The eventual choice of Oxford was sensible, both because it offered excellent opportunities for education—the parents were determined to give the boys the best possible education—and because in a university town, which was essentially middle-class, there were fewer people who would have heard their story, or who might recognize Thomas Lawrence as Thomas Chapman. In London, by contrast, the story of Thomas Chapman’s running off with his daughters’ governess was well known among people of his class, a kind of scandalous object lesson in how not to conduct an affair; he would certainly have been recognized at his club, whereas in Oxford he could use the Oxford Union as a club without being bothered—the dons, wrapped up in their own insular world, were unlikely to have heard the gossip about him, or to care.

Another reason for choosing Oxford was that it was then a lively religious center. Sarah’s religious feelings had always been strong, and they grew stronger still as she took on herself the responsibility for the sin of breaking up Thomas’s marriage and giving him five illegitimate children. She was not a religious zealot like Edith Chapman, but she wanted a place to bring up her children in a religious atmosphere, and Oxford certainly was that. Hardly a day passed in Oxford without the sound of choral singing, organs, and bells somewhere. Not that Sarah was a High Church Anglican, or would have approved of the pomp and circumstance of religion as it was practiced at the university. She was a strict follower of the evangelical movement, and attended Sunday service at St. Aldates Church, in the center of Oxford, planted firmly opposite Christ Church College and Cathedral, in stubborn opposition to High Anglicanism, with its “Roman” rites and elaborate services. The evangelicals, or Low Church Anglicans, then as now, preferred simpler services, emphasized the personal relationship between the communicant and Jesus, and believed that the Bible should be taken literally. The Lawrence family met for prayers and Bible reading every morning before the older children left for school, as well as on Sundays, with the boys kneeling beside their father as he led the service, and he or Sarah read aloud to them from the Bible.

Of course this kind of religious home life was more common in the late Victorian era than it is now, but even by late Victorian standards religion played a large role in the lives of the Lawrence family, and was certainly a bond between Sarah and Thomas. She was fervent in her belief, and Thomas seems to have been too, though in the polite and unobtrusive manner of his class. He was a gentleman in religion as in everything else, whereas Sarah was consumed by a need to save him, to compensate by the intensity of her faith for the sin into which she had led him, and to atone for it by ensuring that her sons’ religious feelings were as strong as her own. To some extent, she succeeded—her eldest son, Bob, would eventually accompany her to China as a missionary; Frank and Will seem to have retained throughout their short lives a certain degree of religious feeling. But Arnold was much less religious; and with her second son, Ned, she failed completely, and therefore, throughout his life, fought all the harder to save him.

The problem went far beyond the fact that Ned was the “Peck’s bad boy” of the Lawrence family, an incorrigible rule-breaker and mischievous practical joker, with a gift for spinning imaginative tales—Sarah recognized that in other ways Ned was the child who most resembled her. He had her determination; her features; her piercing, bright blue eyes; and, as he grew older, her stature, though the other boys all took after the father in height as well as coloring. Frank, for example, was tall, lean, a good scholar, but also brilliant at exactly those team sports that are generally taken to indicate character in England: rugby and cricket. Will was described by a contemporary as “really an Adonis to look at, beautiful in body,” tall, graceful, a prizewinning gymnast. As striking as Ned’s face was, and as physically strong as he became, he hated competitive sports and avoided as much as he could all forms of organized games—not an easy thing to do in an English school, nor one that made for popularity, either with the masters or with the other boys.

Because of T. E. Lawrence’s fame, few families have been subjected to such intense scrutiny as the Lawrences, or have been the subject of so much retroactive psychoanalysis. The fact that his mother was the disciplinarian of the household, and that she carried out herself whatever physical punishment she decided was needed, has been given an exaggerated role in the development of Lawrence’s admittedly complex personality. In keeping with her very literal view of Christianity, Sarah had an equally simple faith in the old adage “Spare the rod, and spoil the child.” In her old age, when T. E. Lawrence became a friend of Lady Astor,* his mother remarked that “one of the reasons that Lord Astor’s horses never won is because he wouldn’t whip them.” On the other hand, descriptions of Sarah as a sadistic mother are wildly overdrawn. Using a whip or a switch on children was more the rule than the exception at all levels of society in the late nineteenth century, and none of the Lawrence children, when they were grown, seem to have complained about it. She never had to whip Bob or Frank, and Arnold remembered being whipped only once, but she was obliged to whip Ned on his buttocks frequently, for fairly routine misbehavior, or for refusing to learn to play the piano. It seems likely that there was a clash of wills between Ned and Sarah—T. E. Lawrence would sum it up by writing that “we do rub each other up the wrong way"—which did not develop between her and the other boys. Her youngest son, Arnold, would later say that his mother wanted “to break T. E.'s will,” but this is merely to say that throughout her life she wanted all her sons to be obedient, pious, and truthful, and that Ned, unlike his brothers, was not necessarily or consistently any of those things. Biographers have speculated about the extent to which T. E. Lawrence’s strong streak of masochism in later life, as well as his extraordinary ability to endure pain and deprivation, was a product of the beatings he received from his mother, but this seems doubtful. Sarah loved her sons, was loved by them, and took an interest and great pride in everything they did. At all times, there were present in the house a full-time nanny and other servants, as well as Thomas Lawrence, so it is unlikely that the whippings were in any way cruel or unusual punishment, or carried out in such a way as to leave deep psychic scars. As in most English families of their class, the nannies were a calming and beloved presence—one of them stayed for several years, and when she left to join her sister in Canada, she was replaced by another with whom T. E. Lawrence was still in correspondence many years later, when he was famous.

As to the question of why such whippings were carried out by Sarah rather than Thomas, this may merely reflect the fact that he himself must have been caned by older boys (“prefects”) and by masters during his years at Eton, a practice which was then common in public schools. Thomas was not the only nineteenth-century Englishman of his class to leave school with a marked distaste for corporal punishment. Winston Churchill, who was beaten at Harrow (Eton’s rival) and much resented it, did not blame his father (whom he idolized) for sending him there, but as a result never laid his hand on his own son Randolph, whose behavior might have persuaded even the most benevolent of fathers to pick up a whip. All the Lawrence boys agree that their father retained a “quiet authority” in the family, and that he could be “very firm when necessary,” sometimes intervening when he thought Sarah was being “unduly harsh,” and invariably making the bigger decisions that affected their lives.