Ancestors

Sarah Beale

Sarah Beale was born on St Helena, the East India Company's island in the South Atlantic, where its ships called on the voyage between England and India. Her memorial in St James's Church, Jamestown, calls her "A native of this Island". She was baptized at Calcutta, in Bengal, on 28 February 1728. Cotton's list of inscriptions in the Madras Presidency, abstracting the Calcutta baptisms, gives her as "Sarah Beale, daughter of Mary Beale 'from St. Helena'". No father is named.

She married three times. Her first husband was Capt. Henry Palmer, "of the family of Lord Selborne, a private merchant, who died in 1743". They had children, but their names are not known.

Her second husband was Capt. James Irwin of the ship Mary, who had traded on his own account in India since the early 1730s and had spent time on St Helena. A modern biography of the Company director Laurence Sulivan says that "Sometime between 1743 and 1751 Captain Irwin married a Sarah Beale in St. Helena". The Dictionary of National Biography also names her as Sarah Beale, the widow of Henry Palmer. Their sons were baptized at Calcutta. James was born on 11 October 1748, and Eyles was baptized on 23 February 1751. A daughter, Sarah Gambier Irwin, married Thomas Pearson at Calcutta in 1767. James Irwin bought the estate of Hazeleigh in Essex, but he died in Bengal on 20 June 1752.

Her third husband was the Rev. Robert Mapletoft, one of the chaplains at Calcutta. They married there on 31 March 1753, by one account. He was a Cambridge man of twenty-six, from a family that had produced priests "since the reign of Queen Elizabeth". He had offered to go to the Nawab's court at Murshidabad to learn Persian, so that he could teach it to the Company's young writers, or clerks. Hyde, the historian of the Calcutta church, says that while the letters went back and forth he met Sarah instead. By the summer of 1756 they had two children, Anna Maria and Robert, and she was expecting a third.

In June 1756 Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, besieged and took Calcutta. During the siege Mapletoft worked on the ramparts, cutting open cotton bales and filling sacks with the cotton for a breastwork. The women and children were sent aboard the ships in the river. Sarah was one of four women who stayed with their husbands until nearly midnight before they were made to go. On a morning soon after, the men with families were allowed a short visit to the ships. Mapletoft was with Sarah when the Governor, escaping from the town himself, ordered every ship to cast off. He was carried downriver to Fulta and died there.

Sarah escaped to Chinsurah, the Dutch settlement up the river. The Dutch governor and his wife took her in, and she gave birth there to a daughter. Hyde says that of everyone connected with St Anne's, the Company's church at Calcutta, she was the only one who survived the year 1756.

She stayed in Calcutta for many years afterwards, "through the Governments of Clive and Hastings". Her daughters married there. Anna Maria married William Wynne, the Secretary, on 25 August 1770, and Robert Brooke in 1775. Constantia married Capt. Robert Patton, aide-de-camp to Warren Hastings, on 31 July 1772, "and bore him seventeen children". Her son Eyles had been sent to England for school and went into the Company's service at Madras in 1766. Both of her Mapletoft sons-in-law later governed St Helena: Robert Brooke from 1788 to 1800, and Robert Patton from 1802 to 1807.

In old age she went home to St Helena. She was buried at St James's Church, Jamestown, on 8 December 1792. The burial register reads "Decr. 8. Mrs Sarah Mapletoft, Widow". Her memorial in the church gives her death as "December M.DCC.XCII". Her son-in-law Robert Brooke was then governor of the island. Cotton gives her burial as 8 September 1792, a date that has been copied since, but the register and the memorial both say December.

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Cite: Heirology, "Sarah Beale (1728-1792)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/sarah-beale-1728-1792-660db7.