It cannot have been long before his parishioners realised that this was indeed an unusual man from an unconventional background.
The only surviving photograph of him, taken in about 1865, shows an alert and humorous face with wildly curling dark hair and beard, and light-coloured eyes – so it seems he inherited from his father the black curly hair and blue eyes that he described in his lightly-fictionalised account of his family's history, written in old age [1] .
Robert Barlow was Anglo-Irish, born into the Protestant Ascendancy that had ruled Ireland for centuries. Divided by religion and language from the native population, they also seemed half-foreign to their counterparts in England.
The novelist Anthony Trollope returned from his time in Ireland with a noisy, boisterous social manner that was often commented on [2], and Jane Austen once described an Anglo-Irish family as "bold, queer-looking people" [3].
Robert was born in Dublin in about 1804 [4], just after the great events that were to determine the course of Irish history in the 19th and 20th centuries – the Rebellion of the radical United Irishmen in 1798 and the passing of the Act of Union in 1800. Parliament House in Dublin, which had been the first purpose-built parliament house in the world, had been sold to the Bank of Ireland, and Dublin would soon sink into the long decline that would last until 1922.
Robert was the youngest child of John Barlow, gentleman, and his wife Ann. He loved and admired his mother, and in his novel told her story with the greatest sympathy and affection. She in turn was devoted to him – he "was a prime favourite" with her, "and used to be called her white-headed boy" [5].
Ann's surname is unknown, but may have been Wilson, the middle name of her son John. Her father seems to have been a Dublin merchant, and she had many relations in Ireland. Whether all her relatives belonged to the Protestant ascendancy is not clear. She was certainly a cousin of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, 'Black Jack' Fitzgibbon, 1st Earl of Clare, still loathed today for his support of the Act of Union and his unremitting hostility to Catholicism. Robert Barlow does not explain how his mother was related to the Lord Chancellor – Fitzgibbon's father was a Roman Catholic who had been obliged to change his faith in order to become a barrister, as Catholics were then forbidden to practise at the Irish bar.
Ann's parents had both died by the time she reached sixteen, leaving their two sons and two daughters an income of £200 a year apiece. Their father entrusted them to the guidance of his cousin, a substantial merchant in the American trade. This "Cousin Joe", whose true name is unknown, apparently urged the young men to follow their fortunes in the New World, while their sisters lived in his household. His ulterior motive, according to the novel, was to take possession of their fortunes by devious means, and this Ann Barlow's family evidently believed he contrived to do. This may have been a comforting family myth developed to explain the family's financial predicament.
John Barlow was the son of a Lancashire merchant, sent to Dublin on business between his father and Cousin Joe. The family seems to have had Irish connections, as John's sister was also living in Dublin, and later in the novel several "tall Irish cousins" of John Barlow are mentioned. He was a young man of "aristocratic appearance", with blue eyes and "a profusion of black hair, curled becomingly by nature". He was a sportsman – a first-rate horseman, a fine angler, and very particular about his guns. His dogs were the best bred and trained in the country, and he neither beat them nor allowed his keepers to do so, saying, "No man shall be at liberty to exhibit his tyrannical disposition over my poor dogs".
John and Ann fell in love at first meeting. They married and set up home in Dublin, living on Ann's £200 a year plus an allowance of £500 made to John by his father, who could not afford to take capital from his business in order to make a marriage settlement for his son. It was not long before John, being of "that easy, yielding nature", had fallen into the fashionable habit of drinking to excess, to his young wife's dismay. Their misfortunes began a few years later when the Lancashire business of Mr Barlow senior failed, and John and Ann lost the main part of their income.
Now John needed employment. According to his son's novel, although John had been sent to Dublin on his father's business, he had not been brought up to a trade or profession but had been raised as a gentleman. This is possibly another family story, developed to disguise an unwelcome truth. The elder Mr Barlow was, according to his grandson, an able businessman, and unlikely to have raised his son as a gentleman if he had insufficient funds to settle upon him. On the whole it seems likely that John was supposed to be engaged in the Dublin end of his father's business, at least nominally, and was being paid accordingly. Apparently, John's only marketable skill was his fine handwriting, and Cousin Joe offered him a post as a clerk in his offices. It is noticeable that Robert Barlow never mentions any assistance given to Ann and her children by the Barlow family, who seem to have cast John off.
John worked for a time for Cousin Joe, but soon found it intolerable to be cooped up in an office all day, especially as, according to the novel, he had no practice in keeping office hours. He turned increasingly to drink and became steadily more unreliable until at last he lost his job.
As their debts mounted, Ann found herself with five small children to bring up, and only one maid-of-all-work to help her. She turned to Cousin Joe and borrowed money against her inheritance, with which to rent and furnish a house in Bolton Street, so as to take in lodgers. When her brothers in America heard of her plight, they wrote to tell her that they would give her £100 a year. But John's need for alcohol grew until at last he was arrested for debt and taken to the sponging-house. This was a private prison where bailiffs held debtors, charging them heavily for lodging, food and drink, until their families could raise enough money to free them. Ann raised the necessary sum, but from that time on she and her entire household – children, servants and lodgers – were engaged in a running battle to hide John from the bailiffs.
It was at this difficult time that she heard from America of the death of both her brothers; only her "cheerful temperament" and her ability to see "Providence in everything" could keep her from despair. Her brothers had left all their money to her – their other sister is never mentioned again in the novel – but Ann came to believe that Cousin Joe, who had managed the young men's Dublin affairs, contrived to lay his hands on all their money.
Joe was a man with a shady past – in the American Wars of Independence he had convinced General Washington that he was in all faith a supporter of the rebels, when it was for reasons of profit alone that he smuggled gunpowder across the Atlantic hidden in tubs of butter. His accomplice in this treasonable activity was his foster brother – in those days, "a most sacred bond of union" tied the son of the gentleman and the wet-nurse's child. Joe's secret contacts inside Dublin Castle had kept him safe from discovery by the government.
After some time Ann found herself once more in financial difficulties. She sold up the house in Bolton Street and took small apartments in Denzel Street. Here for a while John managed to give up the drink and for two years proved himself to be a devoted and loving father. At last his old ways came upon him once more, and he lost his employment and the battles with the bailiffs recommenced.
Now Cousin Joe offered to help Ann, and found her a house in Georges Street near the Quay, to run as a furnished boarding-house to which he would be able to direct many ships' captains in need of lodging. She kept the house for several years and it was during this time that Robert was born, the last of her eight children, of whom six survived to adulthood ("all handsome and interesting children").
Unfortunately John found that the ships' captains were congenial drinking companions with a ready source of cheap liquor, and he now became a "complete drunkard". When Ann found herself once more in debt, Cousin Joe speedily sold up the boarding house, found her a position as matron of a lunatic asylum and arranged for the children to be fostered.
The madhouse was in the village of Finglass, where there were several asylums in the early part of the century. It is not clear how long Ann worked there. One story retold by Barlow in his novel demonstrates her quick-thinking and composure – an inmate proposed to throw her out of an upstairs window, but she distracted him from his purpose by saying that first she must put on her bonnet.
During her time at Finglass her old servants used to bring her reports of the children. The eldest boy James and one of his sisters were taken in by a relative; the other two girls were sent to one poor Catholic family and Robert and his older brother John to another. Robert was only a small boy, probably four years old, but anecdotes reveal that he was very protective of his brother from this time on.
When the owner of the lunatic asylum gave Ann's post to one of his relations, she took her children to live in "a miserable half-furnished lodging, in an out-of-the-way place called Greek Street". They were living on £15 a year given to her by a relative and £50 from Cousin Joe.
Ann's husband John had been in England for a time visiting his family, but his drinking debts had again led him to the debtors' prison from which he was freed by his father. Most unfairly, his appearance was still unaffected by his intemperate habits, whereas his unfortunate wife was already prematurely aged with hard work and anxiety. Indeed, people assumed that he had married a much older widow with children of her own, and that only little Robert was John's child.
His hunger for alcohol was now so strong that he would even steal the children's food from the table to sell it for drink, and Ann was at last obliged to leave him for their sake. Again and again he sought her out, and repeatedly she left him, until he finally agreed to live apart from his family if Ann would make him a small allowance on which to live. Never in all this time, in spite of his drunkenness, did John show any violence or anger towards his wife and family.
Ann had managed in spite of all her difficulties to send her sons to schools where they would receive a gentleman's classical education, and to give her daughters the accomplishments necessary for ladies.
Her eldest son, James, was probably born in 1792 and was perhaps eight years old when his family first lost their money. After he finished school, Ann apprenticed him to a Dublin apothecary, presumably at the usual age of fifteen. He was evidently an ambitious boy and when his mother learned of his great desire to continue his medical studies by training as a surgeon after his studies as an apothecary, she sold her annuity of £15 to find the necessary capital.
On qualifying, James joined the Royal Artillery. It was common for young Anglo-Irishmen to take a commission in the British Army or to join the East India Company, and many of his school friends will have done the same. Army surgeons did not have a high social status (although this improved a great deal during the Napoleonic Wars) but James had no capital with which to buy a practice in Dublin, while the army offered him opportunities for advancement, new horizons and adventure. James soon left Dublin for a posting in India.
In the meantime, his younger brothers and sisters were living in a very small house in Dublin while their mother worked as a housekeeper in an endowed school – a post found for her by a bachelor clergyman cousin.
The two boys' school fees were to be paid and money found for their father's small allowance, all from Ann's income of £90 – it seems that her inheritance from her father had been dissipated by her borrowings. This income was supplemented by the work of her daughters.
Mary Sophia was born in about 1795, and so was probably nearly twenty years old when her brother James left. Isabella Catherine was four years her junior, and Anne ("Nanny") was two years younger than Isabella. They were sensible girls and could be trusted to live on their own with their brothers; the neighbours respected them, but thought them very proud as they kept themselves to themselves.
"The girls literally slaved", wrote their younger brother over fifty years later, making "tasteful children's clothes" for a depository where ladies' needlework was sold anonymously. From India, James sent them whatever money he could spare, but with letters taking up to six months to reach him, he could hardly be kept informed of developments at home.
When young John left school, probably at the age of fifteen, he took a post as an attorney's clerk. The family ambition was to make him an attorney, and fortunately his employer was so impressed with the boy that he offered to take him without the usual payment of a premium while continuing to pay him as a clerk, if John could only find the money needed to pay the stamp duty. This was luckily provided by James, who at this point sent home a remittance of £100.
At about this time, the family had a brief period of unexpected prosperity.
The beautiful children's clothes sold at the depository attracted the attention of a wealthy married woman who wanted to recommend the makers' work to her friends. When she called to visit the girls, their brother John happened to be at home, and she was struck by his resemblance to the husband of a relative she had not seen for some time. Ann's reluctance to beg from her family had led to her dropping out of sight, and this lady was in fact her first cousin.
Delighted with this discovery, the lady insisted on helping them. She paid the rent on a better house, so that Ann could come home to live with her children, and she introduced them to society. Their talent at music – inherited from their mother, whose singing voice as a girl had been much admired – and their other accomplishments prevented their new aquaintances from guessing the truth about their past. The eldest girl experienced an unpleasant moment while out walking with her new friends, when she realised that the drunkard lying in the mud of the street was her own father – but fortunately she kept her self-possession and did not let her companions guess the truth.
John Barlow, the gentle hopeless drunk, was now nearing his end. He died of a fit of apoplexy, with his sons John and Robert at his bedside. They buried him privately and respectably in Clontarf churchyard. Throughout his account of his parents' lives, Robert Barlow wrote of his father only with affection and sympathy.
For Robert, his mother had already made plans. She intended him for the church, a curious decision for a mother ambitious for her son at a time when a private income was thought essential for a clergyman.
During her lifetime, the status of clergy had risen steadily until by the beginning of the 19th century a clergyman was automatically considered a gentleman. Robert's social position would therefore be assured, unlike his brothers in the more lowly branches of medicine and the law.
However, his mother was possibly unaware that a clergyman without a private income was greatly handicapped. Indeed, the Irish writer R L Edgeworth in 1809 advised parents in his Essays on Professional Education not to send a son into the Church unless they were
fully able not only to defray the considerable expenses of his education at a university, but to add to his income, perhaps for many yearsuntil he was beneficed, describing the plight of poor curates as "the extreme line of human misery" [6].
In addition, it was difficult for a young clergyman to find a benefice or to advance in his profession without the help of a patron. Mrs Barlow, in her social isolation, may not have realised this.
At this time, young clergymen were not expected to feel a calling to the ministry. Religious belief was assumed and it was only towards the middle of the century that a sense of vocation came to be seen as important. A university education was, however, generally required, and so on leaving Mr White's school [7] Robert was sent to Trinity College. He was entered there on 6 November 1820 at the age of sixteen. The college records show that his father's occupation was given as 'gentleman', and describe Robert as a 'pensioner', indicating that a fixed annual fee was paid for his education [8]. According to his own account, he managed to obtain a scholarship to assist with the expense.
This was necessary because once more the family had encountered an unexpected downturn in their fortunes.
Their kind relative died in childbirth, and again they were in financial difficulties. Young John earned £1 a week at the attorney's office, Robert was tutoring other students to help cover his costs at college, and the two older girls were once more selling their needlework. They could hardly leave the house, because of the shabby state of their own clothes. Their sister Nanny, however, had been trained to go out as a governess, and she quickly found a post with the family of a retired merchant. There she was treated most kindly and included in all their invitations, because, said her employer,
I know all her family, and that they are superior to my own in rank.She was able to send home the princely sum of £40.
At last, after an absence of eight years, James came home from India. He must have found his family much altered, and they must have noticed a great change in him from his years abroad. His health had suffered while he was there, but he was posted to Jersey where he rapidly recovered. In England he renewed his acquaintance with a cousin of his father's, Michael Hoy.
Mr Hoy had made his fortune as a Russia merchant in the heyday of British influence there during the reign of Catherine the Great, when the aristocracy had a passion for all things English.
By 1791 Messrs Hoy & Bellis were one of four establishments in St Petersburg calling themselves 'The English Shop'; their premises were at 74 Malaia Millionaia. At the beginning of May 1801, an English visitor wrote,
… went into the Shop of Mrs Hoy, a great English house that sells everything [9].Hoy's London offices in 1808 were in Sise Lane [10], where other Russia merchants had their premises.
His fortune made, he had retired to become a landed gentleman, buying property on the Isle of Wight and around Southampton and becoming a Justice of the Peace. In 1814 he commemorated the visit to England of the Tsar Alexander I by erecting a monument on St Catherine's Down in the Isle of Wight, near the Medina Hermitage, his summer residence [11]. The tablet recorded his "remembrance of many happy years" spent in the Tsar's dominions.
Hoy had no children, and had taken a liking to his young cousin James, whose character compared most favourably to the "tall Irish cousins" whose families had studiously ignored Ann Barlow in her difficulties, and who were now hoping to inherit Mr Hoy's fortune.
In his novel, Robert was at pains to stress that James was completely disinterested in his approach to Mr Hoy, seeking to make his acquaintance only as a matter of courtesy to a relation. In fact in the early 19th century James would have been thought most imprudent and careless of the interests of his mother and siblings if he had not attempted to make himself pleasant to a wealthy relative.
In May 1825 Michael Hoy remarried. He was then in his late sixties and his bride was nearly forty, so while he provided in his new Will for any children they might be fortunate enough to have, he also chose an heir to inherit in the event that there were none. He made generous provision for his widow, and gave his estate, if he died childless, to the young doctor, James Barlow.
Michael Hoy died three years later, on 26 June 1828 [12]. Subject to various legacies, annuities and the life interest of Mrs Hoy, James Barlow was now a Hampshire landowner, with properties near Southampton and on the Isle of Wight.
At last the Barlow family in Dublin could leave the days of genteel poverty behind them. They bought a comfortable house in a desirable area of Dublin, hired servants and kept a "flash carriage and pair of grays" in which to go out once more into society. Mary Sophia, the eldest daughter, was by then thirty-three years old; she had spent the years of her youth at home earning money by sewing children's clothes.
In the same year, Robert Barlow was at last old enough to enter the church "for which he had long been designed, and which he embraced of his own accord". He was priested at Ferns in County Wexford [13], and found a curacy in Belfast [14], a growing industrial town with a well-established linen industry. Belfast was particularly subject to typhus fever, and here Mr Barlow had his first encounter with an epidemic as a clergyman, tirelessly caring for his parishioners at home and in the Fever Hospital [15].
James's great good fortune and his generosity enabled his sister Nanny to leave her post as a governess, and gave John an opportunity to rise in his profession.
It also enabled Robert to marry – perhaps rather an impetuous decision, because marriage for a young clergyman closed some doors to advancement.
Although Robert was the youngest of the family, he was the first to marry and it seems likely that it was a love match, particularly as there are no indications that the marriage brought him any great wealth. All we know of his wife is that her name was Marianne, eldest daughter of Joseph Webb of Lower Gardiner Street, Dublin [16], and that when they married on 15 November 1829 Robert was twenty-five years old and Marianne was forty-seven; it is not known if she had been previously married.
We cannot help but notice that, devoted to his mother, Robert had married a woman only a dozen years her junior. Perhaps he was happiest being mothered. He was used to the attentions of three older sisters, and possibly the circumstances of Ann's life had prevented her from spending the amount of time with her "white-headed boy" for which he longed. The disparity in age between Robert and Marianne may not have been obvious, although it must have been known in Dublin. However, it does seem, from the novel and Robert's replies to censuses, that age was a delicate subject for them – for example, in his reply to John Sayer of Middleton, who was census enumerator in 1841, Mr Barlow gave his wife's age as thirty, eight years younger than himself.
James, meanwhile, was becoming established as a Hampshire landowner.
In a move that possibly reflects a certain distance from the family of which he had seen so little in recent years, he took the additional surname Hoy. This must have been as a mark of respect, as it was not required under the terms of his benefactor's Will. He announced his intention of standing for Parliament at the next election, professing himself
to be 'perfectly independent in principles' though 'a steady friend of the British Constitution' who had 'laudable ambition to keep the inhabitants free from the thraldom and trickery of party' [17].Perhaps inspired by the Hoy motto, Be industrious, attentive, serve well and you must succeed [18], he was successfully returned to Parliament on the 13 January 1830, at the by-election following the death of one of the Southampton MPs.
Only a few months later, a general election was called following the death of King George IV, as was customary at the time, and once more James stood for election. Once more – and certainly at great expense, as elections in those days were notoriously expensive and corrupt – he was elected member for Southampton.
The mood of the country was for change, and the Duke of Wellington and the Tories were replaced at the polls by Lord Grey's Whig administration. James would be present in the House for much of the great reforming Whig ministry of the 1830s, and he was a Member of Parliament when the old Palace of Westminster burned down on 16 October 1834, to be replaced by the buildings that we know today, which were only finally completed in 1860.
Meanwhile, in Ireland on 15 April 1830, Nanny married the Revd Hector Francis Vaughan, rector and vicar of Myshall in County Carlow [19]. James will have been able to provide her with a proper marriage settlement – something his mother never had.
His brother John was established in his profession as a Dublin lawyer, his youngest sister was happily married, and allowances had been made to his spinster sisters and to his mother. There only remained the question of finding a parish for Robert.
Robert had been lucky in finding a curacy. This was the first step after ordination and frequently presented a problem. Curacies fell into two categories: a young clergyman could either be employed by a resident incumbent who needed the extra help, or appointed by an absent incumbent to run the parish on his behalf. Some 10% to 15% of ordinands never found a curacy at all [20] and disappeared from view into teaching or the like, while many men remained curates all their lives.
The next problem was to find a living. The wait for a benefice was particularly long for men ordained in the early 1830s – 52% waited for over fifteen years to find a parish of their own. [21] To do so, they had to find a patron willing to appoint them.
Each benefice had a patron, who owned the advowson or right of presentation to the living. Ideally the patron would view the advowson as a trust, not an investment, and take the trouble to find the right incumbent – the local élite caring for its people. Some livings were held by the Crown and some by bishops, Archbishops or other dignitaries of the Church. There were livings owned by institutions, trustees, London companies and guilds, and Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Roughly half the livings were in the hands of private patrons. A patron might choose an incumbent because they were connected by blood or friendship, or decide on the basis of the applicants' churchmanship – High, Low or Broad. Crown livings might frequently be the subject of political patronage, while Church livings were increasingly used by bishops as a way of promoting able men. However a large number of livings were obtained by purchase, often by advertisements in the press or through clerical agents.
There were two ways of buying a living.
The more expensive method was for the man, or his family, to buy the advowson. This was the right to present a clergyman to a particular living and could be conveyed like any other form of property.
Alternatively, the man's family or friends could buy for him the next presentation to a living. This was a slightly more delicate matter, at least in theory, and presented an easy target to Nonconformist anger. A vacant living could not be bought, as that would amount to the sin and crime of simony, so the next presentation had to be sold before it fell vacant. In like manner, buying the next presentation to a living for a particular person where the incumbent was evidently dying also amounted to simony, strictly speaking. The price of a next presentation obviously varied not only according to the value of the living, but also according to the age and state of health of the incumbent. Livings for sale were advertised in the newspapers, or handled by agencies.
Some livings were extremely poor, and this contributed to the problem of pluralism – the holding of more than one living. Absentee clergymen generally appointed a curate, often on a very meagre stipend. In 1802 Parliament ascertained that about a thousand benefices in England and Wales were worth less than £100 a year, while another three thousand or so were worth between £100 and £150 – at a time when £150 was thought to provide only the barest necessities for respectability [22].
James Barlow Hoy had no patronage of his own to bestow, so his family would expect him to produce the amount needed to buy his brother a living. When James had indicated how much he was prepared to pay, it would simply be a matter of finding what was available at the price.
Livings in the south of England were the most desirable and expensive, while Irish livings were the cheapest. In 1842, according to The Parent’s Hand-Book by J C Hudson, an English living of about £300 a year with an incumbent aged over sixty could be had for less than £1,000 [23]; John Dashwood in Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility (1811) estimated a living of £200 a year would cost £1,400 – but that would of course be in the south of England.
For some reason, Robert Barlow chose to leave Ireland, where family and college connections might have proved useful during his career, in favour of a living in the north of England. Perhaps he and his wife, like James, wanted to leave the small world of Anglo-Irish Dublin and make a new start elsewhere.
Notes:
[1] A novel, Remarkable, but still True, published 1872, described in his obituary in the South Durham & Cleveland Mercury 6 July 1878 as "framed on the eventful career of his own parents and family". Copies are to be found in the British Library and the Cambridge University Library
[2] Trollope by Victoria Glendinning, p120
[3] see chap 5, Heaven's Command by James Morris
[4] much of the Barlow family history cannot be traced through the usual records, because of the destruction of the Irish Public Record Office in 1922
[5] Remarkable, but still True. The quotations that follow are taken from this, unless otherwise stated
[6] quoted by Alan Haig, The Victorian Clergy, pub Croom Helm 1984
[7] information supplied by the Representative Church Body Library (the biographical succession lists of Church of Ireland Clergy)
[8] Alumni Dublinenses, editors George Dames Burtchaell & Thomas Ulick Sadleir (Dublin 1935) and information from Trinity College Library, Manuscripts Department
[9] By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the lives and careers of the British in 18th century Russia by Anthony Cross, Cambridge University Press 1997, p 19
[10] Post Office Directory 1808
[11] the Hoy Monument, or Alexandrian Pillar
[12] Memories of Bitterne by Irene Pilson
[13] information supplied by the Representative Church Body Library (the biographical succession lists of Church of Ireland Clergy)
[14] obituary in The Stockton Examiner, Saturday 29 June 1878
[15] ibid
[16] information supplied by the Representative Church Body Library (the biographical succession lists of Church of Ireland Clergy)
[17] from A. Temple Patterson's A history of Southampton 1700-1914, courtesy of Penny Rudkin of the Special Collections Library, Southampton Reference Library
[18] St James' Church magazine, article by Alec Chalk, courtesy of West End Local History Society
[19] information supplied by the Representative Church Body Library (the biographical succession lists of Church of Ireland Clergy)
[20] Jane Austen and the Clergy Irene Collins 1993
[21] A M Deane in The Church and her Curates (ed J J Halcombe), quoted in The Victorian Clergy by Alan Haig
[22] Jane Austen and the Clergy Irene Collins 1993
[23] The Victorian Clergy Alan Haig
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