were given on his shoulders, and he was cut to the bone between the shoulder-blades, which were both bare. The doctor then directed the next hundred to be inflicted lower down, which reduced his flesh to such a jelly that the doctor ordered him to have the remaining hundred on the calves of his legs .... 'you shall have no music out of my mouth to make others dance upon nothing'. Some have written that Marsden ordered such treatment but Holt's memoirs do not explicitly link Marsden to the floggings at Toongabbie on that day. Holt's memoirs express his impression of Marsden, as "a busy meddling man, of shallow understanding" who thought himself "a great lawyer". Holt believed that Marsden tried to intimate to Holt that his wife and children were free, but he was not. Holt considered that he had surrendered back in Ireland under terms of free exile. But when the Holt family arrived in Parramatta, Marsden, Aitkins and Dr Thomson called on them and asked Holt to accompany them to Toongabbie, where Captain Johnstone tried to assign him to the overseer Michael Fitzgerald. The next day the Governor was to come to Parramatta and Holt determined to ask the Governor, determined to "have the highest authority, even the Governor himself, and not submit to the whims of understrappers, who always assume tenfold the airs that their superiors might be supposed to have" (his opinion of Marsden). The Governor confirmed he was free. Marsden's attitudes to Irish Roman Catholic convicts were illustrated in a memorandum which he sent to his church superiors during his time at Parramatta: Despite Marsden's opposition to Catholicism being practised in Australia, Governor Philip Gidley King permitted monthly Catholic Masses in Sydney from May 1803, although these were to take place under police surveillance. In 1806, Marsden was the originator of the New South Wales "Female Register" which classed all women in the colony (excepting some widows) as either "married" or "concubine". Only marriages within the Church of England were recognised as legitimate on this list; women who married in Roman Catholic or Jewish ceremonies were automatically classed as concubines. The document eventually circulated within influential circles in London, and is believed to have influenced contemporary views of the Australian colony as a land of sexual immorality, some of which survived into 20th century historiography. In 1809, Marsden was in England. There he befriended