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4

Henry, the unpriestly

Celibacy and drunkenness cause the blackest of crimes all over the world among the Catholic priesthood.

— Peter O’Farrell

Henry O’Farrell was well on his way to becoming a priest. As he readied for a ‘finishing’ education in theology at the ancient Irish colleges of France, Italy, Belgium and Ireland, the Catholic hierarchy in Australia sent introductory letters to their European network, although some hinted at nervousness about his intense manner. His priest Fr. Patrick Geoghegan mentioned to Bishop Goold that he might ‘mention to Shiel (privately of course) O’F’s application’, referring to Fr. Laurence Bonaventure Shiel, who had just arrived as president of the St Francis seminary, later St Patrick‘s College.1 Perhaps O‘Farrell’s youthful intensity about Irish matters was on their minds. He would inevitably be exposed in Europe to discussion about the relationship of Dublin and Rome, and the role of the Catholic Church in the plight of Ireland and its emigrants in colonies like Australia. In the Melbourne he was leaving, Irish immigrants were still accused of being idle, ignorant and immoral and denied the same opportunities as the English and Scotch. And divisions within the Catholic Church were also becoming more evident. Local papers reprinted the open letter of Dublin’s Father Thaddeus O’Malley to Irish Catholic clergy, ‘What will the Priests do now for Ireland?’ He challenged those who would do nothing while Ireland tottered to hopeless ruin due to pestilence and famine visited on them by ‘the perverse will of an insolent dominant faction’.

Henry’s words to the St Patrick’s Society that educated men who did nothing were worse than the ignorant were amplified by Fr. O’Malley. In the death struggle of the Irish, he said, those who did nothing to save them were ‘virtually the abettors of that proud and cruel domination that presses its armed heel upon their neck’.2

Priests ought not be instruments of repression, but seek a voice in national politics to help deliver equality and compatibility. The ‘duties of patriotism require a sacrifice…for priest or layman…the priest is free from the enthralments of domestic ties, and has no family but his flock, for whom as a faithful shepherd he is ever ready to sacrifice even his own life’.

Rome had acquiesced to the argument of English Benedictine monks like Archbishop Polding that the Catholic Church in the new world of Australia had to be accommodated within an English administration, and his fear that increased Irish Catholicism risked sectarian troubles. But Henry’s Irish mentors wanted their Church in Australia to move away from its English orientation, and in Ireland the Catholic Church was becoming more unified, nationalist and assertive under the leadership of Archbishop Paul Cullen at All Hallows College in Dublin, the single biggest source of Irish priests to Australia. Here O’Farrell could have expected to mix with ‘graduates of a robustly nationalist, even Fenian, outlook’.3

Henry would have much time to reflect on how English power had much to answer for, and the need for those of education, power and influence to do more. There would also be time for the free-spirited nature of Paris to challenge his commitment to celibacy and the Church.

Whatever his mind was making of all this, in the winter of 1854 he received word his father had died, aged 62, at his brother’s home Maritemo in South Melbourne.

Henry and his brother might have anticipated a financial windfall.

On 27 July, The Argus referenced ‘the will of William O’Farrell, late of the City of Melbourne, in the Colony of Victoria, gentleman, deceased’, naming Henry’s brother Peter Andrew Charles O’Farrell, ‘gentleman’, and brother-in-law William Lane, ‘merchant’, as executors. They moved within days to dissolve the estate. On 1 August, the Argus advertised O’Farrell’s properties at ‘extremely low prices (with) liberal credit’: 12 newly built two-bedroom brick cottages in Stuart Street, near Swanston Street North; 42 acres of land in Prahran near St Kilda racecourse; 945 acres on the Merri Creek at Plenty; 200 acres in East Brighton; and building allotments in Kyneton, Kilmore, Gisborne and Wangaratta.

The will provided several legacies for various Catholic charities and associations, and £300 for the ‘sole and exclusive use and benefit’ of Bishop Goold, along with £800 for a nuns convent, St Patrick’s cathedral, St Francis Church, St Francis Seminary, Friendly Brothers and Catholic Association.4 Goold had ministered to William O’Farrell in his declining health before departing for a trip to Rome to present some Victorian gold to Pope Pius IV, utilised Peter O’Farrell for legal and financial advice, and mentored Henry O‘Farrell.

Peter O’Farrell did not delay sending the Bishop a cheque for the total £11005 on the basis, he said, it would be refunded if it was found the estate’s assets were insufficient. Which is what they found. ‘My father was thought to be rich and he would have died well off but for ruinous speculations’, Peter O’Farrell would write, claiming he and his family were financially disadvantaged as a result of the speculative deals and debts.6

Back in Australia, Henry was without his father and a diminution of the financial support which had sustained his education, priestly training and travel. And somewhere in Europe, or immediately after his return to Melbourne, his priestly destiny was lost.

Some said he ‘suddenly disappeared’ from a college in France ‘without making any communication to the superior’ before re-appearing in Australia7. Others reported he had been ready to take holy orders ‘but falling in love with a young lady prevented him from following this course, and he accordingly turned his attention to more practical pursuits’.8

A veteran Ballarat merchant and Catholic, James Tappin, said ill-health was not the issue, as the Ballarat Star had suggested. ‘The fact was his educational superiors both here and abroad rejected his candidature, considering him from their knowledge of his proclivities as being totally unfit for holy orders.’9

Other reports cited a dispute with Bishop Goold. His brother Peter told colleagues ‘he has had a dispute with the bishop on some religious points and has given up his intention of joining the priesthood’.10

Perhaps the dispute was over some misbehaviour in Europe, or the vow of celibacy had proved challenging. Peter was in no doubt that a bachelor priesthood flew in the face of the law of nature laid down by the Almighty for all his creatures, and that ‘celibacy and drunkenness cause the blackest of crimes all over the world among the Catholic priesthood’.11

Or perhaps Henry’s travels had reinforced his view that the Church leadership was not prosecuting Irish interests strongly enough and not evidencing the sacrifice required by duties of patriotism, as advocated by Fr. Thaddeus O’Malley.

Or it could have been a falling out over family money or morality. Peter accused the Bishop of trying to gain from his father’s supposed wealth—the body was ‘scarcely cold before Dr Goold insisted on hearing the will read’—and despite the estate being found ‘worthless’ had reneged on repayment of his father’s legacies. He spent the rest of his life castigating the Bishop as a ‘swindler’ who ‘hugged the golden calf to his heart’, and did nothing to address the immorality of some priests. Some brothel landlords, he claimed, told him ‘some of their best customers were priests’ and the Bishop himself had mistresses and had paid ‘hush money’ to their husbands to avoid scandal.12

Whether it was from ‘incompatibility or sentiment of others’, as the Ballarat Star said, or personal conflict over his identity and purpose, Henry was not to be ordained as a priest. Despite the hours of study in Melbourne and Europe, the efforts of his father and family to support the Catholic Church, the encouragement and support of senior clergy and taking deacon orders, Henry, or someone else, had come to a judgment that it was not to be.

Henry’s passion for Ireland now exceeded his passion for the Church. He was ‘genial, warm-hearted and enthusiastic’, one report said, ‘but possessed of an undeniably national bias, and no amount of the dulce et decorum est proclivity pro patria mori as regards Ireland’, a line of Latin poetry about sweetness, honour and preparedness ‘to die for one’s country’.13

Fr. Laurence Shiel, the new St Francis Church seminary head, was perhaps referring to Henry when he wrote to a colleague in early 1856 saying that he ‘never corresponded with ‘O’Farrell’, who was now ‘sufficiently removed from here: on the occasion of a Governor’s soirée he had to be dissuaded from attending in his habit: coelum non animant mutant, qui trans mare currunt (those who cross the seas may change their horizons, but not their character.’14

Having lost his mother and father, been denied his destiny to be a priest and not received an inheritance he might have expected, and with Peter regaling against what he saw as a financially and morally corrupt Catholic hierarchy, Henry now heard more and more Irishmen agitating about English oppression.

The nature of what was going on in Henry O’Farrell’s mind was not clear, even to his own family and St Patrick’s Society friends, but they felt Henry needed time away from Melbourne and its gold-rush fever and to go west to a quieter life in country Victoria.

A businessman John Carfrae was introduced to Henry at his brother’s office in 1855, just after his return from Europe where

he had been educated for the priesthood and was to be ordained by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Melbourne. At the time he appeared a retiring but well-informed gentlemanly looking man of 20. About a week after, on inquiring of his brother, he (Peter) replied ‘Henry is an extraordinary young man, he has…given up his intention of joining the priesthood. He has gone to Clunes to learn sheep farming.’15

Clunes was the first gold-rush town in Victoria, and here lawyer William Lane, Henry’s brother-in-law and a brother of the treasurer of St Patrick’s Society, co-owned a squatter pastoral and mining business. The isolated ovine environment did not sustain Henry, and he soon moved from Clunes to the gold-rush town of Ballarat to operate a hay and corn business with a cousin, Joseph Kennedy. This became such a ‘flourishing and lucrative business’ it allowed them to speculate in the share market and they became ‘possessed of a good deal of landed and house property.’16 Much of the property was on Soldier’s Hill, named after the Colonial soldiers stationed there prior to the 1854 Eureka uprising when hundreds of gold miners, led by Peter Lalor, brother of a leader of the Young Ireland uprising in 1849, revolted against ‘a tyrannical authority’ resulting in the death or serious wounding of about 34 rebels.

Business success seemingly went to the cousins’ heads, and they began to acquire a reputation for ‘habits of intemperance’, as the Ballarat Star described. Henry was seen, when sober, as ‘a steady, trustworthy person’, although ‘eccentric to be sure in some particulars’, and their days combined business and drinking—one staying ‘sober while the other was doing the convivial, and in his turn attending to business while his partner enjoyed a little relaxation’.17

They did well enough for Henry to take another trip to Europe, this time without any Catholic ambition or patronage, a former Ballarat priest even describing him as ‘an indifferent and unobservant’ Catholic who held an ‘obscure and unknown place’.18 The trip coincided with a new group of Irish freedom fighters gaining attention. Calling themselves Fenians, after an ancient Celtic tribe, they formed in 1858 in Ireland and America, with ambitions in Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia.

The first transcontinental insurgent group, the Fenians took advantage of an industrial age spawning a new mobility of people via steamers and rail, easier access to money as modern banking began dealing with funds across countries and oceans; increased voice through new telegraph technology and cheaper printing, and greater access to weapons, especially after the American Civil War.

When Henry returned around 1862, it was to a country which had still not shaken its colonial view that the Irish were a threat to national and empirical security, in an Empire increasingly hungry for the ‘loyalty’ of colonies like Australia, in a world in which the Irish fight for freedom was becoming more intense and more international.

And his Church was not doing enough for the Irish cause, as he saw it, and furthermore had abandoned his family. His brother suffered a major falling out with the Church after some blamed him for debts associated with building St Patrick’s College in Ballarat and St Patrick’s Cathedral. Then after losing a libel case which followed a fatal carriage accident, financial and professional pressures forced Peter to send his French-born wife and children to Paris in the hope of rejoining them later. He was expelled from the Law Institute, of which he was vice-president, and forced to resign from all community roles, including the Board of Visitors at Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum.

Faced with insurmountable debts, the loss of his Catholic base and professional disgrace, the ‘leading solicitor of Melbourne and prominent society man’ as newspapers described him, asked Bishop Goold to at least help him with ‘permission to conceal himself in St Francis Presbytery’. But this was denied, and colleagues said Peter became so ‘intense’ and ‘bigoted’ that in the heat of a religious argument ‘he would bring the blood from his hands, through the pressing of the finger-nails into the palms of his hands.’19

He also carried a gun, which he slept with, and a bottle of poison, declaring he would never be taken alive. Henry, a police superintendent said, later claimed to have been ‘principally instrumental’ in aiding his brother’s escape to the United States, where he reportedly spent time in a lunatic asylum for attempting to shoot the Archbishop of Quebec and wrote several pamphlets on what he saw as the injustices and immorality of Archbishop Goold. He sent copies to the Pope and other senior Catholic leaders in Rome, and presumably to Henry. On his eventual return to Melbourne, Peter would attempt to shoot the Archbishop.

While the Sheriff declared Peter ‘non est inventus’, Henry sought a compulsory sequestration of Peter’s estate and to secure some of his furniture being held under Sheriff’s orders at the Port Phillip Club Hotel. Around this time Henry ‘left the impression of being a very excitable man, very argumentative, rapid in utterance and cantankerous’.

The brothers, formerly shining lights in the Catholic Church, were now in a very different place, Peter in self-exile in the United States, Henry personally isolated and ‘excitable’ and dealing with another setback when his Ballarat business partner Kennedy, died, ‘so confirmed a drunkard he…fell a victim to delirium tremens’.

Some saw O’Farrell as merely intense and erratic, others spoke presciently of him as ‘one who having attached himself to an idea would pursue it at any cost to himself or to others’. He frequently alluded to his experiences on the Continent, saying he preferred its manners and customs to those of England, and fulsomely supported Chartism, an English working class campaign for increased democratic rights. And he ‘exceeded the wildest radical in his hatred of aristocracy.’20 One who met him at the Melbourne Cricket Ground went further, describing him as ‘a very dangerous man’.

Without the financial and personal support of his father, brother and business partner, Henry began to spend more time among hundreds of gold speculators, dealers and agents who clustered in Ballarat at what was known simply as The Corner, where the vigorous trading in mining stocks and ventures ranked it as one of the world’s busiest financial hubs. Henry lost heavily on failed mining companies, which led to the loss of some property assets. As he tried to speculate his way out of trouble he sank further and ‘drank more heavily than he had done previously’. He avoided many former acquaintances, made frequent threats and expressed ‘a determination to take the life of persons offending him’. The Ballarat Star said he was ‘greatly embarrassed’ by his plight, and while affable and gentlemanly when sober, drinking to excess was ‘completely upsetting his mental equilibrium’.

He now lived by himself in his hay and corn store, often went for days without a meal, and walked alone far into the countryside for, he said, his health. A neighbour witnessing a bout of delirium tremens thought he was evidencing ‘the worst species of insanity’21 and another found him crawling on the floor. Local doctors, often called in, found him ‘occasionally, extremely violent’.

Henry had also ‘secreted’ two pistols from a pawnbroker. At the same time, more reports of Irish patriotic uprisings and rebellious acts were appearing in the newspapers. The Freeman’s Journal reported crowds of 30,000 Fenians in New York endorsing militant cries, such as Colonel William Roberts’ declaration that ‘Ireland must be free and we shall free her (long and enthusiastic cheers again and again)…the sword shall now be the arbiter of her destinies…blood must wash out what blood and crime have stained (loud cheers)’.22

Irish American arms and funds supported the Fenians and a secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, later the Irish Republican Brotherhood, formed local cells swearing an oath to do whatever it took to make Ireland an independent republic, and Fenian-minded Irishmen, including some senior organisers, emigrated to colonies including Australia.

Irishmen around the world sensed an uprising in Ireland was imminent, but British authorities raided the IRB offices and arrested its leaders, including some Irish Americans, and seized revolutionary documents.

When news of Fenianism breaking out in America reached Ballarat, Henry ‘pronounced himself a decided partisan of (Fenian) Head Centre (James) Stephens’, one of the founders of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood.23

He would have been disappointed the uprising had failed, but also outraged by reading reprinted extracts from The Times:

Nationalities fill the world with their complaints, but are never able to right themselves, and cannot even stand alone without aid…they are too distinct to assimilate or get on well with their neighbours…they can neither comprehend nor be comprehended and are eventually crushed and ground to powder rather than affiliated. Ireland has hitherto been too Irish to make her way with the rest of us. A time may come when the proportion of Irish to English there, or rather of all foreigners to the natives, will put the country into a better condition for the great race of nations. Ireland may then be no more distinct from us than Lancashire or the valley of the Clyde.24

Authorities in Australia did not need talk of uprisings to be nervous about Irish rebellion. This fear arrived with convicts exiled for riot and sedition. Governor John Hunter, who succeeded Arthur Phillip, frequently warned London that Irishmen, especially Catholics who outnumbered Protestants twenty-fold, were ‘deluded’ and ‘turbulent’ and put the colony’s security at risk. Successive regimes brutally dealt with Irish plotting, proven or otherwise: suspects received up to 1000 lashes, priests were imprisoned, and at one major uprising at Castle Hill (later Vinegar Hill) about 15 shot dead and nine hanged.25

There were calls for a ‘man of war’ to be stationed in Sydney Harbour and two civilian para-military groups were organised and armed. The more recent presence of freedom fighters, such as the Young Ireland leaders exiled in 1849 and 1850, added to the nervousness of authorities.

While some said Irish and Fenian ambitions could never be ‘more than a madman’s dream’, others, like David Buchanan, who narrowly escaped imprisonment for Chartist activity and fled to Australia to become a lawyer and politician, accepted that Irish advocates of physical force were driven by a sincere love of their country, and their spirit ought not die ‘til it has consumed every vestige of wrong which has so ruinously fed upon their very vitals’.26

The fear of those determined to quash any such anti-Empire ambitions was illustrated when Buchanan gave a spirited address on ‘The Wrongs of Ireland’ to a packed audience in Sydney and was duly charged by the Empire with disloyalty, sedition and violation of his oath of allegiance to the Queen. In the subsequent libel case, Empire loyalists won a moral victory when the Chief Justice ruled in Buchanan’s favour but awarded him no costs and damages of one farthing.

As argument raged over injustices, and whether fighting for Irish freedom was a madman’s delusion or patriotic duty, Henry O’Farrell’s mind regressed, forming a darker view of both his personal plight and Irish homeland, and a ‘vindictive animosity’ toward aristocracy and Catholic clergy, ‘vilifying them in a most outrageous manner whenever they formed the topic of conversation’.

His sister Caroline Allan could see he was more restless, uneasy and excitable, deeply affected by financial losses flowing from his brother’s troubles and his own speculative losses and rising debt. She could see he was drinking more and becoming more erratic. O’Farrell lived alone but also now sought female companionship ‘he would otherwise have shunned’.

O’Farrell…rigidly adhered through life to the vows of celibacy he had taken when admitted to deacon’s orders. As illustrating his peculiar turn of mind and habit of living…he frequently made an arrangement with two neighbours…to spend an evening in his house, taking a sort of martyr pride in conquering whatever failings he might possess, though his visitors were allowed perhaps greater liberties than were either compatible with strict propriety…or with being mentioned in the columns of a newspaper.27

Perhaps he was testing his ‘strength through resistance’, the Catholic challenge of celibacy which his brother had warned would lead to a ‘blackness’.

The blackness deepened. In September 1866 he suffered another attack of delirium tremens and threatened to kill a banking friend he had invited to his rooms to plead for a loan to overcome his ruined state. When told that a loan would have to be on the usual terms, ‘he suddenly leapt from his bed, seized a sword cane, and would have killed or wounded the gentleman’ if others had not intervened. The shaken bank official declared ‘Oh, he’s mad! he’s mad!’28 Police alerted O’Farrell’s two sisters Caroline and Catherine, who travelled from Melbourne to attend to him and take him back to Melbourne. But they could not hold him or change his course.

Henry went back to Ballarat in 1867, of uncertain and fevered mind, as the colonies feverishly waited for updates on when His Royal Highness, Prince Alfred, would take the first step of Royal blood on Australia’s shores.

Select References

Argus, (27 July, 1 August 1854; 3 October 1863; 13, 14, 30 March 1868); Ballarat Star, (5 October 1863; 14 March 1868); Brisbane Courier (9 December 1865); Hunter River General Advertiser, (29 August 1882); Maitland Mercury, (2 April 1868; 29 August 1882); Victorian Government Gazette (27 October 1863)

endnotes

1. Condon, Diary James Goold, March 1852.

2 Hobarton Guardian, (1 January 1851).

3 Christopher Dowd, Rome in Australia: The Papacy and Conflict in the Australian Catholic Missions, 1834–1884, (Boston: Brill, Lieden, 2008), p. 21.

4 Advocate, (26 August 1882).

5 Argus, (24 August 1882).

6 Ballarat Star, (22 August 1882).

7 Freemans Journal, (15 August 1868).

8 Age, (16 March 1868).

9 Ballarat Star, (19 March 1868).

10 Sydney Morning Herald, (19 March 1868).

11 P.A.C. O‘Farrell, Priests and Their Victims, (Melbourne: William Sinclair, 1888), p. 26.

12 ibid., p. 19.

13 Ballarat Star, (27 March 1868).

14 Brian Condon (transcr.) Letters and Documents: 19th century Australian Catholic History, (Adelaide: University South Australia), 7 January 1856.

15 Sydney Morning Herald, (19 March 1868).

16 Ballarat Star, (27 March 1868).

17 ibid., (14, 27 March 1868).

18 Argus, (14 March 1868).

19 Rockhampton Bulletin, (9 April 1868).

20 Adelaide Observer, (4 April 1868).

21 Ballarat Star, (27 March 1868).

22 Freemans Journal, (21 October 1865).

23 Empire, (23 March 1868).

24 Freemans Journal, (11 November 1865).

25 Keith Amos, The Fenians in Australia 1865–1880, (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1988), pp. 3, 7.

26 Freemans Journal, (13 January 1866).

27 Ballarat Star, (19, 27 March 1868).

28 A Complete Report Attempted Assassination H.R.H. Prince Alfred, p. 33.