John Patrick, Third Marquess of Bute, K.T. (1847-1900) Part 11

But some of our "advanced" Anglican friends would stare if they saw the good old-fas.h.i.+oned practices which prevail in old Catholic circles. I only wish they could.

[Sidenote: 1873, Old English Catholic homes]

A visit to Arundel Castle in the year following his marriage gave him evident pleasure; and a letter thence gives a pleasant glimpse of the home circle in that historic Catholic home:

The party here is an entirely family one;[8] and Whitsuntide and the Month of Mary [May] add by a shade to the amount of church-going, which is considerable here always: for, as you know, they are a very devout as well as a very merry and very nice family. I am rather looking forward to the procession of the Blessed Sacrament on Sunday week for Corpus Christi. The "Fete-Dieu" in the streets of an English country town will be rather an experience.

We have been down at the sea for the last month. We have no London address, neither of us caring for the place, where no one left me an house and where I have not the least intention of buying one.

Having at this time, as mentioned above, no London residence, Lord and Lady Bute spent their year chiefly between Cardiff and Mountstuart, with occasional visits to Dumfries House, for which Bute had always a particular affection. The stay at {110} Cardiff after their marriage was unexpectedly prolonged owing to Lady Bute being laid up there with scarlet fever, while he had the misfortune to break his arm. As soon as they could travel they went to Mountstuart for the autumn and winter, and Bute dictated thence the following letter, the last sentence of which ill.u.s.trates the curious displeasure with which, notwithstanding his theoretical and archaeological admiration of monastic inst.i.tutions, he always received the news of any friends of his own entering a religious order:[9]

Mountstuart, _September_ 23, 1872.

You will perceive by the handwriting that I am still incapable of using my right hand, which is, indeed, tied up with a piece of wood. I am glad to say that my Lady is now very nearly well; and I trust that her escape from the climate of Cardiff will soon complete her recovery.

The quiet routine of my life here is the same as formerly. My Lady plays the harmonium in our little chapel: we venture on nothing more than hymns, and get along pretty well.

The histories one hears from Rome seem all to be so "cooked" to suit the varying views of people who retail them, that one really feels quite uncertain as to how things are going on. I am told that there is an Italianising party among the Cardinals, from which much trouble may be expected in the event--may it be very far distant!--of the election of a successor to Pius IX.

{111}

I greatly regret to report that H---- G----[10] in a convent as a Redemptorist novice. I can only say that I most sincerely trust, as far as I lawfully may, that he may soon find that he has made a mistake.

[Sidenote: 1873, Oxford revisited]

The reference to the learned Jesuit Father MacSweeney in the following letter, written to his old Oxford friend in the spring of 1873, shows that Bute was now entering on what was to be the most considerable literary work of his life, namely, the translation into English of the entire Roman Breviary.

Mountstuart, _April_ 27, 1873.

We are really coming south for a little, after a peaceful sojourn here of many months; and I hope for an opportunity of seeing you. I am not forgetful, and it will be a great pleasure. There is not much to bring me to Oxford now, as except yourself and very few others I have no friends there now, and I have not the footing I should have had if I had taken my degree. One day, however, I am to come, and my wife is to be "lionised" by old Mr. Parker, between whom and me archaeology has formed ties. I have also business with the erudite Jesuit Fr.

MacSweeney,[11] who has just been sent there. Most of my Oxford friends are married and changed and away--and I suppose I am very much changed myself. I fear I am not less indolent than I was, and my life is devoid of stirring incidents. My luxury is art, and perhaps the favourite pursuit Antiquarianism, as {112} History is the favourite reading. I study, too, a little science. I wish I were better as regards devotion--I want stirring up in that; but my a.s.sociations of that kind are so much with the South, and so difficult to adapt (though I know I ought to try to adapt them) to the environment in which one has to live. We are both, however, looking forward to a Mediterranean trip next winter.

The projected visit to Oxford--Bute's first since his change of religion five years previously--duly came off, and he thus refers to it:

To "do" Oxford in a day is suggestive of the American tourists who "do"

Rome in three; but my wife saw the most noteworthy things under the skilled guidance of old Parker, whom I fear we unduly fatigued. You may imagine the feelings and memories that came over me as I led my young wife through Christ Church. It is difficult to estimate exactly what I owe to Oxford, but the debt is a heavy one.... Materially the place seemed to me very little changed. The newest thing I noticed was St. Barnabas's, which impressed me. Only I wish they'd had the courage to Romanise it enough to put the Altar so--

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch of altar arrangements]

Apropos of Americans "doing" Italy, Story told me that Gibson, the American sculptor, once met and talked with a countryman of his, who was "doing" Italy in some incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time. "Yes, I guess I have been nearly everywhere," he said (the conversation took place in a North Italian {113} railway-carriage), "and one place that struck me very much was--I can't remember the name, but it begins with R." Gibson suggested Ravenna, Reggio, Recanati, and other names. "No, no, it was a shorter name than any of those: there was a big church with a dome, and a colonnade and fountains in front." "Good heavens!

you surely don't mean _Rome_?" said Gibson, aghast. "Yes, that was it--Rome. I knew it was a short name, but I couldn't recall it for the moment." This is a fact, as newspapers sometimes say after telling a more than usually unbelievable story.

[Sidenote: 1873, A winter in Majorca]

The second winter after his marriage Bute had the pleasure of spending in the south which he loved so well, and in more congenial and sympathetic company than he had always secured for his bachelor journeyings, even those which in some degree partook of the nature of a pilgrimage. "Our plan," he wrote on November 6, 1873, "is to dawdle through France and winter by the Mediterranean--we have been thinking of the Island of Majorca." The project was successfully carried out, and we see, from a letter written early in the following spring to the same friend, how much quiet enjoyment he was deriving from the rest and suns.h.i.+ne which he found in the Balearic Isles. The latter part of the letter refers to the recent death of his first cousin Edith Countess of Loudoun, who, it will be remembered, had been one of the party that accompanied him to the Holy Land a few weeks after his reception into the Roman Church.

Bendinat, Palma, Mallorca, _February_ 24, 1874.

This is a very fair place indeed, the best of it being the climate.

I'm nearly always happy when {114} I'm abroad, particularly in the Mediterranean. I suppose there's something in fogs and perpetual rain and cold and darkness which is especially uncongenial to me. Also there are no business and bothers here to speak of, which is certainly a great change from home. We have the quiet and peace which we both enjoy and value, and I am glad to say that I have been getting on very well with the Breviary; for whereas I had hoped before returning to have reached Ascension Day, I now venture to think of the third Sunday after Pentecost.

A drawback (my Lady reminds me) to our residence here is its distance from any church, our only accessible service being one Low Ma.s.s each Sunday. There's an impressive, and very Spanish, Cathedral at Palma, with functions well and carefully done; but it is remote from us here.

The death of Edith[12] was a great shock to me, as well as a source of sincere sorrow. _Requiescat in pace_. We shall all go the same way in the long run, 100 years {115} hence it'll be all the same; but it does seem rather hard that the axe should fall on the neck of all of us (however much it may grieve or inconvenience the survivors), and cut us off from the only world we have any experience of. Not, for the matter of that, that it's much worth stopping in--still, it's all we've got.

However, crying over this spilt milk--and I confess to having shed some tears since I heard the news--will never put it back into the pitcher, so perhaps there is not much use in crying. But I am sincerely grateful for your kind sympathy.

[Sidenote: 1874, Domestic happiness]

Later in the same year, after his return to England, Bute took occasion, in a letter to his ever-faithful friend at Oxford, to repel with indignation some malevolent rumours which had reached him to the effect that he had not found in his home life the happiness which he had antic.i.p.ated.

Not one jot of truth is there, or has there ever been, in these iniquitous calumnies. Our happiness indeed is complete, and the terms on which we live completely affectionate and intimate. I find myself more attached to G. the longer I have the privilege and honour of living with her, and of seeing, as St. Augustine says of St. Monica, "her walk with G.o.d, how G.o.dly and holy it is, and to us-ward so sweet and gentle."

This letter was written from Heath House, Weybridge--"a little house,"

writes Bute, "which we have hired for a month or two. I go hence to London nearly every day to read Hebrew with a Rabbi [this was in view of the new version of the Psalms for his projected translation of the Breviary], and all sorts of things with a Jesuit. Besides the sacred language 'in which the Eternal spoke,' and certain branches {116} of Liturgiology, I continue, as formerly, to read history and science--very humbly.

"We go to Scotland this month, but perhaps shall be at Cardiff for Christmastide, though Mountstuart, as you know, is the home of our predilection."

Before Christmas of this year, which Bute spent not at Cardiff but at Mountstuart, he published (anonymously) a little book containing a translation of the Christmas Offices from the Roman Breviary. "I hope and believe," he wrote, "that it may be of some service to those (there must be many) who desire to follow with intelligence the Liturgy of that holy season, but are prevented from doing so by their partial or total ignorance of the language of the Church. For this reason I should wish the booklet made known through the ordinary channels--a matter in which I confess to thinking our Catholic publishers very much less enterprising and business-like than those who cater for devout Anglicans. But for this state of things, I fear, _non c'e remedio_."

In Bute's own chapel he was accustomed to have the church offices (with the exception, of course, of the Ma.s.s) recited in the vernacular.

"Christmas went well here," he wrote to a friend in January, 1875. "We had the Monsignor [Capel] down. Mattins and Lauds were said in English, the altar being incensed at the _Benedictus_; and Mgr. C.

treated us to a short and rather eloquent _fervorino_ after the gospel at Ma.s.s. By the way, the progress of my Breviary is most discouragingly slow: _eppur si muove_."

[1] "Lapsed" livings are those in the gift of Catholics, who are legally incapable of presenting to them. By statutes pa.s.sed in 1603 and 1715, the patronage of such livings is vested, according to their situation, in the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. All such benefices in Glamorgan were a.s.signed to Cambridge.

[2] The Rev. F. W. Puller, the well-known Anglican divine and controversialist, resigned the vicarage of Roath in 1880 to join the Society of St. John the Evangelist at Cowley.

[3] The Welsh Disestablishment Act of 1920 has, of course, abolished private patronage in Wales.

[4] Canon Jenkins had held one of the "missionary fellows.h.i.+ps" founded at Jesus by his namesake Sir Leoline Jenkins in the seventeenth century, and had accordingly gone out to Natal in 1853, and become a canon of Maritzburg. He had returned to Oxford when Bute came into residence at Christ Church, and was successively dean and bursar of Jesus between 1864 and 1870. A fine portrait of him by Holman Hunt hangs in the common-room of his college.

[5] Pius IXth's wedding gifts were beautiful cameos set in gold.

[6] The (probably mythical) "king of Britain" whom Bede reports to have written to Pope Eleutherius asking for instruction in Christianity.