An aristocratic Catholic friend once told me that his father would refer to a co-religionist landowner as “cousin X”, despite the family connection occurring back in the 18th century. Deep-rooted connections to the past are not uncommon among British landowners but are particularly powerful in old recusant Catholic houses where the sense of history is shaped by stories of persecution, privation and endurance – as well as duty and survival.
The father of the poet Alexander Pope was forced to sell his property in Windsor Forest under a law that forbade the residence of Catholics close to the person of the monarch. As Professor Peter Davidson has pointed out, this gives Pope’s Horatian eulogies about the settled man on inherited land a particular recusant meaning. Pope was also close to the daughters of the Blount family whose romantic family home Mapledurham, in Oxfordshire, is still an important Catholic house today. Dendrochronology has recently proved that it was built shortly after the Gunpowder Plot, and it contains artfully arranged “hides” where itinerant priests could be hidden in a chimney stack.
Horace Walpole was Anglican but he also had a fascination for the Catholic world, which influenced the oratory-like interior of his Gothic home, Strawberry Hill. His epically unreadable novel, The Castle of Otranto, claims in its introduction that the original Italian manuscript was “found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England” which is suggestive of the reputation of such libraries in the 1760s.
The penal legislation against Catholics begins in the 1534 Act of Supremacy, and the 1593 Act Against Recusants was intended to discover and avoid “all such traitorous and most dangerous conspiracies and attempts as are daily devised and practised” by “sundry wicked and seditious persons” who “call themselves Catholics”. Exclusion from politics, certain professions, public office and even education at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge played a key role in defining Catholic lives, and children were very often educated abroad, in France and Belgium.
Burdened by taxation, Catholic families earned a reputation for the careful management of their estates, as well as for refinement and culture. Between the 16th and 19th century, marriages were guided by religious affiliation and financial advantage, rather than political allegiance. The tapestry of familial alliances between well-known Catholic families – the Howards, Welds, Stourtons, Stonors, Petres and Cliffords, for example – underlines the landed Catholic “cousinage” and this web of connections, along with a continental education, adds a distinct culture to the houses, even if the difference, except in the chapels, is often barely perceptible.
Studying in Rome in the mid-1980s, I met Father Philip Caraman, the Jesuit priest who had, with Margaret Fitzherbert, assembled the evidence for the canonisation of the Forty English Martyrs. Back then, my understanding of the Catholicism of a household was confined to a vague awareness of attendance at “Mass”, the odd mention of “monsignors” and the curious distinction of some friends being descendants – lineal or collateral – of St Thomas More and St Philip Howard. But when I became an architectural historian, working for Country Life in particular, I found a deeper source of interest in the social history represented in part by buildings such as the heavily symbolic triangular lodge at Rushton, built in 1593-97 for Sir Thomas Tresham, in praise of the Trinity and the Mass. Tresham was fiercely loyal to the crown and paid endless and excessive fines for his Catholicism; his eldest son Francis died awaiting trial for his part in the Gunpowder Plot.
Stonor Park in Oxfordshire made perhaps the deepest impression, when I visited in 2000 to write about its modern rescue and preservation. The 7th Lord Camoys bravely bought back house and park when his parents, burdened by more modern forms of taxation, put it on the market in 1975. The house was refurnished with the support of other family members who supplied sculpture and paintings, and it houses a library rich with recusant literature. Spread across a sloping hillside, Stonor Park’s classical, mellow red brick front conceals a much older house of the 13th and 14th centuries. The ancient chapel, refitted in Gothic Revival style in 1796, is today moody with a blue-and-pink colour scheme devised by Osbert Lancaster and John Piper, and remains an important centre of Catholic worship.
Associations with Catholic persecution under Elizabeth I are strong. St Edmund Campion, Oxford academic and priest, found refuge at Stonor Park in 1581 and used the attic to print his famous “Ten Reasons” why Catholicism should be preferred to the reformed church. In August of that year, he was captured and tortured; then hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. The printing press was confiscated along with other “massing stuff” and several members of the Stonor family prosecuted and exiled. The house is now run by Lord Camoys’s son, William, and his family, and its survival has a special place in English history, Edmund Campion being one of those Forty English Martyrs who were canonised in 1970.
Another house long in the hands of a leading Catholic family is Lulworth Castle in Dorset, which I visited in 1999, in preparation for an article. The romantic, castle-like house with great round towers was built as a hunting lodge for Viscount Bindon, son of the Duke of Norfolk, in 1608-1610. It has been owned by the Catholic Weld family since 1641 but was gutted by a fire in 1929. When I visited, it was reopening after a long restoration; the remains were roofed over to make the interior useful.
The Weld family had also built a handsome modern neo-Georgian house alongside, but the most compelling Lulworth building was perhaps the extraordinary 1780s free-standing chapel, a domed building designed by Catholic architect John Tasker. Notable as a pre-emancipation, free-standing English Catholic place of worship, it is said George III gave it the nod as long as it was officially presented as the family mausoleum.
The deft Mr Tasker also appears in the story of Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk, where I worked on an advisory report for the National Trust, in 2018, supported by Sir Henry and Lady Bedingfeld. Oxburgh Hall is a romantic late-15th-century red brick house, with a glorious gatehouse towering above its moated site. Its rural location adds to the atmosphere of ancient retreat, as noted by the eldest son of the Bedingfelds – now Father Benedict, a priest in the United States.
The builder of Oxburgh Hall was Sir Edmund Bedingfeld, an influential courtier who entertained Henry VII there in 1487. In the next century, Sir Henry Bedingfield was jailer to Princess Elizabeth when Mary I was on the throne. Presenting himself at court when Elizabeth I succeeded, he received a famous brush-off from Good Queen Bess, who told him: “If we have any prisoner whom we would have sharply and straightly kept, we will send for you.” Recognising he was no longer in line for court positions, Bedingfeld retired quietly to Norfolk, where he paid regular recusant fines.
The family kept a low profile and, in 1777, tore down the old hall, opened up the views and created a great classical saloon, designed by John Tasker, with Adamesque interiors. This was partly subsumed by a hearty re-Gothicising in the 1830s, the profile of the house punctuated by brick chimneys in the Tudor spirit by John Chessell Buckler, a knowledgeable antiquary. His son, Charles Alban Buckler, converted to Catholicism and is best known for the Victorian remodelling of one of the great Catholic houses, Arundel Castle, in Sussex, for the Duke of Norfolk, with a sublime Gothic Revival chapel that is unequalled in the British Isles.
When Sir Henry’s father tried to sell Oxburgh Hall in 1951, his mother – Sybil, Lady Bedingfeld – bought it back, with the support of her daughter and niece, and “the help of St Therese of Lisieux”. They passed it to the National Trust in 1952, with it remaining the family residence. The interiors are suggestive of the new confidence of Catholic gentry after Catholic emancipation in 1829.
The Bedingfeld family’s long adherence to the Catholic faith adds an indefinable something to the fine architectural ensemble, and there is also a freestanding 1830s chapel at Oxburgh. This has an outstanding Flemish altarpiece from the mid-16th century that evokes the continental pieces bought in during a period of Catholic confidence after emancipation. When the altarpiece arrived at King’s Lynn docks, the dockworkers are said to have shouted, “More relics for Sir Henry!”
Among the treasures of the house are the outstanding large embroidery panels worked by Mary, Queen of Scots and her jailer’s wife – Bess, Countess of Shrewsbury (aka Bess of Hardwick) – while Mary was in captivity at Chatsworth. These had been owned by the Brownes (Viscounts Montague) of Cowdray House. Long in ruins, this was a great centre of Catholicism in Sussex, with one of the finest private chapels before a 1793 fire gutted the 16th-century house. I used to visit these ruins as a child and found the place wonderfully mysterious.
Among the Catholic houses rebuilt, or renewed, after this period, Arundel has already been mentioned, but some of the greatest projects were for converts such as the Marquess of Bute, swept up in the great Catholic revival of the Victorian era. Their houses include Castell Coch and Mount Stuart, whose Victorian display belongs to quite another time.
Looking back, it is perhaps the sense of quiet continuity that stands out; a richness of history, despite a history of persecution, and of understanding – even wisdom. The discreet, decent and pious figure of Guy Crouchback’s saintly landowner-father, in Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, comes to mind. The owner of a great estate, his house given over to a convent, he is quietly content with a few rooms in a local hotel, but profoundly conscious of the duties and responsibilities passed down to him. His amiable presence lingers at the back of the imagination as a foil for the folly of others – and perhaps, too, of the modern age. In a few years, it will be the bicentenary of Catholic emancipation. Plenty of time to prepare for a major national exhibition on the endurance, triumphs and treasures of the recusant country house.
Jeremy Musson is an architectural historian, historic building consultant, author and broadcaster
This article first appeared in the March 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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