Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/236

war, declining to give supplies to the enemies of his country. They were personally treated with courtesy. Palmer, however, became ill, and died in June 1802 at Guam.

Though not Scotch, and though a false witness, Margarot was the only so-called "Scotch martyr" who returned to England. False alike to friend and foe, by turns an obsequious flatterer and low intriguer, ever busy and never honest, he wanted but more ability or a fitting occasion to have been the Barere of his party. When his MS. papers were seized in 1804 they were found to contain such entries as these:"Gerald broke open a letter directed to me; he took out of it a ten-pound note, for which he never accounted." In a published letter which Margarot sent to England he said of Gerald—"He has fled from my habitation and the fraternal reception I gave him, to join others who may, perhaps, in return for those good things he has brought with him, encourage his failings, and feed his vanity with insidious praise. He will soon feel, the destructive effects."

Is it a retributive justice upon Gerald's memory, that for having allowed himself to be associated with Margarot as a delegate from the London Corresponding Society to the British Convention in Edinburgh, their names are now linked together on the monument on Calton Hill? Though all the other Scotch martyrs shrank from Margarot in Sydney, they are herded with him in the inscription from which it might have been hoped that his name would have been excluded by all sensible people in 1844. It is consoling to reflect that Macaulay refused to join in making a demigod of a rascal, and would take no part in laying the foundation of the Calton Hill monument.

Margarot reviled his fellow prisoners as "dealers in land and in human flesh," as "inmates and intimates" with their gaolers; he called Mr. Ellis "Palmer's man," and left on record many accusations against Palmer which it is unnecessary to repeat, but which are manifestly false.

His communications to governors may be mentioned. He forwarded a grandiloquent petition (Oct. 1795) impugning the validity of his sentence on constitutional grounds, already discussed and rejected in the House of Commons.