For two years, I tracked Lawrence from library to library and thousands of miles across the deserts of the Middle East, some of it by camel and on foot. Occasionally, in unexpected places – in a shaded nook of the Ashmolean, in the gate-tower of Azraq castle, on the ridge at Mudowwara – I felt his presence and heard his voice once more. Sometimes – when I rode across Sinai, or climbed the Hafira pass – I felt he was simply a few steps ahead, laughing at me, and that if I hurried fast I could catch him up. My quest for Lawrence acquired the character of a pilgrimage, and I came to see that biography was itself a religious act, a form of ancestor-worship, a re-affirmation, a re-invention of the past. I searched and read and travelled, but the moment I thought I had Lawrence in my grasp, he eluded me, laughing, and appeared somewhere else. In the end, I realized that there was no ‘real’ Lawrence at all. There was only my own reflection in a glass: Lawrence and I were two facing mirrors reflecting each other to eternity. At last, in those far-off deserts, I finally knew that the observer is part of his subject: and I understood that there could be no definitive Lawrence, but only an infinite number of Lawrentian images, like crystals in the eyes of his beholders. What I discovered was my Lawrence and my truth, for ‘truth’ is of more than one kind: the kind which remains static, and the kind which bends and shifts according to the individual and the time.

PART ONE

THE WANDERER 1888 – 1916

1. Apparent Queen Unveiled Her Peerless Light

Early Childhood 1888–96

In 1879, a beautiful young woman called Sarah Lawrence alighted from a ferry at Dublin to begin the great adventure of her life. She was to be governess to the children of a wealthy gentleman called Thomas Chapman, who owned a mansion and a vast estate near Delvin in County Westmeath. Though just eighteen, Sarah was a woman of extraordinary dominance and ability, who had already overcome social barriers which many would have found insurmountable. Born the illegitimate daughter of a Tyneside shipwright named John Lawrence, deserted by her father and orphaned at nine by her own alcoholic mother, she had been brought up by an Episcopal minister and his wife in the highlands of Scotland and the Isle of Skye. In the late Victorian era, when illegitimacy attracted dire social stigma, when the classes were almost as fixed in their orbits as the celestial bodies, she was determined to leap the gulf between deprived working-class orphan and respectable, middle-class housewife. If she could not become a queen or a lady of the manor, she could at least use her power to captivate the heart of a nobleman – and that is precisely what she did.

Thomas Chapman, her employer, had been educated at Eton and Cirencester, the grandson of a baronet and the scion of seven generations of colonial English landlords who had originally been granted land in Kerry under the patronage of Sir Walter Ralegh. He had all the benefits of a privileged birth – education, breeding, a vast estate, an opulent mansion, horses, carriages and servants, and the wealth and leisure with which to enjoy them. Yet he was not a happy man. His wife, Edith, was a shrew who regarded any form of pleasure as sinful – ‘the kind of woman’, a neighbour later observed, ‘who was terribly pious, who would go to church all hours of the day, and then if a wretched kitchen maid got herself into trouble, would cast her out without a character’.¹ Edith’s belligerence – which found its most extreme expression in attempts to convert the local Roman Catholic peasants to Protestantism – had become so painful that Thomas could hardly endure her company. When Sarah first appeared on his horizon he was the father of four young daughters and found himself approaching middle age, trapped in marriage to a woman he had long ago ceased to love. Morose, ineffectual, much given to drink, he had abandoned even the pleasures of hunting, shooting and fishing with which most country gentlemen filled their days. Into his dark universe the beautiful Miss Lawrence shot like a comet. She captivated him. As gay and energetic as Edith was ethereal and sour, she was an indomitable organizer. She came to his mansion – South Hill – to take charge of his daughters, but very soon she had taken over the running of the entire household. Thomas was seen to revive visibly whenever she entered the room. Presently – inevitably perhaps – squire and governess fell in love.

It was no rare thing, of course, for a bored Victorian gentleman to dally with an attractive servant-girl. But in an era when the British aristocracy still preserved an almost supernatural reputation, the idea of a gentleman actually forsaking his caste for a liaison with a minion was almost unthinkable. Sarah was aware that she walked a tightrope. She had nothing to offer but herself, and any young girl less determined, or less charismatic, might easily have ended up an unmarried young mother with recourse only to the workhouse – or worse. Her hold over Thomas tightened by degrees, however. In 1885 she became pregnant and left the post of governess at his mansion, to reappear as his mistress in a house in Dublin. It was here, in December 1885, that their first son, Montague Robert – Bob – was born. For a while, Thomas led a double life, commuting between his wife and daughters at South Hill and his mistress and son in Dublin, but soon prudish tongues wagged. The Chapmans’ butler once spied Miss Lawrence in a Dublin store and overheard her giving her name as ‘Mrs Chapman’. Curious, he followed her to her lodgings, where he saw Thomas Chapman emerge. He rushed to Edith with the news, and she erupted with fury. Thomas was obliged to choose between his privileged but emotionally barren marriage with her, and an unconventional, materially pinched, but fulfilling relationship with Sarah. In choosing Sarah, he made the most courageous decision of his life. Some time in 1887, he left his mansion with its unkempt park of green meadows and Irish yews, forsook his inheritance and his culture for ever, and joined Sarah in Dublin. At her insistence, perhaps, he asked his wife for a divorce. Edith stubbornly refused, and in defiance they decided to elope to Britain, where, together, they could make a new start. They left Ireland by ferry on an evening towards the end of 1887. When they stepped ashore in North Wales the next day, they were no longer Thomas Chapman, landowner, and Sarah Lawrence, governess, but ‘Mr and Mrs Thomas Lawrence’ – identities they would continue to assume successfully for the rest of their lives.

They could scarcely have chosen a more repressive moment in the entire history of British morals in which to commit themselves to a common-law marriage. Since the end of the relatively liberal eighteenth century, society had been growing ever more puritanical under the influence of the Evangelical Revival – a movement to which, ironically enough, Sarah belonged. The year 1885 marked the climax of the so-called ‘Purity Campaign’ – a crusade against lax sexual morals which had harnessed powerful Victorian terrors of social chaos and the degeneration of the ‘Imperial race’. Sex had become the great taboo, and society was so fanatically leery of anything smacking of bodies or nudity that polite people went so far as to lap the legs of grand pianos in cloth so that they should not be seen ‘naked’. The moral code was rigid. Chastity was the ideal, the family was sacrosanct, and ‘the fallen woman’ who had been ‘seduced’ was deserving of utter contempt. The pervading omertа on all things sexual led to such incredible ignorance at all levels of society that even a learned Oxford physician could be heard to declare that ‘nine out of ten women are indifferent to sex or actively dislike it; the tenth, who enjoys it, will always be a harlot’.² The dark complement to Victorian prudishness, however, was captured with superb imagination by Robert Louis Stevenson in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Fekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886. At the height of the purity campaign, London was actually an international centre of prostitution, where there were more brothels than schools. Many of these bordellos were frequented by respectable ‘gentlemen’, who, by day, were pillars of the establishment. Despite the strict ban on pre-marital sex, many middle- and upper-class boys had their first sexual experience with a female servant living in the same house.