The Prince and the Assassin. Steve Harris
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