From Memoir and Letters of Lady Mary Arundell

LADY Mary Anne Grenville Nugent Temple, the subject of this Memoir, was the only daughter of George, second Earl Temple, and first Marquess of Buckingham, by his wife Mary Elizabeth, Baroness Nugent, daughter and heiress of Robert, Earl Nugent, in the Peerage of Ireland.[i] She was born at the princely mansion of Stowe on the 8th of July, 1787, and shortly after was carried as a babe to Dublin Castle, her father being in November of that year made Viceroy of Ireland, a high Crown appoint­ment which he had already held once before.[ii] Her father was a staunch, uncompromising Protestant, but her mother, though brought up an Angli­can, was, at the time of her marriage, a Catholic, having been received back into the Faith professed by a long line of her ancestors, (from which her father, Lord Nugent, had unfortunately apostatized in order to satisfy his schemes of political and worldly ambition,) during a visit to London in the winter of 1772.

The touching and romantic story of her mother’s conver­sion, and of the long years of suffering and spiritual privation it entailed, was put on record many years after her death by her only daughter Lady Mary Arundell, in obedience to a request made to the latter by Dr. Brindle in the spring of 1840, during her residence at Prior Park. This most interesting narrative was published in the “Rambler” for 1855, under the title of “A Conversion under the Old Penal Laws,” and was after­wards embodied in a tale of real life by Miss Agnes Stewart, entitled “Earl Nu­gent’s Daughter,” and pub­lished by Burns and Oates in 1883. At the time of her mother’s conversion, to use her own daughter’s words, "most of the penal laws against Catholics were still in force. Priests dared priests dared not to appear publicly; for saying Mass a priest incurred the penalty of death; and the individual at whose house it could be proved that Mass had been celebrated suffered for­feiture of property and trans­portation for life.”

Suffice it to say her con­version to the Catholic Faith had to be kept a profound secret from her father, and, on her marriage with Mr. Grenville, afterwards Earl Temple,[iii] from everyone except her husband, who would on no account allow her to practise her religion. When after six years of persecu­tion and privation, a violent attack of fever had brought her to the point of death, and her delirious cries for a priest had to his great horror revealed the dread secret to those around her bed­side, her husband, in order to save her life, so far relented as to promise to allow her to see a priest. Accordingly, once every year, while they were in London, he himself took her early in the morning to meet a priest for a short time in a private room, which he hired for the purpose, he himself remain­ing in the adjoining room until the interview was over. When her husband however went after three years to Ireland as viceroy, where he remained from July 1782 to March 1783, Countess Temple found an opportunity of hearing Mass almost every Sunday, and on their return to England, during the months they passed every year in London, she was able through the kind offices of a Catholic aunt, Miss Nugent, to meet more frequently the same priest to whom her husband had introduced her, very probably without knowing his name or the fact of his being a Jesuit. This was Father Thomas Talbot, one of the two Jesuit brothers of the Catho­lic Earl of Shrewsbury. Two years after Lord Temple, now the Marquess of Buckingham’s return from Ireland on the expiry of his second term of Viceroyalty, which he held from November 1787 to October 1789, one day having met Father Talbot at the house of a friend of her Catholic aunt’s in London; she had desired the carriage to come for her and bring her two youngest children George and Mary, as she was anxious to procure for them the good old Father’s blessing, they being at the same time too young to understand or repeat any thing they might see or hear. After he had blessed the children, as they played about the room, Father Talbot said to their mother, “Do not be anxious or unhappy about this little girl; it is true she will be educated in a false religion, but prevent any pre­judices being instilled into her mind, and depend on it she will be a Catholic.”[iv] This George, Mary’s youngest brother, afterwards known as Lord Nu­gent, a title to which he succeeded on the death of his mother on 16th March 1812, was for some time Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. His brother, Richard, born in 1776, was afterwards first Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, having succeeded his father as second Marquess of Buck­ingham, and married the daughter and heir of James third and last Duke of Chandos. He was created Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Mar­quess of Chandos, and Earl Temple of Stowe, in 1822. The conversion of these two brothers was the object of their sister’s life-long prayers; but they remained deaf to all her representations and en­treaties, and both died Protestants.

It may here be mentioned that her mother’s second residence as Lady Lieutenant in Dublin had been consoled by her father Lord Nugent’s revealing to her on his deathbed, that for the last two years he had been reconciled to the Catholic Church.[v] But after imparting this secret to his distracted daughter, he expired before she had time to obtain leave from her husband, who was that evening occupied with important state affairs, to divulge the secret of her own conversion, the knowledge of which would have given him such relief and consolation in his dying moments. His death occurred Oct. 13th, 1788. His last words to his daughter were, “Mary, bitter has been my struggle and grief for having educated you a Protestant; I entreat of you to seek that truth which is only to be found in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I die in deep sorrow, begging God to have pity on you and me;”—and he wept bitterly. The profound secrecy he was obliged to observe regarding his conversion was owing to the law against relapsed Papists, which would have deprived his daughter of her inheritance if his return to the Catholic Church were known.

Many years thus passed away. Then, to use Lady M. Arundell’s own words. “The French Revolution broke out,—that astounding crisis, which, while it appeared to sound the knell to all religion in that unhappy country, was the instrument in the hands of God for mainly spreading and encou­raging it in this ill-fated land, where the emigration of the royalists, above all of the parochial clergy, caused an abundance of Catholics and of zealous labourers in the vineyard to be thrown upon our shores.”

Already, on the first arrival of the emigrants, private contributions had been made not only by Lord Arundell, and other wealthy Catholics, but by the Marquess of Buckingham, Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Camelford, Mr. Burke, and others, to the amount of above £5000. Their numbers however rapidly increased beyond the resources of private relief.

Returns at the Custom House, September, 1792, show that there landed in the different ports of the kingdom in the first three weeks of September 4045 priests exiled for not taking the oath to a sacriligious Constitution. Altogether 50,000 French priests suffered exile. The total number of priests who took refuge in England was 10,000, and owing to pov­erty and want the mortality amongst them was fearful. Between the years 1792 and 1802, about 1250 French priests died in Great Britain and the Chan­nel Islands. In 1795 there were 8000 French priests on the lists of relief in England. At the beginning of 1800 there were still 5621 receiving help, the rest being able to maintain themselves. At the end of 1801 the number helped was 3,060, while at the end of 1802 only 876 remained in England. The great immigration lasted about ten years and the average number of French priests at anyone time in Great Britain was about 6,000.

When war broke out between France and Eng­land the Marquess of Buckingham, as Colonel of the Militia of his county, went to pass the sum­mer in Winchester, whither he had been ordered, for the purpose of organising it, at its first muster­ing. Winchester was at that time nearly filled with French immigrants fleeing from the horrors of the Great Revolution, and with hundreds of Parish­ Priests from Brittany and Normandy. The noble Marquess entered heartily into the measures taken by the British Government for their relief, and at the suggestion he himself made to his relatives,[vi] then at the head of the ministry, a spacious build­ing, called the King’s House, was quickly furnished and all the distressed French clergy found in it shelter and subsistence.

The residence of this large body of priests was an unfinished palace of Charles the Second. It is now used as a barrack. During the former wars with France it had been set apart to receive French prisoners, and was then being used for stores. In April, 1793, 250 French priests were removed from a house at Fortune, near Gosport, which had been at first set apart for them, to the King’s House at Winchester, where others were already assembled, and being joined by 200 from Jersey, by the end of the year they made up a community of 700. 150 more were scattered through the city. The community in the King’s House was presided over by the “Abbé Martin, a religious of the Congrega­tion of Eudistes, and formerly superior of the Grand Seminaire of Lisieux. Officials and servants had been provided, but the priests found they could manage domestic matters better and more economically themselves, and reduced the expenses of this great community to about 5/6 a head per week. A party of 200 transformed themselves into artisans, and a carpet or tapestry manufactory Was establish­ed by aid of the Marchioness of Buckingham. She herself managed the sale of their work, and the profits were their own. None were idle. Lectures and conferences on theology and Holy Scripture were given; some young ecclesiastics finished their education, and were ordained; retreats were made and preached. Besides the English Catholic Church in the city there were two chapels in the King’s House. High Mass and Vespers were sung on Sundays and feast-days and of course many Masses were offered daily. Perpetual adoration was kept up from half-past five in the morning to eight at night.”

The allowance made them by the British Government was organized as to its distribution by the Marquess of Buckingham and entirely in the first instance superintended by Lady Arundell’s mother. In several works of relief the latter was in close connection with another lady, warmly devoted to the cause, Miss Macnamara. As the recent writer[vii] just quoted says, Lord Buckingham befriended the exiles in every possible way, “by money, by exer­tions, by voice, by influence. When the University of Oxford printed and distributed to the priests an edition of the Latin Vulgate Testament, consisting of 2,000 copies, the Marquess had 2,000 more printed at his own expense.” It is calculated that by the middle of 1793 alms to the amount of about £75,000 had been given to the clergy and £11,000 to the laity; but when private gene­rosity was unable to cope with the ever-increasing distress, the Government quickly stepped forward to its relief and in December, 1793, allotted the vast sum of £7,830 a month to the clergy and £560 to the laity. The lay grant was soon increased to £1,000 a month. In February, 1795, £3,000 was allotted by the Government for the laity, while since December, 1794, the grant to ecclesiastics had been raised to £9,000 a month. Charles Butler says he learnt from the Secretary of the Central Committee that in June, 1806, the sums voted in Parliament had reached £1,864,825. The Government grants to French priests alone are computed to have been considerably over two million sterling. The bishops received ten guineas a month, the other priests thirty-five shillings a month or two guineas. The friendship and inti­macy contracted, during his stay at Winchester, with several of the French clergy, whose attain­ments in literature were highly appreciated by him, while at the same time the urbanity of their manners and their patience under suffering had won his regard, caused the Marquess of Bucking­ham to invite the most distinguished amongst them to the enjoyment of his magnificent library at Stowe. Thus it happened that as long as the family remained in the country there were always at least two of the French clergy residing in the house. On the representations made by these learned and pious men, that if they were to be his visitors he must allow them a place, however small, where they could celebrate Mass, Lord Buckingham desired the groom of the chambers to prepare rooms for them opening one into another, one of which led into a closet lighted by one window, only seven feet by ten, but large enough to contain a large table, which served as an altar. “And this closet,” wrote her daughter 40 years after “for the remainder of my mother’s life, was her oratory,—the sanctuary where she fled for refuge from sorrows, trials and mortifications, and from the annoyances of a world where she was compelled to live and mix in its gayest scenes; for Stowe was always the centre of all that was what the world calls delightful,—all that riches could give and power and influence, ­its halls constantly filled with the leading politicians, wits, and fashion of the day;—yet while it resounded with music, laughter, and hilarity, my mother (whose wit and talents made her the life of every diversion, and who constantly exerted herself even when her mind, was ill at ease to promote the amusements of a crowded host of visitors, because it was her husband’s pleasure to assemble them, and to see his house the focus of splendour and gaiety), when mirth was at its height, and her absence would be unperceived, would steal to the little oratory and pouring forth her heart-felt thanksgiving that she at last could constantly, though secretly, enjoy the consolation of religion, earnestly pray that the mind of a beloved husband, which she rejoiced to see emancipating itself gradually from a dark cloud of prejudice, might be enlightened to see and know the truth.

“And how earnestly would her prayers be offered for the poor children, to whom she was not permitted to teach the one only faith; but whose young minds she endeavoured to train at least to the love and practice of virtue, to fear and love God above all things, and to the exercise of charity and benevolence: and how as they advanced in years did her prayers for them become more earnest and frequent! And while her daughter, full of life and beauty, the spoiled child of fortune, to whom the very name of sorrow was as yet almost unknown, passed the gay hours of a Christmas festival in levity, amusements and all the splendour that wealth could bestow, surrounded by flattery and folly and the young and the gay,—did that poor mother on her knees invoke a blessing which at last was granted to her prayers;—for, three years before her death I had the happiness of being received into the Church!”

Chapter II