From good time girl to benefactress.
Yolande Lyne Stephens was born in Paris in 1812, the daughter of Jean-Louis Duvernay, a teacher of dance. She joined the Paris Opera and became one of its major dancers. In 1833 she danced at the Theatre Royal in London for a season. The 13-year-old future Queen Victoria wrote in her diary: “Mademoiselle Duvernay is a very nice person, she has a very fine figure and dances beautifully, so quietly and so gracefully.” Yolande inevitably had a number of financial “protectors”, including briefly the 6th Duke of Devonshire among others.
In 1837 in London she attracted the atten-tion of Stephens Lyne Stephens, the 35-year-old heir to one of the largest commercial fortunes in the country. The source had been Anglo-Portuguese trade. Stephens went up to Trinity College, Cambridge and then briefly into the 10th Hussars. He was a founder member of the Garrick Club and elected to Crockfords. He hunted with the Quorn. In 1830 he was elected as the ultra-Tory MP for Barnstaple but he failed to be elected at Liskeard in 1834. Yolande danced for the last time on August 19, 1837, and retired to become the mistress of Lyne Stephens.
On July 14, 1845, Lyne Stephens and Yolande were married at St Mary’s, Putney in an Anglican ceremony. After the service they were driven to Cadogan Terrace to be married by a Catholic priest. She was 32 years old at the time of her marriage and was “now as remarkable for embonpoint as she used to be for slenderness and agility”. The marriage failed to give her quite the respectability she had hoped for, and they moved to Lower Grove House, Roehampton. On the death of his father in 1851 Lyne Stephens had an annual income of £52,000 (£6.5 million today).
In 1856 they purchased the 7,700-acre Lynford Hall estate in Norfolk for £133,500 (£13 million). William Burn was commissioned to rebuild the house. In 1858 Lyne Stephens was appointed High Sheriff of Norfolk. Two years later he was dead from self indulgence. His wife was left £300,000 (£33 million) in the will.
Yolande fairly quickly formed a liaison with the married Colonel (subsequently General) Edward Stopford Claremont, then a military attaché at the British Embassy in Paris; this arrangement was to continue for almost the rest of her life until he died in 1890.
In 1872 the convert Mabel Digby arrived at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton as mother superior and had a considerable religious influence on Yolande, who was a generous benefactor to the institution.
In Norfolk at Lynford Hall she was obliged to go to Mass in Thetford, some 10 miles away. It was one of her guests, the Catholic Lord Lovat, who came up with the idea of a private chapel on the estate in December 1875. “Why don’t you build a chapel here in Lynford, and save yourself the trouble of taking your staff and guests to Thetford?” She employed the Catholic convert architect Henry Clutton to design the Gothic Chapel of Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen. It was completed in 1879 at the cost of £10,000 (£1 million). It is a beautiful small Perpendicular building with a rich interior; the altar and reredos remain intact. In 2009 it was leased by the Diocese of East Anglia to the Norfolk Churches Trust which has recently received a grant of £108,345 from the Government’s Cultural Recovery Fund for its restoration.
The chapel was consecrated in October 1884 by Arthur Riddell, Bishop of Northampton. He had been appointed as bishop four years earlier. Northampton was then the largest Catholic diocese in the country, consisting as it did of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire and Suffolk. It also contained the smallest number of Catholics so it was invariably short of funds. Bishop Riddell was ambitious to develop the diocese and build churches: this zeal was matched by the desire of his benefactress to pay for them.
Bishop Riddell gave a firm call to the diocese: “What is our duty? It is to be thorough Catholics, Catholics in name and deed; practical Catholics, fulfilling all our duties to God and to our neighbour, praying, hearing Mass, frequenting the Sacraments, keeping the days of fasting and abstinence, avoiding sin, practising virtue, loving God; this is the way for us to assist in the conversion of England, and there is no other.”
In 1884 Yolande gave a substantial donation towards the purchase and completion of the Bishop’s Palace in North-ampton. The same year she funded the new church of St Francis of Assisi, Shefford in Bedfordshire. The architect was SJ Nicholl. The church is richly furnished and little altered with a stunning stone reredos on the east wall. A panel in one of the stained glass windows portrays her on her knees, wearing a black dress with a white shawl over her head, holding a replica of the church in her hands.
In 1885 she gave £4,000 (£500,000) towards the cost of building the church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Wellingborough. The architect of this Perpendicular church was again SJ Nicholl. It has a largely intact and lavishly fitted interior.
Her crowning gift, however, was that of the church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge, one of the largest Catholic churches in the country. The old Pugin church of St Andrew was too small for the growing influx of Catholic graduates to the University. A site was purchased with assistance from the 15th Duke of Norfolk. In 1883 Canon Christopher Scott was appointed parish priest of Cambridge. The next year Yolande had agreed to fund the new church entirely. She wrote to Bishop Riddell: “What I have most at heart is Cambridge … I must be allowed to indulge my own taste and fancy, for I think it would not do building a church there which could not be worthy of the surroundings.”
Dunn and Hansom of Newcastle were appointed to design the church in early Decorated Gothic style. There is much rich carving on the exterior of the church as well as inside. The nave is tall with high altar and baldacchino. Hardman provided much of the glass.
The size of the church and 213-foot spire outraged the Protestants of Cambridge. They claimed that it was funded by the production of moveable eyes for dolls and called it “eyedollatrous”. Work on the exterior of the building was complete by the spring of 1889. Above the rose window of the north transept were inscribed the words “Pray for the good estate of Yolande Marie Louise Lyne Stephens, Foundress of this church.”
The church was consecrated on October 15, 1890 with almost the entire hierarchy of the English Catholic Church present as well as the 15th Duke of Norfolk. The choir of the London Oratory travelled to Cambridge to provide the music.
The church continues to flourish to this day under its parish priest Mgr Eugène Harkness, the Chancellor of East Anglia. Some 2,500 individuals attend Mass over the weekend. Bishop Alan Hopes, Emeritus Bishop of East Anglia, has retired to a flat in the Presbytery and provides assistance as required.
Yolande died at Lynford on September 2, 1894. A Requiem Mass was celebrated in Cambridge five days later, and her body was then interred in the mausoleum at Roehampton, next to her husband.
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