Thomas Arundell, the younger son of Sir John Arundell of Lanherne, in 1541 acquired the (previously monastic) manors of Tisbury and Donhead. Ten years later he was executed as a supporter of the Protector Duke of Somerset, and his lands were forfeited. Wardour Castle was reacquired by the Arundells in 1571. The family seems to have conformed officially (and, arguably, pragmatically) to the Established Church during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Thomas Arundell, recently made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, was created the 1st Lord Arundell of Wardour by James I in 1605. The Arundells became publicly Catholic again after the latter’s death in 1639, and remained true to the Faith thereafter.
The Arundells married well – to heiresses – and in 1770, Henry, 8th Lord Arundell of Wardour commissioned James Paine to build a magnificent Palladian manor, completed six years later. Hidden within a wing was All Saints Chapel, then undoubtedly the grandest place of worship built in England since the Reformation. Its unspectacular entrance gives little indication of the grand interior with its Corinthian pilasters and exuberant plasterwork. Sir John Soane extended the sanctuary in 1788-90 to encompass the magnificent high altar created by Giacomo Quarenghi in Rome. The furnishings are splendid. There are a number of paintings, the huge Deposition behind the altar being commissioned by Father John Thorpe SJ, Lord Arundell’s agent in Rome, from Giuseppe Cades. Another painting (17th century), that of the Samaritan woman by Louis de Boullogne, was purchased from Notre Dame in Paris at the time of the French Revolution. The silver sanctuary lamps were made by Luigi Valadier in Rome in 1775. The marble relief of the Virgin and Child by Pierre-Étienne Monnot of 1703 came from the chapel of the Jesuit Superior General in Rome.
In 1896 the 12th Lord Arundell of Wardour gave land in nearby Tisbury, together with the stone, for a church. Tisbury had expanded since the arrival of the railway in 1860. The relatively modest new church of the Sacred Heart was designed by Canon AJC Scoles in Early English style, and opened in 1898. The original marble high altar and alabaster reredos survived an unfortunate reordering of 1979.
In 1898 the ownership of Wardour Chapel itself was transferred to a trust. During the 1920s the very difficult Dowager Lady Arundell (née Lucy Errington from Northumberland) sought unsuccessfully to make Wardour a private chapel, with Tisbury as the parish church. Father Wolfe SJ, the parish priest, was moved to write to Lord Arundell in 1924: “If there is a Purgatory at all, some people will catch it hot later on… how tired I am of Wardour affairs.” Lady Arundell appealed in vain to Rome.
In 1933 the Jesuits, after 158 years, left the parishes of Tisbury and Wardour. The last Lord Arundell of Wardour died of tuberculosis in 1944. The estate was inherited by the Lords Talbot of Malahide through an Arundell daughter. The mansion at New Wardour was sold and, after a failed attempt to set up a Jesuit noviciate centre, it became Cranborne Chase School for most of the rest of the 20th century. It has now been converted into flats.
In 1946 the Jesuit connection with the parish resumed. In the second half of the 20th century, the parish was manned to its satisfaction by old-fashioned priests such as Father John Tranmar and Father Richard Randolph (convert descendant of a Bishop of London). The liturgy at Wardour was preserved through the efforts of the late Lord Talbot of Malahide – Novus Ordo English with the Ordinary of the Mass sung in Latin. The Jesuits themselves were never very concerned with liturgy. No changes were made to the sanctuary “in the spirit of Vatican II”; the high altar remains as originally sited, for ad orientem celebration.
Father Randolph was succeeded in 1999 by Father Joe Duggan, a perfectly pleasant Jesuit of the new persuasion, experienced in severing the link between the Jesuits and their historic parishes, such as St George’s, Worcester. He departed in 2003. Father Duggan was replaced by the diocesan Father Thomas Atthill, previously of Salisbury, a man much influenced by the Second Vatican Council. Following his retirement in 2011, Father Robert Miller, a convert Anglican cleric, originally from Nottinghamshire, previously Catholic parish priest of Dulverton, succeeded him. He continued in this role until last September when age and physical frailty sadly forced his retirement.
Tisbury-cum-Wardour is a parish of considerable extent, running from the borders of Dorset and Somerset to Warminster on the edge of the plain to the north edge of distant Salisbury some 20 miles away. Some 500 baptised Catholics fall within its bounds.
On the retirement of Father Robert Miller, there was a period of some doubt as to whether it would be possible to maintain the Sunday Mass at Wardour. A satisfactory solution has however been reached, at least for the time being. The actual parish priest of the still separate parish of Tisbury-cum-Wardour is Father Anthony Paris, a former military chaplain and already parish priest of Salisbury.
He is ably assisted by Father Jonathan Creer of the Ordinariate and by the very recently ordained Father Joseph Meigh, almost certainly the youngest priest in the Diocese of Clifton. Mass at Wardour continues to be celebrated every Tuesday and Sunday. The priests spend a considerable amount of their lives traipsing between Salisbury to Tisbury.
The current major problem on the horizon is the physical state of the chapel. A considerable amount of restoration was done, mainly to the roof, in the 1990s, but a recent architectural survey has revealed that the splendid Soane dome is in severe danger of collapse within the next ten years unless it is properly attended to, at the cost of some £150,000. The failure to do this, in the light of the 250th anniversary of the chapel in 2026, and the 200th anniversary of Catholic Emancipation in 2029, would seem, to say the least, a very great shame.
One of the major problems is that since 2017 it has become very difficult, not to say impossible, for a Catholic building such as Wardour Chapel, set in the countryside a few miles from the nearest village, to obtain any kind of government grant, because it struggles to demonstrate considerable community involvement, despite its links with the thriving Catholic primary school on its doorstep. Sheer beauty and architectural importance are no longer sufficient.
If this important pre-Emancipation gem, of national rather than merely local note, is to be preserved, the burden is going to have to fall on the wider Catholic community, in addition to the committed congregation, to assist with the necessary funding.
(Photography: By Alex Ramsay)
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