An Unconventional Wife

by Mary Hoban

  After little Arthur’s death had spurred Tom’s return to his Anglican roots, he had appeared content and there had been nothing in his demeanour to suggest this was a mere stepping stone to something much more radical. Yet here he was, determined to become a Catholic, a religion his own father had deeply objected to and one that his wife despised beyond anything else. Had he gone mad? Tom would say not, simply that he was moved by various influences.

  For a time, his all-consuming love for Julia and his work, with all the challenges it posed, had kept his restless mind and imagination engaged. But when Julia no longer accompanied him on his various tours across the island — and his travelling increased significantly in 1855 — his mind turned inwards to a soul fretfully searching for a deeper meaning to life. This same impulse had driven him to New Zealand and it was now working on him again. In his published memoir, written years later, he said very little about this decisive moment other than it had been a long time in the making and that it finally resolved itself after he was struck, initially by a passage from the first Epistle of Peter — possibly that description of the Christian inheritance as glorious in its incorruptible substance, in its undefiled purity and in its unfading beauty — and then by the life of St Bridget, a fourteenth-century Swedish saint. Tom had found St Bridget in Butler’s Lives of the Saints, a copy of which was at the inn he was staying in on one of his tours of inspection. What it was about St Bridget that particularly attracted him he did not say, except that the impression her life made upon him was indelible.

  The epiphany at the country inn may have gone no further had Tom enjoyed a coterie of intellectual and like-minded friends to discuss his theories and doubts with, but without such a group, his default position, the extreme response, was inevitable. If only his proposal to return to England after Willy’s birth had been accepted, this dramatic leap of faith may never have happened. Tom had after all witnessed the trauma of converting to Catholicism when he was at Oxford. He had seen it, too, in the colony, for Van Diemen’s Land was a society where all difference, including that of religion, was carefully calibrated. On one of his inspectorate tours, he had stayed with Charles Wilmot, brother of Julia’s ex-fiancé and the youngest son of the former governor Sir Eardley. Wilmot had recently converted to Catholicism and Tom, though he scorned the colony’s prejudice, had noted that Wilmot was now, an object of great suspicion to the locals.

  In the absence of anyone to confide in, Tom began reading Dr Newman’s Tracts for the Times. It was immaterial to him that Newman was on a different side of the religious divide to that of his own father, or possibly that would always be the most important element. Tom’s friend Arthur Stanley observed of Dr Newman and Dr Arnold that not only were they like each other, but they were of the very same essence. In Newman’s Tracts Tom found a justification for his action, a way of making the irrational appear plausible, the improbable appear routine. There was no one more likely to approve Tom’s actions than John Henry Newman, a man who had traversed similar ground and had arrived at the same conclusion. He would be an ideal confidante and counsellor, and Tom wrote to him for advice. For his part, Newman, a man always surrounded by disciples, welcomed with open arms the son of his old foe, Dr Arnold.

  Just as Tom’s journey to New Zealand had been a work of faith, one that he could not interfere with for fear of tampering with the integrity of his conscience, so too now was his decision to become a Catholic. A martyr’s compulsion drove his search for enlightenment and nothing — not a despairing wife, the bewilderment of friends, the contempt of men, even doubt as to whether truth existed — would halt that search.

  Julia refused to accept Tom’s decision, but how could she possibly counteract such single-minded belief? Once her initial bewilderment and panic had passed, she pleaded with him to do nothing definite until he had told his mother and knew her response. Julia believed, correctly, that Mrs Arnold would be horrified, and hoped that his mother would be able to convince Tom not to take this extraordinary step, even if Julia, his own wife, could not. Tom agreed to Julia’s plea, but had she seen a letter he wrote to Newman at the same time, she would have been repelled. In it, Tom sought Newman’s advice regarding the timing of his formal reception into the church, a ceremony during which he would profess his belief in the teachings of the Catholic Church followed by a public declaration of his acceptance by the church. Clearly, Tom had no intention of rescinding his decision, regardless of his mother’s or his wife’s reaction.

  Julia also appealed to their friends Bishop Nixon and Thomas and Catherine Reibey to talk to him, but while they, too, deplored his decision, none could convince him to reconsider it. At the most, Catherine was able to extract a promise from him that he would not convert until he had heard from his mother. She also convinced him to see an Anglican clergyman and to read books in support of Anglicanism. All the while, Julia continued her arguments against his conversion and eventually she was able to wring from him a promise that he would not take any final step until he had actually seen his mother. She hoped that if he returned to England, his need for Catholicism might abate.

  Despite his promises, Julia found no relief, as Tom sought constantly to have her and Catherine Reibey release him from them. Catherine eventually succumbed to his pleading — she recognised his stubbornness — and released him, but Julia would not. The roots of mistrust, once sown, are hard to smother, but she made one more desperate appeal, an appeal that exposed her depth of feeling and of thought. In the letter she found herself writing to Tom, those scant months after Theodore’s birth, in which she explained her decision to leave him, Julia recognised the inevitability of Tom’s conversion and that, despite all the promises in the world, his mind was made up. She wrote:

  So the fearful gulf between us is beyond redemption. God only knows what it cost me to feel this. How different were my first feelings on hearing that you had become a believer in Christianity, I thought (how utterly mistaken I was) that through you I, and our children would be led to God. But now for myself, I almost feel the utter impossibility of such ever being the case; a Romanist I cannot be, my whole soul revolts from a religion so utterly inconsistent with the true worship of Christ, and for our children I cannot but feel the prospects to be equally dreary.

  All I ask of you now is to try to view the question impartially, to ask yourself whether, as you were mistaken in your former views, you may not be mistaken now, and also to ask yourself if you cannot be content to live and die without joining the Church of Rome. If after you have heard from home … and having heard whatever may be urged against your present plans by anyone who has your welfare at heart, you are still in the same mood I will release you from your promise. But at the same time that I do this I will, I must, leave you.

  The fearful gulf that would be placed between us would be more than I could bear, and still live with you; for our children’s sake as well as for ours it will be better for us to part. Of course as a true Roman Catholic you can never give consent to your children being brought up in the Church of England. I can never consent to their being brought up in the Church of Rome, and a division of religion among children of the same parents would be frightful, if those children were to still live under the same roof. Do not think dearest Tom that it costs me nothing to feel this, would to God I could look upon it in any other way, but I could not live with you and feel at the same time so utterly separated from you. You tell me to pray to God, I cannot pray, I do not know how — and you who might have taught me have placed an unsurmountable barrier between us.

  I love you dearest Tom most deeply, and in separating from you I shall strike my own death blow, but as things are now it must be so … Your letter to me was the coldest I have ever received from you, you are rapidly losing all feeling of love towards me; you do not even at the end say, ‘God bless you’. I do not remember ever to have received a letter from you that did not end with that sentence. I know I am not worthy, that God’s blessing sh
ould be asked for me, but how bitter is the thought that you also feel this. I know that I am vile, God only knows how vile, but I cannot bear that you should think this. We are both young to feel that all our earthly happiness is blighted, but you have the fanaticism, the superstitions of the Church of Rome to take the place of earthly affections. I have nothing. Whatever I may say in moments of excitement (of excitement almost more than I can bear), that you may be happy even if I am wretched is the sincerest wish, I will not say prayer, of my life.

  A shard of glass had ground its way into her heart. She knew divorce was impossible. It could only be granted by an Act of Parliament, which precluded all but the very rich, and certainly most women. If she left her husband, there was no guarantee that she would ever see her children again, unless he agreed that they could live with her. Abandonment. She had already lived that word and she knew instinctively — the only way Julia knew things — that without Tom’s love, without her children, she would only have what she thought of as her ‘vileness’, her bitterness, and her anger as company. Even so she hoped he might be happy even if she was wretched. That was her penalty for loving him. But she could not, would not, become a Catholic, the thing she hated most. She knew when she married that her husband would be head of the household, but that did not mean he could control her soul. It was not something she could submit to.

  In those dark months while she waited for Mrs Arnold’s response, Julia continued her attempts to persuade Tom to revoke his decision. She knew she could not reason with him, so she tried to paint for him the loneliness of her position when his first thought would never be for her, but would always be for his own soul. Tom was moved by her desperation, telling her that he now knew how her whole nature revolted against Catholicism and that he realised he would deserve only contempt and loathing if he was capable of sacrificing the fear, the happiness, the moral and religious growth, of the wife whom I love and who has been a true and faithful wife to me, to some morbid caprice or taste for spiritual luxuries on his part. But this was no caprice, he said. It was his soul at stake and his religion should and would determine the religion practised in his household. There would be no divided Arnold house. If he converted, so too would Julia and all his children. It was not only his duty, but also Julia’s duty, and the duty of all to submit to the Catholic Church.

  Desperate appeal fought devout belief, but Julia could never meet or match this degree of conviction, particularly when rational discussion and emotional response were negated. The impasse was intolerable for these two lovers. Julia, all love and hate, a force, not an organism, and Tom, all conscience and belief. Something had to give.

  Baby Theodore developed whooping cough, casting once more the shadow of death over the household. Julia was in a frantic state of mind, frightened by the baby’s health and frightened, too, by the pain she recognised in the dark, frightened eyes of her daughter.

  Polly was nearly five years of age in that house in New Town, watching silently as her mother became more distraught and her father retreated into stubborn despair. She heard friends and family trying to persuade her father that his conversion was unnecessary and trying to convince her mother to remain in the marriage. She observed the pain of her grandfather, William, as he reminded Julia of his grief when he lost his children and of the limbo he was in, neither married nor unmarried. And she witnessed her mother’s friends Catherine Reibey and Mrs Nixon talk of the social censure and ostracism that Julia would face if she separated from Tom. Polly may not have understood the words spoken by the adults around her, but she absorbed the anxiety and she felt the pressure that was all the time building. This demonstrative, adventurous child — Tom thought her ‘passionate’ like her mother — did not resist when Julia sent her to stay with Catherine Reibey at Entally. Still, Mrs Arnold’s response did not come.

  In her later life as a novelist, Polly explored this deep fracture that developed in her parent’s marriage, the conversations in novels such as Helbeck of Bannisdale and Robert Elsmere giving clues to the intimate exchanges that took place between her parents. Both novels explore the conflicts that arise between men and women when conscience and religious scruples are pitted against love, when a desire for independence is pitted against a demand for submission. Invoking Julia’s sensibility, Polly’s heroine in Helbeck tries to imagine her future in a dramatically altered landscape, in which she would be guided, loved, crushed if need be, by a man whose first thought could never be for her, who put his own soul before her. She asks her lover how they are to live together in this world and also in the next:

  I know you don’t want to force me; but if, in time, I don’t agree with you — if it goes on all our lives — how can you help thinking that I shall be lost — lost eternally — separated from you? … And as far as I can see I shall reject it all — wilfully, knowingly, deliberately. What will you say? What do you say now — to yourself — when — when you pray for me?

  And in Robert Elsmere, Polly turned to her father for inspiration, capturing his misery when she wrote of the hero Robert standing gazing at his home,

  the home consecrated by love, by effort, by faith. The high alternations of intellectual and spiritual debate, the strange emerging sense of deliverance, gave way to a most bitter human pang of misery. ‘O God! My wife — my work!’ … There was a sound of a voice calling — Catherine’s voice calling for him. He leant against the gate of the wood-path, struggling sternly with himself. This was no simple matter of his own intellectual consistency or happiness. Another’s whole life was concerned. Any precipitate speech, or hasty action, would be a crime. A man is bound above all things to protect those who depend on him from his own immature or revocable impulses. Not a word yet, till this sense of convulsion and upheaval had passed away, and the mind was once more its own master.

  At the beginning of October, Tom received a letter from Dr Newman. It was all he wanted to hear, indeed he found it kind and comforting, but when Julia saw it she erupted. In frustration and fury, she sent off her own response to Newman, blaming him for all the ills that had befallen her. Tom was mortified by her action and wrote immediately to Newman begging his forgiveness for Julia’s unjust and half-frantic language. He asked Newman to pray for her, as she was possessed at times by an evil spirit and had no knowledge of what she did or said. Newman destroyed Julia’s letter, annoyed at the tone and anger conveyed in it. He was, according to some, a man who shrank from opposition. But after she had sent her demons sailing off to Newman, Julia recognised a new resolve in Tom, and she was forced to decide whether she would stay or go.

  In the end, there was no choice. Impossible as it was to imagine her life with Tom if he became a Catholic, it was more impossible to imagine her life without him. What was more, the law held that after separation, children became the man’s property. If there was no Tom, there could be no children. And there she stopped. She was still nursing Theodore, watching him struggle for breath as each cough racked his little body. She had just sent Polly away to shield her from the seismic change that was occurring in her world. She witnessed every day Willy’s loneliness and his bewilderment at his sister’s absence. Julia understood this language. She had seen it in her own younger brothers and sisters when their mother had abandoned them, and she knew she could never do that to her own children.

  Her mind was made up. She would remain within the confines of her marriage, to conserve and preserve what she could of the life she had chosen. She did still love Tom, even if her trust in him was destroyed — a bleak truth to face, but too much had passed between them. She vowed then that she would never resile from her decision to stay, but could she reconcile herself to it? That she would not dwell on. Exhausted by the long battle between them, and wanting only peace, she yielded.

  Her resolve to stay did not bring the peace she yearned for. Tom, no longer fearful of her desertion, reneged on his promise to wait until he knew his mother’s reaction and decided to be received into
the Catholic Church immediately. He blamed this on Julia, telling his mother that Julia

  was herself partly the cause of this, for she talked to everybody about the change in my opinions, and what I had done or contemplated doing, so that it was scarcely possible for me to stay where I was …

  Julia’s horror and distrust of the Roman Church and its attitude towards women was forcefully reaffirmed when Tom sought the advice of Robert Willson, the Catholic Bishop of Tasmania, who told him the promise he had made to Julia was a wrong one in itself, and that it was better to break it than to keep it because a promise that implies we disobey the will of God, and fail to do what He has commanded, is not binding. But Julia’s humiliation was not at an end.

  For months, now, she, along with her father and others in their circle, had tried to make Tom understand that his conversion could jeopardise his position as inspector of schools — a Catholic would be deeply suspect in a position of such influence — and threaten their fragile financial position. Sectarianism in Australia, affecting every aspect of life, from education and employment to friendship and marriage, reached its zenith in the mid-twentieth century when so great was the social chasm dividing Catholics and non-Catholics in Australian culture that schools did not compete in athletics across denominational lines … Nothing would curb Tom’s fervour. He simply would not countenance the idea that his religion could possibly threaten his job. He was wrong.

  Anti-Catholic sentiment stirred as soon as his conversion became public and it roared to life on the morning of his reception into the Roman Catholic Church — 18 January 1856 — when one of Hobart’s leading newspapers declared that Tom Arnold had perverted to the Catholic faith. It called upon him to resign his position. Tom’s reaction was brutal. He immediately blamed it on Julia, claiming that the article was a direct result of her having talked so much about the matter. Reality was setting in and Tom did not like its guise. He knew that privacy was non-existent in this small community and that his conversion to Roman Catholicism was a matter of public knowledge and interest. He gave Julia no chance to respond to his accusation. Instead, he left for the church, intent on acknowledging the authenticity of his own inner experience.