An exceptional and historic manuscript, initiating the arrest of George Johnston of the NSW Corps and the most famous trial in Australian colonial history, investigating the Rum Rebellion against Governor William Bligh.

An exceptional and historic manuscript, initiating the arrest of George Johnston of the NSW Corps and the most famous trial in Australian colonial history, investigating the Rum Rebellion against Governor William Bligh.

This was the actual indictment against Johnston, as conveyed to the Judge Advocate by order of the Prince Regent on behalf of George III, and signed by the Home Secretary. The key document on which the whole trial would hinge, it began the process that would lay bare – to a fascinated Metropolitan audience – the incredible unrest that had riven New South Wales.

Largely through the support of Joseph Banks, Bligh had been appointed Governor of NSW in 1805 with orders to straighten out intractable problems in the colony, especially the fractious relationship between two successive Governors, Hunter and King, and the increasingly powerful New South Wales Corps. Bligh was surely the wrong man for the job, and proved no match for the conspirators of Sydney and for what Evatt called the "organized defamation" of his character. Although John Macarthur was Bligh's greatest antagonist, it fell to Johnston to stage the actual coup, marching on Government House to arrest Bligh twenty years to the day after the original proclamation of the colony.

Many of the main parties of the mutiny, notably Johnston and Macarthur, had rushed to England to have their cases heard, only to be met by a great round of jockeying and whispering in the corridors of power, but little action. Johnston was the only one of the rebels to be court-martialled – Macarthur was an adept at sidestepping formal punishment and escaped censure entirely – but after the relatively mild punishment of being cashiered, he was allowed a passage back to New South Wales in 1813, with orders that he be treated as 'any other ordinary Settler'.

The Warrant, in part missing and restored with old paper, is redolent of the age, and includes for the first time the famous lines that must have struck fear into Johnston, who is accused of having "at Sydney, in the Colony of New South Wales, begin, excite, cause, and join in a Mutiny, by putting himself at the head of the New South Wales Corps, then under his Command… imprisoning… the person of William Bligh, Esquire, then Captain General and Governor in Chief, in and over the Territory of New South Wales." This was the text read out to initiate the trial, which is why it has been sent to Charles Manners Sutton, the Judge Advocate General, who proved himself an able and forensic cross-examiner throughout the trial.