Catherine Disney

a biographical sketch

Anne van Weerden

This sketch is dedicated to

Eli Sarkol

The illustration on the front page comes from the web page The Irish Aesthete.

It can be found at theirishaesthete. com/2013/04/01.

It shows the entrance hall of Summerhill mansion, the house in which Catherine Disney saw William Hamilton for the very first time.

Catherine Disney

a biographical sketch

Anne van Weerden

Published by J. Fransje van Weerden 2019, Stedum, The Netherlands

Typeset by I^Tf^X

Printed by BoekenGilde, Enschede, The Netherlands

ISBN: 978-94-6323-411-5

Preface

The aim of this sketch is threefold.

First, it is to tell something about Catherine Disney (1800-1853). She is known as the ‘lost love’ of the famous Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805- 1865), who invented what we now know as Hamiltonian mechanics, and was knighted for his work in 1835. In 1843 he discovered the quaternions from which vector anal¬ ysis emerged, and which are now used for smoothly changing orientations in for instance robotics, gaming and spacecraft. Because throughout his life Hamilton cor¬ responded extensively, and based upon his letters, poems and personal notes two bio¬ graphies were written, his life can be read about in almost meticulous detail.

Yet about Catherine’s own life hardly anything is known, and what is known seems to merely reflect the view men had on ‘good’ women in the protestant ascen¬ dancy class of Regency and Victorian Ireland: in the 1880s Hamilton’s biographer Robert Graves described her as of “singular beauty, amiable, sensitive and pious,” and according to Hamilton she was ‘graceful,’ and had a “simple loveliness,” a “nat¬ ural bloom,” and a “retiring timidness.”

Having fallen in love with Hamilton Catherine was forced by her family to marry William Barlow, a clergyman who was also her brother-in-law, and as long as she could she was a good and obedient wife. In 1848 she broke down and tried to commit suicide, survived, but was weakened by the attempt. As far as is known thereafter she lived with family members, yet only five years later, shortly before she died, she was finally able to tell Hamilton that she had also loved him.

Gathering data about Catherine’s life was greatly facilitated by the publicly available Irish censuses, church records, Griffith ’s Valuation, previews of newspaper articles, and the abundance of books on the Internet Archive containing information about members of the protestant ascendancy class in Ireland, especially the clergy. Acquiring insights into Catherine’s personal feelings was much more difficult because letters written by her do not seem to exist any more. Yet Hamilton wrote many let¬ ters about her in the months after her death in 1853, and in the summer of 1855 when he unburdened his heart to his friend Aubrey de Vere; through these letters it is pos¬ sible to at least catch a glimpse of how it must have been for her.

Second, it is to underpin what I showed in my 2015 essay A Victorian marriage : Sir William Rowan Hamilton, that what happened between Hamilton and Catherine was much more nuanced than what has been claimed, that his whole life Hamilton only loved Catherine. Just having turned nineteen he fell in love with her at first sight, and after some very happy months in which he enjoyed being around her but did not tell her that he loved her, in February 1825 he heard from her mother, for him

VI

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

completely unexpectedly, that Catherine was betrothed to William Barlow. It took him almost seven years to come to terms with his feelings of loss. Thereafter he was clearly in distress about Catherine three times: in 1830 after having met her, in 1848 after having corresponded with her, and shortly before her death in 1853 after having spoken with her twice. That seemed to suggest that he had always remained in love with Catherine, and had consequently unhappily married.

Yet in his letters and poems it can be read that around the time of Catherine’s marriage he had assumed that she wanted to marry Barlow. Noticing in 1830, and reading in 1848, how terribly unhappy Catherine was in her marriage was very diffi¬ cult for him, yet due to the social strictness in the Victorian era there was nothing he could do. But when Catherine finally told him, almost on her deathbed, that she also had loved him, that she had wanted to marry him but had been forced to marry Bar- low, that was devastating. Being in distress thereafter had nothing to do with his own marriage; it simply was very hard to hear that from the woman he once deeply loved, and who had been so unhappy that she now was dying before her time.

Having shown in my essay that Hamilton had a good marriage, it appeared to me that giving the above mentioned facts as arguments why his distress over Catherine had nothing to do with his own marriage might still not be completely convincing, and that became a second reason to write this sketch about Catherine’s life. What I hope to accomplish is that reading about what happened to her will make it more easy to see that distress about her fate would not only be restricted to Hamilton and his romantic contemporaries, but probably to most people who learn about it, espe¬ cially when imagining that that would happen to someone they love themselves.

Third, it is to show that although in the Victorian era the influence of mothers on especially their sons was publicly much less visible than that of their husbands, and generally only the warmth they gave to their sons as babies and small children seems to have been acknowledged, their influence was of course as strong as that of the fa¬ thers. Next to apparently having been a loving mother, as can be read in one of Ham¬ ilton’s poems, Catherine’s unhappiness seems to have had a hitherto unnoticed influ¬ ence on her eldest son James William Barlow (1826-1913). He was rebuked and for¬ bidden to preach because he stated that the doctrine of eternal punishment did not come from the Bible, and that it drove many people away from the Church; an idea which can be connected directly to his mother’s suicide attempt and her having lost her faith in her last years. It has been contemplated how James Barlow came to his extreme ideas, but no one linked it to his mother’s utter unhappiness, as if that could not be a motivation for such a learned man to live his life the way he did. To show his mother’s influence on him, also his life and that of his daughter Jane Barlow (1856- 1917), a once very famous Irish writer, will be briefly discussed.

Of Catherine’s sad and unhappy story anyone can be a judge. Human suffering is known to everyone, regardless of country, culture, religion or beliefs. That made it seem justifiable to extrapolate from the scarce known facts about Catherine even though she may have seen things differently; ascribing feelings to her most people can relate to was a way to visualize how hard it must have been for her. But also parts of James Barlow’s motives and thoughts have been filled in although that is not in any way backed by sources. It was chosen to do so for the sake of the story, and to avoid many mights and may haves while investigating how his mother’s story may have in¬ fluenced his theological ideas.

Preface

vii

About Jane Barlow much more is known, and although the story other life cannot be told without taking into account the political and social circumstances of Ireland then, that has, nevertheless, been left out because my goal was not to write a sketch about her life, but to show that in what has been written about her Catherine’s influence is missing. Having been completely absent in the descriptions of her son and granddaughter diminished Catherine to how she is mostly seen: a romantic ideal, someone’s lost love, a clergyman’s invisible wife.

The use of tragic stories in times of omnipresent death

In the first half of the Victorian era there was a high mortality rate because of a lack of understanding about hygiene, and antibiotics did not exist yet. Sorrow was such a frequent occurrence that the people then appear to have almost been used to it. This seems to be recognizable in a letter written by Hamilton, who then was only seven¬ teen and lived in Trim with his aunt Elizabeth and uncle James, 1 to ‘Cousin Arthur’, a first cousin once removed who lived in Dublin. The story is given here because it illustrates how, in those socially very strict times, the fact that women had to vow obedience to their husbands at the altar, and were not granted a divorce on the ground of not loving their partners, caused very much misery. In first instance Jenny, the story’s protagonist, reluctantly agreed to marry her suitor, but when she heard that she could have married the man she loved her marriage turned into a mental prison; she had to stay in that unhappy marriage for the rest of her life.

“Trim, November 12, 1822. Past eleven at night.

“Do you remember me sending you some crumbs of a bride-cake in a letter, a few months ago? I think you will be interested in the history of the bride, told partly from my own recollection, and partly from very good authority: Jenny Walker was a very pretty girl, our children’s maid some years ago. There never goes from this town a regiment with as many bachelors as came into it; one of the soldiers courted Jenny, and it seems she was equally in love with him. But her mother did not choose her to marry him, because he was a soldier, and because he was poor. She came to Aunt [Elizabeth] to request her to lock her up, or at least confine her to the house. Aunt refused to take charge of her, and parted with her. In time the regiment went, and Jenny heard no more of her lover. Early in this year there came another, and one of the soldiers, an Englishman, a serjeant, I will not say fell in love with her at first sight, but declared that moment, she shall be my wife. Accordingly he soon went to Mrs. Walker, and got her over completely to his interest. She came to Uncle [James] to request him to add his influence to hers, to get her daughter to marry this English¬ man, who (although she did not like his being a soldier) was of very good character, and had saved a great deal of money. Jenny was at last prevailed on, for she supposed the Scotchman had forgotten her. Unwillingly she consented. The soldier gave a ball, at which the officers were present. Huge bride-cakes were made, of which you got a crumb. A separate room was given them in the barrack, and everything done in the first style. They were married at eight o’clock by Mr. Butler [Vicar of Trim], and at ten she received a letter from the man she had really loved, saying that he had (I be¬ lieve by legacy) got a good deal of money, left the army and turned farmer, and would soon come to Trim to marry Jenny.

1 [Graves 1882, 122-123]. He lived with them during the largest part of his youth, see p. 25.

VIII

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

“She and her husband went to Dublin with the regiment, and are now there. She returned last week to see her friends, and paid a visit to Aunt. She told her that her husband was a dark, distant man.

“Have you ever read Mackenzie’s novel called Julia de Roubigne ?2 The facts that I have mentioned are very like the fictions of that novel. There is a great deal of romance in real life. Everyone that saw her last week remarked that, though she was dressed so well, she was not at all so handsome as she used to be; but this is easily accounted for, by those that know the history of the letter for it has probably been preying on her mind.”

In the Introduction to Julia de Roubigne Mackenzie gives his reason to admire such tales so much, “One advantage I drew from [writing, or arranging the writings of others], which the humane may hear with satisfaction; I often wandered from my own woe in tracing the tale of another’s affliction; and, at this moment, every sentence I write, I am but escaping a little farther from the pressure of sorrow.” When he was writing his letter also Hamilton had already experienced many deaths of relatives,3 and he once said that he could not write verses on the deaths of family members, being hindered by a “crushing sensation of disaster” whenever that happened. Being used to sorrow clearly did not make it any easier.4

But whether it was due to his youth, or indeed to being used to sorrow, or to having been used to the fact that women had hardly anything to say about their own lives, in his comment to Jenny’s story, next to feeling for her, Hamilton also sounds touched by the romance in it. He does not seem to have fully realized that Jenny’s life had become a misery, and it can be wondered whether he saw it differently when, many years later, he heard about Catherine’s forced and very unhappy marriage, and their own story came to resemble that of Jenny and the man she loved.

Given names and surnames

When writing the essay A Victorian marriage I was in doubt how to call Catherine Disney and William Hamilton. Calling her by her given name and him by his sur¬ name seemed to imply that he was taken more seriously than she was, or seen more as an independent person. But it appeared unavoidable; based on the custom that women’s surnames changed when they married, and the uneasy feeling I had when calling her Barlow, I decided I had to call her Catherine, the name she did have throughout her life. And as regards his name, using William for him was not an op¬ tion because also Barlow’s given name was William. I therefore called him Hamilton, as he called himself in his letters.

2 Mackenzie, H., Julia de Roubigne. In Mackenzie, H. (1819), The Miscellaneous Works of Henry Mackenzie, Esq. In Three Volumes, Vol III. Edinburgh: James Robertson and William Blair, archi ve.org/details/miscellaneouswor03mack.

3 Before writing this letter Hamilton’s parents Archibald Hamilton and Sarah Hutton had died already. Also three little children had died: his sister Sarah, his brother Archibald, and his cousin Kate, daughter of uncle James and aunt Elizabeth. And when Hamilton was only nine years old his aunt Sydney, sister of Hamilton’s father and uncle James, died of cancer. She had also lived in Trim, had written many proud letters about him to his mother when he was little, and had helped him learn Latin and Hebrew. She died in Dublin, having been taken care of by Hamilton’s parents. [Graves 1882, 26-27].

4 [Graves 1882, 26], [Graves 1889, 302]

Contents

Preface v

I Catherine’s early years 1

1 Introduction 3

1.1 A forced and unhappy marriage . 3

1.2 Unhappiness and history . 5

1.3 Biographies and letters . 6

1.4 Birth and death . 9

1.5 Descent and addresses . 12

2 The Disney family 19

2.1 Deaths of two brothers . 19

2.2 The death of Lambert Disney . 20

2.3 Summerhill and absent fathers . 23

2.4 A very happy but unfortunate meeting . 26

2.5 Fraternal love for a rare but fading beauty . 28

3 A shattered life 31

3.1 Happy youngsters and parental worries . 31

3.2 An elder suitor . 33

3.3 A Valentine poem . 35

3.4 A hastened marriage agreement . 38

II Catherine’s married life 41

4 A clergyman’s wife 43

4.1 A forced signature . 43

4.2 A son and a perpetual curacy . 46

4.3 Trying to make a life in Edenderry . 47

4.4 Upsetting visits . 50

4.5 A crushing refusal . 52

5 Children and bereavements 55

5.1 A growing family . 55

5.2 Life in Carlingford . 56

5.3 Deaths of two sons . 57

5.4 The comfort of nearby siblings . 61

5.5 An emptying house . 63

6 The end of the marriage 65

6.1 Visiting Dunsink Observatory . 65

6.2 A heavenly correspondence . 68

6.3 The suicide attempt . 70

6.4 Waking up again . 73

6.5 Staying with family . 74

7 The last years 77

7.1 Death of a third son . 77

7.2 Exchanging gifts . 79

7.3 Renewed contacts . 80

7.4 Parting interviews and death . 83

7.5 Carlingford’s haunted Rectory . 87

III Catherine’s posthumous influence 91

8 James William Barlow 93

8.1 Contact with Hamilton . 93

8.2 Heterodoxy . 95

8.3 The biography . 98

8.4 Alternative marriages in a doomed society . 100

8.5 Reputations and an original mind . 102

8.6 The Society for Psychical Research . 104

9 Jane Barlow 107

9.1 A very close or inward-turned family . 107

9.2 Delightful gems or exhausted knowledge . 113

9.3 Extremely shy or delicately strong . 115

9.4 Interpretations . 119

9.5 The great sleep . 121

Epilogue 127

Appendix 129

Bibliography 133

Part I

Catherine’s early years

Catherine Disney is known as the ‘lost love ’ of the famous nineteenth cen¬ tury Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton, yet hardly any¬ thing is known about herself. Her birth record was not found online but her marriage record was, as were newspaper articles about the births of most of her seven sons. Her burial record is also online; she died in Donnybrook in 1853, her age was given as fifty-three. And there appeared to exist a portrait of her, which is held in the Hamilton collection in Trinity College Library in Dublin, it is shown here on p. 29 and on the back cover.

In this part Catherine ’s life is described, as far as that was possible, from her birth until her marriage in 1825. Because her father placed many work- related advertisements in various newspapers it is known where during her youth his offices were, and although not entirely certain, there are reasons to assume that whenever possible he held office in the family residence. From Hamilton's correspondences it is known that Catherine and Hamilton met and fell in love with each other in 1824, when he still was a student at Trinity College Dublin. Catherine ’s family does not seem to have trusted Hamilton’s capabilities to take care of a family, and forced her to marry the reverend William Barlow. Catherine was never able to reconcile herself with the marriage, and Hamilton, who did not know about the coercion, needed almost seven years to cope with having lost her.

A scenario is suggested here for how Catherine ’s family may have come to their decision, and for the sake of visualizing what happened, thoughts and feelings have been ascribed to Catherine. Neither the scenario nor what she may have thought or felt is based on direct sources, yet everything imagined has strictly been kept within the boundaries of what is known about her.

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 A forced and unhappy marriage

It is generally acknowledged that the unhappiness of parents can profoundly influ¬ ence the lives of their children. This idea however often seems to have been lacking in historical descriptions, especially when the unhappiness was hidden, not expressing itself in openly visible ways such as violence or addiction. Unhappiness of parents thus influencing the children holds for instance for forced marriages, if partners can¬ not find their peace with them yet silently endure. Based on mostly indirect informa¬ tion, this sketch is about such a forced and unhappy marriage, in the protestant as¬ cendancy class of Regency and early Victorian Ireland.

Many marriages were arranged then; there were no health insurances or pensions, and therefore parents tried to marry their children into families with good reputa¬ tions, with enough money to acquire a good education for the children, and to secure a well-provided for old age. But while in case of arranged marriages both partners had a choice and agreed with the marriage, and many such marriages worked out well, forced marriages were of a very different order. Most often marriages seem to have been forced in cases of pregnancies out of wedlock, or when a family in financial trouble could be saved by such a marriage. But it also happened when a family felt that its honour was at stake, for instance when, after the families had come to an agreement, one of the partners had a change of heart and wanted to break off the en¬ gagement.

In case of silent sufferings, of the forced partner but perhaps in the long run also of the unloved one, these forced marriages often did not recognizably influence the lives of Victorian men. But for women they could have devastating consequences; at their weddings they had to vow obedience to their husbands while a divorce was hardly ever granted, and forced marriages could therefore turn into lifelong mental prisons. In 1825 Catherine Disney (1800-1853) was forced by her family to marry the reverend William Barlow (1792-1871) although she had fallen in love with the then Trinity College Dublin student and later famous mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865), a love which was mutual. She never found her peace with the marriage, and after having tried to commit suicide in 1848, weakened by the attempt

4

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

she died five years later. Catherine Disney’s role in Hamilton’s life has been discussed extensively, but her own life does not seem to have been described. This sketch is an attempt to do so, mainly based on the information given in Hamilton’s biographies, supplemented by newspaper articles and various scraps of information.

Hamilton’s first biographer Robert Perceval Graves published his biography, which consists of three volumes, in the 1880s, deep in the Victorian era, and conse¬ quently wrote about Catherine Disney in a very concealed way. In the descriptions of the years after Hamilton’s marriage Graves acknowledged, albeit very cautiously, Hamilton’s periodic distress about her, but at the same time gave much emphasis to the fact that his work was hardly influenced by it. Reading original letters and per¬ sonal notes written by Hamilton and kept in Trinity College Library, Thomas Leroy Hankins published a second biography in 1980. He had discovered that Catherine’s influence on Hamilton’s life had been much larger than Graves had indicated, and argued that his whole life Hamilton had only been in love with Catherine. This idea was challenged in 2015; in A Victorian Marriage : Sir William Rowan Hamilton , an essay based upon these two biographies, it was shown that the truth rather lies some¬ where between these two extremes. 1

Using the ideas put forward in that essay, in this biographical sketch it will be tried to look at what happened from Catherine Disney’s point of view. Thereafter it will be briefly discussed what influence Catherine’s unhappiness apparently had on her eldest son James William Barlow and her eldest granddaughter Jane Barlow, two in their times well-known Irish writers. James Barlow was Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin from 1860 until 1893, and Vice Provost from 1899 until 1908; Jane Barlow was a poet and novelist, writing mainly about peasant life in Ireland. 2 Because many members of Catherine’s large family play a role in this biographical sketch, and quite a few of them share the same names, an overview of the families involved is given in the Appendix.3

Motivation for interpreting Catherine Most parts of this sketch are factual; all mentioned events did happen, and almost all indications of Hamilton’s thoughts and feelings come directly from his letters,4 interpreted as discussed in the essay A Victorian Marriage. Yet about Catherine so little is known that to be able to paint a vivid picture of what happened to her scenarios have been added; one describing a screening of Hamilton’s family by the Disneys, and others for what may have hap¬ pened during Catherine’s 1845 visit to the observatory, in Carlingford around her suicide attempt in 1848, and at her son’s wedding in 1853. Yet they were extrapolated from Hamilton’s observations, and have strictly been kept within the boundaries of what has been written about Catherine.

For the sake of visualizing what happened to her also feelings and thoughts have been ascribed to Catherine, again within the boundaries of what is known. It will mostly but not always be indicated when that is done without proof that that really was her opinion; that holds especially for the chapters 4 to 7, and it will again be stressed at the beginning of Part II.

1 [Graves 1885, 692], [Hankins 1980, 358], [Van Weerden 2017]

2 For James and Jane Barlow’s work see footnote 17 on p. 97, and footnote 18 on p. 113.

3 The Appendix can be found on p. 129.

4 What is added are feelings of betrayal, see p. 84. It seems obvious that Hamilton will have had such feelings, but they have not been mentioned in the biographies.

Introduction

5

1.2 Unhappiness and history

As regards the influence Catherine’s unhappiness had on her son and granddaughter, and through them on history, it can be contemplated how things could have been if she had not been forced into a marriage which made her so terribly unhappy. Of course, what would have happened if she had been allowed to marry Hamilton is too complex to fantasize about because it would include for instance different children, making this family story non-existent. But it can be imagined that if she had never met Hamilton she would have married Barlow willingly. If it then also is imagined that they would have had the same children and grandchildren, not only Catherine’s life, but also their lives would most likely have been very different.

Catherine’s eldest son James Barlow was seen as having had an “interesting and original mind” 5 and perhaps, if he had not been so preoccupied with “the nature of life after death and the possibility of evaluating human happiness and misery,” which with hardly any doubt had to do with his mother’s terrible fate, he would not have been rebuked for heterodoxy6 and might have become Provost instead of Vice Provost. He then probably would have used his originality to steer Trinity College in a different way, for better or worse, than it went now.

In her Obituary in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research it was written about Jane Barlow, “In the recent death of Miss Jane Barlow the Society has lost an early, a very gifted and valued member. [ . . . ] Slight in appearance with large and deep-set eyes she looked as if the flame of genius and thought had almost burnt out her physical frame, so frail was she.” If her father would have been a valued clergyman and perhaps Provost, she might have defended herself much more than she did and mingle much more in the literary circles, and she perhaps would have been able to put her mark on Irish literature so firmly that no one would even have thought about excluding her from anthologies of Irish literature. 7

But the story of this family line ends with her; as far as is known James and Mary Barlow did not have grandchildren, and there thus are no direct descendants. And therefore no one to remember and to judge the specific suppositions made in this sketch about Catherine’s long lasting influence on her son and granddaughter. Still, Catherine had other children, and descendants who have not been discussed here; perhaps they do have memories or family stories. And she of course profoundly influ¬ enced Hamilton, who through his fame in turn influenced very many people; Cather¬ ine’s forced marriage thus was in any case not an isolated personal problem, as many people writing about Hamilton seem to have regarded it.

This story is therefore also a plea. In many places in the world the difference in roles between men and women, or perhaps rather in esteem, is slowly disappearing, but unfortunately earlier conceptions are still recognizable. Although much research is now done on women who would have been famous had they lived now, what still seems to be necessary is to scrutinize the stories of earlier times and see whether or not the roles played by less conspicuous women were described truthfully, or given the importance they should have had. No one enters this world as an adult, everyone

5 See p. 103.

6 See p. 97, p. 96.

7 See p. 115. Jane Barlow’s obituary can be found on pp. 49-51 of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, archive.org/details/journalofsocietyl8soci.

6

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

has some family history, good or bad, but including both men and women. These family histories always have an influence, and especially when it concerns people in power or people who did remarkable things in any place at any time, these influences extend to the history of humankind in general.

1.3 Biographies and letters

Hamilton’s biographies In both Graves’ and Hankins’ biographies it has been described how in August 1824 Hamilton, just having turned nineteen, fell head over heels in love with Catherine Disney. Hamilton did not know that, at some unknown time, she was betrothed,8 until in February 1825 Catherine’s mother told him, for him completely unexpectedly, that Catherine was going to marry in May. 9 He found that very difficult and it took him almost seven years to come to terms with his loss.

The deviation in A Victorian Marriage from the biography by Hankins, who had concluded that Hamilton had always and only loved Catherine, starts with taking Hamilton literally when he compared falling in love and being rejected by Ellen de Vere in December 1831 with falling in love and losing Catherine. Having visited Catherine in 1830 and having seen, for the first time, her unhappiness, he had be¬ come very distressed, and Lady Campbell had comforted him. After Ellen de Vere’s rejection having had some very difficult months, in August 1832 he wrote to Lady Campbell, “Since that time when your affectionate sympathy first manifested itself towards me, I have had another affliction of the same kind and indeed of the same degree, except that my mind had been a little better disciplined to receive it.” 10 This letter was written shortly after Hamilton had realized that he had lived a “passion- wasted” life, which led to an important psychological discovery.* 11 Acknowl¬ edging his subsequent psychological change led to the most important deviation in A Victorian Marriage from the biography by Graves who wrote that, having been re¬ jected by Ellen de Vere, Hamilton started to have “tenderer and warmer feelings” for Helen Bayly after he “had felt obliged to suppress his former passion,” 12 therewith vaguely suggesting that Helen Bayly was not a first choice. Yet Hamilton did not suppress his feelings; after the difficult months in the spring of 1832, in the following summer he started to understand why he could be so lastingly unhappy, and then discovered how to handle himself. He remained to use this discovery through the years, 13 and although he could be very distressed and unhappy when someone close to him was unwell, he was never again so melancholic for such long periods of time.

8 Graves nor Hankins mentions when the family betrothed Catherine to Barlow, therefore in this biographical sketch the scenario is adopted which seems to be the best fit to the known details.

9 See p. 39.

10 See p. 51, [Van Weerden 2017, 117]

1 1 This remarkable discovery, where it came from and what its long lasting positive consequences were, has been described in [Van Weerden 2017]. Ellen de Vere’s brother Aubrey, who had become Hamilton’s friend, does not seem to have recognized the importance of this discovery; the poetic bachelor he was he very much appreciated their reminiscences about “beautiful Visions” of the past, as Hamilton had called seeing Catherine for the first time [Van Weerden 2017, 313]. Also Graves did not recognize the importance of the discovery; he saw Hamilton as a “simple, zealous, great man” [Graves 1885, 286], [Van Weerden 2017, 498-499], somehow not crediting him with deep feelings or useful contemplations about his own emotions. [Van Weerden 2017, 192-194, 200-202],

12 [Graves 1885, 2]

13 [Van Weerden 2017, 272]

Introduction

7

After this psychological change having felt as if his “health of mind and even of body were greatly improved,” as he wrote to his friend Aubrey de Vere, in October 1832 Hamilton discovered conical refraction for which he would be knighted, and fell in love with Helen Bayly. In November he asked her to marry him. They married in April 1833, and according to Hankins Hamilton never regretted having married her, while according to Graves Hamilton “remained to the end of his life an attached husband.” 14 In 1879 De Vere wrote to Graves, who then was preparing the bio¬ graphy, “[In 1837] Hamilton’s affection for his wife had not waned. Indeed I do not know that it ever did.” This letter having been written after Hamilton’s death, it sub¬ stantiates the conclusion that the Hamilton marriage was a good one. 15

Meeting Catherine and writing letters In A Victorian Marriage it was also argued that Hamilton did not know that Catherine was forced to marry Barlow, 16 and that only slowly, by bits and pieces over the course of many years, he learned what exactly had happened with Catherine. After Hamilton had heard about her engagement he had not seen her any more; they only saw each other during two visits in 1830 and one in 1845, they corresponded during six weeks in the summer of 1848, and shortly before Catherine’s death in November 1853 they had two ‘parting inter¬ views’ as Graves called them.1'

As can be read in a poem Hamilton wrote after he visited Catherine in 1830, that was indeed the first time he noticed that something was wrong with her. 18 About the 1845 visit nothing further is known; Hamilton only mentioned this visit in letters to brothers of Catherine. During the 1848 correspondence Catherine apparently told him that her marriage had been unhappy from the start, but only during the parting interviews shortly before her death in November 1853 she could finally tell him that she had also loved him and had wanted to marry him, but that she had been forced by her family to marry Barlow. 19 Both in 1830 and 1848 having learned about Cather¬ ine’s unhappiness Hamilton became very distressed, and it must have been difficult for him that there was nothing he could do for her; as a deeply religious man he had a reverence for marriage, both for hers and for his own. But in the parting interviews hearing that her marriage had been forced upon her was devastating, as it would be for most people who lost a first love without having known why.

In those times it was utterly forbidden for a married man to talk about such feel¬ ings, but after Catherine’s death in 1853 Hamilton was able to relieve his stress by

14 [Hankins 1980, 126], [Graves 1885, 335]

15 For how and why over the years subsequent writers concluded from Graves’ biography, or from each other, that Hamilton had a bad marriage, that it had been fated from the start or even fell apart, see [Van Weerden and Wepster 2018]. De Vere’s letter is part of a collection of letters written by him to Graves, mainly regarding Hamilton, which is held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, library.nd.edu. See Irish Studies Resources for Graduate Research, Aubrey de Vere Letters to Robert Perceval Graves, Collection No. MSE/IR 1040.

16 [Van Weerden 2017, 274-275]. Hamilton thought that Catherine had happily married Barlow, see p. 28.

17 [Graves 1882, 185], [Graves 1885, 691]. On the latter page it can also be read how extremely cautious Graves was about revealing how these parting interviews came about, especially when com¬ pared with Hankins’ description.

18 See p. 6 and the poem on p. 51.

19 [Van Weerden 2017, 303]

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

writing very many letters about her, yet without revealing her identity, to many peo¬ ple he judged to be discrete.20 Among the people Hamilton corresponded with about Catherine were his then new friends Mr. and Mrs. Hassell, whom he had learned to know during a meeting in Hull in the summer of 1853. 21 Hamilton ended his corre¬ spondence with the Hassels writing, “The Ancient Mariner of Coleridge is described as being under the impulse of a spell, which constrained him to talk his tale to some selected persons, & obliged them to listen. “I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; ...” But even the Ancient Mariner at last released the Wedding Guest; and it is time for me now to release you & Mrs Hassell from the po¬ sition of listeners to my own story.” 22 Having been able to express himself like that, and having found enough friends to correspond with, writing all these letters may have been Hamilton’s salvation and that of his marriage; it apparently greatly helped him to come to terms with his feelings. After some months he regained his balance, and the outpouring of letters diminished.

Hamilton had been distressed after hearing about Catherine’s betrothal in Febru¬ ary 1825, after the 1830 visits, during the six-week correspondence in 1848, and after her death in November 1853, and that seemed to suggest that during his entire life he had only loved Catherine. In the meantime however he lived quite a normal daily life as a very hard working mathematician with many social duties, who loved his fam¬ ily and always tried to remain humble despite all the praise he received through his exceptional intellect.

Information from Hamilton’s letters Having been triggered to dwell on mem¬ ories by reading letters which were left to him by his in 1851 deceased sister Eliza, in 1855 Hamilton entered into an intense correspondence with De Vere which lasted from July until October; most of what is known today about Catherine and her very unhappy marriage comes from this correspondence. 23 In these letters Hamilton “un¬ burdened himself” about Catherine, as Hankins called it, and therefore the letters are different from, and more informative than, the many letters Hamilton wrote to

20 [Hankins 1980, 353]. Apparently next to the Disneys only Lady Campbell knew that it con¬ cerned Catherine Disney, see [Hankins 1980, 354]. Discretion was indeed very important because of Hamilton’s fame; he was so widely known that he could not risk their story or her identity to become public, it would have ruined the reputations of many people. Also the Dublin gossip, see [Van Weerden and Wepster 2018], had to do with Hamilton’s fame: many people will have found it interesting to talk about him because of it, while not many people really knew him. His sense of hu¬ mour did not help either; when he once was asked what he was thinking about he answered that he was trying to multiply the North-East by the South-West. Not everyone will have understood the joke. [Van Weerden 2017, 224].

21 According to Hankins Hamilton had asked whether he could be allowed to correspond with Mrs. Hassell. Her husband “thought his wife too sensitive to bear the burden of such confidence,” but he had invited Hamilton to write to him instead. [Hankins 1980, 353].

22 [Ishikura 2008, 69]. In this 2008 article Waka Ishikura describes the influence on Hamilton of the famous romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and their meetings in 1832. The story in her article about the Lawrence sisters, not mentioned in this sketch, is based on an unfortunate error Graves had made in the biography; he had assumed that Hamilton had befriended the eldest sister, Sarah Lawrence, who was a friend of Coleridge. But Hamilton’s friend was her younger sister Arabella Lawrence, see [Van Weerden 2017, 58 footnote 21]. For the 1834 text of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Coleridge see The Poetry Foundation , poetryfoundat ion.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834.

23 Unfortunately, not much more than the parts of the letters given by Hankins and Graves are publicly available.

Introduction

9

many people shortly after Catherine’s death. For instance, the fact that Catherine was forced to marry, that she “pleaded desperately against the marriage,” but that her father had an “iron will” and she was “led as a victim to the altar,” would not have been known if it had not been for this correspondence. 24

Yet also the letters Hamilton wrote shortly after Catherine’s death contain cru¬ cial information. In December 1853 Hamilton wrote to the Hassells,25 “The marriage of the lady, to whom this letter relates, was a constrained one, & from the very first (as I long afterwards came to know) was not a happy union: yet during a long course of years she contrived (as I have heard and believe) to discharge, with the most exem¬ plary propriety, all duties of a wife, a mother, & a Christian: and was, to the last, the idol of her own family, & a cherished favourite with all her acquaintances. At length her health of body, & (in some degree) of mind, broke down.” The remark that he “long afterwards came to know” that the marriage was “from the very first [ . . . ] not a happy union” is in complete accord with the earlier statements that Hamilton had not known about the coercion around the time of Catherine’s wedding, and that he learned how very unhappy Catherine was during their six- week correspondence in 1848; he obviously had not heard that ‘only recently’ during their parting interviews.

And there are pieces of information in other correspondences from Hamilton. Shortly after her last 1848 letter Catherine tried to commit suicide, and according to Hankins, thereafter she “lived almost constantly with her mother or with her sisters and brothers.” It can, unfortunately, not be deduced therefrom whether or not in the last five years of her life she also lived with Barlow even if it was only for short periods, or how often she saw him or spoke with him. But in 1855 Hamilton wrote to a friend that in one of the parting interviews Catherine had “confided to [him] that she looked forward with terror to the bare possibility of her recovering health enough to make it necessary for her to live with [Barlow] again.” Next to this having been the most clear expression of her very negative feelings for Barlow, it also suggests, al¬ though some uncertainty remains, that she had not returned to him any more. 26

1.4 Birth and death

Catherine Disney was born as one of the six daughters and eight sons of Thomas Disney (1766-1851) and Anne Eliza Purdon (ca 1765-1858). At the time of writing of this sketch her baptism record, if it exists in the Dublin records, has not appeared on¬ line yet, making both the place and the date of her birth uncertain. It has generally been assumed that Catherine Disney was born in 1806. However, it is known from newspaper articles that she died on the 3rd of November 1853, 27 according to Graves while she was “staying in the house of a brother near Dublin,” and from Hankins’ biography it is known that this was Robert Anthony who lived in Donnybrook. 28 The

24 For Thomas Disney’s ‘iron will’ see p. 39.

25 [Ishikura 2008, 68]. As an illustration of Hamilton’s romanticism, Ishikura writes that after Catherine’s death Hamilton “began narrating the story of his love for Catherine as a romantic tale,” and quotes from this letter, which is not mentioned by either Hankins or Graves.

26 [Hankins 1980, 350], p. 84.

27 Genes Reunited : Search British Newspaper Archive (hereafter Genes Reunited : SBNA), genes reunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: William Barlow rector Creggan, years: 1853-1853.

28 [Graves 1885, 691], [Hankins 1980, 351].

10

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

burial record of a Catherine Barlow who died in Donnybrook and was buried on the 7th of November 1853 will thus with hardly any doubt be that of Catherine Disney, and it gives her age at the time of her death as fifty-three.

[Page /<? ]

BURIALS in tho Parish of i/ - - - - -

1 S -C " • ^ ' . ,Ji V* j 1? 9

in the County of U ^ Fi (hc Year$lW* 'l'~ 10* d

1	Kur.o.	Ab«U.		A.-..	13v wbow Ibo Ceremony * waM-erfcrmoJ.
1	ur/.'tt >r rr* /.Iff i 1 n No. A'7'		"fj \r> /: >		A '‘“ ‘A . rL.Cj'C-

Figure 1.1: Catherine Disney’s burial record on Irish genealogy, ie : Church Records , church records. irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/display-pdf.jsp?pdfName=d-3-126-5-154. It is not known why she was buried at St. Werburgh, but also three sons who had died young, see the Appendix on p. 129, were buried there. She may have wanted to be buried close to them.

Another reason to assume that Catherine was not born in 1806, therewith making it very likely that her age as given in the record is indeed correct, is that it can be deduced from a combination of sources that her brother Henry Purdon was born in the summer of 1806. 29 Catherine’s age in the burial record having been given as fifty-three means that she was born in 1799 or 1800, and since it is known from the headstone of her brother Thomas’ grave at Mount Jerome Cemetery that he was born on the 22nd of February 1799, it is possible but highly unlikely that she was born in the same year. It will therefore be assumed here that Catherine was born in 1800, and that she thus was five years older than Hamilton.30

29 According to [Leslie 1911, 320, 338] Henry was the sixth son, and Janies the seventh. In the [Alumni Dubl., 231] it can be seen that when on the 1st of July 1822 Henry entered Trinity College Dublin he was fifteen, which means that he was born in 1806 or 1807. His brother James was sixteen when he entered on the 7th of July 1823, he therefore was also born in 1806 or 1807. Henry thus must have turned sixteen very soon after entrance, while at his entrance James had just turned sixteen; if Henry was born in July 1806 and James in June 1807, that would make their age difference eleven months, which is on the verge of what is possible in case of full term pregnancies. But it would be in accord with the birth on the 26th of July 1808 of Thomas and Anne Disney’s eighth son Lambert, of whom there is a baptism record, making him one of the only two Disney children whose birth date is certain. See Irish genealogy. ie : Church Records , churchrecords.irishgenealog y.ie/churchrecords/display-pdf.jsp?pdfName=d-244-l-2-001. Another reason to accept Catherine’s age as given in the record is that 1800 would give a far more logical sequence of birth years for the Disney children than 1806. For the Disneys having had six daughters and eight sons see p. 20, for the list of children see the Appendix on p. 129.

30 See for a transcription of the headstone Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives : Dublin Head¬ stones : Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin, Part 68, No. 10112. igp-web.com/IGPArchives/ire/du blin/photos/tombstones/lheadstones/mt-j erome68.txt [accessed 17 May 2017]. Thomas Disney’s brother Robert did have two sons in the same year; Robert was born in January and Patience Ogle in December 1806, a time difference of eleven months. But even if Catherine would have been born late in December there would only have been ten months between her birth and that of Thomas.

Introduction

11

Although it is not known with complete certainty where Catherine was born, up to the street it is known where she died because less than two years after her death in November 1853, on the 14th of February 1855, Robert Anthony’s wife Caroline died. Having given birth to a still-born son on the 1st of February,31 she died of influenza,32 only forty- four years old. In her burial record it is mentioned that she had lived at Seafield Terrace in Donnybrook; in a family notice in the Cork Examiner her death day is given, and her address as Sea-view Terrace.

Figure 1.2: Seaview Terrace no. 5, from a 2014 Google Maps street view recording. A car in front of the house was erased to make it more easy to imagine that Catherine lived there. If this is indeed the house where she died, it was here that she could finally tell Hamilton that she had loved him, and had wanted to marry him. After having been notified of Catherine’s death Hamilton again came to the house. He was not invited in yet saw “the upper right hand shutters open but the light was soon afterwards concealed.” [Hankins 1980, 352].

31 Caroline Disney was Catherine’s first cousin and sister-in-law. See for the birth of her son and her death Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Robert Disney, years: 1855-1855, type: familynotice. For the house presumably having been no. 5 see p. 12.

32 She had lived in Donnybrook but was buried in Dublin, in the parish of St. Mark. Rather unusually, the burial records of that parish in those years also give the causes of death such as influenza, scarlatina, convulsion, fever, asthma, head complaint, insanity, decline, old age. Irish ge¬ nealogy. ie : Church Records, churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/display-pd-30-4-4-041.

12

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

The six houses of Seafield Terrace, or Seaview Terrace as it is called now, still exist. 33 It is not known exactly in which house the Disneys lived, yet Caroline Disney died in February 1855, and in June 1855 the Victorian writer Anthony Trollope came to live at number 5, 34 which makes it quite possible that that had been the Disneys’ house. Robert Anthony was a solicitor working in Dublin, 35 and having to take care of his very young children, he may have moved his family back to Dublin; for instance his eldest sister Jane, who had married John Barlow, lived in Dublin, in Raheny. 36

1.5 Descent and addresses

Descent Catherine’s mother, Anne Eliza Purdon (ca 1765-1858), was a daughter of William John Purdon (1740-1793) and Jane Coote (1742- ..). She had a brother Simon who was born in 1767; in the Dictionary of the Landed Gentry it is stated that Simon was an only son, Anne is not mentioned. 37 In The Gentleman’s and London Magazine of July 1791 it is written that Thomas Disney, “third son of the late Dr. Brabazon Disney,” married “Miss Ann Purdon, only daughter of Wm. John Purdon of Ely Place, Esq.;” 38 William and Jane Purdon thus had one son and one daughter. Anne Purdon’s parents married in Dublin in 1764, 39 and her brother Simon having been born in 1767 it is assumed here that Anne was born around 1765.

Anne Purdon came from rich and high-classed families; the Dictionary of the Landed Gentry mentions that the Purdon family was an “ancient family, [ . . . ] pos¬ sessed of considerable property in the co. Clare.” 40 According to the Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage , Anne’s mother Jane Coote was a daughter of Robert Coote, Esq. of Ash Hill, Co. Limerick, and on the website Landed Estates Database it

33 In Thom’s historical maps on Griffith’s Valuation - Ask About Ireland , the street is called Sea View Terrace. See askaboutireland.ie/griffith- valuation, Griffith’s Places, Seaview Terrace, Dublin, Rathdown. On the historical map it is east-south-east of Donnybrook, to the right of Mount Enroll, on the modern map it is a non-indicated part of Nut ley Road. In the historical map it can be seen that Sea View Terrace consisted of six houses. It was also called Seaview Terrace as can be seen in a web article by Downdall, D. Seaview Terrace Donnybrook : A Georgian Oasis, historyeye.ie/sea view-terrace [accessed 27 May 2018], or Seafield-terrace as was written in an 1879 report by Dr. William Frazer who had found a sepulchral mound. In his report Frazer mentioned that the field, which then was called Mount Erroll, was “on the plot of ground that immediately adjoins the row of houses on Seafield-terrace,” see p. 30 of Description of a great sepulchral mound at Aylesbury-road, near Donnybrook, in the county of Dublin, containing human and animal remains, as well as some objects of antiquarian interest, referable to the tenth or eleventh centuries. However, in the map on p. 32 it is again written as Sea View Terrace, archive.org/details/b2230759x. It was discovered in 1978 that his find contained a Viking sword.

34 See p. 294 note 65 of Shrimpton, N. (ed) (2014), Anthony Trollope : An Autobiography and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, books. google. com/books?id=a_5-BAAAQBAJ.

35 From 1851 until 1858 Robert Anthony is mentioned as working from 43 Dame street in Dublin, see Genes Reunited : SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Disney 43 dame, county: Dublin, years: 1850-1860.

36 See p. 61. Robert Anthony later left for England with his family and lived in Cheshire, there¬ after in Cheltenham, ukcensusonline.com.

37 [Burke 1852, vol 2, 1084]

38 See p. 392 of The Gentleman’s and London Magazine for 1791. books. google. com/books?id= LPORA A A AYA A J .

39 For the year of this marriage see Irish genealogy. ie : Church Records , churchrecords.irishgene alogy.ie/churchrecords/display-pdf.isp?pdfName=prsll-anne-16.

40 [Burke 1852, vol 2, 1084]

Introduction

13

can be read that this family was “descended from a younger brother [Chidley Coote] of Sir Charles Coote, Earl of Mountrath. In 1666 Chidley Coote was granted almost 3,000 acres in counties Limerick and Kerry. The Cootes of Ash Hill married members of the Evans (Lord Carbery), Purdon and Carr families.”41

Also Catherine’s father Thomas Disney had, from both sides, a rich and high- class background. His mother, Patience Ogle (1730- after 1798), was from her moth¬ er’s side of the Meade family, and around the 1800s the ‘Meade Ogles’ formed a “dy¬ nasty of wealthy merchants who dominated the representation of Drogheda.” 42 That had started already before 1700; Patience Ogle’s father and grandfather, both called Henry Ogle,43 had been sheriff and mayor of Drogheda, Co. Louth.44 According to the Armagh Clergy and Parishes Patience’s brother John left the Disney couple a house in Drogheda, and from a nephew, William Ogle, they bought a house; both houses were hers after her husband’s death.45 In 1773 she also inherited, from her brother John, a sum of £5000, an in those days very large amount of money. 46

According to the Clerical and Parochial Records of Cork , Cloyne, and Ross and the Dictionary of the Landed Gentry , the Disneys descended from the De Isney or D’Eisney family, which had come to Lincolnshire, England, with William the Conqueror in 1066. 47 Thomas’ father Brabazon Disney (1711-1790) was born in Co. Louth, became a Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in 1736, Professor of Laws in 1747, Archbishop King’s Lecturer in 1754, Professor of Divinity in 1759, and was Chancel¬ lor of Armagh. Brabazon Disney and Patience Ogle married in 1761, and they had five sons of whom Thomas was the third. The two eldest sons and the fourth son, Wil¬ liam, Brabazon and Robert Disney, attended Trinity College Dublin, Thomas and his youngest brother Edward did not.

When Brabazon Disney died in 1790 48 he left his family very well provided for. To his wife Patience he left “£300 per annum (in addition to £200 under marriage settlements),” 49 “£8000 to four younger sons,” 50 he had “bought a Commission for

41 [Burke 1869, 261]. Landed Estates Database, landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/ estate-show .jsp?id=2417 [accessed 22 Jan 2018].

42 See Smythe, William Meade (1786-1866), on The History of Parliament, historyofparliamenton line.org/volume/1820-1832/member/smythe-william-1786-1866 [accessed 11 Dec 2018].

43 See the Ogle Research Group , oglekin.org/Ahnentafel/Chart-uk/BOB-Pedl2.htm [accessed 11 Dec 2018].

44 See D’Alton, J. (1844), The History of Drogheda, with its Environs, volume 1. Dublin: Pub¬ lished by the Author, archive. org/details/historydroghedaOOdalgoog.

45 [Leslie 1911, p. 40]

46 See pp. 276-279 of Ogle, H.A. (1902), Ogle and Bothal: A History of the Baronies of Ogle, Bothal, and Hepple, and of the Families of Ogle and Bertram. Printed privately, onlinebooks.libr ary.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=olbp68310 [accessed 10 Sept 2018]. A sum of £5000 in 1773 was a very large sum of money indeed: according to the website Measuring Worth, measuring worth.com, in 2016 a sum of £5000 in 1773 treated as wealth would have an economic status value of £9,101,000, or an economic power value of £67,820,000.

47 [Brady 1864, vol 2, 71], [Burke 1852, vol 1, 334-335]. On the Geni website the lineage can be followed from Catherine, geni.com/people/Catherine-Disney/6000000083354634924, up to her fore¬ father Lambert De Isney, geni.com/people/Lambert-De-Isney-of-Norton-Disney/60000000221867 16337 [all pages accessed 11 Dec 2018]. According to Burke this “Lambert De Isney” was “the first mentioned in the records of this kingdom” and the “ancestor of the Disneys of Norton D’ Isney,” which was “in the wapentake of Boothby Graffoe, and part of Kesteven.”

48 [Alumni Dubl., p. 231]

49 According to the website Measuring Worth in 2016 a sum of £500 in 1790 treated as wealth would have an economic status value of £799,000, or an economic power value of £5,051,000.

50 William was not explicitly mentioned as a beneficiary, yet it can be assumed that as the eldest

14

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

his son Thomas, and apprenticed Edward to John Patrick, merchant, also bought lands of Galtrim, Boycetown and Mitchelstown in Meath, and had obtained a living for his son Brabazon, etc.” 51

Addresses In his younger years Thomas Disney was in the military; his father had, as mentioned, bought a commission for him. In 1791 he married, according to a short wedding announcement in The Lady’s Magazine, as an “esquire of the 5th regiment of foot,” an infantry regiment of the British Army, “miss Ann Purdon, of Ely place.” 52 It is not known where they lived in the first years of their marriage; they may have lived at Anne’s family home at Ely Place,53 or perhaps with Thomas’ mother who then also lived in Dublin. 54

The first year for which an address of the Disneys was found is 1797, when they already had four children; newspaper articles mentioning Thomas Disney appeared after the death of his youngest brother Edward. In the November and December editions of Saunders ’s News-Letter it can be read about the “late merchant Edward Ogle Disney of Abbey-street,” 55 that “such persons as having demands against Dis¬ ney are desired to furnish their accruals at the office on no. 49 of said street,” while “persons who were indebted the said Disney are requested to pay the amount of their accounts to Thomas Disney Esq. of the Royal Hospital, who is authorized to give dis¬ charges for the same.” In those days the Royal Hospital of Kilmainham at the Road from Inchicore was a home for aged and maimed soldiers, and Thomas Disney was “Auditor and Registrar” at the Hospital as can be read in newspaper articles between 1797 and 1805. 56

Through various sources it can be seen that the Disney family actually lived at the Hospital: in some newspaper articles published between 1802 and 1805 there is

son he inherited the rest of the legacy.

51 [Leslie 1911, p. 40]. Leslie mentions that the eldest son, William, was still “under 21,” which will have referred to the year in which the will was made, 1777, not to the year of the proving of the will, 1793; William was in his early thirties then. According to the Oxford Dictionaries , oxford dictionaries.com, a ‘commission’ is a warrant conferring the rank of officer in an army, navy, or air force. Buying a commission was common usage in those days; they could be bought, sold or earned, as a whole or partially. Also according to the Oxford Dictionaries , a ‘living’ is a position as a vicar or rector with an income or property.

52 See p. 447 of The Lady’s Magazine : or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropri¬ ated solely to their Use and Amusement , Vol. XXII for the Year 1791. babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=hvd.hw291s. For the history of the fifth regiment of foot see Cannon, R. (1838), Historical records of the British Army. The Fifth Regiment of Foot; or, Northumberland Fusiliers. London: Printed by William Clowen and Sons, archive.org/details/ci hm_48494.

53 Ely Place is in Dublin, some blocks south of Trinity College. In 1794, a year after their father’s death, Simon Purdon sold 6 Ely Place, which thus will have been their parental home. See Genes Reunited : SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Purdon Ely, years: 1793-1794.

54 The year before his marriage Thomas’ father had died in Dublin, see note 1 on p. 131.

55 As mentioned, Thomas’ youngest brother Edward had been apprenticed to the merchant John Patrick, and combined with his second given name, Ogle, there is hardly any doubt that this is indeed Thomas’ brother. There is a burial record online of a Disney of Abbey Street who was buried on the 12th of November 1797, but during the writing of this sketch the record had not been scanned yet. churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords. Keywords: Disney Abbey street.

56 Genes Reunited : SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Thomas Disney or Thomas Difney, county: Dublin, years: 1797-1805. According to the Oxford Dictionaries an audit is an official inspection of an organization’s accounts, and a registrar is an official responsible for keep¬ ing lists of names or items, or official records.

Introduction

15

mention of “the Register’s apartments at the Hospital,” 57 and in the web article An afternoon in Ireland’s grandest classical building, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham 58 it is mentioned that next to the soldiers, also the staff resided at the Hospital, “The Governor of the Royal Hospital was usually a distinguished general, and the [staff] included a master, deputy-master, chaplain, secretary, registrar, pay-master, physi¬ cian, surgeon, assistant-surgeon, apothecary, reader, providore, chamberlain, butler, and fueler, who had apartments in the house.” Therefore, assuming that Catherine was indeed born in 1800, she will have been born in the Royal Hospital.

Figure 1.3: The Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, looked at from the north-north-east, where now the gardens are. This drawing is reproduced from p. 217 of the Dublin Penny Journal, Vol. IV, 9 January 1836, No. 184. babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp. 33433081677647. The hospital was built between 1680 and 1684, see dublincity.ie/image/libraries/dgl7b-roy al-hospital-kilmainham. Catherine will have been born at the side of the hospital which can be seen in this drawing because the staff, amongst whom the registrar, had their apartments in the north wing, see footnote 58 on this page. Or she may have been born in the Lying-in Hospital, now called the Rotunda Hospital, which was founded in 1745 and moved to its present location in 1757. grassrootsgaa.ie/rotunda-pdfs/chronological_History_of_The_Ro tunda_Hospital.pdf [all websites accessed 17 March 2018]. However, most babies seem to have been born at home under guidance of an accoucheur, as in case of both Hamilton and his three children. [Van Weerden 2017, 223].

5' Genes reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: regifter apartments Disney, county: Dublin, years: 1802-1805.

58 A 2014 blog post by Patrick Comerford, patrickcomerford.com/2014/07/an-afternoon-in-irelan ds-grandest.html [accessed 13 March 2018].

16

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

From around 1800 Thomas Disney’s whereabouts are rather easy to trace be¬ cause due to the nature of his work he placed many advertisements, articles and no¬ tices in the newspapers. It can be seen therefrom that next to working for the hospital he became an estate agent; in 1802 he was, for instance, looking for a game-keeper, “a person who has been a soldier will be preferred,” and in 1804 he was managing prop¬ erty of the Earl of Darnley. 59

At some time between April 1805 and January 1806 Thomas Disney seems to have become a full time estate agent.60 He moved his offices to 31 Upper Merrion Street; the newspaper articles were, for instance, about land as part of an estate, or about furnished houses with excellent gardens, “for terms apply to Mr. Lawler, at Thomas Disney’s, Esq. Upper Merrion-street, where tickets of admission will be given for any day except Sunday.” Having had apartments in the Royal Hospital, and also his later office address having been mentioned as the family address,61 it is assumed that whenever possible Thomas held office in the family residence.

As far as can be derived from the articles, he worked from Upper Merrion Street until October 1809, but the growing family may not have been able to remain there because in 1808 they seem to have resided temporarily in Glasnevin. Although there are no online baptism records of most of Thomas and Anne’s fourteen children,62 two records do exist, of William John and Lambert; they were written in 1808 by Thomas’ brother Robert, who then was a reverend in Glasnevin. Having been born in July 1808 Lambert was registered in Glasnevin in August, which may indicate that they lived there, but remarkably also William John, who had been born in February 1796, was registered then; he apparently did not have an earlier baptism record.63

From October 1809 until August 1810 Thomas Disney worked from 33 New Gar¬ diner street, and from August until the end of 1810 from 32 Lower Gardiner street. Between 1811 and 1812 no articles were found, in 1813 he is found working from an office in 38 Gloucester Street, now Sean MacDermott Street. It can be seen in the articles that he held office there until September 1823, but on the 30th of September 1822 a notice appeared in Saunders’s News-Letter , “Mr. Thomas Disney, has re¬ moved his Office from No. 38, Gloucester-street, to No. 4, Westland-row.” 64 The new location at Westland-row contained a house, offices and yard, and was in the parish of St. Mark.65

59 Genes reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Thomas Difney Darnley, county: Dublin, years: 1800-1805.

60 Thomas Disney placed many articles about houses and lands to be sold or let, see Genes re¬ united : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Thomas Difney or Thomas Dis¬ ney, county: Dublin, years: 1800-1824.

61 Prom September 1822 Thomas Disney held office at 4 Westland-row, and when in April 1824 two of the Disney brothers, Henry and James, were confirmed in St. Anne’s Church, their home address was indeed given as 4 Westland-row. See Irish genealogy, ie : Church Records , churchrecor ds.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/display-pdf.jsp?pdfName=d-30-l-3-002.

62 Six Disney brothers entered College; they were registered as having been born in Dublin as sons of Thomas, Generosus. [Alumni Dubl., 231]. Generosus means eminent, or ‘of gentle birth’, [Graves 1882, 6]. The two eldest sons went into the military.

63 Both records can be seen at Irish Genealogy. ie : Church Records, churchrecords.irishgenealo gy.ie/churchrecords/display-pdf.jsp?pdfName=d-244-l-2-001. The Disney family may have lived temporarily with the family of Robert and Jane Disney in Glasnevin, but in 1809 they moved to Mitchelstown where Robert became rector, see [Brady 1864, vol 2, 71].

64 Genes reunited : SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Disney Westland- row, county: Dublin, years: 1822-1822.

65 See p. 149 of the Parliamentary Papers: 1780-1849 , Volume 11, Part 2, books.google.com/boo

Introduction

17

Figure 1.4: The Grosvenor Hotel, Westland Row, 1974. It was directly opposite to the first Dublin train station, Westland-row Station, now Pearse Station, which was built in 1834. The hotel was number 5, the two columns of windows to the right of the hotel belonged to number 4, where the Disney family lived. The block of houses does not exist any more; it was demolished in 2005 to make way for the Naughton Institute / Crann Building, dublin. sciencegallery.com/blog/sab/2005/08/ground-broken-naughton-institute [accessed 10 Sept 2018]. The photo comes from the Dublin City Council Photographic Collection on Dublin- city. ie, dublincity.ie/image/libraries/sc014-grosvenor.

This would be Catherine’s last known Dublin address, because in 1826 her eldest son James William was born there, and very soon thereafter she moved to Eglish. It is not known however where she lived between her marriage and her son’s birth; Barlow apparently did not have a house of his own. Yet something can be derived from what is known. After Hamilton heard, in February 1825, that Catherine was going to marry, they did not see each other any more until 1830. She therefore did not live at Summerhill; in September 1825 Hamilton stayed there for some weeks.66

But she will also not have lived at Westland-row, because the Disneys knew that when Hamilton attended college he lived with his Cousin Arthur at 10 South Cum- berland-street, which is very close to Trinity College’s campus; the only street in- between is Westland-row. It is hardly conceivable that Barlow and the Disneys would have taken the risk that Hamilton and Catherine would meet each other in the streets, and Catherine thus may have lived with Barlow’s parents, or perhaps, be¬ cause Barlow’s father died in 1825, with John and Jane Barlow.6'

ks?id=VgJEAQAAMAAJ, or p. 149 of the Appendix in the Third Report from the Select Commit¬ tee on Fictitious Votes, Ireland; with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, archive.org/ details/opl245544-1001. It is mentioned there that Thomas Disney was a ‘freeholder’, which means that he either owned the property at West land- row or held it in long lease. The houses must have been new since in the 1818 map, figure 1.5 on p. 18, they were not there yet.

66 See p. 46, p. 47, p. 34, p. 39, p. 7, p. 46.

67 See p. 32, [Graves 1882, 178], p. 129, p. 12.

18

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Figure 1.5: On this map, published in 1818, the places have been indicated where Thomas Disney is known to have held office, and where Catherine thus will have lived before she moved to Eglish in 1826 or 1827. 1 is the Royal Hospital where she most likely was born. 2 is Upper Merrion Street, 3 is New Gardiner Street; it has been assumed here that what is now Upper Gardiner Street was new then, hence the name which is not used any more. 4 is Lower Gardiner Street, on the map called Gardiner Street; this would be in accord with the aforementioned assumption. 5 is Gloucester Street, since 1933 Sean MacDermott Street, and 6 is Westland-row, which did not exist yet when this map was made, it was the Vice- Provost’s garden. The map can be seen in Warburton, J., Whitelaw, J., Walsh, R. (1818), History of the City of Dublin from the earliest accounts to the present time, Vol. II. London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, archive.org/details/historyofcityofd02warb.

Chapter 2

The Disney family

2.1 Deaths of two brothers

The family was doing well financially, but between 1812 and 1815 the two eldest sons, who were in the army, became engaged in battle. The Disney’s second son, William John, who was born in 1796, was a midshipman in the Royal Navy, on the HMS La Hogue under Captain T.B. Capel.1 Only seventeen years old,2 he is mentioned as having been a member of the crew of one of the “warships that blockaded the Con¬ necticut coastline” in the War of 1812, 3 the blockade having commenced in February 1813. He then died in an accident on the HMS La Hogue.4

Born in 1794, Brabazon Disney went into the army around 1812. He fought in the 1815 battle at Waterloo where he became slightly wounded and had “some hair¬ breadth escapes.” Around 1830 his health deteriorated, and in 1831 he was so ill that “he had no hopes of ever being able to join in the active duties of his profession.” He resigned, and died on the 14th of March 1833. In 1838 Thomas Disney wrote letters, sounding quite desperate, or perhaps indignant, to General Lord Hill, about his son not having been permitted to sell his Lieutenant-Colonelcy, and in these letters he asked to return the money for the benefit of his three unmarried daughters. 5

1 See p. 20. For the La Hogue see for instance Wikipedia , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_La_Hogue.

2 Boys could join the navy at very young ages indeed: there is a letter in the National Archives of Ireland , written in 1821 or 1822 by Thomas Disney’s eldest brother William, “outlining difficulties experienced by his brother Reverend Robert Disney, Church of Ireland rector of Mitchelstown, County Cork, in keeping an examination appointment for his twelve year old son William Thomas Disney, at the naval college.” search. nationalarchives.ie/Details/archive/110201703.

3 “Disney, Wm. Midshipman Dublin,” see p. 7 of The Shanachie , volume 26 (2). digit alcommons. sacredheart.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1046&;context=shanachie [accessed 16 Feb 2018].

4 See p. 20. There is an online article [anon.], stating that the ship’s logs show that he died on the 23rd of March 1813. familysearch.org/service/records/storage/das-mem/patron/v2/TH-904-82 119-2247-18/dist.txt?ctx=ArtCtxPublic [accessed 12 Dec 2018]. The article contains a small error; William John was not born in Glasnevin but registered there when he was twelve already, see p. 16.

5 [Disney 1838]. This correspondence contains a letter Brabazon wrote to his father about the battle at Waterloo on the 18th of June 1815. See for Brabazon Disney also p. 96 of Dalton, Ch. (1904), The Waterloo Roll Call. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. archive.org/details/waterlooroll callOOdaltuoft. It is mentioned there that Brabazon was a “son of Thos. Disney, of Rock Lodge, co. Meath,” that in 1816 he was a Captain “in the 67th Foot,” “exchanged to Rl. Fusiliers” in 1819, became a Major in 1825, Lieutenant-Colonel in 1830, and died “in Dublin 14th March, 1833.” His

20

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

In those days commissions in the army could be bought full-pay or half-pay, and full-pay commissions could be sold back again. Brabazon was on half-pay, and although in 1831 he applied for permission to sell, for some reason he could not be re¬ stored to full-pay in the one and a half year thereafter. In 1832 and 1833 Thomas Dis¬ ney, who saw that his son was getting worse until he even was in “a very dangerous state,” tried again to sell but it was not allowed; they had to send a medical certifi¬ cate stating that Brabazon’s life was “in no immediate danger.”

Commissions seem to have costed on average a few hundred pounds, a then large amount of money,* * * * * 6 7 making it quite understandable that Thomas Disney tried to get the money back. Moreover, the reason why he was refused the money will have felt very unjust because Brabazon had been “worn out in the service.” But the way Thomas Disney was arguing in these letters to grant him the sum is remarkable, even more when knowing that he decided to publish them.

He wrote to Lord Hill, “the price of his Commission I did, and do conceive, I had a right to. It was the money of my children; I have still twelve alive, six sons and six daughters. When any step was to be purchased for their brother they all petitioned me to purchase, so much was he beloved by them. I had also a son in the Navy who was killed in a horrible manner, the tiller of a seventy-four, Lahogue, (I think under Hon. J.B. Capel,) having caught his head, and, oh God, smashed it! but enough of this, excuse this. I either have or have not a right to the purchase-money of my late son’s Lieut. -Colonelcy. [. . . ] I have three daughters unmarried, they have very little; it will be for them.” But Lord Hill answered that Thomas Disney had “no claim under the regulations of the service to the value of [Brabazon Disney’s] Commission,” leading Thomas Disney to the decision to publish these letters.

It is difficult to interpret Thomas Disney’s letter; it seems strange that such a man, working with the law, used such emotional arguments. Although the letter is about honour and injustice it is foremost about money, and it can be wondered why Thomas Disney thought that in that context painting a vivid picture of his dying son would help his case. Even more remarkable is the exclamation mark because this was no conversation, and he decided to publish it. Unless in their time this would evoke sympathy, it could perhaps indicate a slight lack of insight in other people’s feelings.

2.2 The death of Lambert Disney

Although in the correspondence Thomas Disney fought an apparently just and cer¬ tainly understandable case, his letters suggest that he had a strong focus on money

death announcement in the Limerick Chronicle of the 20th of March 1833 reads, “Lieutenant-

Colonel Disney, late of the 7th Royal Fusileers, eldest son of Thomas Disney, Esq. of Westland-row,

Dublin.” limerickcity.ie/media/03 20 33.pdf. Remarkably, as Thomas Disney’s address both Rock

Lodge and Westland-row are mentioned. Searching for the oldest newspaper article mentioning Rock Lodge as his address, an article was found from the 11th of February 1832. Genes Reunited :

SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Disney Rock, years: 1828-1832. Because Thomas Disney still kept his offices for some time, see footnote 11 on p. 58, both addresses will have applied when Brabazon died.

6 See for instance pp. 640-641 of the Journals of the House of Commons , vol. 76, 1821. babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=:ucl.c0000032649;view=lup;seq=656.

7 According to the website Measuring Worth, measuringworth.com, in 2016 a sum of £500 in 1820 treated as a commodity would have an income value of £518,400 [accessed 13 Oct 2017].

The Disney family

21

and position, which may have been connected to the fact that contrary to his still living brothers he had not attended college. Also understandable is that he wanted to have especially his daughters financially well provided for, but he apparently felt the need to carry out his decisions with an “iron will.” 8

Many of his children married well and led financially stable lives, but the appar¬ ent idea of necessarily having to be rich and of high status also brought utter misery. In any case for Catherine, who tried to commit suicide after having been forced to marry into more financial stability than love then seemed to offer her. But apparently also for her brother Lambert who, according to John Herson in his book Divergent Paths : Family Histories of Irish Emigrants in Britain 1820-1920, became obsessed and depressed by suffering a decline in status which he found impossible to accept; in December 1867 he ended his life by walking in the dark on the rails in a tunnel where he was overrun by a train.

Lambert had been a college friend of Hamilton, who in September 1824, while being in Trim, wrote to his sister Eliza, ““A person could say a good deal on one of those sheets,” exclaims Lambert at my elbow, as he eyes aghast their formidable appearance - true, my dear sir, and I have a great deal to say. When in all my life did I ever sit down or stand up to write to Eliza without having a great deal to say?” At the end of the letter Hamilton wrote, “You will perhaps wonder who is the Lambert I mentioned at the beginning of this letter. He is a son of Mr. Disney that has now the house and demesne of Summerhill [...]. He is now with Uncle [James Hamilton] [...], and I am to dine at his father’s with him to-day.” 9

Lambert did not stay in Trim very long; in January 1825, having stated that his favourite Disney was Edward, Hamilton wrote to uncle James, “Of Edward’s broth¬ ers, the next in my interest and affections is Lambert. I cannot but regret, for his sake and for yours, that he was not so completely or so long resigned to your care as to enable you argilla quidvis imitari uda [to shape anything out of him, as out of moist clay] ; 10 for I think he has latent principles of Taste and of Genius worthy to be devel¬ oped by your hand, and which would have repaid your culture. But I do not regret his removal from Trim, if, on the one hand, he was not intended to remain with you for a period such as you would have yourself desired; or if, on the other hand, while so re¬ maining, and for the first time in his life separated from all his family, his almost too finely affectionate disposition had lost in melancholy the power of adequate exertion. He is now reading for Entrance with a Dublin tutor.” * 11

From Hamilton’s remarks it can be inferred that Lambert Disney loved his family very much, but also that he strongly clung to them. His “almost too finely affection¬ ate disposition” seems to indicate that he did not have a very positive self-image, and may be a token that the children had learned from their father that their worthiness was not primarily determined by who they were as a person. That is a harsh state¬ ment, yet it is in line with the observation Herson made in Divergent Paths , that Lambert Disney’s “sense of self was determined by his position in the commanding Anglo-Irish landed class that equated Ireland’s best interests with its own.” 12

8 See p. 39. Unfortunately, nothing is known about Anne Disney Purdon’s stance in this matter.

9 [Graves 1882, 162, 164]. They walked to Summerhill, and thus will have dined at the mansion.

19 See for instance p. 53 of Wilkins, A.S. (1888), The Epistles of Horace : Edited with Notes. Lon¬ don: MacMillan and Co. archive.org/details/qhoratiflacciepiOOhora.

11 [Graves 1882, 172]

12 [Herson 2015, 225]

22

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

According to Herson, Lambert Disney had been “an established member of the local squirearchy in Co. Meath.” 15 He was an estate agent, but in 1850 he had to give up his duties because of a severe and protracted illness.14 In 1853 his friend Eyre Trench John Richard Nugent was commissioned into the militia, and some months later Lambert Disney was commissioned into the same regiment. When in 1856 Nu¬ gent was appointed in England, in the 2nd Staffordshire Militia, he soon found a job for Lambert Disney as a paymaster.

Herson writes, “The Disney family were never reconciled to their exile from Ire¬ land. Such a conclusion is often made in relation to Catholic Celtic emigrants but rarely in relation to Protestant ones. Yet the evidence clearly suggests it in relation to this family. They failed to settle in Britain for a number of reasons. Firstly, they expe¬ rienced a drop in social status. They had enjoyed a privileged existence in Ireland as members of the Ascendancy, but from a life networking with people at all levels of the Protestant establishment Lambert Disney descended to working in a back-street bar¬ racks and dealing with the burghers of a small English town. Clifton Lodge in the Co. Meath countryside had been swapped for Clifton Lodge in a street in Stafford. These changes must have been unpalatable to him and his wife.” 15 Herson further argues that Lambert Disney was, politically, an obsessive man. Already in Ireland having been defending his protestant class securities, “evidence survived from his death” that he was “on a one-man crusade against threats to his religion and his class.” 16

The suggestion that for Lambert Disney losing his place in the higher circles of society entailed losing his value as a person therefore does not appear too far-fetched; Herson’s observation about Lambert’s “sense of self,” Hamilton’s remark about his “almost too finely affectionate disposition,” and Catherine’s forced marriage, all seem to be directly connected with what could be recognized in Thomas Disney’s let¬ ter to General Hill, that he had an overly strong focus on status and money. Even if he just tried, well-intendedly, to protect his children.

It has not been proven that Lambert Disney killed himself, yet Herson makes a strong case for it. Disney’s friend Nugent did not claim that he had been suicidal, yet he “testified that he had been with Disney on the evening before his death and that he ‘had not been in his usual spirits. He had, indeed, been suffering much depression - of a religious character - for some time past.’” Very early the next morning, the 13th of December, walking in the “pitch-black Sliugborough Tunnel,” Lambert Disney was “near the far end when the luggage train came up behind him but he must surely have heard it and even perhaps seen its headlamps. He could then have stepped on to the opposite track, squeezed against the wall or laid down between the rails. He did none of these things. Instead, his head was on the rail itself. It might have been a tragic accident, but the weight of evidence points to depression and suicide.” 17

13 From personal email correspondence. In Divergent Paths Herson stated that Lambert Disney was born in in Galtrim, Co. Meath, [Herson 2015, 222], but he now believes this to be erroneous.

14 [Herson 2015, 223]

15 [Herson 2015, 226-228]. The Disneys had named their house in Stafford ‘Clifton Lodge’ after their old home in Athboy, according to Herson “a clear sign of nostalgia for a lost past.”

16 [Herson 2015, 224]

17 This view was also held by some newspapers in 1867; combining articles of for instance the Birmingham Journal and the Stamford Mercury , it was written that “Captain Disney, of the 2nd Staffordshire Militia, was seen upon the line as early as two a.m., and was supposed to have met with his death from the engine of a ballast train which left Stafford at 5.30 a.m.. Captain Disney, we are informed, had been unwell for some time, and the conclusion to be drawn is, that he committed

The Disney family

23

2.3 Summerhill and absent fathers

Catherine saw Hamilton for the first time in 1824, when she lived with her family at Summerhill. Graves called the house where they lived “the residence of the family of Disney,” 18 and from combining letters by Hamilton with other sources it can be seen that this residence was the famous mansion in County Meath; in 1850 Hamilton wrote that the house where he “first met the Disneys” was “greatly decayed,” and in 1855 he wrote that it had “passed into other hands.” 19

Figure 2.1: Summerhill in Co. Meath. The website archiseek mentions that the mansion had a hundred rooms, archiseek.com/2012/summerhill-co-meath. According to the website The Irish Aesthete Summerhill, “the greatest of Ireland’s country houses” and “one of Ire¬ land’s greatest architectural beauties,” was demolished in 1957. theirishaesthete.com/tag/ summerhill. The entrance and tree-lined avenue still exist. See Buildings of Ireland, build ingsofireland.ie/niah/search.jsp?type=record&county=ME&regno=14333005 [all websites accessed 29 Oct 2018].

The ‘decay’ Hamilton wrote about is in complete accord with an 1846 description in The Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland , in which it was mentioned that the “neat and well-built town of Summerhill” was in a state of decay, that the house and the demesne, which had been “regarded as one of the finest in Ireland,” had been “nearly denuded of its venerable and magnificent woods,” 20 and that they were “in the fair way to become a scene of comparative desolation. The mansion was a splendid spec¬ imen of Grecian architecture; but is now reduced to a condition too sadly in keeping with the demesne.” 21

The ‘passing into other hands’ before 1855 is also mentioned on the website The Irish Aesthete , “The house was seriously damaged by fire in the early 19th century

suicide.” See Genes Reunited : SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Disney Stafford ballast Shugborough tunnel watch unwell suicide, years: 1867-1867.

18 See p. 26. Hamilton remarked that “Mr. Disney” “had Summerhill,” p. 21, yet Summerhill was owned by the Langford family in any case until 1825. [Van Weerden 2017, 57 fn. 18]. Hamilton may therefore have indicated Thomas Disney’s offices, because it seems that around 1821 Thomas Disney had become estate agent for the Langfords. Genes reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbn a/index. Keywords: Disney Summerhill, years: 1818-1822.

19 [Graves 1885, 648], [Hankins 1980, 351], [Van Weerden 2017, 297-298]

20 In his 1826 poem Hamilton indeed mentioned that the mansion had been surrounded by “dark woods,” see p. 27.

21 See pp. 293-294 of The Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland, vol III, N-Z. Dublin: A. Fullarton. archive.org/details /bub_gb_lHMuA AAAM A A J .

24

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

and thereafter successive generations of the Rowley owners [ . . . ] never seem to have had sufficient funds to oversee a comprehensive refurbishment. In fact in 1851 the estate was offered for sale.” 22

Figure 2.2: A staircase in Summerhill. This photo is, together with that of the entrance hall which can be seen on the cover of this sketch, one of the few glimpses left of the inside of the mansion, archiseek.com/2012/summerhill-co-meath [accessed 29 Oct 2018].

In his biography Graves does not comment to the fact that, although Thomas Disney had his offices at Westland-row in Dublin, the Disneys then lived at Summer- hill as if it was their own home;23 Catherine and Hamilton saw each other for the first time in the drawing-room where the Disney family apparently had gathered, and then the family and their guests dined together, also in the mansion. 24 What is known though is that fathers more often did not live with their families for shorter or longer periods. 25

22 The Irish Aesthete , theirishaesthete.com/2013/04/01/my-name-is-ozymandias, theirishaesthe te.com/2016/04/13/an-echo-of-lost-grandeur [both websites accessed 18 Aug 2018].

23 They will already have had many connections there; according to Herson in personal email correspondence, the Disney family’s close links with Co. Meath had developed in the eighteenth century. See also ‘Disney of the County of Meath’, [Burke 1852, vol 1, 335].

24 [Graves 1885, 648], [Hankins 1980, 37-38]

25 Travelling was exhausting and took much time; when Catherine met Hamilton there were no trains yet. That it was quite customary for a husband and a wife to be often away from each other can, for instance, be seen in the unhappy story of Susan Phillips Burney. They did have problems, but that was not due to being away from each other. Quaile, D. (2005), An Eighteenth Century Family at Bellcotton : The story of Susan Burney and Molesworth Phillips. Online article, first published in the Review of the Termonfeckin Historical Society. termonfeckinhistory.ie/an_eightee nth_century_family_at_bellcotton_12.html [accessed 21 May 2018]. In that story also the romance between Thomas Disney’s younger brother Robert and Jane Brabazon is mentioned. And Mrs. Patience Disney, Catherine’s grandmother who, as can be read, was held in high regard by her then

The Disney family

25

Because Thomas Disney was an estate agent, and took care of estates very far removed from one another,26 he doubtlessly also was very often away from home. It is therefore possible that the Disney family lived in Summerhill while Thomas Disney worked elsewhere, being with his family as often as he could. And that having them in Summerhill simply was convenient because it was more central than Dublin as regards the places where he worked. In the early 1830s Thomas Disney would move to Rock Lodge in Freffans Little, which is, as the crow flies, about six kilometres from Summerhill. 27

2.3.1 An apparent consequence of absence

Also Hamilton’s father Archibald Hamilton was often away from his family. He was a solicitor who had gone bankrupt in 1807, and in any case after the bankruptcy he mostly worked far away from Dublin. Although the bankruptcy was due to choices he had made himself it was not seen as just his fault; in 1809 he was compensated after winning a law suit against Archibald Hamilton Rowan, one of the founders of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen. 28 But it had led to the public sale of the fam¬ ily’s “entire household furniture, plate and plated ware, china, delft, glass, and house linen [...], together with very valuable collection prints, and five small wax figures, elegantly adapted for a drawing room, executed in a very superior style, and highly deserving the attention of the connoisseur. There is an excellent mangle, and wash¬ ing machine, which will be sold Tuesday the second day of sale. Dublin, 17th Aug 1807.” 29 Graves writes that Archibald Hamilton “was soon furnished with introduc¬ tions to manufacturing houses in the North of England, which [ . . . ] brought him at once promises of employment. [ . . . ] In the year 1814 he [was] employed by the Fish¬ mongers’ Company of London, as their solicitor in an important suit.” It made him travel through the country and even work from London.30

It has often been assumed that a direct consequence of the bankruptcy and Arch¬ ibald Hamilton’s subsequent absence was that Hamilton was sent to Trim, to live with and be educated by his uncle James and aunt Sydney Hamilton. A reason to doubt this direct connection however, is that the public sale was in August 1807, the month in which Hamilton turned two, while the first letters from aunt Sydney to his mother about how he was doing were written in September 1808, a year later. He then had been in Trim for some time, but as it appears not for months already. It is therefore far more plausible that, Hamilton’s mother having noticed even before he was one month old that he was uncommon,31 and soon everyone around him realiz¬ ing how extremely intelligent he was, sending Hamilton to Trim really was a decision

future daughter-in-law Jane Brabazon.

26 Around this time Thomas Disney also was estate agent for the Wolfe estate in Co. Limerick, see Landed Estates Database : Estate: Wolfe. landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/estate-sho w.jsp?id=2307 [accessed 5 Jan 2018].

27 See the maps of the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage , buildingsofireland.ie/cgi-b in/viewsite.cgi?siteid=5167 [accessed 24 May 2015].

28 For what happened, financially, between Archibald Hamilton, Hamilton’s father, and Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Hamilton’s godfather, see [Graves 1882, 11-14].

29 Saunders’s Newsletter , Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Key¬ words: Archibald Hamilton linen mangle drawing, county: Dublin, years: 1807-1807.

30 [Graves 1882, 14]

31 [Graves 1882, 29]

26

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

in his interest; Archibald Hamilton now worked far away from home and could there¬ fore not oversee his son’s education, while uncle James was a very good scholar who was teaching in the diocesan school of Meath. Also Hamilton’s eldest sister Grace came to live in Trim; perhaps they were sent to Trim together to make it more easy for them both, their little sister Eliza having been only one and a half years old. 32 The Hamiltons obviously did not just send the children away; after Eliza four more children were born,33 they all visited each other often, and by the families on both sides many amazed and very proud letters were written about Hamilton while they also warned him for vanity, a danger of which they were fully aware. The Hamiltons of Dublin and Trim were attached families, internally and to each other; after the deaths of Hamilton’s parents when he was in his teens,34 the bonds between Hamilton and his sisters, and between him and his uncles, aunts and cousins, were very strong indeed. But one of his upcoming problems may have been a result of what the wise decision of sending him to Trim must have looked like from the outside; what people in Dublin will have seen and talked about was a bankruptcy, a public sale, a father away from home and children sent to Trim to live with an uncle.

2.4 A very happy but unfortunate meeting

In July 1823 Hamilton had entered Trinity College Dublin, and he was starting on his second year when uncle James took him with him on a visit to the Disney family. Graves writes, “It is carefully recorded by Hamilton that Tuesday, August 17, 1824, was the day on which he made his first visit to the residence of the family of Disney at Summerhill, a place in the county of Meath, not far from Trim, then and now the property of Lord Langford, to whom Mr. Disney senior was agent. The Disney family, to whom he was then introduced by his Uncle, became at once to him the objects of warm friendship, and one daughter of the house the source of a still deeper feeling, which influenced his whole life. The five sons were nearly of his age, were fellow- students in College, and were men of ingenuous dispositions, of ability and culture. The sister by whose charms Hamilton’s susceptible heart was instantly captivated was, by all accounts, of singular beauty, amiable, sensitive, and pious.” 35

In ‘The Enthusiast’, a poem written in January 1826, Hamilton described their very first meeting,

It was an August evening, and the youth

Had numbered nineteen summers when - a guest -

32 Since in any case 1802 James Hamilton had been curate of Trim. He also was Master of the school for the diocese of Meath which was located at Talbot’s castle in Trim, and he lived there with his sister Sydney. At college, uncle James had received very high grades, and next to Latin and Greek he knew several oriental languages, while aunt Sydney knew Latin and Hebrew. [Graves 1882, 24, 84], Uncle James then did not have children yet, but in 1814 he married Elizabeth Boyle and they raised a warm family, as can be read at various places in Graves’ biography. Hamilton lived with un¬ cle James almost his entire youth, yet he saw his own family very regularly, and regarded them as his ‘real’ family [Van Weerden 2017, 235].

33 Soon thereafter Hamilton’s father was earning money again and they raised a normal family, which underpins the suggestion that Hamilton was in Trim by choice and not by necessity. Sadly, a son named Archibald died early, a daughter Sarah when she was four years old.

34 Hamilton’s mother died in 1817, when he was twelve, his father died in 1819.

35 [Graves 1882, 160]. Graves mentions five sons. Next to Brabazon who then was in the army, and William John who had died already, there were six more sons, see the Appendix on p. 129. The third

The Disney family

27

He came within an old romantic mansion,

With dark woods round. - He found a brilliant circle And, (holier charm!) a happy family.

He then wrote about how impressed he was by Catherine,

But, oh! how soon, and how entirely faded

All else, when his enthusiastic gaze

Had fallen upon a form of youth and beauty,

A maiden in her simple loveliness,

With locks of gold, and soft blue eyes, and cheeks All rich with artless smiles and natural bloom: - He sat beside her at the board, and still He saw her only, thought of her alone - But now it was on other charms he dwelt,

Her thoughts, her tastes, her feelings - and these were So full of mind, of gracefulness, of nature,

Blended with such retiring timidness,

They rivetted the chain her beauty wove. -

For Hamilton it was love at first sight; he “committed all kinds of social blunders. He ignored Mrs. Disney, whom he should have led into dinner, and took Catherine’s arm instead, and completely monopolized her during the whole evening.” 36

Catherine also fell in love with Hamilton, but it is not certain when that hap¬ pened. In 1861, almost eight years after their parting interviews, Hamilton corre¬ sponded for a while with Catherine’s younger sister Louisa. She had only been eleven or twelve when Hamilton and Catherine fell in love, and meeting him again at her brother Thomas Disney’s house she became fascinated by her sister’s story. Having asked Hamilton about it he wrote, “Wonderful hour! of my sitting, irregularly, from the very first, beside her: when, without a word said of love, we gave away our lives to each other. She was, as you know, beautiful; I was only clever and (already) celebrated.” Combined with what is known from the parting interviews, 37 it clearly leaves room for the suggestion that also Catherine fell head over heels in love with Hamilton on that unexpected and happy first meeting.

From the foregoing quote, and a sentence in the 1826 poem,

They met again, too often for his peace;

Her image became twined into his being,

it can be inferred that they saw each other quite often during those months; Hamil¬ ton will have visited Summerhill regularly because he and his sisters befriended the family, and he clearly felt at home there.38 They apparently also regularly met in

son, Thomas, had graduated in 1819; Robert Anthony, the fourth son, graduated in the autumn of 1823, a few months after Hamilton had entered; Lambert, the eighth and youngest son, entered Trinity College in 1825. [Alumni Dubl., 231] Because Hamilton entered in the summer of 1823 and graduated in 1827, his ‘fellow-students’ were Robert Anthony, Edward Ogle, Henry Purdon, James and Lambert.

36 [Hankins 1980, 37-38]. The parts of the poem ‘The Enthusiast’ are given here in the form in which they were published in the Dublin Literary Gazette, and National Magazine , September 1830, 276-277. babel. hathitrust. org/cgi/pt?id=chi. 17194895. See also [Graves 1882, 183-185].

3' See p. 83.

38 See p. 46.

28

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Dublin; Graves continued his introduction of Catherine, “When they met in Dublin, the young people on both sides - for [Hamilton’s] three elder sisters were then in town - formed a literary society which brought into full mutual communication their thoughts, their tastes, and their feelings.” 39 It all sounds very happy, they were a privileged group of youngsters. And that contributes to the idea that Catherine had an overall happy childhood; in a poem written in 1830, Hamilton mentioned that she had loved the home of her youth. 4n

But they did not tell each other how they felt; in the poem Hamilton also wrote,

He had not talked of love - his happiest hours Were those he spent with her, yet then his words Were only such respectful tenderness,

As if he were addressing a dear sister - And she thought of him but as of a brother.

2.5 Fraternal love for a rare but fading beauty

In one of his letters to De Vere of 1855 Hamilton mentioned that it was “almost cu¬ rious” to him ““to recall how ‘platonic’, how sexless, or at least how perfectly frater¬ nal” his love to [Catherine] was; it began “by a sudden burst of boyish admiration for a rare, but fading beauty.”” 41 This platonic and fraternal picture is in perfect corre¬ spondence with the above given lines from the 1826 poem, although without Hamil¬ ton’s letter it would hardly have been guessed that the poem could be taken so liter¬ ally. Also striking is the remark about Catherine’s ‘fading beauty’ which perfectly fits the assumption that she was born in 1800; at that time just having turned nineteen Hamilton was still a boy, while Catherine was twenty-three or twenty-four already, substantially older in the eyes of a teenager.

It is not at all certain however that also Catherine’s feelings were so platonic. De¬ scribed as having been pious and timid, as a woman in her times she probably did not have much freedom to show her feelings, especially because she was not certain about those of Hamilton. In any case, Hamilton did not know about her love for him as can be seen from his poems; he had written in his 1826 poem that “she thought of him but as of a brother,” in a poem composed shortly after her marriage that he wished her “richest bliss, unmixed and long,” and in an 1830 poem that her marriage had “not to her brought perfect happiness,” something he apparently had expected.42

39 [Graves 1882, 160]. Grace was twenty-two then, Eliza seventeen, and Sydney fourteen. Cather¬ ine’s elder sister Anne Eliza Disney became very close to Eliza Hamilton, who seems to have known how Catherine felt about her brother. Hamilton “did confide in Eliza,” but she was “prevented by “the instinctive and right reserve of her sex” from ever relaying back any information about Cather¬ ine’s feelings.” [Hankins 1980, 38]. What her motives were can only be guessed, but people then were generally very secretive about anything that had to do with love and marriage. Still, it can be won¬ dered what would have happened if she would have told Hamilton that Catherine also loved him. Their literary society was called the ‘Stanley Society’, and Graves continues, “To give stated expres¬ sion to these, and so furnish material for regular discussions, they set on writing of essays, called the Stanley Papers, one of which was to be supplied in turn by the members to a weekly meeting, at breakfast.” But the writing of the papers only commenced in June 1826 [Graves 1882, 211], and by that time Catherine was not a member any more because she married in May 1825.

40 [Graves 1882, 361]

41 [Ishikura 2008, 68]

42 For the poem written shortly after her marriage see p. 45, for the 1830 poem see p. 51.

The Disney family

29

A portrait of Catherine Disney

Figure 2.3: According to Trinity College Dublin Library this portrait is “attributed as be¬ ing Catherine Disney. It is quite faded and bad quality so it is difficult to ascertain whether it is Disney in the portrait.” Shown here in an adapted form, it is certainly possible that this is Catherine; Hamilton’s lines about her “locks of gold, and soft blue eyes, and cheeks All rich with artless smiles and natural bloom” seem to be easily recognizable. The picture has been darkened and given more contrast, and because a part of the drawing, containing Catherine’s nose, the right side of her mouth and her right cheek, was damaged, this part has been adjusted while keeping as much as possible like the original and trying not to be overly specific. For her nose her son James’ image, see p. 95, has been used as an example, and the iris of her right eye, which looked quite strange, was slightly lowered, unexpectedly easily making her face more symmetrical. This drawing apparently having been in Ham¬ ilton’s possession it is either an 1854 copy of a miniature portrait he had borrowed from Thomas Disney to have it copied in Dublin, or a portrait he received from Louisa Disney in 1861. Courtesy of The Board of Trinity College Dublin.

Chapter 3

A shattered life

3.1 Happy youngsters and parental worries

Considering Thomas Disney’s focus on money and status, he will have seen with dis¬ pleasure what happened with his daughter. She was in her mid-twenties while Ham¬ ilton was very young and still needed some years to finish his studies. But what was probably worse was that it was not at all certain that he would use his enormous in¬ tellect to gain a strong and well-paid position.

Hamilton’s parents had died already when Catherine and Hamilton met, but realizing that her father was a real estate agent and Hamilton’s father had been a solicitor, and that many people of the Dublin higher classes seem to have known each other, it can easily be assumed that Thomas Disney had also known Archibald Ham¬ ilton. And that may have had as a consequence, Archibald Hamilton not having han¬ dled his “money concerns” very well, 1 that Thomas Disney did not hold him in very high regard, 2 even though after his bankruptcy in 1807 Archibald Hamilton had been able to regain his social status. A further aggravating circumstance will have been that only some months before his death in 1819 Archibald Hamilton had married a widow who already had a son. She was pregnant when her new husband died, and therefore his money had to be divided between his wife and the seven children.

In September 1824, just two weeks after he had been introduced to the Disneys, Hamilton had dined with in any case Thomas Disney and Lambert,3 and by January 1825 Catherine’s parents had learned to know him well. On the 11th of January, while staying with Cousin Arthur,4 Hamilton wrote a letter to uncle James in which he described how close he was becoming to the Disney siblings, and that several times already he had dined with some of them in town. He then wrote about their parents, “Mr. and Mrs. Disney have shown a desire to cultivate our society. Mr. Disney called

1 Archibald Hamilton made such a remark in an 1814 letter to his wife, [Graves 1882, 44],

2 Although before and after his bankruptcy, see p. 25, Archibald Hamilton was certainly not poor as can be seen from what was publicly sold at the time of the bankruptcy, he also was not rich.

3 See p. 21.

4 Hamilton mainly lived with his uncle James in Trim, but studying in Dublin he stayed with Arthur Hamilton. Cousin Arthur, as Hamilton called him, was a barrister, and a cousin of Hamil¬ ton’s father and uncle James. After the death of their parents Hamilton and his sisters often saw each other at his house; he seems to have been a father figure to them.

32

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

on Cousin Arthur, and Mrs. Disney has paid us a still more welcome and delicate attention, by making a visit to my sisters, who are now with me. These visits were preparatory to an invitation for Monday the 3rd, which included us all. I accepted it: Cousin Arthur was engaged at Court till eleven that night, and Grace, Eliza, and Sydney were [at the house of a maternal relative].” 5 Which means that on the 3rd of January Hamilton had dined with the Disneys without the other members of his family even though the Disneys had taken much trouble for them; it may have con¬ tributed to an image of the Hamiltons as a scattered family.

It is not known how often Hamilton dined with the Disneys but, as mentioned, he did so in any case in September 1824 and early in January 1825. During these din¬ ners, having been young and enthusiastic, Hamilton probably did not hide his love for science which, as clearly appears from his biographies, he intended to pursue if necessary at the cost of a luxurious life. He was indeed very willing to make sacrifices for science; when only a few years later he was given a choice to become a Fellow, with prospects of a substantially higher income, he rejected it because “so decidedly did I prefer the Observatory to Fellowship in point of liking, that I would have accepted it if it had been offered to me without any money at all.” 6 But even if Hamilton had not been so explicit, Thomas Disney will soon have found out that, like his father, Ham¬ ilton did not value money very highly, 7 and that will have done Hamilton’s case not much good. Thomas Disney must have dreaded the idea of his daughter having to en¬ dure a public sale of her family’s possessions, or perhaps of a family he would have to support financially in order to avoid a public humiliation.

In the meantime Catherine was very happy. She loved her family and her home, she loved playing the harp, and she loved the company of that very promising boy, even when he was a bit young for her. 8 Sometimes, on dark winter evenings when they all sat around the fire and she played, she gently glanced at his face and saw that he was intensely focused yet without looking at her, but when she started to sing he could not help himself and hung over her in a silent trance of pleasure. 9 She then tried even harder to captivate him as long as she could, wishing that these intense feelings would never stop again.

And she started to dream about how that would be, that she would be the wife of such an affectionate man, that she would be able to enjoy his never ending enthu¬ siasm and the wonderful combination of his genius and humble kindness, 10 and that they would grow old together peacefully.

5 [Graves 1882, 173]. After the deaths of their parents their youngest sister Archianna, who then was only ten years old, seems to have lived with relatives on a more permanent basis than her three elder sisters.

6 [Graves 1882, 241]

' In 1819 Archibald Hamilton wrote to a friend, “I need not urge on you to attend to your son. I am sure you and [your wife] will unite in every step that is proper for securing to him the best education and the best advantages; still recollect, you cannot do so too soon or too early; William is a proof of the great advantage of early attention [...]. No property in money is equal to such advantages, or can compensate for their neglect.” [Graves 1882, 64], Of course, also for Thomas Disney very good education for his sons was important, but Archibald Hamilton’s preference of education over money will have been, to say the least, not entirely equal to Thomas Disney’s idea of how to gain a secured future.

8 See p. 51. Marrying a younger man was not too unusual; her sister Anne Eliza would marry a man who was eight years younger than she was.

9 This image is taken from the poem ‘The Enthusiast’, [Van Weerden 2017, 62-64].

10 [Graves 1889, 226], [Van Weerden 2017, 168, 170]

A SHATTERED LIFE

33

3.1.1 Screening the Hamiltons

Hamilton saw the attention of Catherine’s parents as very friendly, yet they may have had a quite different motive. A plausible scenario for what happened may be that, having noticed that their daughter had fallen in love with Hamilton, the Dis- neys were screening him and his family in order to come to a decision about their daughter’s future. Thomas Disney probably made up his mind months ago already, but Anne Disney apparently knew that Catherine was in love and wanted her daugh¬ ter to be happy;11 she may have argued with her husband to give Hamilton a last chance by investigating the soundness and supportive powers of his family.

Used to being very close as a family themselves as can be seen from Hamilton’s poem and Lambert Disney’s home sickness, 12 after having learned to know Hamil¬ ton’s family better the Disneys knew that it was a warm one, but also as scattered as they had suspected. Uncle James was not poor but certainly also not rich, 13 and knowing about his very unconventional education methods which probably worked in Hamilton’s case but not in Lambert’s, they may have concluded that the most stable family member was Cousin Arthur. That in itself will have been slightly reassuring; as an unmarried barrister he would be able to guide Hamilton in his money business.

But then there were the Hamilton sisters, who should be able to support them¬ selves and not become dependent on Hamilton. If they would marry financially stable men that would be no problem, but during her visit to them Mrs. Disney will have seen that there was a good chance that they would not marry at all. 14 They now lived at various places with relatives, and if they would indeed remain unmarried there would always be the risk that after the deaths of the elder family members Hamilton would have to provide for them. Thomas Disney had already been worried about his own three unmarried daughters; lo having even more unmarried women in the family will not have been a particularly positive prospect.

3.2 An elder suitor

Also the reverend William Barlow seems to have been a regular guest of the Disneys. The “elder Disneys had long contemplated” a marriage for Catherine with Barlow, 16 who appeared to be a very good choice overall. In those days marriages were re¬ garded as sacramental, and they usually were more contract-like than bonds of love.

11 As can be inferred from the way she spoke with Hamilton, see p. 39.

12 See p. 27, p. 21.

13 [Graves 1885, 406],

14 Hamilton’s four sisters did not marry, and Grace, Sydney and Eliza lived at Dunsink Observa- tory with their brother from 1827 until his marriage in 1833. Thereafter they became frequent visi¬ tors. [Van Weerden 2017, 162].

15 See p. 20.

16 [Hankins 1980, 39]. In August 1861 Hamilton wrote to Catherine’s sister Louisa, who “had be¬ come fascinated by their story,” about an evening when they all sat around the fire and listened to Catherine play the harp, “alas, there was another person in the room, whose presence or absence seemed then to me a matter of supreme indifference.” [Hankins 1980, 358, 405 note 70]. It is not known who exactly the ‘elder Disneys’ were, yet it is hardly conceivable that amongst them were members of the Stanley Society, see footnote 39 on p. 28, since that would imply very untrustworthy people. It may therefore have indicated the Disneys older than Anne Eliza: Catherine’s parents, their eldest daughter Jane and her husband John Barlow, and their eldest son Brabazon.

34

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Already betrothals could hardly be broken once a proposal had been accepted, al¬ though women had slightly more room for further considerations than men had, 17 but especially to women divorces were hardly ever granted. It meant that parents had to be very cautious to whom they promised their daughters; suitors had to be of good reputation and able to provide for them.

Born in 1792 Barlow was thirty-two, he was incumbent of Clonturk, now Drum- condra, and he had good prospects of a further career in the Church of Ireland. His family belonged to the higher classes of Ireland, also in that regard making the choice for this marriage a good one; his father James Barlow was a solicitor in Dublin, his brother John would become Director and Governor of the Bank of Ireland, and his brother Maurice a General. 18

Further aggravating parent’s choices for male marriage partners was that at the altar women had to pledge obedience to their husbands. The families their daughters married into should therefore not only be trustworthy financially, but also personally. Marrying within the own extended family was a way to feel confident about the char¬ acters of the partners; in 1829 Catherine’s sister Anne Eliza married her first cousin John James Disney, and in 1841 her brother Robert Anthony married his first cousin Caroline Disney.

Also siblings of one family marrying siblings of another after a good marriage was common. In 1813 Catherine’s eldest sister Jane had married Barlow’s elder brother John, and their marriage apparently was both a happy and a financially very stable one.19 Therefore, marrying Catherine to Barlow seemed to assure her of a prosperous future, and it may even be assumed that, next to his focus on money and status, in making these plans for Catherine also the warm side of Thomas Disney’s fa¬ therly love had played a role.

This marriage being a good choice equally held from Barlow’s point of view; he had found in his sister-in-law a lovely and beautiful woman, who came from a wealthy family of which members were important clergymen, and being pious and timid she was exceptionally well fitted to become a reverend’s wife. But Barlow’s incumbency did not come with a glebe or a glebe house, 20 and he will have been looking for a bet¬ ter position. The Disneys apparently were prepared to wait for him and there thus did not seem to be a problem; with all his good prospects and the support of his family-in-law, for Barlow the future had been full of promises.

But then, on that very unfortunate summer evening, Hamilton walked into their lives, and Barlow soon started to notice that Catherine was falling in love with the boy. It made him feel uneasy; for him it meant that, while he was working hard to give her a home, in came a youngster, barely nineteen years old, who cheerfully and

17 [Van Weerden 2017, 156]

18 See Pedigree No. 10, Barlow of Dublin, Ireland. Supplied by Mr. Disney Barlow, of Lough¬ borough. This pedigree can be found between pages 32 and 33 of Barlow, M. (ca 1932), Barlow Family records. [London]: s.n.. archive. org/details/barlowfamilyrecoOObarl.

19 An indirect reason to assume that it had been a happy marriage is the description by Katharine Tynan of their daughter Mary Louisa Barlow as a warm and strong woman, see p. 116, p. 117. That it was financially stable can be derived from their apparently large heritage, see the caption of figure 7.1 on p. 78.

20 See p. 47 of Erck, J.C. (1820), The Ecclesiastical Register. Dublin: Printed by J.J. Nolan, boo ks. google. com/books?id=CjpMAAAAYAAJ. Barlow was incumbent of the parish of Clonturk from 1816 until 1826, see p. 183 of Ball, F.E.(1920), Southern Fingal : being the sixth part of A History of County Dublin. Dublin: At the University Press, archive.org/details/historyofcountyd06ball.

A SHATTERED LIFE

35

unknowingly was on the verge of destroying all his dreams. Who had no living par¬ ents and no family money, who had not even graduated yet, who just was surrounded by promises of a brilliant future and by a bunch of unmarried sisters. Barlow decided that he was not prepared to give up his dreams of a life with this woman, something which does not show him as a very kind or respectful man but which is, regarding him and his motives in the light of those times in which many men saw their wives as property, also not completely unintelligible; Barlow felt that he had every right to Catherine, he owed that ‘mere boy’ nothing. 21

Looking very happy, as Hamilton later described it even “radiant with delight,” Catherine clearly had no idea what her family was up to,22 nor that they had given Hamilton a last chance by screening him. The screening obviously did not have a good outcome, and the Disneys will therefore again have been prepared to wait, as they had been before they learned to know Hamilton, for Barlow to gain a position which would come with a house for his new family. Postponing this marriage was still not a problem because in those times women generally did not marry very young, and Catherine being in her twenties was not a reason to hurry.

What no one seems to have taken into account however was the depth of Cather¬ ine’s love for Hamilton. Before Hamilton walked in, she might happily have accepted her family’s choice, as was customary in those days. But that changed dramatically in that August month, making meeting Hamilton a very unfortunate event indeed.

3.3 A Valentine poem

Still completely unaware of what was happening Hamilton was very much in love; he ended the letter to uncle James of the 11th of January23 writing, “It is absolutely ne¬ cessary that I should no longer defer speaking of Miss Disney. Beautiful as she is, the stranger only can observe her beauty; her mind and her heart, with those who know her, are the objects which engage their attention and secure their love.” And on the 14th of February he wrote her a poem. 24

To Miss C. D.

A VALENTINE ODE.

Look how returning Valentine

Woos timid spring again to shine!

21 See p. 39. Barlow’s motives are unknown, what is described here are interpretations.

22 See p. 51. The reason to assume that Catherine did not know about the marriage plans is that the first time Hamilton saw sorrow in her eyes was in 1830, see p. 51. If she had known about the plans while falling in love with Hamilton she would have felt anguish, and he would have noticed that. The fact that he did not, that he wrote in the 1826 poem that she had seen him as a brother, and that in a farewell poem written in 1825, see p. 45, he even assumed that she was happy to get married, certainly allows for the scenario adopted here, in which the decision to force Catherine into marriage was very quickly made, see p. 38.

23 See p. 31.

24 [Graves 1882, 173-176]. It is not certain that Hamilton sent this poem to Catherine, but Graves did mention about the poem ‘A Farewell’, see p. 45, that Hamilton had written but not sent it, and about this poem he made no such comment. Moreover, Hamilton was in the habit of sending his poems to very many people, even if the poems were emotionally quite explicit. It thus will be assumed here that he did send his poem to Catherine.

36

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Flowerless is the mossy hill;

The garden glories slumber still:

Yet shall Spring yield her tribute gem, Catharine! to thy diadem.

See, to braid thy golden hair,

Starts the virgin snow-drop fair;

And the modest violet’s hue Emulates thine eyes’ soft blue!

O if / the wreath might twine,

O if I might call thee mine,

Life should be one undying Spring,

Scattering flow’rets from his wing!

Forgive me, that on bliss so high Lingers thrilling phantasie:

That the one Image, dear and bright,

Feeds thoughts by day, and dreams by night: That Hope presumes to mingle thee With visions of my destiny!

Hast thou not seen the summer Sun Rise, his rejoicing race to run;

Ardour and light around him throwing,

In all his morning promise glowing:

As if no cloud could overcast His lustre ere the morn be past?

Perchance it may be mine to soar Higher than mortal e’er before:

Climb the meridian steeps of fame,

And leave an everlasting name.

Perchance it may be mine to span Whate’er man most admires in man:

The awful glories of the Sage,

And the diviner Poet’s rage!

If such my lot. ... O then how sweet To lay my triumphs at thy feet:

Recall the days of chivalry,

And hope the crowning meed from thee!

Yet, should those hopes, which brightly play Now round my path, all pass away;

And o’er my tempest-darkened soul The cold world’s billows wildly roll:

Then, trust me, Kate! some joy ’twould bring, Blunt even misfortune’s sharpest sting,

To think I had not cast o’er thee The shadow of my misery.

When first I saw thee, Kate! my gaze Was fixt in rapturous amaze:

I had not thought on earth to find So much of loveliness combined.

In fairy-land awhile I seemed to be -

A SHATTERED LIFE

37

But ’twas a bright reality!

The hallowed memory of that day From me shall never, never pass away!

How felt my soul subdued, refined,

By the soft music of thy mind:

In lines how deep thy beauty pressed Its image on my inmost breast!

O the unutterable power

Which dwelt in that, Love’s natal hour:

The chords of finest feeling then Awakened, ne’er to sleep again!

Still shall that form the beacon be To guide my bark o’er Honour’s sea.

But I will love it as I love a star,

In its high sphere, so radiant and so far!

For could I speak the spell Which (Arab legends tell)

The Genii fraught with mystic art To fascinate the unconscious heart:

Its magic potency Should not be tried on thee!

I could not bear that Kate should prove The anxious hours of untold love;

I would not that her gentle spirit Should aught of care or grief inherit:

Or dim those eyes with secret tears Of hope deferred, through lingering years.

No! be life’s bitterness to thee unknown,

And may thy cup be full with bliss alone!

In purity and beauty shining,

With happiness around thee twining,

Earth smile upon thee, like a younger Heaven,

And be this daring lay forgotten - or forgiven!

February 14, 1825.

Introducing the poem, Graves writes, “The Valentine verses [ . . . ] disclose with ingenuous openness the lofty aspirations of the student, the dazzled admiration of the lover, and the bitter pangs inflicted on him by the thought that the circumstances of his position afforded no footing for his hopes; for it is to be remembered that when he wrote them, the Fellowship, which was the object of his ambition, was clogged with the obligation of celibacy.” 25

Theoretically Graves was right, Fellows were not allowed to marry. Yet consider¬ ing that Hamilton was only nineteen and therefore perhaps not yet too impressed by the old rule of celibacy, or even already confident that also without a Fellowship he could “climb the meridian steeps of fame,” the poem can be read very differently. The

25 [Graves 1882, 169]. In 1840 the celibacy statute was repealed, when Franc Sadleir was provost of TCD. [Graves 1885, 422], tcd.ie/provost/history/former-provosts/f_sadlier.php.

38

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

lines in which Hamilton reflects on what could happen if he would not become as famous as he expected might indicate indeed that he would then be happy not to have asked her to marry him, yet it is also possible that he felt that he would be so happy with her at his side that he would be able not to cast his shadows over her life and even feel joy for succeeding therein; after all, he was young and full of hope. The stanza in which he contemplates to love her as he would love a star is another one which might have been prompted by the rule of celibacy, but he may as easily have alluded to his assumption that she thought of him but as of a brother; his assurance that he would never use tricks to win her over seems to serve as comfort for her if she indeed was not in love with him. Lastly, the fact that he did contemplate using a spell in the first place is again not in line with being certain that he would never marry.

Catherine must have been very happy with the poem; now she knew that Hamil¬ ton also loved her and, whether or not that was possible, wanted to spend his life with her. But seeing her become so happy the family must have been in shock; even if they did not read the poem themselves and she did not speak openly about it, from her happiness they will have been able to guess that in the poem Hamilton declared his love for her. 26 Knowing Hamilton well by now and having screened his family, they realized that he would do anything for science but also for love, and that if necessary he would indeed give up his chances to become a Fellow. That being married to Cath¬ erine he thus would become a very happy, very laborious, very famous, but also very poor mathematician, who in times of need would not be supported by a rich and sta¬ ble family.

What then followed makes the last but one stanza of Hamilton’s poem even more remarkable. Written while contemplating the effect of a spell and realizing that she then would not marry him out of love, which could mean that, especially if she was in love with someone else, she would become very unhappy once the spell would be broken, up to coercion instead of a spell he precisely described her future life. If Cath¬ erine indeed read this poem, the comparison between Hamilton’s thoughtful contem¬ plations about her feelings and the demands of her husband who was obviously less sensitive to them, will have made her life even more difficult.

3.4 A hastened marriage agreement

Now knowing that Hamilton also loved Catherine, the Valentine poem may have been the trigger for Barlow to come into action. When he made his move Thomas Disney will not have hesitated for a moment. The first thing they had to do was to take care that Catherine would not react to the poem and make sure that Hamilton would not know about her love for him; the romantic youngster he was he might try to elope with her.

From a letter Hamilton wrote to Peter Guthrie Tait in 1858 it is known that the Disneys came to their decision in February, and from Graves that Hamilton “learned quite unexpectedly from the lips of her mother that the lovely object of his passionate admiration was claimed as bride by an elder suitor, and that her marriage would shortly take place.” 27

26 It also possible that Catherine did not read the poem because the family intercepted Hamilton’s letter, but that would not change Catherine’s having fallen in love nor the family’s shock.

27 [Graves 1885, 610], [Graves 1882, 182]

A SHATTERED LIFE

39

To prevent Hamilton from seeing Catherine again Mrs. Disney will have visited him in Dublin or in Trim to tell him. 28 She seems to have felt very sorry for them; Hamilton wrote in one of the letters to De Vere of 1855, after Catherine’s death and then knowing everything, that he “heard that she was engaged, from her mother, whose anguish of manner, whether arising from compassion for me, whose love she no doubt divined, or through pity for her daughter, [ . . . ] I never can forget.” 29 For Catherine her family’s decision must have come as a thunder stroke. Having been happy and full of expectations, and apparently trusting her beloved family, she was rudely shaken out of her daydreams about a future at Hamilton’s side, and her sheltered life was shattered to pieces. In the 1855 letter to De Vere Hamilton wrote, as paraphrased by Hankins, “Catherine pleaded desperately against the marriage, [ . . . ] but her father had an “iron will” and Barlow was too proud to let his prize be taken by a “mere boy.” [ . . . ] Catherine’s relatives told her it would be a sin to break the marriage agreement. The family’s honor was mentioned and she was “led as a victim to the altar.”” 30

But what in the long term weighed most heavily on her conscience was that, because she did not see Hamilton any more, she could not explain to him what had happened. That she had not been deceiving him by reacting so lovingly to his atten¬ tions, that she had not known about this marriage herself. She became afraid that if he would feel betrayed by her he would think unkindly of her, and she started to have feelings of guilt about what they had done to Hamilton, who had still been so young and so full of life and spirits. Of course, it was not her fault that her family had forced her, but she had given him hope by looking at him as if she had already promised to marry him, even though she knew that as a pious Christian woman she had to wait for a man to propose, and until her family would allow such a marriage. Her feelings of guilt towards Hamilton became a heavy burden. 31

3.4.1 Suicide as a sin or as an act of madness

In the 1858 letter to Tait, Hamilton described his deep despair after having been told about Catherine’s betrothal. “Perhaps it may be because we are as yet so slightly acquainted with each other, that I am willing to confess to you on this occasion of the melancholy event which you report,32 that I have, once in my life, experienced, in all but its last fatal force, the suicidal impulse. It was (as I full well remember) in the month of February, 1825, ... and (curious coincidence) when I was on my way from Dublin to this very Observatory: 33 for Dr. Brinkley had invited me to join a dinner

28 Even though several Disney siblings were his friends, before Catherine’s marriage Hamilton apparently did not visit Summerhill any more. That can be derived from the fact that he did not see her distress then; he assumed that Catherine was happy to get married, and the first time he saw her unhappiness was in 1830, see p. 51, see also footnote 22 on p. 35. He would visit Summerhill again at least once, but that was in the summer of 1825, after Catherine had moved out, see p. 46.

29 [Hankins 1980, 39], [Van Weerden 2017, 303]

30 [Hankins 1980, 39]

31 For Hamilton having been full of life and spirits see footnote 27 on p. 51, for indications of Catherine’s feelings of guilt see for instance p. 52 and p. 83.

32 That may have had to do with Tait having lost a very close friend, William John Steele, some years earlier, see [Van Weerden 2017, 56 fn. 14].

33 The Royal Astronomer of Ireland lived at Dunsink Observatory. Before Hamilton succeeded him in 1827, Brinkley thus lived there.

40

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

party here. The grief, which had then recently and suddenly fallen upon me was one which I feel even yet. ... I remember - and have many hundreds of times passed the exact spot, where I thought for a moment of plunging, for death, into the water. I wish that I could add that it was religion ... which protected me. My recollection has always been that it was simply a feeling of personal courage, which revolted against the imagined act, as one of cowardice. I would not leave my post; I felt that I had something to do.” 34

From these sentences it is evident that however important and impressive that moment was for Hamilton, he was not suicidal; he did not contemplate suicide for a longer period of time, nor had he lost his hopes for his entire future, he thought of it for a moment yet immediately felt important enough not to do it. He then still was a youngster, and having been so much praised as he already was he had an enormous inner confidence; his most difficult task was how to stay humble, something he worked on all his life.35 But because of his enormous self-confidence 36 he also seems to have found it difficult to understand why someone else would not want to live, and he consequently saw really committing suicide as an act of cowardice. Or, as he would see it many years later in Catherine’s case, as an act of madness.37

It is not known exactly how anxious her suicide attempt in 1848 made him; he seems to have been very angry with Barlow,38 yet in 1855 he wrote to De Vere that, having corresponded with Catherine from mid- July until the end of August 1848, his “agitation” after Catherine’s last letter “was extreme,” but not that that had again been the case after her suicide attempt in October.39 As can be read in his letters, given by Graves in his biography, Hamilton was a very religious man who regarded matrimony as holy, and he will have seen suicide as a sin. He was strict enough not to make an exception for Catherine’s very unhappy marriage, 40 and therefore probably also not for her suicide attempt. That might perhaps be attributed to his inability, as a Victorian higher class male, to understand what it is for someone not to have con¬ trol over one’s own life, something he always more or less did have. But it does not at all mean that he was not empathetic; every time he heard that Catherine was even more unhappy then he already knew he became distressed again. He had wished her all the happiness in the world, even when married to someone else.

34 [Graves 1885, 610]

35 [Van Weerden 2017, 65]

36 [Van Weerden 2017, 59]

37 See p. 73.

38 [Van Weerden 2017, 289]

39 For the six-week correspondence see p. 68. Graves would have withheld such information, but the fact that also Hankins did not mention a renewed agitation suggests that Hamilton really reacted differently to Catherine’s suicide attempt than to her letters.

40 It is not known whether that would also have held for a forced marriage; Hamilton only learned about the coercion shortly before Catherine died.

Part II

Catherine’s married life

Catherine married in May 1825. As was mentioned in the Introduction, thereafter Catherine and Hamilton met again only a few times. When in 1830 Hamilton was staying at Armagh Observatory, he visited Catherine and she made a return visit, she visited Hamilton at Dunsink Observatory in 1845, they corresponded for almost six weeks in 1848, and Hamilton vis¬ ited her twice in October 1853.

The first time Hamilton saw Catherine’s unhappiness was during his 1830 visit. It is surmised here that after her return visit Catherine’s marriage became worse because Barlow did not allow her to have further contact with Hamilton. Of the 1845 visit not much is known, but a possible scenario is given. It was, most likely, during the 1848 correspondence that Hamilton learned that Catherine’s marriage had been unhappy from the start. After they ended the correspondence, Catherine confessed to Barlow that she had contacted Hamilton and that was in fact the end of the marriage; she tried to commit suicide some weeks later.

Having survived the attempt which left her physically weakened, Catherine apparently did not live with Barlow any more, she lived with family instead. In October 1853, only shortly before her death, she invited Hamilton. They talked with each other twice, and during these interviews she could finally explain to him that she had been coerced into the marriage, and that she had also loved him.

Part of the aim of this sketch is to visualize what happened to Cather¬ ine and how unhappy she was, therewith underpinning the assertion that Hamilton’s periodic distress about her had nothing to do with his own mar¬ riage. To allow for such visualizations, just as in the first part of this sketch thoughts and feelings have been ascribed to Catherine which are not based on sources; such sources do not seem to exist. Yet, again everything de¬ scribed here has strictly been kept within the boundaries of what is known about her.

Chapter 4

A clergyman’s wife

Apart from what Hamilton wrote about Catherine, not much is known about her. To give, nevertheless, an impression of her life, in the next chapters it has been tried to describe it from her point of view, within the boundaries of what is publicly known. The description is not without hiatuses and inaccuracies however. For a more com¬ plete picture of Catherine’s private life Hamilton’s letters in Trinity College Library could be read again, searching for details which until now were perhaps deemed to be too personal, or not interesting enough to publish. To give a more accurate de¬ scription of Catherine’s life also a good knowledge of the lives of clergymen’s wives in the Regency and early Victorian era would be needed. In the following chapters, therefore, only what is mentioned to come from original sources should be taken lit¬ erally.

4.1 A forced signature

Catherine Disney and William Barlow were married on the 5th of May 1825. The marriage announcement in Saunders’s News-Letter reads, “Marriages. On the 5th inst. the Rev. William Barlow, second son of James Barlow, Esq. of North Great George’s street, to Catherine, daughter of Thomas Disney, Esq. of Westland-row.” 1 They were married by James Jones, Rector of Urney, and witnesses were Thomas Disney junior, one of Catherine’s brothers, and James Barlow junior, one of Wil¬ liam’s brothers. And as seen from his signature compared with his handwriting, the marriage record was written by Barlow. 2

Both James Jones’ and Catherine’s signatures are very shaky. It is not known why James Jones’ hand seems to have trembled, he may have guessed a lot by watching them. But knowing how Catherine must have felt that day, her apparently also tear- stained signature seems to be a heartbreaking token of how terribly unhappy she was.

1 Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Barlow Westland- row, years: 1825-1825. Inst, is the abbreviation of instant, the day of the current month.

2 See figure 4.2 on p. 46.

44

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Catherine had searched for Hamilton in the crowd attending the wedding, but she could not find him. She soon realized that he would not come, that he would not be able to bear seeing her with Barlow, and in her wedding dress.3 Her heart sank even further; now he would not see how much she had cried the weeks before the wedding, and know that she had not betrayed him during those very happy months. She felt re¬ sponsible and very guilty towards him even though she had not wanted this marriage; if she had not looked at him so lovingly, he would not have been so hurt. What had they done to this wonderful and lovely boy. She could only wish that he would recover soon and find someone for himself.4 5

	MARRIAGES. ( The Year iS? J~ ) Page
	N“/?/ 7 h.
Married in this / hr c . «.
th isf<-/ZZL_. Day of i-Av <■ - in the Year One Thoufand Eight Hundred and^.'; ■ w f r--t ''** - By me -
s J // ' s' — - This Marriage was folemnized between Usi ^7* — ' - - f r ^ — in the Prefence of.? — ^~'r" Acv,, A, . _ _ _
( - . - - -

Figure 4.1: In this church record it can be seen that William Barlow was from the parish of St. George, which was then Clonturk, now Drumcondra. Catherine’s parish was St. Mark’s, the parish in which the marriage took place, and which entails Westland-row. Irish Geneal¬ ogy. ie : Church Records, churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/pdf.jsp?churchrecords/display-pdf Name=d-30- 1-3-123.

Barlow will have been full of hope about his future with Catherine. She was beau¬ tiful and pious, natural and timid, and he had gained her parent’s consent. She was looking a bit tired now but that would certainly soon pass; he deeply felt that God would be on their side. He firmly resolved to be a very good husband, and fully com¬ pensate her for not loving him by giving her a financially very stable life, granting her as much freedom as he could bear, and by giving her any material goods she would like to have. 6 And if he tried hard enough Catherine would eventually completely submit to the sacrament of matrimony which prescribed that her mind and body now belonged to him, 7 and start to love him as she should.

3 See the poem ‘A Farewell’ on p. 45.

4 Shortly before the start of the Victorian era weddings were mostly private, not the large events they often are now, see [Van Weerden 2017, 160 fn. 4]. Yet Hamilton mentioned a ‘festal throng’, see p. 45; if only the families attended there would have been a crowd already, see the Appendix on p. 129, and if also Hamilton had been invited, it may have been a much larger wedding.

5 As Hamilton had described her in his poem, see p. 27.

6 Which, according to Hamilton in later letters, he did, see p. 50.

' Because women were often seen as property, and had to vow obedience to their husbands before God, very pious women could only hope to marry a loving or at least considerate husband.

A clergyman’s wife

45

But as seen from Catherine’s point of view, even if once she would have accepted Barlow’s intentions and probably even have been happy with them, having fallen in love with Hamilton she now was forced into this marriage, and that had changed ev¬ erything. To be owned by Barlow for the rest of her life was a truly horrific notion,8 completely explaining her shaky signature in the marriage record; she will have real¬ ized all too well that from that night on she would have to do her duties as a wife and produce children.

Hamilton had indeed not attended the wedding; he could not. Still assuming that Catherine had married happily, on the 13th of May, about a week after the wedding, he wrote a poem in which he described his feelings.9

A Farewell

I could not see thee on thy bridal day,

I could not mingle with the festal throng;

Though not perchance less fervently than they I wished thee richest bliss, unmixed and long - But not at once are quelled those feelings strong,

Which held entire dominion o’er the mind,

Nor high resolve hath power, nor charm of song,

At once the wounded spirit to upbind,

Or do the trace away, that love hath left behind.

To me thou canst not be what thou hast been - The polar star in Hope’s high firmament - The fount that made life’s desert pathway green - The spell that bound me wheresoe’er I went;

The treasure of my musings, the dream blent With many a rainbow hue of far delight,

O’er which my fancy but too fondly bent; -

The prize my young ambition to invite -

The one dear thought that tinged all else with its own light.

Seldom, how seldom! shall we meet again,

And stranger-like, and part as strangers part;

I shall, perhaps, be quite forgotten then,

And chilled may be this once impassioned heart.

Yet though no more my star of hope thou art - My spring of loftiest, sweetest fantasy - Thy cherished image never shall depart,

Still will I wish all joy to wait on thee,

Still pray thy lot on earth a younger heaven may be.

He did not send the poem to her however, 10 and she therefore did not know that he still thought very highly of her, and that he did not feel deceived by her. Although reading about his pain might again have added to her feelings of guilt.* 11

8 As can be deduced from her use of the word ‘terror’ in the first parting interview, see p. 84.

9 This poem was published under the ‘pseudonym’ W.R.H. in The Dublin Literary Gazette, and National Magazine for August, 1830, p. 149. It is reproduced here in its published form, babel. ha thitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi. 17194895; view=2up;seq=175.

10 [Graves 1882, 182],

11 As is suggested on p. 54.

46

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Four months later, in September 1825, Hamilton stayed with the Disney family for more than two weeks, writing to his sister Eliza on the 6th and the 24th from Summerhill, “I am now, as you will observe by the date, in Summerhill. If you wish to have a more minute description, know that I am in the chamber of the eastern wing upon the north side of the castle, as I conclude from the stars - time midnight, as I learn from the deep tolling of the clock in the tower. A shaded lamp is burning before me; all is quiet now except the audible ticking of my watch; both doors of my room are open, one of which leads to a suite of uninhabited apartments, so long that my light only shows their gloom, through which the beams wander without filling their extent. [ . . . ] I have been making a very long visit here, and a very pleasant one. I could talk to you about many of the reasons, difficult yet interesting to analyze, which still make Summerhill to me “like a heart-cherished home on some desolate plain,” but I have neither inclination nor time to write about them.” 12

From both the poem and the fact that he felt comforted at Summerhill staying with the Disney family it can again be concluded that Hamilton was totally unaware of the fact that the elder Disneys had forced Catherine into marriage. It can only be guessed what would have happened if he had seen her on her wedding day, and would have recognized the anguish in her eyes.

4.2 A son and a perpetual curacy

Catherine got pregnant at some time in January 1826, about eight months after the wedding, which might indicate that Barlow tried for a while not to hurry her. Not yet having a house of their own they may have lived with family, and the announcement in the Dublin Evening Mail of the birth of their eldest son James William reads, “25 Oct 1826. Births - On the 21st inst., Westland-row, the Lady of the Rev. William Barlow of a son.” 13

BAPTISMS.

I The Year 1 8’/ ) Page

Figure 4.2: The baptism record of William and Catherine’s first child, James William Bar- low. Irish Genealogy, ie : Church Records , churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/di splay-pdf.jsp?pdfName=d-30- 1-3-067.

12 [Graves 1882, 188-190]. In the photo on p. 23 his room was on the left side of the house.

13 Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: William Barlow, county: Dublin, years: 1826-1826.

A clergyman’s wife

47

During Catherine’s pregnancy Barlow was appointed as a perpetual curate in Eglisli, in the diocese of Armagh, and that position did come with a glebe house. He resigned his incumbency in Drumcondra in August 1826, published a Farewell note in September, 14 and thereafter he will have had to prepare their future home in Eglish. James William was privately christened on the 25th of November and registered on the 6th of December, apparently by Barlow himself; comparison of the record with his signature shows that Barlow also wrote the record.

It is not known why James William was born at Westland-row, 15 nor why he was privately baptised. Baptisms were usually done publicly, in church, but children could be baptised in their parent’s house, for instance if there was fear the child would not live. James does not seem to have had a weak health, yet Catherine may have been unwell. Again imagining her life then, she had been expecting a baby from a man she did not love, and she may have felt uncertain whether or not she could love this child. If she had been silently hoping that her baby would not look like his father too much, but feeling bound by her promise at the altar was at the same time trying to reject these thoughts, such inner conflicts may easily have affected her health.

A more practical reason may have been that Barlow was not allowed to baptise his son in church because he was not the incumbent any more. Wanting to baptise his son himself was in itself quite customary; as can be seen in the Glasnevin church records also Robert Disney, Catherine’s uncle, baptised his own children.16 The Book of Common Prayer ascribes that after a private baptism the child would “be brought into the Church, and be received into the Congregation. If the Minister who receiveth it have not himself baptised the Child he shall examine and try whether the Child be lawfully baptised, or no.” Since it was Barlow himself who did the baptism and it thus was lawful, baptising him privately in Dublin, and later receiving him in Eglish, was probably the most convenient thing to do.

4.3 Trying to make a life in Edenderry

In December 1826 or early in 1827 Catherine moved to Eglish, and in September she became pregnant again; their second son, Thomas Disney Barlow, was born on the 15th of June 1828. The birth announcement in the Dublin Evening Packet and Cor¬ respondent reads, “Births. June 15, Edenderry Glebe, the Lady of the Rev. William Barlow, of a son.” 17

In the 1837 Topographical Dictionary the parish of Eglish is described: it was some seven kilometres north-west from Armagh and had about 5400 inhabitants,

14 Genes Reunited : SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Clonturk Barlow, county: Dublin, years: 1826-1826.

15 As was argued earlier, see p. 17, Catherine will not have lived there before and during her preg¬ nancy. Yet it will not have been a problem that she now was at Westland-row; because of the lying-in period which then lasted three weeks, [Van Weerden 2017, 183], and the subsequent period of breast feeding combined with the December cold, no one will have been afraid that she would meet Hamil¬ ton in the streets. But for Catherine being so close to Hamilton, yet not able to speak with him and explain to him what had happened, may have been very difficult.

16 Irish Genealogy. ie : Church Records , churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords. First name: Jane, last name: Disney, location: Glasnevin.

17 Genes Reunited : SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Barlow Edenderry, years: 1828-1828.

48

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

who mainly lived from husbandry and weaving linen cloth. Barlow is mentioned as living in the glebe house which is called “commodious” , and as perpetual curate, he earned £200 per annum. The parish had an “old church” and an apparently also old parish school, which seem to have been at about a kilometre to the west of the glebe house. 18 In 1821 a new church had been built, at about two kilometres south of the old church, and of the glebe house, “a large handsome edifice, having a square tower with pinnacles.” There were various schools, apparently for boys and for girls, and one of them was on the glebe grounds as is also indicated on the map, south-east of the glebe house. 19

Figure 4.3: The glebe house of Eglish parish was in the townland of Edenderry as can be seen in this historic map on Ask about Ireland : Griffith’s Valuation, askaboutireland.ie/gr iffith-valuation, Griffith’s Places, Edenderry, Armagh, Map views. The maps of the Grif¬ fith’s Valuation have been drawn between 1847 and 1864, therefore after Catherine had moved to Carlingford. Edenderry is the third townland south of Benburb, which can be seen on the modern map at about ten kilometres north-west of Armagh. The road from Benburb which crosses Edenderry from north to south is called Maydown road.

Although the house and the land were beautiful, it is not at all certain that Cath¬ erine could see it that way, the quiet of the land may have been difficult for her to enjoy. Perhaps, if her sons attended the school on the glebe grounds, Catherine may have made contact with the children or their teachers and parents or even helped at the school; it is not known how much she valued status and standing. One of Ham¬ ilton’s poems seems to indicate that she loved children, therefore, if she did make contact she may have enjoyed it, it would certainly have made her surroundings a bit more lively. Barlow in the meantime seems to have tried hard to make life bearable

18 The Griffith’s Valuation map indeed shows a “School Ho.” and a “Church (in ruins)” at the western border of the townland Eglish, which itself is west of Edenderry.

19 [Lewis 1840, 596, vol 1]. Earning £200 pounds per annum made Barlow certainly financially stable; according to the website Measuring Worth, measuringworth.com, in 2017 the relative eco¬ nomic status value of that income or wealth in 1837 was £232,500, the economic power value of that income or wealth £797,500.

A clergyman’s wife

49

Figure 4.4: The former glebe house in Edenderry as seen from Maydown road, reproduced from a 2011 Google Maps street view recording.

Figure 4.5: The Holy Trinity Church of the parish of Eglish, near Edenderry at Drumsallan, with its “square tower with pinnacles.” This is also seen from Maydown road, and repro¬ duced from a 2011 Google Maps street view recording.

50

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

for her; Hamilton wrote in a later letter that she “had a handsome carriage (which Lady Hamilton never had), and was allowed to receive members of her own family as often (apparently) as she could wish.” 20

Doubtlessly to Catherine’s happiness, in 1829 her brother Edward Ogle Disney became curate in Tynan,21 about eight kilometres from the Barlows’ glebe house in Edenderry, and in 1831 he became perpetual curate of Killylea, only some five kilo¬ metres away. In 1833 a second brother, James Disney, became curate in Drumcree, about two kilometres north of Portadown, and about twenty-five kilometres from Edenderry; as Hamilton had mentioned, they will have visited each other regularly.

Still, the roles of men and women having been so strictly separated, it can be won¬ dered whether Edward and James recognized Catherine’s unhappiness, and if they did whether they were able to comfort her. Both men were still unmarried, moreover, Barlow had been their brother-in-law since 1813 when their eldest sister Jane had married his brother, at which time Edward had been nine and James only six; they thus already knew and perhaps even had liked Barlow for most of their lives.22

4.4 Upsetting visits

In 1827 Hamilton became Royal Astronomer of Ireland, and he therefore moved in¬ to Dunsink Observatory. He had frequent contact with Thomas Romney Robinson, the astronomer from Armagh Observatory, and in March 1830 Hamilton stayed with him for some time. While he was in Armagh, Hamilton and Catherine saw each other twice; Hamilton visited her, and she made a return visit. From Graves’ and Hankins’ biographies separately it is difficult to see what exactly happened during Hamilton’s visit to Armagh, but combining them parts could be retraced. 23

It is not known whether Hamilton had planned the visit beforehand or decided to do so during his stay. He wrote to Cousin Arthur that he had made the visit on the 26th of March 1830, and that the journey had been “rather long for an inexperienced horseman.” It is also not known whether they met each other in Edenderry where Catherine lived, or in Tynan where Edward Ogle lived, but because in either case it was a long ride from Armagh, he will not have made this visit unannounced. And if he expected that it would be difficult to see Catherine being happy as Barlow’s wife, he may have found the presence of Edward, his favourite among the Disney brothers,24 reassuring.

Also Hamilton’s motives for visiting Catherine are unknown, yet it is remarkable that he thought that he would be able to cope with meeting her; he was apparently coming to terms with his feelings. Because Hamilton still thought that Catherine had married willingly, and he doubtlessly had read the announcements in the papers of the births of her sons, he will have assumed that she had a happy family. He therefore may have wanted to try whether he could bear to befriend the family, which would enable him to visit her every now and then, and make him feel certain that she was

20 [Hankins 1980, 354], Lady Hamilton used an Arabian for “her own independent excursions.” [Graves 1889, 136, 498]

21 [Leslie 1911, 332]

22 It can easily be assumed that the Disney brothers did like him; Thomas Disney would hardly have insisted on this marriage if his sons would have had a problem with Barlow.

23 See [Van Weerden 2017, 86].

24 Seep. 21.

A clergyman’s wife

51

all right. Deciding to visit Catherine can in any case be regarded as a brave plan, and seeing her in happily married circumstances and with her children around her might have eased down the last parts of the feelings of loss he had had since that terrible day in February 1825.

But it all turned out very differently; Catherine was by far not as happy as he had expected, and when Hamilton returned to Armagh Observatory he was very dis¬ tressed. According to Graves Lady Campbell, who thereafter became a very good friend, recognized Hamilton’s feelings, could “attract his confidence,” and saved him from “giving way to morbid despondency.” 25

That same evening Hamilton wrote a poem from which it can be seen that for him Catherine’s unhappiness was completely unexpected,

We two have met, and in her innocent eyes A meek and tender sorrow I have seen;

Ah! then, the change which my glad light put out,

And threw a gloom over my once bright way,

Has not to her brought perfect happiness,

Has not been able wholly to repay Her for the severing of those earlier ties,

The parting from that home she loved so well.

Though more than one fair child, about her knees,

Sports, or puts up his prayers, or fondly gazing Soothes her to peace and joy; and though a spell,

And witchery is round her, that constrains Whoever sees her to admire and love;

And though wealth is not wanting, nor the things The many care for, yet she seems to me Far, oh how far! less radiant with delight,

Less safe from sadness than when first we met.

Hamilton may have succeeded in bringing the visit to a good end, but his ride back to Armagh Observatory must have been very difficult. Also Catherine will have felt terrible; it was said about Hamilton that it was generally very easy to read his feelings 26 and therefore, if he could see the sorrow in her eyes, she will certainly have seen the shock in his.

After Hamilton had left Catherine started to worry about him, and she felt very guilty that he had arrived so full of hope and energy27 but had left in such altered mood. These feelings of guilt were added to the guilt she had felt towards him all along, and that triggered her reaction. She almost immediately decided to make a re¬ turn visit to the observatory; knowing him very well she realized that if seeing her up¬ set him so much he would not dare to visit her any more, and she therefore had to talk with him before he would return to Dublin. Perhaps, if she could make him believe

25 [Graves 1882, 360]

26 [Van Weerden 2017, 40]

27 In 1827 someone said about Hamilton that he was “so full of life and spirits that [...] I believe that for the sake of making a tour among the stars, he would willingly be fastened on to a comet’s tail.” [Graves 1882, 270].

52

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

that she was actually happy, he would calm down again. Or even better, if she could convince him that she would be happier if they would see each other more often, they might become friends.

Catherine was really very happy to see Hamilton for a second time. He offered to show her the telescope,28 and while he was conducting her upstairs to the dome she almost started to feel familiar with him again, having talked with him during the wonderful hours of his visit to her and now being so close to him, receiving his undi¬ vided attention. It slightly eased her worried feelings, and she cautiously started to hope that they could have a real friendship. But then, when he tried to explain to her how the telescope was used, she saw that he was trembling.

Hamilton was very nervous indeed, being alone in the dome with the woman of his dreams, and so close to her again as he had been five years ago. He wanted to ask her what had happened, why she was not happy, if Barlow did not treat her well. But he could not, in those days such questions were unheard of; according to Graves, Ham¬ ilton was “forbidden by circumstances to manifest that interest.” 29

Despite his nervousness Catherine still felt wonderful and she enjoyed his ex¬ planations, until he asked her if she wanted to look through the telescope. He had tried very hard to stay calm, but managing the telescope to make that possible he broke the wires in the eyepiece. With the wires also the spell of hope was broken. He was very ashamed and she comforted him, at the same time feeling guilty all over again; what had they done to this lovely man. Catherine returned home filled with happiness because she had seen him again, with frustration over the lost moments of having felt released from some of her feelings of guilt, and with desperation because it might have been the very last time she had spoken with him.

4.5 A crushing refusal

In the following weeks Catherine started to worry about Hamilton even more, feeling very badly towards him. That feeling kept haunting her, and became so strong that she decided that she would ask her husband whether she could write to Hamilton. She still wanted to explain to him that she had not known about the marriage plans earlier, that she felt so very sorry for him, and that she would be very happy if they could keep in contact. To Barlow she wanted to say that he could trust her, that she certainly was not going to tell Hamilton about the coercion or trouble him with her unhappiness and things he could not do anything about; she knew very well that as a married woman she could not say such things. And if a real friendship between her and Hamilton would be too much for him to bear and he would be afraid that he would become too jealous, he could perhaps allow her a nice correspondence.

When Barlow came home that evening she watched him carefully. He seemed to be in a good mood, and she decided to speak with him after the children would have gone to bed. But singing them to sleep she started to feel very nervous; it suddenly did not seem to be possible any more to speak with him about all her carefully pre¬ pared nuances, they never spoke with each other like that. She went downstairs and

28 [Hankins 1980, 106]. Graves did not mention this visit but Hankins did. Almost three months after Catherine’s death Hamilton wrote to Thomas Disney Jr. that he had offered to show her the telescope, and in his agitation had broken the wires in the eyepiece. [Hankins 1980, 450 note 34].

29 [Graves 1882, 361]

A clergyman’s wife

53

then, as if listening to someone else, she heard herself ask bluntly for his permission to write to Hamilton, to “explain that she had not been responsible for his rejection in 1825 and that she wished to keep his friendship.” 30 Barlow refused, leaving Cather¬ ine devastated.

Figure 4.6: Dark clouds above the glebe house, as looked at from across the river Black- water. Reproduced from a 2011 Google Maps street view recording.

It was perhaps the worst decision he ever made in his life. If he had let her, if he had trusted her, she would finally have been relieved from her incessantly nagging feelings of guilt. That would doubtlessly have made her more happy, and she would perhaps have been thankful that he allowed her to do something he dreaded, which might even have helped her to value his kindness again. And Barlow could also have trusted Hamilton; his reverence for marriage was so absolute that he would never have allowed himself to become the cause of a crisis between a husband and a wife.

But Barlow simply could not trust them. He had seen how full of emotions his wife had been after Hamilton’s visit, he had asked her many times how her visit to Armagh had been but she had not given clear answers, and he was certain that he could see how eager she was to renew her friendship with Hamilton. A boy who still was a threat, being unmarried and apparently not yet in love with someone else.

He started to preach to her, about the position women had in a marriage under God and how she should love him and obey him. 31 Pious as she was, and having vowed obedience to Barlow at the altar, Catherine could not but refrain from con¬ tacting Hamilton. She had to live on while bearing the loss of her dream of a friend¬ ship with him, the growing distrust of her dominant husband whom she started to dislike, and the ever more heavy burden of her feelings of guilt.

30 [Hankins 1980, 348]

31 According to Hamilton, in 1848 he “preached her into madness, and very nearly into suicide.” [Hankins 1980, 354], What Barlow actually felt or said is unknown.

54

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

4.5.1 Attempts at comfort

Hamilton in the meantime still knew nothing about Catherine’s forced marriage. Be¬ lieving that Catherine had wanted to marry Barlow, that she perhaps even had loved him, he now assumed that her marriage had not given her what she had expected from it, that it somehow had lost its lustre.32 He could not stop worrying about her, and in an attempt to console her he tried to establish a friendship for her with Lady Campbell. He felt that Catherine would greatly benefit from such a friendship because Lady Campbell had been able to recognize his feelings so well, and had com¬ forted him when he had been in agony.

He described his plan to Lady Campbell in April 1830, “You will be to us a con¬ necting link, a bond of sympathy, a being that we both shall love, and that shall have added to the happiness of both. She indeed will not know that I have had any part in procuring for her your friendship, but the thought that I have had so will cheer and soothe me not the less.” 33 Very unfortunately, exactly at that time Lady Campbell moved to Dublin and the plan fell apart. Hamilton now feared that no one would con¬ sole Catherine, and he decided that he would try to comfort her himself by publish¬ ing his poems ‘A Farewell’ and ‘The Enthusiast’ in the August and September 1830 issues of the The Dublin Literary Gazette, and National Magazine ,34 hoping that Catherine would be soothed by his love for her.

But not knowing about the coercion, Hamilton also did not know about Cather¬ ine’s feelings of guilt; in his writings there is not any sign of him having felt betrayed by her and of course, those feelings had only taken root in Catherine’s unhappy mind because of the coercion. The consequence of not knowing what caused her sorrow was that the ways in which Hamilton tried to comfort her35 did not work; consoling some¬ one who was happy once and perhaps can find that happiness again is very different from consoling someone who feels trapped and is forbidden to say so.

Catherine did read the poems. In August she read about the pain Hamilton had felt when he heard that she was going to marry, that he could not see her on her bridal day; so she had guessed correctly why he had not attended her wedding. Read¬ ing about how he had seen her, as his “polar star in Hope’s high firmament - The fount that made life’s desert pathway green reminded her of her overjoyed feelings when she had read his Valentine poem; it now made her feel loved and terribly sad at the same time. But in September reading in the last sentences of ‘The Enthusiast’ that losing her had left him “darkly changed” was again devastating. It reinforced her feelings of guilt about what they had done to him, she by letting him fall in love with her, and her family by taking her away from him.

And also Barlow read the poems. It caused further tensions between them; for Barlow the decision to publish these poems simply meant that Hamilton would not stop making his life difficult. He tried even harder to keep his wife away from that boy, and Catherine became unhappier by the day.

32 As has been argued in [Van Weerden 2017, 274], see also p. 9.

33 [Graves 1882, 362],

34[Van Weerden 2017, 91]. Hamilton’s motives to publish the poems were not given by Graves, but this is certainly plausible. The poems were published under the easy to guess pseudonym W.R. H., in the August issue on p. 149 and the September issue on pp. 276-277, respectively. For further details see footnote 9 on p. 45.

35 As he would also do in their 1848 six-week correspondence, see p. 69.

Chapter 5

Children and bereavements

5.1 A growing family

In October 1830 Catherine became pregnant again. The birth of their third son, Wil¬ liam Brownlow, was announced in for instance in the Belfast News-Letter of the 12th of July 1831, “Births, Deaths, Marriages and Obituaries. On the 3rd inst. at Eden- derry Glebe, Co. Armagh, the Lady of the Rev. Wlm. Barlow, of a son.” A fourth son, Brabazon John, was born in March 1833; an article in the Dublin Evening Mail of the 1st of April 1833 reads, “Births, the 24th at Edenderry Glebe, county Armagh, the Lady of the Rev. Wm. Barlow, of a son.” 1

According to the Armagh Clergy and Parishes, on the 24th of February 1835 their fifth son, Arthur Edward, was born, 2 but of him no birth announcements were found. There will most likely have been notifications though, and because such articles were very widely read, the notification of William’s birth even having been published in for instance the Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier, also Hamilton will have known about the births of the children.

Hamilton had fallen in love with Helen Maria Bayly in 1832, and they married on the 9th of April 1833. Catherine will certainly have heard about the marriage; if she had not read it in the papers,3 she will have been told about it by her Dublin family members. She sincerely hoped that he would become very happy because she granted him happiness from the bottom of her heart. Also Barlow hoped that Hamilton would become very happy yet with a very different motive;4 it would release him from the vague but constant unrest about that boy who never seemed to get married and thus remained a threat. He even started to feel some hope again; with Hamilton married perhaps Catherine would finally accept that she was his wife and should think of him alone.

1 Genes Reunited, : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. For William Brownlow, key¬ words: Barlow Edenderry glebe son, years: 1831-1831; for Brabazon John, keywords: Edenderry glebe, years: 1833-1833.

2 [Leslie 1911, 45]

3 Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Royal Rowan Helen Hamilton Bayly, years: 1833-1833.

4 This is again an interpretation; it is unknown what Barlow’s opinions were in this matter.

56

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

5.2 Life in Carlingford

In 1837 Barlow became vicar in Carlingford and also there they lived in the glebe house. 5 Built in the neighbourhood of King John’s castle and adjoining Carlingford Bay, Carlingford was very different from Eglish. “The town is beautifully situated on the south-west side of the spacious lough or bay to which it gives name, and immedi¬ ately at the base of an extensive range of mountains which terminates at this point. It consists of 288 houses. [ . . . ] A new glebe-house was built [ . . . ] in 1813: the glebe, in its immediate vicinity, comprises about 21 acres.” 6 * “[This ancient town] is thor¬ oughly Celtic, in its total disregard of the “unities” in architecture; but not the less picturesque on that account are the roofless castles, the mouldering Abbey overrun with ivy, the taper tower of the church, and the cottages and dwellings, with trim shrubberies and green grass plats. [ . . . ] The Glebe House, surrounded by gigantic old sycamores,' [is] the residence of the excellent rector,8 the Rev. William Bar- lowe. [ . . . ] Contiguous to the old Abbey is a capacious and handsome modern church, erected upon the site of an ancient religious edifice, the tower of which, being in good preservation, serves as a steeple to the present building. It is surrounded by a remark¬ able green graveyard, well stocked with old oaks and spreading sycamores.” 9

Figure 5.1: Carlingford Castle, or King John’s Castle, as shown in the Dublin Penny Jour¬ nal, Volume 1 No 4, July 21, 1832. babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951000728778j;vi ew=lup;seq=35.

5 See Leinster p. 20, in Slater, I. (1846), Slater’s National Commercial Directory of Ireland. Manchester: I. Slater, books. google. com/books?id=2TZPAAAAYAAJ.

6 [Lewis 1840, 254-255, vol 1]

' The European Acer pseudoplatanus.

8 According to the Armagh Clergy and Parishes Barlow actually was vicar of Carlingford.

9 See p. 77 of the 1846 A Picturesque Handbook to Carlingford Bay, and the Watering Places in its Vicinity [anon.]. Neway: Greer, books. google. com/books?id=9x4wAAAAMAAJ. For the “hand¬ some modern church” see figure 5.6.

Children and bereavements

57

Figure 5.2: On this historical map the glebe house can be seen in the right lower corner of the map. Ask about Ireland : Griffith’s Valuation, askaboutire land.ie/grifhth-valuation, Griffith’s Places, Carlingford, Louth, Map views. The ‘Castle (in ruins)’ is not King John’s Castle, that is further to the north outside this map view. See also the Irish Historic Towns Atlas No 23: Carlingford by O’Sullivan and Gillespie, Royal Irish Academy 2011, ria. ie/ga/node/94255. Choose ‘Text’ for more maps.

5.3 Deaths of two sons

But then disaster struck for the family. In March 1837 a sixth son, Maxwell Close, had been born, 10 and a death announcement in the Dublin Morning Register of the 1st of June 1838 reads, “Deaths. At Westland-row, Maxwell, youngest son of the Rev. William Barlow.” * 11 It is not known why they were in Dublin, perhaps Maxwell had been ill and they had sought help from the best doctors in Dublin.

10 Also of his birth no newspaper articles or family notices were found.

11 Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Weitland Maxwell, years: 1838-1838. At the time of the death of Maxwell Close Thomas Disney had already bought Rock Lodge in Co. Meath, see footnote 5 on p. 20, but he seems to have kept his offices for some more years; members of the Disney family still lived at Westland-row until in any case 1842. In 1835 for instance ‘Rev B. Disney’, ‘Thomas J. Disney’, and ‘Rev J. Disney’, who will have been two cousins of Catherine, and perhaps her brother James, see p. 18 of Report of the Fifth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, books. google. com/books?id=Nh9LAAAAYAAJ. And

58

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Maxwell Close was buried in the parish of St. Werburgh on the 30th of May 1838 and his burial record gives his age; he was fourteen months old. 12 His parish was given as St. Peter’s, a parish south of the river Liffey, 13 perhaps indicating that they were also staying with other relatives, or that Maxwell had been in a hospital. 14

Figure 5.3: The Rectory, or Vicarage, or Glebe House, at Dundalk Street in Carlingford was a large house, having had twenty-two rooms. The date of this photo is unknown, but it may have been made in the early twentieth century. It is slightly adjusted to make it easier to imagine that Catherine lived there. The photo is now in the possession of the Carlingford Heritage Centre, and shown here courtesy of the current owner of the property. For the twenty-two rooms see yourirish.com/folklore/ghost-carlingford-rectory.

more people lived there; in 1834 a baby called Robert Sandham was born at 4 Westland row, “Father occupation: servant,” see Irish Genealogy. ie : Church Records , churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/chu rchrecords/display-pdf.jsp?pdfName=d-30- 2-1-075. Also in the 1840 birth announcement of the first daughter of Catherine’s sister Louisa it is mentioned that the baby was born “at the residence of her father, Thomas Disney, Esq. 4, Westland-row” although she then lived with her husband Henry Hobson at Jenkinstown Glebe, Dundalk, Co. Louth. Genes Reunited : SBNA, keywords: Jenkinstown glebe, years: 1840-1840. The last time Westland-row was mentioned in connection with the Disneys is when in 1842 Mrs. Disney, Elizabeth McMollan, widow of Brabazon Disney and aunt of Catherine, died at Westland-row. Genes Reunited : SBNA, keywords: Westland Disney, years: 1842-1842. Thereafter no more Disneys at Westland-row were found in newspaper articles, and in any case in 1850 someone else lived in the house, see the Dublin City Directory 1850, dublinl850. com/dublinl850/xdubdir63.html.

12 See Irish Genealogy. ie : Church Records, churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/displa y-pdf.jsp?pdfName=d-326-4- 2-017.

13 [Lewis 1840, 556-557, vol 1]

14 Adelaide hospital was in St. Peter’s, in Bride street, but it was founded a year after Maxwell’s death. Perhaps they already treated patients before officially opening.

Children and bereavements

59

When in 1841 Catherine was in the sixth month of her seventh and last pregnancy they lost their son William Brownlow. His death announcement in the Monaghan Northern Standard of the 5th of June 1841 reads, “Died. May 26, in his 10th year, William Brownlow Barlow, third son of the Rev. William Barlow, Vicar of Carling- ford.” He was buried in Dublin on the 29th of May 1841, just like his little brother in St. Werburgh, but as his parish Carlingford was given. 15

Figure 5.4: “The rectory was destroyed by fire when it was unoccupied in the late 70s, and demolished in 2008.” Shown here courtesy of the website Carlingford People and The Cooley Penninsula. carlingfordpeople.ie/gallery/meissner-rectory [accessed 24 Oct 2018].

John Lambert was born three months later; his birth announcement in the Dublin Morning Register of the 20th Aug 1841 reads, “Births. August 16, at the Vicarage, Carlingford, the lady of the Rev. Wm Barlow, of a son.” 16 It must have been very dif¬ ficult , even though in those years many children died young, for the parents that did not make it any easier. For Catherine it will even have been more difficult than it al¬ ready is for any parent; she was trapped in an unhappy marriage and seems to have been, as could be derived from Hamilton’s 1830 poem, soothed in her unhappiness by her love for her children.

15 Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Brownlow Barlow vicar Carlingford, years: 1841-1841. Irish Genealogy .ie : Church Records, churchrecords.irishgene alogy.ie/churchrecords/display-pdf.jsp?pdfName=d-326-4- 2-020. Also other members of the Barlow family were buried at St. Werburgh, for instance John and Jane Barlow of Sibyl Hill, Clontarf. Ap¬ parently more people from other parishes were buried at St. Werburgh: on the same page as William Brownlow, Hamilton’s Cousin Arthur is registered; apparently having moved house, he was from St. George’s. And next to Carlingford, also someone from Co. Kildare was registered on that page. It may have been customary there; in 1728 fees were published for marriages and burials, foreign¬ ers could be buried in the church yard for £2.40. See theirishaesthete.com/2013/05/18/terms-and- conditions-may-apply.

16 Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Vicarage Carling¬ ford, years: 1841-1841.

60

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Figure 5.5: As seen from Cuchulafnn Heights, the remnants of what once was the glebe house. Behind the rubble the Catholic Church of St. Michael can be seen, and in the back¬ ground the Slieve Foye mountain. A last sycamore still stands. Reproduced from a 2010 Google Maps street view recording.

Figure 5.6: The church and its graveyard. John Lambert, and perhaps also Maxwell Close, will have been baptised in this church. Reproduced from a 2009 Google Maps street view recording.

Children and bereavements

61

5.4 The comfort of nearby siblings

In 1844 a new church was needed in Carlingford because the parish was very exten¬ sive, and families had to travel too far to come to church. Donations were given, and in an article of May 1844 in the Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent it can be read that Catherine did act as the vicar’s wife, “Rev. William Barlow donated £20, Mrs. William Barlow donated £5;” she apparently had money of her own. 17 In the article it can also be seen that, as was suggested earlier, they had frequent con¬ tact with their families: both Barlow’s brother John Barlow of “Sibyl-Hill, Dublin” was mentioned, 18 and Catherine’s brother Thomas Disney, “jun., Esq., 68, Lower Gardiner- street, Dublin.” 19 The church was indeed built; its foundation stone was laid in September 1844, 20 and the newspaper articles mentioned that the “Rev. Wil¬ liam Barlow, Vicar of the Parish, delivered a suitable address on the occasion.”

Although not very close by, now three of Catherine’s brothers and two of her sis¬ ters lived within a one day travelling distance from Carlingford. Catherine’s brother James Disney was, since 1837, perpetual curate in Charlemont,21 about ten kilome¬ tres north of Armagh; the same year, 1837, her brother Henry Purdon had become curate in Tynan, and in 1840 he became perpetual curate of Kildarton. 22 And in the

17 Genes Reunited : SBNA, genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Disney Barlow Carlingford, years: 1844-1844.

18 From the baptism records of their daughters Margaret Izabella and Catherine Maria it can be seen that John and Jane Barlow moved from Dublin city, parish St. George, to Sibyl Hill, parish Clontarf, between 1824 and 1826. See churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords. Keywords: Baptism, Izabella Barlow; Catherine Maria Barlow.

19 In the article two men are mentioned who were called Thomas Disney, one from Dublin, and one from Rostrevor. In the 1847 marriage announcement of Thomas Disney, Catherine’s brother, and Dorathea Evans, it is mentioned that he was from county Dublin, and she from Rostrevor where her father was vicar. See Genes Reunited : SBNA , genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna/index. Keywords: Evans Disney Rostrevor, years: 1847-1847. It is therefore possible that Thomas Disney learned to know Dora Evans when he visited family at Rostrevor.

20 [Leslie 1911, 164]. The church is St. Andrew’s Church of Ireland, Bush. “Situated in the beau¬ tiful Cooley Peninsula Co. Louth, the church was built as a Chapel-of-ease for nearby Carlingford Parish although it now functions in practice as the Parish Church. [ . . . ] The Church was con¬ secrated on Tuesday, September 16th 1845. grangebushresidents.webs.com/sharedhistory.htm [ac¬ cessed 15 Dec 2018].

21 [Leslie 1911, 338].

22 Kildarton Church is about three kilometres east of Armagh. Henry Purdon seems to have been one of the family members who defied his father’s focus on money and status. “Mr. Disney did not enter Holy Orders at his first outset in life. He held for some years an employment under the Board of Ordnance, which would have been of rising pecuniary value; but he was desirous of entering upon a life of greater usefulness, and had fixed his thoughts upon taking part in the Christian ministry; so that he eventually resigned his appointment, and, at his ordination [in 1837], entered the service of the Church, in Ireland, as a curate at 75 1 a-year.” See The Colonial church chronicle and mis¬ sionary journal, and foreign ecclesiastical reporter , 9: 81-89. babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd. ah6blr. According to the website Measuring Worth, measuringworth.com, the relative income in 2017 of £75 in 1837 would be about £87,000. That is not by any standard a small amount of money, but apparently substantially less than he could have earned. Between 1850 and 1852 he was a missionary in Newfoundland and Labrador, see Ralph, R.F. (2015), Travel and Trial: An Examination of the Establishment of an Anglican Community in the First Church of Eng¬ land Missions of Southern Labrador, 1848-1876. Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 30 (2): 187- 219. journals. lib. unb.ca/index.php/nflds/article/view/25132/29080. After Henry Purdon returned to Ireland, in May 1854 his brother Edward Ogle took him as curate in Newtownhamilton where he himself was rector. “As a result of looking after the poorest in the parish, Henry caught typhus and died in July 1854.” Disney. H. (1995), Disney s of Stabannon: A Review of an Anglo-Irish Family

62

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Figure 5.7: St. Andrews Church, The Bush. Catherine donated £5; the only public activity in her capacity as a vicar’s wife which was found in the newspapers. To put her donation in perspective, in 2017 a donation of £5 in 1844 seen as a commodity would have, according to the website Measuring Worth, measuringworth.com, an income value of £6,000. Reproduced from a 2010 Google Maps street view recording.

year mentioned, 1844, Edward Ogle, who had been curate of Armagh since 1834, be¬ came rector of Newtown- Hamilton, 23 which is south of Armagh, about twenty kilo¬ metres closer to Carlingford. 24 But none of these three brothers had married yet, and as was remarked earlier, as Victorian men they were perhaps not really able to under¬ stand Catherine’s misery. On the other hand, it may have made them rather free to invite her, or make longer visits to her.

Catherine’s sister Anne Eliza had, in 1829, married their cousin John James Disney and now lived in Slane, about sixty kilometres from Carlingford. But their youngest sister Louisa lived indeed quite close to Catherine; she had married Henry Hobson who was rector in Ballymascanlan, 25 which was only ten kilometres from Carlingford as the crow flies, and twenty kilometres if travelling around the moun¬ tains. They will have seen each other often; Hamilton wrote about Catherine that she “was allowed to receive members of her own family as often as she could wish,” and of Louisa it was said that in Ballymascanlan “she was surrounded by relatives.” 26

from the Time of Cromwell. [Oxford]: Hugh Disney.

23 [Leslie 1911, 332]

24 The name Newtown-Hamilton is what it reads, a new town founded by Mr. Hamilton around 1770. “The surrounding district was erected into a parish by Primate Robinson, who severed it from the parish of Creggan, built a church [in 1775], and endowed the living [...], a rectory and vicarage, in the diocese of Armagh [...]. The glebe- house [ . . . ] is a handsome residence; it was built under the old acts in 1806 [ . . . ] [and improved] in 1830.” [Lewis 1840, 438-439, vol 2]. Edward Ogle Disney was rector in Newtown-Hamilton until 1854.

25 See Louth, Ballymascanlon Churchyard, igp-web.com/IGPArchives/ire/louth/cemeteries/bal ly mascanlonO 1 . txt .

26 See p. 50, and McDonnell, G. (1995), Reviewed Work: Disneys of Stabannon by Hugh Disney. Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society , 23 (3): 378-379.

Children and bereavements

63

It is not known who of the Disney siblings knew about Catherine’s forced mar¬ riage. Of only two siblings something can be inferred: Thomas and his wife Dora would later become intermediaries between Hamilton and Catherine; they will have known. But Louisa’s later fascination27 with her sister’s story seems to indicate that before 1861 she had no clue at all. Louisa had been only twelve or just thirteen when Catherine married; perhaps her family had not said much to the younger children, in those days marriages always were a difficult subject.

If therefore Louisa and Catherine saw each other often at Carlingford or Bally- mascanlan, but Catherine did not openly speak of her unhappiness, or did not want to tell Louisa whom she had been in love with before her marriage, than that would certainly explain Louisa’s later fascination; she must have seen her sister’s unhappi¬ ness. But marriage having been holy then Louisa could not help Catherine with that, yet what she could do for her is be a good and loving sister, and take care that Cath¬ erine saw much of her family. Indeed always having loved them, Catherine will have found much comfort in her siblings’ closeness, especially when her eldest children left their parental home.

5.5 An emptying house

About a year after William Brownlow’s death, on the 2th of July 1842 Catherine’s el¬ dest son James William, sixteen years old, entered Trinity College in Dublin. 28 In the Alumni Dublinenses it is mentioned that he had been at Wakefield school,29 James thus will have left the house even before 1842. And if he was sent to the school in 1838 when he was twelve, as was done more often in case of eldest sons,30 he had left home around the death of his little brother Maxwell Close.

As inferred from the Alumni Dublinenses Catherine’s second son, Thomas Dis¬ ney, had been privately tutored, allowing him to stay at home a bit longer. But in 1844 he followed James to Dublin, he entered TCD on the 1st of July, also sixteen years old. Catherine’s once lively home was half empty now; she doubtlessly loved her three younger sons, Brabazon John, Arthur Edward and John Lambert, but four sons were not with her any more. She was forty-four, and even though many women had children until being almost fifty, Catherine did not get pregnant any more after John Lambert’s birth in 1841. The delivery may have been difficult bringing her life in dan¬ ger, or perhaps John was not in good health; he would also die young.31

2' See p. 27. In 1861, eight years after Catherine’s death, Louisa met Hamilton at her brother Thomas’ house, [Hankins 1980, 357], and someone apparently told her about it. Hamilton and Louisa thereafter started a correspondence which lasted for some weeks, and then she finally heard the details, such as Catherine playing the harp when they sat around the fire, see p. 33. Hamilton even sent her a copy of his 1848 correspondence with Catherine, which could serve as a proof that it was innocent, even for those times. The 1848 correspondence, see p. 68, does not exist any more, unless of course one of Louisa’s descendants still owns it.

28 [Alumni Dubl., 40]

29 This may have been the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, a boys school in Wakefield, Eng¬ land, which was founded in 1591. archive. org/details/historyoffreegraOOpeacuoft. However, James Barlow is not mentioned as a pupil, and therefore it is uncertain.

30 Hamilton’s eldest son William Edwin went to Clapham School in London when he was twelve, and so did two other eldest and twelve year old sons of friends of Hamilton [Graves 1885, 524].

31 See p. 77.

Chapter 6

The end of the marriage

6.1 Visiting Dunsink Observatory

In 1845 1 Catherine visited Hamilton at Dunsink Observatory, together with her brother Thomas, who was an ‘intimate friend’ of Hamilton and then seems to have lived in Ballygall, some four kilometres from the observatory. 2 It is not known when exactly they made their visit; Hankins remarks that Hamilton “left little record of this visit,” and Graves does not mention it at all.

Catherine may have been in Dublin to see her sons James William and Thomas Disney, then students at Trinity College. 3 From the fact that she visited Hamilton it can safely be assumed that she was in Dublin without Barlow; if he forbid her to contact Hamilton, he doubtlessly would also not have given his consent to this visit. The house at Westland-row was not in the Disney family any more, and Catherine will have stayed with family members, perhaps with her sister Jane at Sibyl Hill, or at Thomas’ house.

Thomas inviting Catherine to come with him to visit Hamilton would have been quite curious if he knew how unhappy Catherine was, and knew about her love for

1 In the fall of 1845 the famine started. Barlow apparently was “active during the famine,” see p. 69, but because nothing was found indicating what he did it is unknown if and how it influenced Catherine’s life. A letter does exist from Edward Ogle, who then was rector of Newtownhamilton and had become chairman of the Newtownhamilton Relief Committee. On the 13th of November 1846 he wrote to the Lord Lieutenant, “The terrible necessity of our present miseries cannot afford to wait. Strong men perishing with hunger are willing to work for daily bread, but are now compelled to exist on the very refuse of our fields. The beasts of the earth are at this moment better fed than hundreds of our fellow creatures around us. Disease and death will soon follow, as they have ever done before on the rack of famine. In a few months, Public Works may only serve to dig the graves of the people. After such a melancholy catastrophy, relief will come in vain.” McMahon, K., McKeown, T. (1985), Agrarian Disturbances around Crossmaglen, 1835-1855: Part IV. Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society , 11 (2): 342-362.

2 In his later marriage announcement, see footnote 19 on p. 61, it is written that Thomas was “of Ballygallbeg, county Dublin.” If Ballygallbeg was the name of his house it is possible that he lived in Ballygall and had his offices in Lower Gardiner street, as was mentioned earlier, see p. 61. Graves does not mention Thomas Disney in the descriptions of the years around 1845; having been very focused on Hamilton’s ‘important’ friends he hardly wrote about Hamilton’s private friends. Yet describing 1851 Graves calls him an ‘intimate friend’ of Hamilton, see [Graves 1885, 671].

3 [Alumni Dubl., 40].

66

Catherine Disney : a biographical sketch

Hamilton; he then would have been aware that he could worsen her unhappiness. If he on the other hand still had no idea that her marriage had been forced upon her, he might have seen it as just a reunion, remembering the old days when they all saw each other regularly. But that would imply that he had not seen the stark contrast be¬ tween her ‘radiant’ happiness before that defining day in February 1825 and her un¬ happiness thereafter, and that he would not have guessed what had been happening; being almost of the same age, having been one of the two witnesses at her wedding, and later becoming an intermediary between Hamilton and Catherine,4 that does not seem very plausible. The most likely scenario therefore is that Catherine decided to make this visit, and that she asked Thomas to accompany her, just as Edwin Ogle had been with her when Hamilton visited her in 1830.

6.1.1 Feelings of warmth and a spark of anger

From the day she was in Dublin Catherine had wanted to see Hamilton, being so close to him now. She doubted whether she would dare to visit him, risking to make him so nervous again as he had been in Armagh in 1830 when he had broken the wires of the eyepiece. But she felt that she could try how he would react because he now also was married himself; having heard from her brothers that it was a happy marriage, she expected that that would make seeing her again much more easy for him, and perhaps even pleasant. And assuming that Hamilton would not recognise how terri¬ bly unhappy she was if she would try very hard to look kindly at him, she hoped that he would also look kindly at her, and that she would be able to draw strength from it, that it would counteract the coldness of her own marriage, even if that feeling would last only for a little while.

She decided to take the risk and asked Thomas to make an appointment, fully aware that she therewith would break her wedding vow of obedience to her husband. Thomas may have accepted to come with her out of love for his sister, perhaps he hoped that it would do her good, she looked so unhappy lately. And he did not worry about Hamilton; he had seen him fall in love with Ellen de Vere in 1831 and then with Helen Bayly, and he will have assumed rightly that Hamilton saw Catherine as a love from the past, albeit as such very important.

At the observatory Catherine felt very happy, and she made her acquaintance with Hamilton’s wife.5 For Lady Hamilton it will have been very special to speak with Catherine; she had known Hamilton for several years already before their mar¬ riage, she had read the poems Hamilton had written about Catherine, and she had doubtlessly often talked with her husband about her because Hamilton had known since 1830 that Catherine was unhappy and found that very difficult. From the be¬ ginning Hamilton had made it very clear that he would not hide his feelings for both Catherine Disney and Ellen de Vere, arguing that if he would deny his feelings for

4 See p. 79.

5 Lady Hamilton was from Nenagh, Tipperary, but before her marriage she had been in Dublin often. She had learned to know Hamilton during her many visits to two of her sisters, who lived with their families in the houses neighbouring the observatory. Moreover, several family members seem to have lived in the city of Dublin, her parents had married there, and she had at least one friend in Dublin, see [Van Weerden 2017, 137]. Because many members of the higher classes seem to have known each other, and Helen Bayly had been twenty-three already when Catherine moved to Eglish, they may already have met before.

The end of the marriage

67

them now he would have been a liar then; 6 Hamilton was, as friends testified, indeed extremely honest. 7 Having been so open about his feelings, the fact that Helen Bayly still decided to accept him in marriage shows that she did not see that as a problem, he also was very open about his feelings for her.

After Hamilton had shown them the astronomical instruments,8 this time with¬ out