Catherine Disney : a Biographical Sketch Completely Unexpectedly, That Catherine Was Betrothed to William Barlow

——— 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. ——— a biographical sketch Anne van Weerden Published by J. Fransje van Weerden 2019, Stedum, The Netherlands A Typeset by LTEX 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 corresponded 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 ascendancy 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 letters 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 AVictorian 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 difficult 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, especially 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 influence 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 of her 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.

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