House, 2010), p. 375.
15 Joanna Richardson, The Courtesans: The Demi-Monde in 19th Century France, (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1967), p. 28.
16 Ridley, Bertie, p. 149.
17 Richardson, The Courtesans, pp. 28, 31.
18 Nathanial Newnham-Davis, Gourmet’s Guide to Europe, (London: Ballantyne, Hanson and Co, 1908), p. 6.
19 Stephen Clarke, Dirty Bertie: An English King made in France, (London: Random House, 2015), pp. 127, 119.
20 Examiner, (27 April 1867 BLN).
21 Ridley, Bertie, p. 105.
22 Hannah Pakula, An Uncommon Woman - The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p. 253.
23 Ridley, Bertie, p. 105.
24 ibid., p. 278
25 ibid., pp. 105,106.
26 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 68.
27 Robert Travers, Phantom Fenians of New South Wales, (Kenthurst, Aust: Kangaroo Press, 1986), p. 11.
THE ASSASSIN
3
Henry,
the would-be priest
The display of Master O’Farrell…surprised me…the educated class of Australia Felix will therefore borrow an example from the St Patrick’s Society of that day…and try if they can conduct themselves as…consistently.
— John Pascoe Fawkner, founder of Melbourne.
Henry O’Farrell was born on a level of Empire very different to Prince Alfred, but he too would voyage to the other side of the world and struggle with his destiny and moral compass.
He was only a baby when he left his Irish homeland, too young to understand the passion and pain of his countrymen striving to overcome poverty and British subjection. And too young to know he was leaving Ireland, but Ireland would not be leaving him.
In 1836 his father William, a butcher, and mother Maria took their family from Arran Quay on the Liffey River in Dublin, to sail across the Irish Sea, another ordinary family among tens of thousands seeking something better in Liverpool, Glasgow, London or Manchester.
Capitalising on cheap fares—as low as 10d in steerage and 3d on deck—William O’Farrell chose Liverpool, the Merseyside city which by 1841 had the highest percentage of Irish-born, about one in six, of any English city. Here he renewed his butchery trade in Edge Hill, not far from the thriving docks where some 40 percent of world trade was now passing and where the world’s first inter-city passenger railway station had opened just six years before.
Irish migrants did much of the construction and labouring work of the rail revolution, including the Liverpool–Manchester Railway and Grand Junction Railway workshops, where William O’Farrell met their appetites with sausages and steaks. He did well, a ‘butcher boy of Arran Quay’ who became ‘tolerably successful’ as a butcher and ‘saved a considerable sum of money’.1 But all was not tolerable. Local English Protestants feared for their jobs, with political and religious leading to physical clashes with Catholic workers. Preachers castigated ‘the evil of Popery’ and a ‘conspiracy’ to overthrow the Church of England. Hugh McNeile, an Irish-born Anglican cleric, declared:
The time has come when everybody must choose between God’s side and the devil’s. We must fight unto death. We must lay down our lives rather than submit. The struggle has to end only in the subjection of either Catholics or Protestants.2
Protestants like McNeile saw Roman Catholicism as threatening ‘Britain’s providential mission to defend and propagate reformed Christianity’, a mission based on a strong notion of national supremacy reinforced by biblicality and royalty. Queen Victoria herself said her duty was to:
maintain the true and real principles and spirit of the Protestant religion; for her family was brought over and placed on the throne of these realms solely to maintain it; and the Queen will not stand the attempts [that are being] made to…bring the Church of England as near the Church of Rome as they possibly can.3
Young Henry O’Farrell was not to know the choice between God and Devil would become his own, and that leaving Ireland was not the family’s escape from the British–Irish struggle. But William O’Farrell had felt the tumult and bloodshed of the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798, when republican-minded Irishmen, influenced by the American and French revolutions, engineered an uprising against British rule, which under Elizabeth I, Charles I, Cromwell and William III had seen the best land confiscated by English and Scottish Protestants, and Irish society divided into the ascendant Protestants and the Celtic Catholic minority.
And while the ‘98 Rebellion resulted in an 1801 union whereby King George III ceased being King of Great Britain and King of Ireland to become the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, there was little unity. The Protestant and Catholic tension and violence of Dublin had travelled to English soil.
William O’Farrell had lived his whole life hearing and seeing Irish Catholics painted as an evil threat to an empire and its religion, the enemy of its moral well-being. The Liverpool Mail even slated O’Farrell family heroes like Daniel O’Connell: ‘One of the many obnoxious vices of popery is that where it prevails, it generates hosts of filthy and importunate mendicants, the vermin of the human race.’4
In 1841, hopeful he and his family could do better in a new land far away, William O’Farrell sailed with his wife, two sons, Henry and older brother Peter, and nine daughters to the Empire’s newest outpost on the other side of the world.
This was as far away from the troubles of Ireland and England as could be, but the O’Farrells would soon discover great oceans were no barrier to old troubles.
The colony of Port Phillip had been founded only six years before they arrived, not from an official colonial expedition but the opportunistic John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner venturing across Bass Strait from Van Diemen’s Land in search of pastoral land, which they purchased from eight Aboriginal chiefs. They declared Birrarung, as the ancient Wurundjeri people called it, ‘the place for a village.’ The village became ‘the settlement’ and ‘the township’ under various names before becoming Melbourne in 1837 when Queen Victoria, who had just acceded to the throne as an 18-year-old, honoured the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, her Prime Minister and political mentor.
In 1839 the first immigrants from Britain sailed direct to Port Phillip. It was an arduous and sometimes perilous journey, lasting up to 17 weeks, but by the time the O’Farrells arrived a British ship was berthing every week, and they were now among nearly 17,000 people in the province of Port Phillip.
The collection of small clusters of houses, sheds and tents beside the Yarra Yarra River, surrounded by a few low-lying hillocks known as Batman’s Hill, Flagstaff Hill, Eastern Hill and Emerald Hill, was nothing like Dublin or Liverpool, as eight-year-old Henry O’Farrell could readily see.
Most buildings were of ‘wattle and daub’, roofed with coarse shingles or sheets of bark. Bullock-drawn drays and horses battled mud or dust and tree stumps in the so-called streets, with laundry strung up between trees, mostly tea-tree and gums, as strange birds and wildlife screeched and hopped. The
