventual ruin. PROB 11/1759/497; IR26/1201/347; Gent. Mag. (1829), ii. 188. He was credited in 1830 with having on the occasion of his first return to Parliament in 1816 written and sent to his London address a letter to himself reminding him to take the oaths before he tried to vote. Hopetoun mss 167, f. 149.

In November 1819 he wrote to his friend John Macarthur in New South Wales of the ‘bad spirit among the lower classes and the idle poor’, and his hope that any insurrection would be ‘as little sanguinary as possible’. He contemplated going one day to Sydney as a ‘rural settler’. J.J. Eddy, Britain and the Australian Colonies, 1818-1831, pp. 39-40. Two months later, claiming that no other Member was ‘equally conversant in the affairs of the colony’, he tried to interest Goulburn, under-secretary at the colonial office, in his plans for the promotion of Scottish emigration to the Cape. He saw systematic and subsidised emigration as one solution to the problems of overpopulation, rural poverty and rising poor rates, of which his own locality furnished many ‘deplorable’ examples:

I yesterday presided at a bench of magistrates at Ampthill, and it was heartrending to witness the clamorous entreaties of the paupers on one side, and on the other, the loud remonstrances of the farmers, who declare their utter inability to provide employment and support for the people, when they get about 6s. 6d. per bushel for their corn. At this moment, we have nearly 2,000 young men between 16 and 25 years of age who are actually existing upon 4s. per week. Of course where there is misery there is seldom morality. Early and improvident marriages are constantly taking place without mutual regard, but with the view to obtain a larger rate of relief from the parish. This is one of the leading causes of the increase of population. Cape Recs. xiii. 2-3.

At the general election of 1820 he was again returned for East Looe by Sir Edward Buller†, who, informing the premier Lord Liverpool of the fact as evidence of his own loyalty, commented that it was not necessary to say more of Macqueen, as he was ‘a particular friend of your Lordship’s’. Add. 38283, f. 228. At the contested county election, he seconded the nomination of the sitting Member, Sir John Osborn*, a junior minister, who was defeated. His father had subscribed £500 to Osborn’s election fund. Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 18 Mar. 182; Beds. RO, Wrest mss L 30/11/204/9. While Macqueen clearly continued to support the Liverpool administration, he had an appalling record of attendance during the 1820 Parliament, in which his only known votes were against more extensive tax reductions, 11, 21 Feb., abolition of one of the joint-postmasterships, 13 Mar. 1822, and inquiry into the prosecution of the Dublin Orange rioters, 22 Apr. 1823. He was given ten days’ leave to deal with urgent private business, 12 Mar. 1821. Late in 1820 he tried and exhausted Liverpool’s patience on the subject of one Major Williams, whose information of ‘very little value and importance’ on a supposed conspiracy was out of all proportion to his financial and other demands. Add. 38288, ff. 80, 82, 245, 253. He signed the Bedfordshire loyal address to the king, adopted by the local Tories to counter the Whig campaign in support of Queen Caroline, 15 Jan. 1821. Northampton Mercury, 20 Jan. 1821. When Lord Tavistock, the duke of Bedford’s son and one of the two Whig county Members, presented the Bedfordshire reform petition, 26 Apr. 1822, Macqueen, in an intervention barely audible to the reporters, claimed on secondhand authority that anti-reformers had been forcibly excluded from the meeting, and stated his belief that ‘the majority of England, like the majority of the county of Bedford, looked upon the taxation which burdened the country as the price of its redemption from foreign slavery’. The Times, 26 Apr. 1822. On 26 June 1822 Hume, making an allegation which was repeated in a radical publication the following year, suggested that the surprisingly high expenses of the Bedfordshire yeomanry cavalry represented a covert means of lining the pockets of Macqueen, their proud and self-important commander; Macqueen was adamant that all the sums granted were ‘bona fide expended for the service of the corps’. Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 25 May; The Times, 27 June 1822; Black Bk. (1823), 175. He presented petitions from Dunstable and Luton protesting at the importation of foreign straw hats, 3 July 1823. The Times, 4 July 1823. In 1825, when it was asserted in a contemporary review that he had ‘attended occasionally, and voted with government’, he introduced a bill to regulate the Provincial Bank of Ireland, which did not progress beyond its first reading, 21 Mar., and presented a Woburn petition in favour of the county courts bill, 25 Feb. Session of Parl. 1825, p. 475; The Times, 19, 26 Feb., 22 Mar. 1825; CJ, lxxx. 237. He brought up a petition from Bedfordshire coroners for an increase in their allowances, 14 Mar. 1826. The Times, 15 Mar. 1826.

In August 1820 Macqueen applied to Liverpool through Osborn to be appointed the first civil governor of New South Wales, who would take out with him ‘a very large body of most valuable settlers’ as part of his scheme to ‘lessen the expenses, to promote the commerce, and to increase the prosperity of the colony’. He boasted that he was qualified by his ‘knowledge of the principles of the law of the land, of commerce and of agriculture, energy of mind and activity of disposition, and above all independence of circumstances’. He told Osborn:

With my prospects and intentions you are well acquainted, that I am disposed to exert the best efforts of my family and connections in support of government in our own county and elsewhere, but to enable me to do this with effect and safety, it is absolutely necessary that I be supported on this occasion. I have no mercenary end to gratify, but the increase of estate and property which might take place in my absence would permit me to adopt measures on my return which would materially assist our political views. Add. 38286, ff. 371, 372.

He was passed over, but in July 1823, after the enactment of the New South Wales bill, he successfully applied to government for a grant of 10,000 acres in the interior, with a provisional reserve of 10,000 more, on condition that he invested his own capital in the settlement, cultivation and exploitation of the land, appointed resident agents and overseers, employed convict labour and encouraged emigration by the respectable poor. He appointed as his chief agent Peter McIntyre, who arrived in Australia in April 1825 with a party of carefully selected emigrants, plus livestock, agricultural equipment and tools. On his behalf McIntyre selected 10,000 acres on the River Hunter in the Newcastle area, and the estate which was developed there was called Segenhoe, after the Bedfordshire manor which formed part of the Ridgmont property. Macqueen failed, however, to obtain the ten acres on Sydney Cove which he wanted for the erection of warehouses, and in 1826 he applied, again without success, for an equivalent at Newcastle harbour. Claiming at the end of that year to have invested over £12,000 and to have settled 25 families plus numerous convicts, he called on government to grant him the reserved 10,000 acres, which, after the resolution of a dispute between McIntyre and a colonial official, were handed over to him in June 1827. Later that year, when he put his total investment at over £23,000 and promised the immediate injection of a further £5,000, he was given another small grant of ‘inferior land’ to consolidate his holding, and allowed to purchase an additional 2,000 contiguous acres which contained a good river ford. His project was the first significant experiment in controlled emigration to New South Wales, and his property there was the most important estate in this phase of the colony’s development. Hist. Recs. of Australia (ser. 1), xi. 141-3, 250, 381-2; xii. 794-5; xiii. 150, 156, 623-3; xiv. 239; xv. 78-79; Eddy, 61, 224; J.F. Campbell, ‘Genesis of Rural Settlement on Hunter’, R. Australian Hist. Soc. Jnl. and Procs. xii (1926-7), 84, 91-93; W.J. Goold, ‘These Old Homes’, Newcastle and Hunter District Hist. Soc. Jnl. and Procs. v (1950-1), 158-9.

Macqueen aspired to a county seat, and in September 1825, when a dissolution was anticipated, he declared his candidature for Bedfordshire at the next general election. In his canvass of the Luton area in late November he stressed his hostility to Catholic relief and stated that he was ‘disposed to support the government, so long as he conceived [its] public conduct to merit his confidence’. Herts Mercury, 17 Sept., 3 Dec. 1825; TCD, Jebb mss 6396/238. Tavistock, who offered on strict purity of election principles, reported in January 1826, when the announced retirement of his colleague Pym and the inability of the county Whigs to find another candidate prepared to stand a poll seemed certain to give Macqueen a walkover, that he had ‘been telling a lie about his vote on the Catholic question [on which he is not known to have voted during ten years in the House], and has got into a scrape by it from which he will not easily extract himself’. The Times, 19 Dec.; Add. 36461, f. 385; 51749, Holland to H.E. Fox, 30 Dec. 1825; 51766, Lady Holland to same, 18 Jan. [1826]. In fact it did him no harm, for although Pym was nominated in desperation, Macqueen finished comfortably at the head of the poll, over 200 votes above Tavistock. On the hustings, he reiterated his opposition to Catholic claims (his opponents made pointed references to his Catholic mother) and his general support for the ministry, though, under questioning, he said that he would oppose them, as he untruthfully claimed to have done already, if they interfered with the current level of agricultural protection. The Times, 19, 23, 24, 27 June; Herts Mercury, 10, 17, 24 June; Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 8 July 1826. It was no secret that he had spent very heavily, and there was talk of a petition against him alleging bribery and treating; his total expenditure was later said by the Whigs to have been in excess of £30,000. Althorp Letters, 129; Fitzwilliam mss, Tavistock to Milton, 3 Dec. [1826], 5 July 1830. At one of a series of dinners to celebrate his success, 20 July 1826, he denied that he was ‘a tax-loving Tory’ and mocked the Whigs’ record on this subject during their mercifully brief period in office 20 years earlier. Herts Mercury, 22, 29 July, 5, 12, 19 Aug. 1826. In September, when Macqueen was still lording it in the county, the duke of Bedford explained to Lady Holland, who of course regarded him as ‘a contemptible fellow’, that

the splendid equipage which you saw (under permission) pass through Ampthill Park to the races, consisted of four grey horses, which are more usefully employed on ordinary days, in the plough on the old doctor’s farm, and his two plough or stable boys to drive them, dressed out in some cast off lord mayor’s jackets, which the venerable doctor purchased for the last county contest in 1820. Add. 51669, Bedford to Lady Holland, 7 Sept.; 51766, Lady Holland to H.E. Fox, 18 Jan. [1826].

In November 1826 a hostile newspaper mischievously reported that Macqueen was spreading the story that he was to move the address at the opening of Parliament; in the event, he did no more than secure a return of the number of recent appeals from quarter sessions to king’s bench, 29 Nov. Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 11 Nov.; The Times, 30 Nov. 1826. Early in 1827 Macqueen, whose wife sustained burns to her face and neck in an accident at Ridgmont, rented Osborn’s residence at Chicksands Priory, where he subsequently entertained Tory ministers with shooting parties. Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 3 Feb.; Herts Mercury, 17 Feb. 1827, 19 Dec. 1829; Russell Letters, i. 115; Hatfield House mss 2M/Gen., Macqueen to Salisbury, 11 Sept. 1828. It was reported locally that he had voted for the duke of Clarence’s allowance, 19 Feb., but a statement that he had done likewise on 2 Mar. was afterwards emphatically refuted. Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 24 Feb.; Herts Mercury, 3, 10 Mar. 1827. He voted against Catholic relief, 6 Mar. When presenting the Redbournstoke petition against any alteration of the corn laws, 20 Feb., he argued that ‘it could be readily shown, that those evils which had so severely afflicted the country, were referable to very different causes than the operation of the present system’. He presented a number of similar petitions, 14, 23, 30 Mar. Herts Mercury, 24 Feb.; The Times, 21 Feb., 24, 29, 30 Mar. 1827. He voted against the second reading of the new corn bill, 2 Apr., and at the county meeting to petition the Lords against it, 23 May, complained that it did not offer sufficient protection to farmers, who were unfairly burdened with taxation. He attended an agriculturists’ dinner to celebrate its defeat in the Upper House, 28 June 1827. Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 26 May, 7 July 1827.

In this Parliament Macqueen took up the vexed subject of the law of settlement. He did not proceed with the amendment bill of which he gave notice, 13 Feb. 1827, but he drew attention to the problem at the Bedfordshire agricultural show in October and tackled it in the House in 1828. The Times, 14 Feb., 31 May; Herts Mercury, 19 May; Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 13 Oct. 1827. Moving successfully for the appointment of a select committee of inquiry, 21 Feb., he warned that ‘there might be somewhat of novelty in his views’ on the ‘harsh and evil policy of the present law’. He advocated abolition of the current regulations affecting settlement by hiring and service, which produced a huge number of expensive appeals from sessions and had a bad moral effect on the poor, and changes to those governing settlement by marriage. On 18 Mar. he introduced a bill to deal with hiring and servitude, which he had printed for the consideration of Members and other interested parties. When he moved its second reading, 29 Apr., he explained that the committee had decided, though not yet formally reported, that revision of the law of settlement was an essential prerequisite of poor law reform. He argued that it was the ‘paramount duty of every government to provide and encourage the providing of employment for its population, as the means of their subsistence’, and that this employment ‘ought to comprehend a sufficiency of the necessaries, and a moderate share of the enjoyments of life’. After detailing his personal experience of the level of rural poverty and unemployment in Bedfordshire, where rates were soaring, he predicted that

if the progress of pauperism proceeded as it had done during the last twelve months, the time was not far distant when the whole of the produce of the country would be absorbed, not in adding to the comfort and happiness, but in ensuring the degradation and misery, of the poorer classes.

If a domestic solution was not found, he concluded, resort must be had to controlled emigration. The measure had a mixed reception, but Peel, the home secretary, thought the balance of argument was marginally in its favour. Macqueen, who presented a petition from the Society for the Encouragement of Industry for amelioration of the condition of agricultural labourers, 9 May, was named to the select committees on parochial accounts, 15 May, and the poor laws, 22 May. On 9 June 1828 he brought up the report of his select committee and postponed his bill until the next session. He duly brought it in, 18 Feb. 1829, but it encountered strong opposition in committee, 3 Mar., and made no further progress after 4 May. Macqueen did not attempt to revive it in 1830.

He voted against repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb., and, after presenting anti-Catholic petitions, 7 May, against relief, 12 May 1828. Presenting a petition for agricultural protection from 400 Bedfordshire landowners and 600 shopkeepers, 25 Apr., he described it as the ‘first instance of a body of tradesmen coming forward to advocate the necessity of fair remunerating prices to the farmer’. He brought up a petition from Wixamtree against the revised scale of corn duties, 19 May. He divided with the Wellington ministry against ordnance reductions, 4 July 1828. He had ingratiated himself with the 2nd marquess of Salisbury and his acolyte Samuel Grove Price*, and shared in their financial support of the Tory and anti-Catholic Herts Mercury. Writing to Salisbury in Vienna in September 1828, he anticipated the Catholic question coming to a head in the next session:

It is said that the duke of Wellington and the lord chancellor have an idea of proposing securities to be given by the Catholics. I am disposed to smile at this plan as proceeding from those who are not aware of the leading attribute of Popery, namely submission to the infallible church ... Although they have accepted of every liberality, they have conceded nothing ... The duke of Wellington I consider firm in power. If any measures be adopted to give further concessions I fully expect Peel to retire.

Salisbury, who deplored the alarmism of the Brunswickers, counselled ‘shrewdness and moderation’, qualities for which Macqueen was not especially noted. Hatfield House mss 2M/Gen., Macqueen to Salisbury, 20 July, 11 Sept., Sun. [Dec.], reply [Dec. 1828]. He did, however, give only silent opposition to Catholic emancipation, 6, 18 Mar., and did not vote in the divisions of 23, 27, 30 Mar., being forced to take a pair on the latter occasion on account of his father’s terminal illness. Herts Mercury, 21 Mar., 11 Apr. 1829. He presented hostile petitions, 12, 18 Mar. At the Cambridge University by-election of June 1829 he voted for the anti-Catholic Bankes.

Macqueen, who in the autumn of 1828 claimed to be clearing £1,000 a year from the stock of his pedigree bull at Segenhoe and £300 from that of each stallion, and hoped soon to make an annual profit of £1,500 from wool, tried to interest Salisbury in investing in land in New South Wales. He seems to have exceeded his authority and to have caused himself some financial embarrassment by making a purchase which Salisbury refused to endorse. Hatfield House mss 2M/Gen., Macqueen to Salisbury, 11 Sept., Sun. [Dec.] 1828, 4 Jan., reply, 9 Jan. 1829. In November 1828 he joined three other men in applying to government for a large grant of land on the Swan River, where they hoped to cultivate tobacco, cotton, flax and sugar, in return for paying for the cost of sending out 10,000 British settlers, but he soon withdrew from the scheme. Hist. Recs. of Australia (ser. 3), vi. 588-90, 610. In the summer of 1829 he resumed his futile bid to secure a warehouse site at Newcastle. Ibid. (ser. 1), xv. 78. He visited Scotland and Paris in the autumn of 1829, when, following his father’s death, he had the house at Ridgmont rebuilt. Herts Mercury, 24 Oct. 1829.

At the county meeting to petition for repeal of the malt tax, 16 Feb. 1830, he criticized ministers for the ‘unguarded expression’ concerning distress which they had inserted in the speech from the throne; asserted that ‘at no former period did such an intense degree of misery and wretchedness exist’; advocated ‘an equitable adjustment’ of the currency to ‘meet the interests both of the fundholder and the landlord’ and ‘render justice to the working classes’, and called for due protection for domestic agriculture, observing that ‘the essence and real meaning of free trade he always considered to be reciprocity’. Ibid. 20 Feb. 1830. He presented the meeting’s petition, 18 Mar., with a similar one from Caddington. On 17 Mar. presented a petition from the Bedfordshire authorities for revision of the vagrancy laws and seconded Portman’s motion to refer it to the select committee on the Irish poor, to which he had been appointed on the 11th. He was reported in the press to have paired on the ministerial side against the enfranchisement of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, 23 Feb., but with opposition against the Bathurst and Dundas pensions, 26 Mar. The Times, 1 Mar.; Herts Mercury, 17 Apr. 1830. He voted against government for a reduction of the grant for volunteers, 9 Mar., and the production of information on British interference in the internal affairs of Portugal, 10 Mar., and in condemnation of the appointment of a treasurer of the navy, 12 Mar. He presented a Bedfordshire petition for an increase in the import duty on foreign flour, 27 May. He was in the minority for an amendment to the beer bill which sought to prohibit on-sales, 21 June. In May 1830 he published Thoughts and Suggestions on the Present State of the Country, in which he elaborated his arguments in favour of emigration and colonization as a solution to the problems of rural poverty, unemployment and crime. It attracted favourable notice in The Times. The Times, 6, 20 May 1830; Some Beds. Diaries (Pubs. Beds. Hist. Rec. Soc. xl), 132-3; J. Godber, Hist. Beds. 420-1. Earlier in the year it had been thought unlikely that he could afford another contest for the county; and when a second Tory, William Stuart*, a kinsman of Lord Bute with a deep pocket, offered at the general election following the king’s death, Macqueen announced his retirement. He initially did so with a good grace, claiming that he did not wish to subject the county to a divisive contest and that it was desirable, in the present state of affairs, where party distinctions had become blurred, even obsolete, that it should have a balanced representation. On 26 July, however, he produced a sour address in which he accused Stuart and Bute of having persuaded ministers to interfere against him as an act of vengeance for his recent wayward votes. There was some speculation that he might be put in nomination, but he went on an excursion to the continent and was out of the way when the election occurred. Ministers reckoned his replacement by Stuart as a gain. Bodl. MS. Eng. lett. c. 160, f. 134; Herts Mercury, 10, 31 July; Althorp Letters, 151; Beds. RO AD 1081; Add. 40401, f. 132; 51670, Bedford to Lady Holland, Fri. [July 1830].

He claimed 2s. each for 63 special constables enrolled to keep order in his Bedfordshire parish during the period of rural unrest at the end of 1830. A.F. Cirket, ‘1830 Riots in Beds.’, Pubs. Beds. Hist. Rec. Soc. lvii (1978), 101. Soon afterwards he published a pamphlet on The state of the Nation at the Close of 1830, in which he attacked the Wellington ministry for its failure to deal with distress and poverty. He advocated a partial repeal of the 1819 Currency Act, in conjunction with abolition of the Bank of England’s monopoly and the adoption in England of the Scottish banking system, and, above all, his favourite nostrum of managed emigration to Australia, which should cease to be a penal colony. The Times liked it less than his previous tract, but gave it generous coverage. Some of his figures on the current cost of administering New South Wales were later shown to be wildly exaggerated. The Times, 3 Jan. 1831; Hist. Recs. of Australia (ser. 1), xvi. 303. At the contested Bedfordshire election of 1831 he did what he could to assist Tavistock and a fellow reformer, who defeated Stuart. Beds. RO, Russell mss R3/3676; R 767, Macqueen to Tavistock’s cttee. [1831]. In his evidence to the Commons select committee on secondary punishments, 5, 9 Aug. 1831, he recommended a revision of the transportation system, which was inhibiting respectable emigration to New South Wales; but he could not say how the punishment, which in practice offered the starving labourer a veritable incentive to commit crime, could be made more effectively severe. Sydney Smith commented that ‘the ancient profession of picking pockets will certainly not become more discreditable from the knowledge that it may eventually lead to the possession of a farm of a thousand acres on the River Hawkesbury’. PP (1831), vii. 610-15; E. Stockdale, A Study of Bedford Prison, 1660-1877 (Pubs. Beds. Hist. Rec. Soc. lvi), 155.

In 1832 Macqueen tried again to obtain land on the Sydney sea frontage, but, despite the colonial secretary Lord Goderich’s endorsement of his application, the New South Wales authorities turned it down. He also clashed with them and the home government over a demand for quit-rent on his additional land acquisitions, from which he unsuccessfully claimed exemption by agreement with previous ministries. He complained to the colonial under-secretary that ‘it is particularly to be lamented that the practical part of Australian government is so very different from the theoretical assurances held forth in Downing Street’, and moaned that ‘I have not had fair play in the colony’. Hist. Recs. of Australia (ser. 1), xvi. 507; xvii. 8-13. That year he unleashed on the world a gloomy assessment of The State of the Country, in which he added repeal of the usury laws to his well rehearsed list of solutions. Financial problems were crowding in upon Macqueen, who sold his Bedfordshire property to the duke of Bedford in 1832 and 1833. His wife died in the latter year. Diary of a Beds. Squire ed. R. Morgan (Pubs. Beds. Hist. Rec, Soc. lxvi), 1; Cambridge and Hertford Independent Press, 31 Mar. 1832; VCH Beds. iii. 293, 321; Gent. Mag. (1833), ii. 90. He played a leading role in the negotiations with the treasury which led to the formation of the Bank of Australasia in 1832-3, though he had little influence in its affairs thereafter, despite briefly holding a seat on its provisional board. S.J. Butlin, Australia and New Zealand Bank, 21-23, 33, and Foundations of Australian Monetary System, 251, 259; Hist. Recs. of Australia (ser. 3), xviii. 12-14. In 1834 he went out to take personal charge of Segenhoe, which falling prices and inefficient management had made unprofitable. He was prominent in the formation of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, a rival to the Bank of Australasia, and during the next four years cut a conspicuous figure in colonial society. However, his repeated attempts to secure a harbour site were in vain, as was his bid for an additional land grant in compensation. His claims that he had invested over £42,000 in the colony, employed 160 convicts and rehabilitated 20 of them, encouraged respectable settlers and erected churches and a hospital cut no ice with the Melbourne ministry, who insisted on strict adherence to the regulations governing additional grants. A sale of Segenhoe stock was reported in January 1838, and in August Macqueen left the colony, having leased the estate and placed its affairs in the hands of a Sydney agent. Campbell, 93-94; Butlin, Foundations, 251; Hist. Recs. of Australia (ser. 1), xvii. 713-14; xviii. 164-5, 252, 265-6, 448, 498, 513, 623; xix. 540-4; xx. 61, 575-8. On his journey back to England by way of India, Ceylon, Egypt, Malta, Italy and France, he studied all the agricultural products capable of cultivation in Australia, as he explained in his 1840 pamphlet, Australia as She is and as She may be, a protest against the ‘extraordinary and unforeseen’ report of the recent parliamentary inquiry, which, if implemented, would ‘stultify all the progress of the last few years’. He recommended the combination of ‘large free immigration’ with a revised and more lenient system of transportation, the encouragement of varied cultivation, the establishment of a House of Assembly, with control over internal revenues, and the banishment of the Aborigines to the interior, where there was plenty of room for them to die out. In the Commons debate on transportation, 5 May 1840, Lord John Russell cited with approval Macqueen’s views on the remedial effects of transportation on convicts with ‘skill and talent’.

He was by now in deep financial trouble. In 1845 he was living at Caen, and by 1852 he was resident at Banbury. He died of apoplexy at the Queen’s Hotel, Oswestry in March 1854. W. Cathrall, Oswestry, 147; Gent. Mag. (1854), i. 558. By his will, dated 23 Jan. 1853, he tried to provide for his three younger children, Henry Archibald, Flora Georgina and Anne, through the sale of his remaining property in England and Australia, having catered for his elder son, John Potter, by the sale of Ridgmont 20 years earlier. But the will was not proved until 22 Mar. 1856, when administration was granted to the legal representative of a creditor, and the personal estate was sworn under a derisory £20. PROB 11/2229/226; IR26/2070/233.