(1790 - 1808)

The French Revolution broke out in 1789. In England it caused 'a wave of vague sentiment towards every form of Christianity'. This undoubtedly helped the progress towards Catholic emancipation. But even more beneficial was an influx of French Catholic priests.

In the summer of 1790 the French revolutionary government introduced its Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Papal influence was to be minimised and clergy were to become salaried civil servants, bound to the state by an oath of loyalty. Most French bishops and many priests rejected the new legislation. In the following spring so did the Pope.

By the time of the 1791 Catholic Relief Act a few French priests had already sought refuge in England. These were mainly clergy from aristocratic backgrounds and therefore most at risk.

Meanwhile the French revolutionary government retaliated to the Church's rejection of the Civil Constitution; after August 1792 a priest not taking the oath faced deportation. A mass exodus of clergy followed. They went to the Low Countries, Germany, Russia, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Protestant Britain.

By September 1792 there were 1,500 French priests in England and in little more than a year the number rose to about 5,000.

Initially the British Government used the King's House at Winchester as a hostel for some of these priests. It could house more than 600 at a time, although conditions were fairly poor. When in 1796 the government feared a French invasion, it converted the King's House into a barracks, dispersing many of the priests to two locations in the Thames Valley. Norman clergy were sent to Reading, Bretons to Thame.

Anna Maria Smart's Reading Mercury put the case for the exiles in its edition of 15 October 1792 under the heading 'Distressed French Clergy':

'They have been driven from a country where no one is safe ... to seek shelter among Englishmen and Christians. The glory of our national character is generous compassion and they surely have the strongest claims on us who suffer persecution for conscience sake.'

Many Protestant clergy contributed to funds for the French exiles. But Fr Charles Leslie, struggling to pay for the new chapel of St Ignatius at St Clement's, Oxford, found the appeals for the French clergy detrimental to his own fundraising.

The good treatment given to the exiles resulted in greatly improved relations between the Vatican and the British government. Furthermore, the government could not long maintain the curious anomaly whereby French Catholics enjoyed greater freedom in England than their English co-religionists.

Early in 1794 double land tax was abolished. Perhaps this was the spur to Thomas Stonor who, that same year and with parliamentary sanction, negotiated the return of the beech and yew woods surrounding Stonor House. These had been given to the Canons of Windsor 280 years earlier by the Protector Somerset as a result of the Chantries Act. Regaining the woods necessitated an exchange involving loss of other Stonor woodland.

The yew trees around Stonor House are said to have made it a very damp residence. Thomas Stonor therefore had many of them felled. He also completed the Gothicisation of the chapel of the Holy Trinity, which his father had begun in the 1750s.

Thomas Stonor employed one of the French exiles, Fr Jean-Baptiste Mortuaire of Rouen, as his chaplain. One of Fr Mortuaire's duties was the spiritual care of the exiled Marshal of France Dumouriez, who lived at Turville Park on the eastern edge of the Stonor estate. Fr Mortuaire celebrated Dumouriez's Requiem Mass and officiated at his funeral. The Marshal was buried in Henley-on-Thames parish church.

Fr Mortuaire served Stonor until his death in 1830. He was interred at nearby Pishill and his gravestone was incorporated into the paving ofthe Stonor aisle of the Anglican church.

By the time the French exiled clergy started arriving in England, the room Mrs Smart had rented in Reading's Minster Street could no longer be used as a Catholic chapel. Soon after the French Revolution broke out the landlord had asked her to stop using it, claiming that it would bring bad luck to his pregnant wife. Mrs Smart ignored his request and Mass was subsequently interrupted by 'vessels being emptied with accompaniment of offensive smells'. Never again was the room used for Mass.

Mrs Smart's younger daughter Elizabeth had been educated at a convent in Boulogne. In 1792, through friends in France, she learned of four priests waiting at Dover for the government to find them a refuge. She decided to invite them to Reading.

Using funds from a legacy Elizabeth Smart bought a tenement in Finch's Buildings. This had been built as a dower house for Lady Vachell, whose husband's uncle was the Elizabethan recusant, Thomas Vachell of Ipsden. The tenement stood on the south side of Hosier Lane (now Hosier Street) which runs westwards from St Mary's Butts and which was then on the quiet western outskirts of Reading.

On a winter's evening late in 1792 the four priests, all from the Rouen diocese, arrived at the Reading Mercury office, 'looking like a party of smugglers'. Under cover of darkness they were taken to Finch's Buildings. Elizabeth Smart put her knowledge of French to good use, as none of the priests spoke English.

Soon another Rouen priest joined them. In an airy room on the second floor a chapel was established, which seems to have been open to the public. Vestments and church fittings were obtained from the Englefield's recently vacated Whiteknights chapel.

With the closure of the King's House at Winchester in 1796, the government requisitioned the King's Arms in Castle Street, Reading, as a hostel for French clergy. The King's Arms, now four houses numbering 154 to 160 Castle Hill, was a large coaching hotel serving the Bath road. It was transformed into a hostel for more than 340 Norman priests.

The former King's Arms, Reading
Requisitioned by the government to house exiled French clergy

On Sundays and Holydays there were Masses from five in the morning until noon. Benediction was celebrated every evening. The hotel's assembly room was used as the chapel and is said to have been capable of accommodating up to 400 worshippers.

The priests' superior was Abbé Noël Martin, formerly head of the seminary at Liseux, who had been their superior at Winchester. They lived to an almost monastic regime and had little contact with the townspeople. However, in the front garden the priests created floral tributes for all to see in gratitude to George III. These incorporated slogans used such as 'God Save the King' and 'You Could Not Have Guided Us Better'.

The former King's Arms, Reading
Another view

At Thame the government requisitioned the Mansion House in the High Street. This became home to a hundred Breton priests under Abbé Louis Despons, former principal at the college of Saint-Brieuc. There too, a near monastic regime applied. The Mansion House is believed to have become the Thame Girls' Grammar School, subsequently demolished.

The Thame hostel received additional support from local well-wishers, including the Marquis of Buckingham and the vicar's father-in-law. The latter gave them £250 a year for four years (= £5,000 a year today).

Two priests died at Thame and were buried in the parish churchyard. The rest returned to France in 1802, after a public service of thanksgiving at which the vicar preached the sermon.

As has been mentioned, not all refugee clergy lived in the large government-sponsored hostels. Monsignor Michel Thoumin des Valpons, an archdeacon and the Vicar-General of Dol in Normandy, stayed with William Davey at Overy, near Dorchester. This saved the Daveys the inconvenience of having to travel to Mass: the Dorchester congregation having been absorbed into Britwell, which had been absorbed into Waterperry, which had been relocated to St Clement's, Oxford!

Archdeacon Thoumin des Valpons died in the spring of 1798 at Overy Manor. He was buried with honour in Dorchester Abbey, at the expense of the Warden of New College, Oxford. There is a memorial slab to him in front of the altar of Dorchester parish church (the south-west aisle of Dorchester Abbey). By 1801 his place at Overy Manor had been taken by Fr Julien Triquet of the diocese of Le Mans.

While the French clergy settled into their new homes, Michael Blount III of Mapledurham took advantage of the second Catholic Relief Act to build a chapel onto the back of Mapledurham House. It was one of the first legal Catholic chapels to be purpose-built in England since the Reformation. It faces the parish church but is separated from it by a courtyard and a high wall. As at Milton Manor and Stonor House, the Mapledurham chapel was built in Gothick style. It was dedicated in 1797 and designed to seat about fifty people. It soon had to cope with almost twice that number.

During the French Revolution twenty-one of the twenty-three English convents in France found it preferable to risk returning home. The Poor Clares of Aire in Picardy had been established in 1629 as an offshoot of the convent at Gravelines. Mary, the sister of Thomas Simeon Weld II, was a nun at Aire, where she was known as Sister Euphrasia.

For some years the revolutionaries imprisoned the nuns in the convent, but in 1799 the sisters obtained passports and were allowed to travel to England. Thomas Simeon Weld gave them the use of Britwell House as a temporary convent;they stayed there for fifteen years. During that time four new sisters were received into the order, and one nun died.

The nuns' cells are said to have been in the servants' wing, and to have consisted of small interconnected bedrooms with peep-holes in the doors. Apartments were kept aside for Thomas Simeon Weld to stay when he visited with John Palmer, his valet (who later became first abbot of St Bernard's Abbey, Leicestershire). The nuns were also visited by Thomas's relative Cardinal Weld, who gave them an organ.

Unlike the French exiled clergy, the English religious communities received no help from the British government. Indeed, there was something of a backlash against them. Catholics still had no representation in Parliament and the House of Commons gave a large majority to a bill reinstituting restraints on Catholic education and monasticism. Fortunately the House of Lords rejected the bill and communities such as the Poor Clares of Britwell wisely adopted a low public profile.

The year 1800 saw further reconciliation between the English Catholic community and the Crown. In January George III requested that Cardinal Henry Stuart, impoverished by the Napoleonic regime, be granted a pension of £4,000 a year for life (= £80,000 today). The Cardinal, known to Jacobites as Henry IX, was the last Stuart claimant to the English throne. However, the claim did not have the support of the Catholic Church and Henry Stuart did not press for its recognition.

In 1800 Fr Thomas Webster took charge of the Woolhampton mission. In little more than two years he baptised eighty children. He was based at Woolhampton for twenty-eight years and travelled widely, substituting for clergy up to fifteen miles away.

Henry Addington, later Viscount Sidmouth, was invited to form a government in 1801. He was a firm opponent of Catholic emancipation but that year sold his estate at Woodley to James Wheble, a prosperous Catholic businessman. Wheble made Woodley Lodge, later known as Bulmershe Court, a Catholic mission.

Woodley Lodge (2 miles E. of Reading) had been built by the Whebles in 1777. After James Wheble repurchased the house, the family stayed there for more than a hundred years. The estate was former Reading Abbey land. James Wheble was fascinated by the abbey's history and largely financed the excavation of its ruins.

The parish boundary between Earley and Woodley ran through Woodley Lodge, the main rooms being in Earley. The house was demolished in 1963 to make way for a teacher training college now affiliated to Reading University.

Fr Pierre Miard de la Blardière of Liseux became James Wheble's chaplain at Woodley Lodge. He was the fifth Norman priest housed by Miss Smart at Finch's Buildings, Reading. Hitherto he had supported himself, like many other French exiled clergy, by giving French lessons.

Fr Miard de la Blardière ministered from Woodley Lodge for thirty-one years before retiring to France in 1833. He celebrated Mass daily and his congregation consisted of nearly two dozen Catholics, most of whom were members of the Wheble household. He lived in a small cottage on the west side of Church Road, Earley. Known as Maisonette, French for little house, it was later incorporated into a larger dwelling of the same name. Maisonette was demolished in the latter half of the 20th century and Oldfield Close now occupies its site.

In June 1802 Fr George Bruning died at Isleworth. In the Middle Ages the Eystons had moved from Isleworth to East Hendred. Now Fr Bruning's body made the same journey. As brother-in-law of Thomas Eyston (who died six years earlier) he was buried in the Eyston aisle of East Hendred parish church. Fr Bruning had been chaplain at Britwell House for nearly a quarter of a century from 1765, and had also been chaplain at Milton Manor and East Hendred.

Fr George Baynham, the old Franciscan chaplain, lived on alone at the deserted and crumbling Ufton Court until his death in the spring of 1803. The previous year John Jones of Llanarth, who had inherited the estate, sold it to Mr Congreve, the squire of Aldermaston.

Congreve stripped out much of Ufton Court's oak panelling. Some was reused in Aldermaston parish church. However, there is still original panelling at Ufton Court, including fascinating painted panels in the priest's oratory (place of prayer). There are also painted panels in a bedroom, which bear the monogram MR for Maria Regina, Latin for Queen Mary. These are said by some to refer to Mary Tudor but are more likely to show devotion to the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven.

Ufton Court was sold again in 1837, at which time it was considered unfit to be a gentleman's residence. The new purchaser was Richard Benyon de Beauvoir of Englefield, who refurbished it as estate workers' tenements. His successor, William Benyon of Englefield, leases the property to Berkshire County Council which uses it as a residential centre for schoolchildren. The property has been greatly restored and is open to the public one day a year.

In the summer of 1805 twenty-one people were confirmed at Mapledurham. One of these was Mary Ilsley whose younger brother Joseph was born five days before Christmas that year. It seems that their father was a servant at Mapledurham House.

Ilsley is one of the commonest variants of the name Hildesley. It is possible that downwardly mobile branches of the Catholic main line of the Hildesleys may have become known as Ilsleys or Illsleys. A will was written in 1633 by a ploughmaker called Griffin Illsley of South Stoke. This is only a mile south of Littlestoke Manor, a principal residence of the Hildesleys, whose heraldic badge incorporated a griffin.

Although most downwardly mobile branches of recusant families tended to conform to Anglicanism, it is an intriguing possibility that perhaps one or two branches of the Ilsleys had maintained Catholic continuity with the recusant Hildesleys. This would not have been too difficult if they had entered the service of Catholic gentry. And after all, the Blounts of Mapledurham were only ten miles downstream from Littlestoke.

Michael Blount was Joseph Ilsley's godfather. Up to the age of thirteen Joseph was taught by Fr Antoine Le Febvre of Rouen. This French priest became chaplain at Mapledurham in 1798, shortly after dedication of the new chapel, and stayed with the Blounts for twenty-four years.

At the age of thirteen Joseph Ilsley went to the English College at Lisbon, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Fr Le Febvre's former pupil achieved great distinction, becoming a priest, professor and eventually president of the college. He was even dubbed a knight of the Order of the Immaculate Conception by the King of Portugal.

In his late fifties Dr Ilsley returned to England because of ill health. He spent his last five years as a parish priest near Garstang in Lancashire and was buried under the porch of his church in 1868.