by Ged Martin
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Maseres, Francis (1731-1824), colonial administrator and author, was born in London on 15 December 1731, the son of Peter Abraham Maseres, a physician in Broad Street, Soho, and his wife, Magdalena, daughter of Francis du Pratt du Clareau. He spent his childhood in Soho and at Betchworth on the North Downs, which gave him a lifelong affection for Surrey. A Huguenot by descent, he was raised on stories of persecution in France which left him with an interest in seventeenth-century history and a hostility to Catholicism that was 'part of his very frame' (Cobbett, 234). Educated at Kingston upon Thames grammar school under the Revd Richard Wooddeson, Maseres, together with his brother Peter, was admitted to Clare College, Cambridge, in July 1748. Taught by John Courtail, another Huguenot by descent, Maseres graduated BA in 1752 with first-class honours in mathematics and was awarded the first chancellor's medal for classics. A fellow of Clare from 1756 until August 1759, he pursued his mathematical interest and retained his enthusiasm for Latin authors for the rest of his life. In 1758 he published a textbook to 'remove from some of the less abstruse parts of algebra, the difficulties that have arisen therein from too extensive use of the Negative Sign', which he argued should be used only as the symbol of subtraction (Dissertation on the Use of the Negative Sign in Algebra, 1758, preface, i); he dedicated this work to the duke of Newcastle, then chancellor of Cambridge University. Two years later he applied unsuccessfully to Newcastle for the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge, which went instead to Edward Waring. He was also a fine chess player and even held out for two hours against François-André Philidor.
Maseres combined his academic career with studying law. He had been admitted to the Inner Temple in 1750 and was called to the bar from the Middle Temple in 1758. He practised with little success on the western circuit and as a common pleader in London. Promotion, even 'a Welsh Judgeship' (Maseres Letters, 74), evaded him and it was probably the hope of future advancement that led him to accept the potentially demanding post of attorney-general of Quebec in 1766, a province in which French-speaking British officials were in short supply. Recommended by Charles Yorke, attorney-general in Rockingham's administration, he replaced George Suckling and set sail on 23 June 1766.
Maseres arrived in Quebec in September to join the administration, headed by the newly appointed Guy Carleton, of a lightly governed province that had been ceded to Britain only in 1763; one of the judges was a ship's surgeon. The population consisted of a small community of British merchants, 'the violent gentlemen of the army' (Maseres Letters, 18), and the French Catholic majority. Maseres wrote on 19 November 1767 that he believed 'the right way of settling this province would be to take away their religion (that is, discourage it without persecution, and powerfully encourage the Protestant religion)'; at the same time the French should be left with 'their ... innocent, useful and compendious laws', which were so much to be preferred to 'the voluminous, intricate, unknown laws of England' (ibid., 57-8). The trouble was, as Maseres perceived, that while the treaty of 1763 had promised toleration of Catholicism 'as far as the laws of Great Britain permit', 'the laws of England do not at all permit the exercise of the Catholic religion'. He commented, 'Tis difficult [for a Catholic people] to be well-affected to a set of governours whom they look upon as enemies of God, deserving of, and destined to, eternal damnation' (ibid., 54). His preferred solution was to produce a code of the French and English laws applicable to Quebec.
During his three years in office Maseres managed to offend both the merchants and the military. He antagonized the former by claiming in 1766 that Britain had inherited the powers of the former regime to collect customs duties on rum, and by attempting to introduce English bankruptcy laws in 1767. He earned the enmity of the latter by treating as murder the death of a soldier, Donald Mackenzie, who had died after a vicious flogging, and by attempting to prosecute six army officers for assaulting a magistrate. His fiscal policies had to be dropped after his customs proposals were dramatically resisted by a jury of 'pretended patriots' who followed the lead of their American neighbours in resisting imposed taxation. His prosecution of the six officers failed because of the evidence provided by an unreliable witness. As a result, his position was seriously weakened.
Maseres was 'a good deal out of heart' at the failure of his 'schemes for the benefit of the province' (Maseres Letters, 86) and began to yearn for his beloved Surrey. Rigid he may have been, but Maseres was simply trying to uphold order in a turbulent community where even the basis of law was uncertain. Tensions came to a head in February 1769 when the governor, Carleton, bluntly rejected his long-awaited report on methods of reconciling French and English law. He granted his attorney-general indefinite leave, hoping that 'some Opportunity may offer this Gentleman in a Situation more agreeable to his own Inclinations, and where the Fervor of his Zeal can be of no essential disadvantage to the King's Service' (ibid., 24).
Back in Britain, Maseres kept his interests in Canada alive by lobbying on behalf of the merchants at the time of the Quebec Act of 1774 and by writing copiously about Canadian affairs in a series of pamphlets published under the title The Canadian Freeholder (3 vols., 1776-9). In 1773 the influence of the lord chancellor, Henry Bathurst, then Lord Apsley, secured his appointment to the virtual sinecure of cursitor baron of the exchequer, which gave him an income of between £300 and £400 a year. Contemporaries often referred to him as Baron Maseres, but this was not a peerage title. He became a bencher at the Inner Temple in 1774 and its treasurer in 1782. From 1780 until 1822 (when he was over ninety) he served as a judge of the sheriff's court in the city of London. His life was bound up with the Temple: his rooms were at 5 King's Bench Walk, and although out of term he used to dine at his home in Rathbone Place, which he inherited from his brother John, he always returned to the Temple to sleep. Just as he spoke the French of Louis XIV, so to the end of his life he wore clothes from the time of George II, including a 'three-cornered hat, tye-wig and ruffles' (GM, 573). He was very sociable and delighted in entertaining visitors, many of whom were eminent mathematicians, to dinner.
Maseres was a prolific author. He pursued his mathematical studies and published a number of treatises on subjects such as trigonometry, logarithms, and algebra, which Joseph Priestley declared were 'original and excellent' (J. T. Rutt, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, 2 vols., 1831-2, 2.490). Elected FRS on 2 May 1771, he contributed papers to the Philosophical Transactions for 1777, 1778, and 1779. He had acquired a lifelong fascination for history in his youth when he had set himself the task of reading the whole of Rapin's History of England, paying special attention to the sources used. He showed a keen interest in the civil wars of the seventeenth century, and in 1815 edited for the first time a collection of important tracts, which he attempted to contextualize in his introduction. He edited a number of reprints of historical works, including Thomas May's History of the Parliament of England which Began 1640 and Sir John Temple's History of the Irish Rebellion, both of which revealed his anti-Catholic prejudices. A fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he wrote a 'View of the ancient constitution of the English parliament' which was published in Archaeologia (2.301-40), eliciting a response from Charles Mellish. According to William Cobbett, Maseres 'had no asperity in his nature; he was naturally all gentleness and benevolent' (Cobbett, 233). He was generous to refugees from revolutionary France, Catholic priests included. A whig in politics, he was always stirred by injustice; he visited Cobbett during his imprisonment in Newgate in 1810, wearing his wig and gown to underline his protest. Jeremy Bentham hailed him as 'one of the most honest lawyers England ever knew' (Maseres Letters, 33), while Cobbett admired him for refusing to accept a salary increase. Someone, Maseres said, would have to meet the cost 'and the more I take the less that somebody must have' (Cobbett, 233). In later life he associated with advanced whigs such as the radical William Frend but, despite writing over thirty books and pamphlets, he generally kept out of political disputes.
Maseres could afford to be lofty about money. 'He was by no means stingy' (Cobbett, 233) but his bachelor life was frugal. Legacies inherited from his father and brother grew into a massive fortune. Cobbett recalled Maseres as a loyal Anglican, who endowed a Sunday afternoon service at Reigate, where he had a country home, The Barons, to provide an additional opportunity for church attendance. He was not blind, however, to the abuses in the contemporary church and wrote two pamphlets proposing reforms, such as the division of populous parishes and an end to pluralism and non-residence, though he stopped short of advocating equalization of clerical incomes. In old age he moved towards the Unitarians, a conversion that Cobbett dated to 1812 when Maseres was over eighty. However, this may simply have represented the late flowering of radical protestant ideas common among Huguenots. Robert Fellowes, a young Anglican clergyman leaning to Unitarianism, became his unofficial chaplain, and then his principal heir. When Maseres, who was unmarried, died at his house in Church Street, Reigate, on 19 May 1824, £30,000 was bequeathed to relatives, while Fellowes scooped about £200,000. Fellowes erected a monument to his memory in Reigate churchyard.
GED MARTIN
Sources
The Maseres letters, 1766-1768, ed. W. S. Wallace (1919)
E. Arthur, 'Maseres, Francis', DCB, vol. 6
DNB
W. Cobbett, Rural rides, new edn (1967), 232-9
GM, 1st ser., 94/1 (1824), 569-73
Nichols, Illustrations, 9.556-7
Venn, Alum. Cant.
C. Lamb, The old benchers of the Inner Temple, ed. F. D. Mackinnon (1927)
Archives
Inner Temple, London, papers
RS, papers
U. Edin. L., mathematical notes, ref. Dc 5 7
UCL, logarithms
Yale U., Farmington, Lewis Walpole Library, exchequer accounts | Bodl. Oxf., letters to Stephen Rigaud
NMM, letters to Andrew Mackay
Likenesses
C. Hayter, oils, 1815
P. Audinet, line engraving (aged eighty-three; after C. Hayter, 1817), BM, NPG; repro. in Lamb, The old benchers, facing p. 26
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