(1715 - 1745)

The government's fears of a rebellion came true in September 1715 when the Scottish Jacobites rose. However, fifteen weeks were to pass before Prince James Edward Stuart landed in Scotland. By that time his supporters had suffered significant defeats.

The Pretender proved a poor and uninspiring leader. After six weeks he deserted the remnants of his army and sailed back to France.

As ever, the folly of those who sought to reimpose a Catholic monarch by force rebounded on the English Catholics. In the summer of 1716 Catholics were again ordered to leave London and stay at least ten miles from the City.

The Catholics of the Thames Valley area gave little or no active support to the Jacobites. However, one of those executed at Liverpool for taking part in the rising was George Collingwood, brother of a Jesuit priest based at Sandford-on-Thames. Fr Charles Collingwood had come to Oxfordshire in 1701 and stayed at Sandford until his death three years after the rebellion. He was buried in the Sandford parish church.

In 1716, as an aid to the collection of taxes, the government began registering land owned by Catholics. All Catholics were obliged to register their names and holdings. Among those in the Thames Valley area who did was a London Catholic, Roboaldo Fieschi, who with his step-sister held a small estate at Chinnor (4 miles SE of Thame).

At Paris in the same year John Talbot Stonor was consecrated titular Bishop of Thespiae by the Papal Nuncio. He returned to England as Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District with temporary jurisdiction also over the London District. His responsibilities therefore initially included the whole Thames Valley area.

Although the Vicar Apostolic's mere presence in England was punishable by death, Bishop Stonor was a supporter of the Hanoverian monarchy. George I showed his appreciation by persuading the Holy Roman Emperor to make the Bishop Abbot and Baron of Lieu Dieu de Jard. So, despite the anti-Catholic legislation, Bishop Stonor was able to travel relatively freely throughout his extensive territory. He spent much of his time visiting the small Catholic communities based around the country houses of the gentry. In between he often stayed at Stonor House, Watlington Park or Heythrop, near Chipping Norton.

In 1718 Charles Eyston of East Hendred wrote his will. He was the son of George Eyston, the restorer of St Amand's chapel. Known as the Antiquary, he was a great friend of the Oxford diarist Thomas Hearne. Shortly after the Antiquary's death Hearne described Eyston as:

'a Gentleman of eminent virtues and my great friend and acquaintance. He was a Roman Catholic, and so charitable to the poor that he is lamented by all that knew anything of him ... He was a man of sweet tempers and was an excellent scholar, but so modest that he did not care to have it at any time mentioned.'

The Antiquary possessed a large library and many rare volumes and manuscripts. He wrote a number of books, mostly on church history and religion, including a history of Glastonbury Abbey. He died in 1721 at the age of fifty-four 'after he was seized with a Diabetes'.

Hendred House
Photo by J L Hadland

Charles Eyston fathered eleven children by his wife Winefred Fitzherbert, who survived him by thirty-two years. He was buried in the Eystons' aisle in East Hendred parish church, where there is a monument to him and his wife. His will reveals his loyalty to the Catholic Church, because he describes himself as 'Being by God's grace steadfast and certain in the integrity of that faith which my ancestors have received and learned from the holy Roman Catholic church, in obedience to the Apostolic See of Rome ...'

In his will he left a gold enamelled cross and two guineas (= £109 today) to each of his God-daughters, Mrs Dormer, Mrs Englefield and Mrs Belson. He left £5 (= £260 today) to the poor of East Hendred. But most interestingly of all he left to his eldest son and heir Charles 'Bishop Fisher's staff', as noted earlier in this book.

In the year that the Antiquary wrote his will the main East Ilsley line of Hildesleys (from whom the staff seems to have come) was all but extinct. That very year the spinster Emerita Hildesley sold the family's last interest in East Ilsley, the village from which they took their name.

The Hildesleys' principal residence in the seventeenth century had been Littlestoke in a Thameside finger of the parish of Checkendon. About the time that the Hildesleys died out another Catholic family, the Doughtys, moved into the parish. They were related by marriage to the Blounts of Mapledurham via the Tichbornes.

The Doughtys occupied Checkendon Court in the village of Checkendon and are also believed to have held Braziers Park near Ipsden, and Woodcote House at Woodcote. (The present Woodcote House was built c.1733 and remodelled in the early twentieth century. It is now The Oratory School, the Catholic public school founded by Cardinal Newman.) At some time during the first half of the eighteenth century the Doughtys are said to have had a small Catholic chapel in the grounds of Checkendon Court. Subsequently it was used as a chicken house and fell into ruin.

In September 1721, six weeks before his death, Charles Eyston the Antiquary dined at the Mitre Inn, Oxford with Thomas Hearne and Mr Kimber of Holywell, one of the staunchest recusants in the city. Three years later Thomas Kimber of Holywell, who may have been Mr Kimber's son, was ordained. Fr Kimber worked in Wales and died at Powis Castle near Welshpool in 1742. The Earls of Powis had until recently been Catholic and still treated Catholic priests favourably. Like Thomas Gage, they had conformed to Anglicanism for materialistic rather than theological reasons.

The year after the Antiquary's death, 1722, his friend Thomas Hearne noted that a Catholic named Richard Hudson was operating a small school at Kidlington for several sons of the gentry. Hudson had settled at Kidlington three years earlier. His family stayed in the village until 1779. He had previously taught the young Lord Leinster and was rated a good grammarian but not much of a scholar. Hearne, who was sympathetic to Catholics, supplied Hudson with books.

Although the Pope family had moved away from Binfield, Alexander Pope maintained his contact with Berkshire and Oxfordshire. In 1718 he stayed at Stanton Harcourt (5 miles W. of Oxford). His refuge was the half-ruined Harcourt Manor. It belonged to Viscount Harcourt, some of whose ancestors had been recusants.

The Viscount had a modern house at Cokethorpe (2½ miles W. of Stanton Harcourt) but Pope seems to have preferred the old manor as a place in which to work. He ensconced himself in what is now called Pope's Tower, formerly part of the Harcourts' private chapel. There he completed the fifth volume of his translation of the works of the ancient Greek writer Homer.

Pope also visited Stonor and wrote of its then 'gloomy verdure' of damp yew trees. He penned a cryptic poem about a pig and a wig, which may have referred to Bishop John Talbot Stonor!

Henry Englefield of Whiteknights died in 1720, which was the last year in which the Prince family of Clifton Hampden were recorded as recusants. It was also the year in which Francis Hyde IV and his brother John sold Hyde Hall, Purley. Francis Hyde IV lived at St James, Westminster. He and his brother were great great grandsons of Francis Hyde I who built the hall. They sold it to Francis Hawes, a director of the South Sea Company, who gave the house its present name, Purley Hall. Shortly afterwards Hawes was financially ruined when the 'South Sea Bubble' burst and his company collapsed.

In 1723 the Oath of Allegiance was administered and lists made of those refusing it. About this time the Stonors were paying £240 a year (= £12,500 today) in recusancy fines. Their once vast land holdings now consisted of just the fields and woods between Stonor and Watlington, a couple of woods between Turville and Ibstone, and another between Fawley and Hambleden.

In the summer of 1726 Charles Eyston, son of the Antiquary, married Mary Hawkins, a relative of the Cursons of Waterperry. Thomas Hearne took a great interest in the son of his old friend. He described Mary as 'a very agreeable pretty young woman of about Mr Eyston's age, viz. little more than twenty ...'

Charles, Mary and Charles's mother lived together at Hendred House. Hearne noted that the bride's fortune was no more than £1,000 (= £52,000 today), an important point as Charles had 'many brothers and sisters that are to be considered out of his estate'.

At the time of the wedding in 1726, Hearne wrote in his diary of 'forty acres of land at East Hendred never ploughed, because the land belonged to the Chaplain of Hendred, a Carthusian'. This referred to land that, before the suppression of the religious houses, had belonged to Sheen Abbey, Surrey. This was a rare example of respect for former church lands, especially nearly two centuries after the dissolution of the monasteries. In most cases Catholic gentry in the Thames Valley area had shown little reluctance to exploit the spoils seized from the abbeys and convents, presumably taking the view that 'if someone is going to get them, it might as well be us'.

The year after Charles Eyston's marriage, Sir Edward Simeon was busily enclosing the land adjoining his crumbling manor house at Britwell Salome near Watlington. A legal agreement was drawn up between Sir Edward and twenty-one commoners. He agreed to make a one-off payment of 30s. (= £80 today) to the poor of the parish and to give them a 10s. (= £27 today) every Michaelmas. In return the commoners gave up their rights over more than eighteen acres of land near the ancient Icknield Way on which they had grown crops.

Sir Edward Simeon demolished the old manor house and built the present small but elegant mansion in the Italian classical style. In the autumn of the 1729 the first chaplain of the new house arrived, Fr William Brown. He and his successors are thought to have lived at the nearby West End Villa, now called The Priest's House. This was probably built at about the same time as Britwell House.

Britwell House
Above, fireplace in the main hall. Below, detail of fireplace carving.

The mansion was probably designed by Edward Trubshawe. He had worked on Sir Edward's other house at Aston-by-Stone in Staffordshire. In 1790 single storey wings were added. In the early twentieth century a second storey was added to these wings. In 1960 the designer David Hicks restored the house as near as possible to its original state. He described the fireplace in the entrance hall as 'surely a very great example of English baroque architectural detail'.

The pressure to conform to Anglicanism was not confined to the gentry and nobility. In 1727 at Woolhampton, where there was a comparatively large Catholic community, an illiterate country woman, Winefrid Owen, formally submitted to the Church of England. Her submission occupies a full page in the parish register. It states that she had offended God by not acknowledging the King's lawful authority and not attending Anglican services. It adds that the Pope has, and should not have, any authority over the King.

Three years later a similar submission was made by another Woolhampton woman, Anne Arnett who had 'lived for several years in communion with the Church of Rome'. She copied out the submission in her own handwriting. Anne Arnett may later have been reconciled to Catholicism, because fourteen years later someone with a similar name was a member of the nearby Catholic congregation at Ufton.

Indeed, reconciliation to the Catholic Church was by no means unknown. In 1730, the year that Anne Arnett became an Anglican, John Willcott of Britwell and Mrs Haskey of Stonor were reconciled by Fr Monox Hervey at Watlington Park.

In 1727 George II became King. Apart from the Double Land Tax, most anti-Catholic legislation was no longer rigorously enforced. In the year of the coronation Sir Francis Curson succeeded his father Sir John at Waterperry. Until then he had been living two miles to the south at Great Milton. By his first wife, Elizabeth Knollys, he had a son who died at the age of fifteen while a student at the Jesuit school at St Omer in Picardy. His second marriage, to Winifred Powell, produced no heir.

Also in this coronation year Willoughby Bertie (pronounced Bartie), later third Earl of Abingdon, married Anna Maria Collins, the Catholic daughter of Sir John Collins. The wedding took place in Florence and the couple's daughters were raised as Catholics.

1728 saw the start of a public quarrel between Sir Richard Moore of Fawley, Berkshire and his wife Lady Anastasia. They had been married for twenty-one years and had fourteen children. The argument hinged around the sacrament of penance (confession). Lady Anastasia and one of her daughters preferred a secular confessor from Woolhampton, an ordinary priest who was not a member of a religious order. Sir Richard, whose brother John was at one time a Benedictine, insisted on the family using Fawley's resident Benedictine chaplain.

Lady Anastasia enlisted the support of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District, Bishop Bonaventure Giffard and his assistant Bishop Benjamin Petre. They recommended that Sir Richard and Lady Anastasia separate, but this was not acceptable to Sir Richard.

At Christmas 1728 Lady Anastasia therefore fled from Fawley. She settled in Paris where she became involved with the Blue nuns. Her husband never forgave her for disobeying him. By the time Sir Richard died one of their sons, Benedict James Moore, had himself become a Benedictine at St Gregory's, Douai. He later became prior.

Lady Anastasia only succeeded in ridding Fawley of the Benedictines after her death in 1742. She left £200 (= £10,600 today) to maintain a secular chaplain, who was to be approved by the Vicar Apostolic or his assistant. Consequently in 1745, three years after Lady Anastasia's death, Fr James Angel became chaplain at Fawley. Thus ended the only significant Benedictine mission base in Berkshire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But perhaps the Benedictine presence was not entirely eliminated: Fawley is said to be haunted by the ghost of a monk.

The Fawley chaplain served a ten mile long strip of the Berkshire Downs which included Lockinge near Wantage in the north and the Lambourn Valley in the south.

Fawley Manor

In 1731 Fr John Capistran Eyston became Franciscan Provincial, that is, head of the order in England. He died in that post during the following summer, having worked on the English mission for more than a quarter of a century. His baptismal name was Charles Eyston but he does not appear in the pedigree of the Eystons of East Hendred. Nonetheless he lived at Hendred for two or three years from about 1725, possibly as chaplain to Hendred House. At the time he was Procurator-Definitor of the Franciscan Province, one of a number of high offices he held in the order.

As Fr Eyston was becoming Franciscan Provincial in 1731, the sixth Thomas Stonor came of age. He had inherited the family estates at the age of fourteen and now married Mary Biddulph, heiress of the baronies of Camoys and Vaux. The following year the diarist Thomas Hearne noted that the Bishop of Oxford had accused Thomas Stonor of using charity to bribe people to become Catholics, a charge that was strongly denied. Hearne described the Anglican bishop as 'stingy'.

Swyncombe House, situated in a fold of the Chiltern Hills beside the Ridgeway, had passed by marriage from the Fettiplaces to the Dormers of Peterley and Wing. The Dormers were absentee landlords, but it is said that some of the villagers still gathered round the Catholic chapel at the house. Also the Catholic mission at Britwell House was only a mile and a half away, and the Britwell Catholic register lists the death of James Price of Swyncombe.

Charles, the fifth Lord Dormer, who married Katherine Fettiplace, died in 1728. His eldest son, also Charles, succeeded him as sixth Baron. However, as he was a priest he had no need for the house. He therefore sold it in 1732 for £13,966 16s. 0d. (= £740,000 today). The Elizabethan manor house was subsequently destroyed by fire in the first half of the nineteenth century. The present house is a 1980s replacement.

In 1733, twenty-two year old Basil Eyston was a Benedictine Professor at Douai. He was the second son of Charles Eyston the Antiquary. Two years later Basil Eyston's younger brother William joined the Jesuits at Watten in Flanders, but he seems to have left after only a short while.

Whiteknights near Reading was held by Sir Henry Englefield, who inherited it in 1720 from his father, the Henry Englefield with whom Alexander Pope had fallen out. Sir Henry had inherited the Englefield baronetcy from his distant cousin, Sir Charles Englefield.

Sir Henry's Franciscan chaplain, Fr Clifton, died at Whiteknights in 1734. He left his 'bridle, saddle, whip, boots, spurs and spatterdashes' to his successor, 'if a brother of the Province'; in other words, provided that he was another Franciscan. Fr Clifton was probably succeeded by Sir Henry's Franciscan brother Charles, whose religious name was Fr Felix Englefield.

In 1736 Francis Perkins IV died, leaving £52 10s. 0d. (= £2,800 today) to support his wife Bell Perkins, the former Arabella Fermor. He left his landed property to his eldest son Francis. It was held in trust by Sir Henry Englefield of Whiteknights, William Wollascott V of Woolhampton, John Hyde of Hyde End, Brimpton and the Ufton estate's bailiff, John Berrington.

Francis Perkins left £100 each for his other sons (= £5,300 today) so that they could be placed as apprentices to some trade or profession. This bequest highlights the financial and social predicament of Catholic gentry in the eighteenth century. The sons of the star of 'The Rape of the Lock' were destined to go into trade.

The following year Bell Perkins herself died. Some of her books are preserved by the Benedictines of Douai Abbey, Woolhampton.

An indication of how anti-Catholicism was on the decline at this time can be seen in the response to the recusant returns for 1736. Less than a third of the Oxfordshire parishes bothered to submit returns, and those that did often failed to report Catholics. None was reported in Dorchester, Stonor, Haseley or Waterperry. Perhaps such glaring omissions caught the attention of the Anglican authorities. Two years later no less than twenty-five were reported by Pyrton, the parish that included Stonor.

Fr Peter Ingleby, a Jesuit priest, was living at Culham near Abingdon at that time. He probably lodged with Robert Gainsford, steward to Lady Elizabeth Bisshopp. She seems to have been responsible for a minor resurgence of Catholicism in the Culham district in the first half of the eighteenth century.

About 1740 the gardens at Mapledurham House were laid out in the style championed by Alexander Pope. The house had recently been inherited by Michael Blount II, nephew of Pope's friends Teresa and Martha. An uninterrupted view was created from the east-facing front of the house by constructing a ha-ha, a concealed ditch, to separate the parkland from the drive. An elegant low wall, surmounted by railings, separated the carriage turning circle from the court in front of the house.

The gardens to the north of the house, known as the Pleasure Ground, were intended to be as naturalistic as possible. A cedar of Lebanon was planted which still stands, now a great tree.

Despite these works of fashionable improvement, the Blounts were far from financially secure. They frequently let the house to tenants. About the time that the landscaping was carried out Michael Blount had to sell the family's fine collection of armour. His father, Michael Blount I, had overspent his income by £2,500 (= £133,000 today) during his twenty-nine year ownership of Mapledurham.

An account book for the various estates of Sir Henry Englefield during the early 1740s has survived and is kept at Reading University's site at Whiteknights. It shows that the Whiteknights estate had twenty-seven tenants, including six esquires, one of whom was William Wollascott V. The total annual income from Whiteknights was about £736 (= £39,000 today).

Sir Henry had four tenants at Kingston Winslow, only a mile from Compton Beauchamp where the wife of the exiled Sir Francis Englefield ended her days. These four tenants provided Sir Henry with about £239 a year (= £12,700 today).

At Englefield itself Sir Henry received nineteen free farm rents and had a tenant who provided him with £30 a year (= £1,600 today). One of the free farms was called Ilsleys; interesting because Ilsley is a version of the name Hildesley. Sir Henry rented the poor's land at Englefield for £6 a year (= £318 today).

There were differing opinions at this time as to whether Catholics could legally sell interests in their lands. This is shown by a surviving letter written in the summer of 1744 to Sir Henry Englefield about problems he was having 'taking up money' on the Englefield estate.

In 1741 John Moore died in the debtors' jail at Coventry. He was the brother of Sir Richard Moore of Fawley, Berkshire and had lived a most unusual life. Forty-three years earlier he had become a Benedictine monk at St Edmund's, Paris where his uncle was prior. As a monk John Moore had taken the name Francis. He lived a strange double life as a senior Benedictine and a financially independent Jacobite agent.

In 1701 ill health had forced him to return to England. He subsequently married and may well have been a factor adding to the friction between his brother and sister-in-law over the Benedictine chaplaincy at Fawley.

Richard Challoner was the Sussex-born son of a Nonconformist father who died while he was a boy. Richard's widowed mother went to work as a servant for the Catholic Sir John Gage of Firle in Sussex. About 1704 the thirteen year old Richard Challoner became a Catholic.

At about that time he and his mother moved to another Catholic house, at Warkworth near Banbury. There Richard Challoner was tutored by Fr John Gother, a former Presbyterian and a notable controversialist. Fr Gother arranged for the boy to be educated at Douai, commencing in the summer of 1705.

Thirty-six years later, in 1741, Richard Challoner was consecrated Bishop of Debra, at the headquarters of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District, a convent in Hammersmith. Bishop Challoner became auxiliary to the Vicar Apostolic, whose territory included Berkshire.

By this time Richard Challoner had written a number of books on religion, including his classic 'The Garden of the Soul'; a spiritual handbook, containing prayers, devotions and a summary of Catholic doctrine.

In the year of his consecration Bishop Challoner published 'The Memoirs of Missionary Priests', stories of the martyred and persecuted Catholic priests of post-Reformation England. He also made a visitation of Berkshire.

During this journey Bishop Challoner went to Whiteknights where the Franciscan chaplain at the time was Fr Jerome Beveridge. The Bishop noted a 'large congregation of 300 Catholics in the neighbourhood of Reading', although it is not clear how he defined that area. He then visited John Perkins of Ufton Court, his chaplain Fr Macarthy and William Wollascott V of Woolhampton. Bishop Challoner found a congregation of about eighty at Woolhampton. He administered Confirmation there and at George Brownlow Doughty's house at Beenham. (Doughty's wife was Frances Tichborne of the famous Hampshire recusant family, by whom he fathered 10 children.) The Bishop also visited East Hendred, where Charles Eyston was his host, and Fawley, where he found a congregation of sixty Catholics.

Christopher Stonor was ordained in 1743. He spent the next four years based at Stonor with his uncle, Bishop John Talbot Stonor. After that he was appointed English agent in Rome to the Vicars Apostolic. He held this post for nearly half a century until his death in 1795 at the age of eighty. He was also chaplain to Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart, Duke of York and his niece, the Countess of Albany.

At first Monsignor Stonor lived in the household of the Cardinal Duke of York. Later he had his own quarters in the Vatican and lodgings in the papal palace at Monte Cavallo. He is buried in his own chapel at the church of Santa Caterina di Rota, opposite the English College in Rome.

Alexander Pope died in 1744. He had continued to correspond with Martha Blount of Mapledurham and had dedicated his 'Epistle on Women' to her. In his will he left her about £3,000 (= £160,000 today), sixty books of her choice, his household goods and plate, the furniture of his grotto at Twickenham and the urns that stand by the garden door at Mapledurham. These were designed by William Kent, that most revered landscape architect. A few of Pope's books are still at Mapledurham.

Alexander Pope's poetry is still enjoyed today. A modern writer has said: 'If it's neat, it rhymes and you've heard it before, it's Pope!'

Thirty years after his father's unsuccessful attempt to seize the throne, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, made his own bid. He landed in Scotland in the summer of 1745 and by early autumn most of Scotland was in Jacobite hands. But, instead of consolidating his position, he moved south into England. By early December he had reached Derby, only 120 miles from London. The Young Pretender expected a spontaneous rising of English Jacobites to support him, but was sadly out of touch with reality. His Scottish supporters, discovering the lack of English or French support, retreated.

This was the turning point of his campaign. The following April the half-starved Jacobite Highlanders were defeated at Culloden. Five months later 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' escaped back to France. His was the last armed attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy.