CHAPTER TWO

Nothing to Fear in England

‘We will make every effort to procure you that happiness and peace which you could no longer enjoy in France; take courage, therefore, you have nothing more to fear.’

Greeting to refugee nuns arriving on Shoreham Beach, 1792

AS THE ENGLISH CATHOLIC LORDS petitioned and quarrelled with their own priests, the public attitude to the Catholics in England underwent a transformation based on two very different things: patriotism and compassion.

It was not the campaign of the would-be governing class for Catholic Relief which was responsible, although this continued. It has to be said that even among the great Catholic lords there were different approaches towards participation in the ruling life of the country. Conspicuous for his apparent apostasy was the Premier Peer and Earl Marshal, Charles 11th Duke of Norfolk, who succeeded his father in 1786.1 In general, such conformity for the sake of integration into the national life had always been known among the Catholic aristocracy and gentry – even if not in quite such a flamboyant form. The Duke, for example, declared that if he was going to hell, he would rather go to hell from the House of Lords than anywhere else. Others of his class and kin preferred a more subtle approach to conformity, with an alleviation of the controversial Oath of Allegiance which Catholics had previously found it impossible to take.

A Relief Bill was prepared by Charles Butler, who would be the first Catholic barrister and was a man undaunted by controversy. A memorial was presented to the Prime Minister, William Pitt, in May 1789. A proposed new oath, formed by the Catholic Committee, was published in June 1789 – and condemned by the four Catholic Vicars Apostolic for the various districts of the country, who disapproved of its language regarding the Papacy. The wrangling continued. Other bishops condemned the oath in January 1791.

Then the priest John Milner attacked the Catholic Committee in February. The peculiar character of Milner was to play a marked part in the history of Catholic Emancipation, not always to its advantage. Here was no gracious descendant of noble but suffering Catholics down the years: Milner, born in 1752, was the son of a tailor in Lancashire and his appearance throughout his life was held to mark his origins – an unwieldy figure and thick, strong neck, florid face marked by heavy, dark, bushy eyebrows. He dressed by preference ‘like a farmer’ in a greatcoat and beaver hat, ‘driving his gig at a spanking pace’.2

‘Asperity’ was the quality his kinder critics gave Milner and he certainly had a weakness for angry rhetorical outbursts. He was also an unqualified opponent of aristocratic dominance over the Church – which implied of course the exact opposite, the dominance of the Church over the aristocracy. There were inevitable comparisons to Thomas à Becket in this respect. A mid-nineteenth-century biography, on the other hand, referred to Milner as the man who had been the Catholics’ Moses in their days of bondage, leading them out of the wilderness: in other words, one of the giants of the Faith. There were many tributes also to his tender pastoral care of lesser people, inspired by the principles of the New Testament. It is possible to see that these two pictures, if slanted in different directions, were not incompatible, especially if other discreet comments are borne in mind: Milner, it was said, undervalued ‘the little etiquettes of society’, and ‘the strength of his language gave a handle to his enemies’.3

Milner the tailor’s son was educated at the English College at Douai in France from the age of sixteen, on the recommendation of Bishop Challoner, and ordained priest in 1777. Returning to England, he ended up in Winchester, a place where Catholic worship of a sort had been openly tolerated since the end of the seventeenth century. But it was Milner who oversaw the building of a Catholic chapel in the Gothic style to replace the inconvenient garden shed and priest’s house where it had previously taken place.

The new Bill was eventually passed by Parliament in June 1791. The Relief begun officially in 1778 was continued: the Penal Laws were at last abolished and celebration of the Mass legalized. Milner was now nearly forty, and in the future would become Vicar Apostolic with the rank of bishop for the Midland District.^*1 His strong dislike of the political influence of the aristocracy, however, combined with his equally strong propensity for aggressive argument, remained. The demands of the Catholic Committee to be consulted on ecclesiastical management were not forgotten.

One satire on these demands of laymen to have some say in the appointment of their religious ministers probably dates from late in 1791 or early 1792. It took the form of a spoof Petition entitled The Rights of Women – an amusingly ludicrous concept at the time, when the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was described by Horace Walpole as a ‘hyena in petticoats’. Found in the Weld Archives, it was supposed to be addressed to the Catholic Committee from ‘Ladies, Widows, Wives and Spinsters, Housekeepers, Cooks, Housemaids and other female persons professing the Roman Catholic Religion, conceiving themselves to be sorely aggrieved by the subtraction of their inalienable rights’.4

Hitherto, although born in a free country, they had only been able to exercise their authority ‘in the paltry concerns of domestic management’ to which their husbands and masters had abandoned them. But ‘it would be an evident injustice to exclude one half of the flock, from a right which is now demonstrated to belong to the whole’ – that is, the nomination of their spiritual directors. There was a further admonition: remember the ‘distinguished’ part women have played in the French Revolution. This was more heavy sarcasm, given the contemporary attitude of horror towards the vociferous and uncontrolled women in the French mob.

As for choosing bishops, women could elect deaconesses from among themselves, deaconesses being the glory of the ancient Church and the extinction of that order ‘a grievous hardship of the sex’ and ‘a most lamentable abuse of ecclesiastical discipline’. Now, these imaginary Petitioners hoped, an ‘indolent acquiescence in established abuses’ would come to an end, and the rights of one half of the Catholic body, i.e. the female half, henceforth be free and untainted.

None of this internecine combat affected the future of Catholicism quite so much as the dramatic, often horrifying events in France. In August 1792 a decree by the new French Legislative Assembly ordered all priests who refused the revolutionary oath to be expelled from the country. The King, Louis XVI, was put to death in January 1793 and in February France declared war on England.

England now became like a Paradise for those who fled from France and the Low Countries. One letter from a certain John Pugh received by a Catholic priest explained the generosity of the welcome:5 ‘I am a Protestant and love the cause of real liberty; but these unhappy men are strangers, thrown by unavoidable accident, not crime, on our shore, and in my humble opinion have the claim which distress not tainted by crime always should have.’ These were words which might stand for the compassion due to refugees down the ages.

It was Sir Samuel Romilly who commented in 1792 on a new ‘phenomenon’: you couldn’t walk 100 yards in any London street without meeting two or three French priests, and this was only twelve years after the Gordon Riots. The Abbé Barruel put it lyrically: ‘the soul seemed to awaken from a terrifying dream of fiends and monsters, into a scene of perfect ease and liberty’. Some French Catholics who were welcomed by the English Protestant aristocrats Lord and Lady George Cavendish were more crudely explicit: ‘Here we are not stunned with the ferocious sound of Ça Ira, nor the brutal carmagnole, rows of strewed bayonets, uplifted.’ In short, France was once more the enemy, as she had been eight times during the past century – but a very different enemy.

Hitherto Britons had had a mental picture of the French as, in the words of Linda Colley, ‘superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree’.6 It was the unhappy (Protestant) Huguenots, notably after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, who had sought to escape France and settle in England. Now the picture had changed. France was no longer a Catholic enemy, but an enemy representing Unbelief who was thus an enemy of Catholicism. It was a country in which nuns and priests were likely to be murdered, or imprisoned and executed during the Terror of 1792. Nor were the horrors short-lived: a terse entry in the diary of a middle-class Frenchman for the summer of 1794 reads: ‘Today, 40 individuals had their heads cut off, including 16 Carmelite nuns.’^*2

Horror stories spread to England and lost nothing in the telling, particularly as there were escapes by members of prominent families such as Stonor, Plowden and Dormer. One party of priests with a host of English boys in their care made a daring crossing to Hull in Yorkshire, and so traversed the north of England to hospitable Lancashire. Naturally the French priests who arrived in England responded with ardent prayers for the King and the Royal Family at Mass.

Benedictine nuns at Cambrai were imprisoned at Compiègne, and since they had no money to subsidize their prison keep – having made lifetime vows of poverty – were limited to a grudging diet of bread and water by their jailers. Mary, daughter of Charles Stonor, born in 1768, had become a nun while still at her convent school in Paris; there she remained, using the term Citoyen when writing to her brother Thomas and prudently designating herself Citoyenne (although she offered a Mass for Louis XVI after his execution). The convent was made into a women’s prison, and only the death of Robespierre saved Mary from the guillotine: she was now Prioress, a tall and severe figure who would impose the religious rules of abstinence even on sick children – but she had survived.7

The refugees fell into two main categories. There were actual Catholic priests: it has been reckoned that French émigrés may have constituted as much as ten per cent of the Catholic clergy in England at one point.8 Then there were the English Catholics, some quite young, who were being educated out of their own country, the only opportunity acceptable to them, Catholic education being forbidden at home. This discreet slipping off abroad was one way of keeping a low profile. Places like Douai and St Omer in France flourished. Naturally some of these same children, upon reaching adulthood, decided to enter the religious life themselves. Sons remained to train as priests, or take their vows as monks; daughters who felt a vocation to the religious life (instead of marrying one of their cousins in England – the obvious alternative at the time) settled into a kind of world which was familiar since childhood, despite being far from home. It was after all a process which had been going on since the Reformation.

Charlotte Jerningham, for example, daughter of the lively observer Frances Lady Jerningham and the solid Norfolk squire Sir William, was deposited by her parents in the Ursuline Convent of the Blue Nuns in Paris in 1784. It was a conventional move for a girl of her class. But it was the same need that had driven English Catholic women during far more frightening times in the seventeenth century. Mary Ward was part of the vast, active Catholic cousinage which had produced several Gunpowder Plot conspirators, but herself was inspired by the more laudable aim of promoting girls’ education. She founded the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary abroad, an order of nuns, for that purpose.^*3 The Reformation, which had necessitated the flight of the convents and their treasured nun–teachers from England, was a positive disadvantage to the cause of girls’ education – unless the girls could go abroad.

Back in England, nuns were therefore another phenomenon, in Romilly’s phrase, not seen for 250 years. Thomas Weld of Dorset, whose daughters had been educated abroad and become nuns, called them ‘terrestrial angels’, on the grounds of their music, now heard once more. (Other nuns, however, felt awkward in their unaccustomed everyday dress – ‘a strange appearance in those unused to it’ – especially as they were forbidden to carry their familiar breviaries, the prayer books which encased their rituals, in public.) One of Weld’s daughters, who made her vows as a nun in 1795 at Winchester, was probably the first to do so since the Reformation.9

John Milner established Benedictine nuns who had fled from Brussels, and Franciscans from Bruges. Lady Stourton hosted some canonesses from Liège at Holme Hall in Yorkshire. In the words of the Prioress, the Stourtons ‘expressed the greatest satisfaction to have it in their power to afford us an asylum in our present distress’, even if the villagers were said to be greatly alarmed to see so many people dressed ‘in a peculiar manner’, just as others gawped at ‘Frenchmen dressed in women’s clothes’ – who were of course actually priests with their long skirts.10 The Benedictine schools for boys at Douai and Dieulouard in Lorraine were given refuge by Sir Edward Smythe at Acton Burnell Hall in Shropshire. The chaplain of Lady Anne Fairfax at Gilling Castle in Yorkshire was Dom John Anselm Bolton, who had held his position for thirty years. Now he arranged for Ampleforth Lodge to be given to his community of St Lawrence, made homeless by the Revolution.^*4

Where money was concerned, appeals were singularly successful, and nearly £34,000 was raised in a few weeks (roughly £2.5 million in today’s money) from the University of Oxford, and cities such as Bristol, Portsmouth and Winchester. The language of the appeals was highly emotive, with its references to the assaults committed against the wretched Catholics caught up in the Revolution: ‘several women... dedicated to religion, in the peculiar exercise of a sublime charity attending sick in hospitals, stripped naked and barbarously scourged in public, women driven out, many old’. There was a significant reminder of the history they all shared: ‘It is hoped that a difference in religious persuasion [Catholic as opposed to Protestant] will not shut the hearts of the English Public against their suffering brethren, the Christians of France.’11

One moving episode at Shoreham Beach in Sussex seemed to sum up the strange contradictions in the English Catholic world. In 1792 French nuns who for years had been established at Montargis in the Loire Valley, having been rudely expelled, expected to go to Catholic Belgium via England. When they arrived at Shoreham, however, where the captain of the ship had warned the inhabitants, the beach was crowded with a large number of carriages and a mass of people.12 The nuns cannot have failed to have felt apprehension, to put it at its mildest, given that they were disembarking on an island where for over two hundred years their religion had been proscribed.

But the women scarcely had time to scramble out of their tiny boats before there was wild cheering. ‘Come, come and forget amongst us all that those villains have made you suffer.’ They were then taken to a neighbouring house for an enthusiastic welcome: ‘We will take away the least trace of your misfortunes.’ The salutations continued: ‘You will find here none but feeling and compassionate hearts, who will esteem themselves happy in repairing the injustice and cruelty of your fellow countrymen.’ Others still said: ‘We will make every effort to procure you that happiness and peace which you could no longer enjoy in France; take courage, therefore, you have nothing more to fear.’

It was at nearby Brighton that the nuns learned of a remarkable piece of intervention on their behalf. It was the heir to the throne, George Prince of Wales, now aged thirty, who had offered to defray expenses in the town where he himself had begun to build a regal so-called pavilion in 1784. He also sent his own physician to see them the morning after their arrival to enquire after their welfare; in a subsequent visit the physician persuaded the Reverend Mother not to journey on as had been intended but rest in England. Later George met the community and, with what was the true politeness of princes, left before too long. That is to say, when it became obvious that the lack of chairs meant the exhausted nuns had to stand so long as he remained, he turned to his companion and suggested tactfully that they left. Who was this companion who had been part of the welcoming party at Shoreham and had undoubtedly alerted the Prince? She was a certain widow, Mrs Maria Fitzherbert, and it was widely believed that she was the Prince’s (Catholic) wife.

Born as Mary Anne Smythe, granddaughter of a baronet, Maria Fitzherbert, as she was now known, was in her thirties, six years older than the Prince. Maria had in fact been twice widowed, in both cases without children. Her previous husbands were also from the higher echelons of the Catholic gentry: Edward Weld, who died after falling from a horse, and Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton, who had died following the Gordon Riots; the latter left her wealthy.

During the 1780s the Prince of Wales’s love for this famously sympathetic woman – ‘sweet by nature’ – had become the stuff of gossip. Her fellow Catholic (or ‘Cat’ as she put it), Frances Lady Jerningham, wrote in 1786: ‘Mrs Fitzherbert has I believe been married to the Prince. But it is a very hazardous undertaking... God knows how it will turn out – It may be to the Glory of our Belief, or it may be to the great Dismay and destruction of it.’ The details of her lifestyle impressed Society: ‘She has taken a Box to herself at the Opera, a thing which no Lady but the Duchess of Cumberland ever did – 100 guineas a year. The Prince is very assiduous in attending her in all public places.’13

The Prince was, in fact, said to have first glimpsed Maria at the opera, probably in the box of her friends Lady Anne and Lady Margaret Lindsay in 1784, and become smitten. Yet her physical appearance was evidently not the whole key to Maria Fitzherbert’s engaging personality. Her hair was luxuriant, it was true, and she had soft hazel eyes; but her figure was lavish, or as Lady Jerningham put it to one who was evidently not an admirer: ‘Do you remember seeing her when she was the Widow Weld? You found her far too fat.’14 One suspects that the answer lay in a mixture of the ardent, the maternal (always an element in the Prince’s later love affairs) and sheer niceness.

Maria Fitzherbert was not only a good Catholic, but she was a good, kind, charitable person: the two virtues, after all, as with any religion however venerable, were not necessarily to be equated. One of the proofs of this virtue was the very fact that their publicly close relationship definitely indicated to the outside world that in some way Maria believed herself married to the Prince. There is evidence of a wedding on 15 December 1785, performed in a private house by a clergyman of the Church of England, after the Prince caused a report of his despair and shortly ensuing death to be carried to her.15 The wedding, valid in the eyes of the Catholic Church, was enough to satisfy Maria’s conscience. (There was no requirement at this date to get married in front of a Catholic priest in England, where the decrees of the Council of Trent had not been promulgated.) Henceforth the couple acted unashamedly as husband and wife.

But this validity in the eyes of the Catholic Church was where the complications of the situation became evident. Except for its dramatic royal connotations, the whole episode was no different from the many anomalies and irksome restrictions faced by Catholics in eighteenth-century England. Here was the heir to the British throne. If the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 applied to anyone, it applied to him. Yet this Act demanded the assent of the sovereign to the marriage of George III’s descendants, without which it had no official status. Any children born to such a union, for example, would be illegitimate. For the future it was significant that the Prince of Wales was still theoretically free to wed (and beget heirs). In the meantime, nice Mrs Fitzherbert graciously lorded it in London – and in Brighton. The destitute nuns of Shoreham Beach were the beneficiaries.

Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle was the younger brother of Maria’s husband Edward, from whom he inherited in 1775. Weld was another Catholic oligarch, to use a modern phrase, who combined landed power, philanthropy for his co-religionists, and a real friendship with King George III. His nature was not that of a political activist and he had in fact refused to join the Catholic Committee in 1782. Weld was certainly known for his individuality within the confines of his class. His co-religionist Robert Clifford criticized him at one point for some property deal which Clifford felt belied Weld’s great reputation for piety. How much better to save a noble family in distress – the religion of hundreds depended on it – than say the breviary at four o’clock in the morning! He added sardonically that everybody had their own method of seeing things, ‘as the Welshman said when he kissed the cow’.16

Weld the determined individual was said to be ‘the handsomest small man in England’. If a small man, he certainly owned a lot of large properties, and was rumoured to be the second-largest landowner in England:17 there were Chideock and Pylewell Park in the south-west, as well as Lulworth, whose proximity to Bath at the time of the Gordon Riots, together with his own prominence, had caused Weld to worry about security. Then there were Leagram and Stonyhurst in Lancashire and Britwell in Oxfordshire.

The Welds had a huge family born between 1773 and 1789. There was a priest, besides the eldest son, also Thomas, who first married and had children, then became a cardinal, giving up his properties. There were intermarriages, naturally enough, with families such as the Stourtons. It was Charlotte Stourton, married to Joseph Weld, who was installed at delightful Pylewell Park, near Lymington, while Catherine Weld, ‘the Dorset Rosebud’, married the future Lord Stourton.

There were also three daughters who had become nuns abroad as Sisters of the Third Order of St Francis at Bruges and had to be rescued. Weld’s agent sent a coded message conveying the success of his mission: he was despatching ‘three black mares’. Weld’s request was that they should wear bonnets and black veils, not those giveaway nuns’ hoods. Nuns must not dress ‘to frighten the crows’. The King nodded benevolently in the direction of the holy paraphernalia they needed to bring with them, technically forbidden: ‘Tell them to bring their Church vestments, breviaries and such like. I will give orders that they shall pass the Custom House.’ The propinquity of the King’s favoured seaside resort, Weymouth, to Lulworth Castle obviously played a part in this friendship between monarch and Catholic gentleman. Who would not want to ride across the sands to nearby Lulworth Cove, over which loomed a romantic Elizabethan castle? It was a castle, incidentally, which had been acquired by the Welds in the middle of the last century and much renovated since.

In August 1789 a more formal visit took place, for which Thomas Weld had his own private agenda. Just as the wretched French royal family, ejected by the mob from Versailles, were trying to settle into the Tuileries in Paris, the King and Queen of England arrived by frigate at Lulworth Cove, where they found carriages waiting to convey them to the castle. At Lulworth itself, the steps were covered with ‘carpetry’. There was a medallion of the King over the door flanked on either side by two great statues festooned with a broad label of Garter Blue silk inscribed with the words: ‘Long Live the King’. Colours were also flown from the top of the castle. Eight of the Weld children lined the steps, singing ‘God Save the Great George’, and the Queen was later greeted by the whole lot drawn up in order of age in the Hall.18

The only awkward moment was when Thomas Weld’s sister was spotted going barefoot and bare-legged, giving food to the poor. George III made his lack of approval for such informality clear: ‘God might be served as well with shoes and stockings on as without them,’ was his acid comment.

The crucial part of the visit – at any rate from the point of view of the host – was the reaction of the King to the Great Chapel, which Weld had started building in the grounds in 1786 (and would in fact be consecrated by three bishops late in 1790). Previous chapels had been attached discreetly to country houses, doubled as upper rooms or in some other way built so that their true purpose was capable of polite dissimulation. At Lulworth there had obviously always been some room for prayer or a hidden chapel, traditionally below the floor of the North East Tower, and later in the muniments room, but this was a radical step forward. There was a story that King George had, with a wink, proposed that his friend was actually building a free-standing family mausoleum (a perfectly legal endeavour, unlike the chapel). At any rate one may imagine the collective sigh of Weld family relief when the royal inspection passed without incident except for the most gracious observations.

Now Thomas Weld was able to write to his co-religionist and neighbour Lord Arundell, whose chapel at Wardour Castle was a few years earlier, but more or less discreetly still constituted part of the house: ‘I am very glad this business is over. I hope it will answer the purpose I have solely in view. I think the King’s seeing the Chapel in that public manner must be a kind of sanction to it.’19

While the Catholics in England benefited from the effects of the French Revolution, which developed into outright war between England and France, the effects in Ireland were very different. Here was a largely Catholic country, riddled with patriotism of a very different sort, if equally sincere. Long ago the future Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, who knew Ireland in the middle of the sixteenth century, described it as being like an egg, lying aloof in the West Ocean. This aloofness could no longer be counted upon. The position of Ireland, so near to England in terms of geography, so distant in terms of religion, made it a perpetual security threat in times of war from the perspective of the British government and the so-called Protestant Ascendancy who ruled it. The perspective of the Irish, who wished for in-dependence from what they considered to be English rule, was naturally very different. War, especially with France, was their opportunity. The example not only of the French Revolution, but the successful bid for independence by the former colonists in America, inspired rebellion.

‘The 1798’ – the Irish revolt of the United Irishmen against English domination, potentially backed by French forces – was led by the Protestant Wolfe Tone. In a powerful pamphlet, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, issued seven years earlier, Wolfe Tone had evoked the outcry of Shylock against persecution of the Jews: ‘Shall they not say to us “Are we not men as ye are... Hath not a Catholic eyes, dimensions, organs, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Protestant is?”’^*5 Wolfe Tone proposed that Anti-Catholicism belonged to ‘the dark ages of superstition’, not ‘the days of illumination, at the close of the eighteenth century’.20

Wolfe Tone and others were arrested and found guilty, al-though Wolfe Tone cheated the hangman and died by his own hand. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a rebel from the ducal family of Leinster, died in prison. But the whole troubling episode convinced the English government under William Pitt that a proper joining-up of the governments with only one Parliament, and that in London, was the essential method to preserve general British security. It was for this reason that the Act of Union of 1801 was promulgated.

Was there perhaps an opportunity here for those (not all Catholics) who believed that Catholic Emancipation was also in the best interests of the country? Catholic Emancipation, like any other Bill put before Parliament, did of course need the Royal Assent; that is to say, the agreement of King George III, good friend of Thomas Weld, benevolent patron of the escaping Weld nuns.