The Prince and the Assassin. Steve Harris
a ‘fearful extravagance and luxury, the utter want of seriousness and principle in everything…all showed a rottenness which was sure to crumble and fall’.24 High-ranking officials were also lamenting the princes’ behaviour. General Sir William Thomas Knollys, comptroller of Edward’s household, noted in his diary that reports of their visit were ‘very unsatisfactory’, including suppers ‘after the Opera with some of the female Paris notorieties’ and he later opposed Edward returning to Paris after the exposition given ‘the scenes I had led to believe had taken place’. Lord Stanley noted in his diary: ‘Much talk in society about the P of Wales and his disreputable ways of going on. He is seen at theatres paying attention to the lowest class of women, visits them at their houses etc.’25
Already concerned by what she sensed went on at Marlborough House, the Queen was appalled by what she heard of her sons’ latest behaviour in ‘horrid’ Paris. Edward was concern enough, but now Alfred was becoming just as ‘decadent’ and ‘a source of no satisfaction or comfort’26 as he too ‘succumbed to Venus’.27
It was a real relief he was leaving for a long sea journey to the far reaches of the Empire. Her hope was that safely away from immoral company, he might learn to become more disciplined and royal. His hope was for a break from maternal and royal expectations on an unprecedented sea voyage and the savouring of Antipodean pleasures and liberties.
Neither could have any idea that this was a voyage that would culminate in unimaginable events which would shake a country and Empire to its foundations.
endnotes
1 Victor Hugo, Guide officiel à l’exposition universelle de 1867, (Paris: 1867).
2 Theo Aronson, Queen Victoria and the Bonapartes, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 67.
3 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 194.
4 Longford, Queen Victoria R. I., (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p. 321.
5 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 225.
6 Sir Phillip Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography, (London: Murray, 1954), p. 207.
7 ibid.
8 Christopher Hibbert, Edward V11, A Portrait, (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 108.
9 ibid.
10 Ridley, Bertie, p. 104.
11 Sydney Morning Herald, (20 July 1867).
12 London Illustrated News, (25 May 1867 BLN).
13 Sydney Morning Herald, op cit.
14 Isabelle Tombs & Robert Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The British and the French from the Sun King to the Present, (London: Random 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