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APPENDIX D.
THE CARMELITES IN ENGLAND.
The nuns of the Carmelite monastery of Antwerp, who had fled from Flanders on account of the French Revolution, arrived at Blackwall, in England, on Friday, July 12th, 1794, and remained in the ship until the next morning. Their confessor, Mr. Newsham, proceeded to London to find suitable lodgings for the sisters, and was much aided by Mr. Coghlan, a bookseller.
Mr. Newsham came the next morning with two boats to fetch them. They landed at St. Catherine's stairs, Wapping, where they found collected a crowd of sailors and other people, looking on with wonder at the strange spectacle. Some of the nuns wore secular clothes over their habits, and in general their appearance was ludicrous. A few of the bystanders began to swear at them, and call them “French devils;" but they were no sooner told that the nuns were English, and that they were running away from the French, than they exclaimed: "Ladies, you are welcome home” and showed them all manner of civility. One woman ran out of a shop and kissed some of the nuns.
The first dwelling of the community in England was at No. 3 Orchard street, Portman Square, London. This house had been procured for them by the kindness of Mr. Coghlan. They entered it on July 13th. They found here several friends, among whom Mrs. Tunstall, Mrs. Randall, Mrs. Cary, Mrs. Selby and Mrs. Murphy were very kind to them.
In August of the same year Lord and Lady Arundell offered the nuns a house, which they accepted with gratitude. This house was situated at a distance of 257 miles from London, at Lanherne, in the Deanery of Tydre, Cornwall. Here had been the seat of the Arundells, from the time of Henry III, and the manor was held of the See of Exeter by military service. Bishop Brantyngham in 1376 granted to Lady Jane de Arundell the licenses of having service performed in the chapel or oratory there.1
Amidst the changes of religion and governments, the Arundells stood forward as the unflinching adherents of the ancient faith; and even amidst all the dangers and terrors of persecution, a priest was to be found at Lanherne. But the house had only occasionally been inhabited by the family
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1Oliver's Collections, p. 129.
383
384 Appendixes.
for nearly a century before the French Revolution. Finally in 1794, Henry, the eighth Lord Arundell, offered it to the Carmelites.1
It was found in a very dilapidated condition with only about three rooms inhabitable. Moreover, certain smugglers had secured, for the carrying on of their unlawful traffic, free ingress and egress. Lord Arundell sent one of his stewards and two master workmen to assist in repairing the house.
Lanherne house was, according to the intention of the donor, to belong to the Carmelite community as long as it would exist.
Sir H. Trelawney, at that time a minister of the Church of England, paid the Sisters a visit, and became their great friend. He was afterwards converted to the true faith, and before his death, he was ordained priest, and died in 1834, at the advanced age of seventy-eight.
In 1795 the community received two English nuns who had belonged to suppressed communities in France. One was Sister Angela Stewart, of the convent of Rue Grenelle, Paris, and the second was Sister Mary Magdalen, Dow, of the convent of Rue Chapeau, Paris. They had been more than fifteen months in prison, expecting every day to be called out and executed. By the death of the tyrant Robespierre they obtained their freedom.
The Carmelite Sisters have remained at Lanherne until the present. The community of Hoogstraeten left their home in Belgium on July 7th, 1794, reached England on the 13th of the same month, and took up their abode in a little house called Friar's Place, near Acton, three miles from Brook Green. For this house they were to pay £30 a year. There were nine rooms in it. Here they suffered great poverty in the beginning, and remained until December when Sir John Webb, and his only daughter and heiress, Lady Barbara, fifth countess of Shaftesbury, afforded them a much better asylum at Canford House, near Poole, in Dorsetshire.2
The emigration of the nuns from Hoogstraeten to England took place during the administration of Ann Hill, the cousin of Archbishop Carroll, with whom we have been made acquainted in the early part of our history of the Carmelites of Maryland. She had been elected on April 24th, 1790, and died at Canford House on October 29th, 1813.
A few years later the nuns were obliged to leave Canford. Lady Barbara, the only child of Anthony Ashley, fifth earl of Shaftesbury, by his wife Barbara, née Webb, had on August 5th, 1814, married the Hon. William Francis Spenser Ponsonby, who was created Lord de Manley, and they, requiring ten years to take possession of Canford house, the nuns had to provide for themselves another residence.
Under the direction of their excellent friend and chaplain, l'Abbe Marest, they quitted Canford in September, 1825, and, sailing on the 14th, arrived on the 24th at Torigni, situated in Normandy between Cherbourg and Constance. Here they remained five years, and in September, 1830, moved to a more convenient seat at Valogne,3 in Normandy. Before leaving England
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1Oliver, pp. 29, 30 2Oliver, p. 140. 3Oliver, p. 142.
Appendixes. 385
they had promised their Bishop that if ever their means allowed they would return. In 1870 they were enabled to keep this promise.
In that year they returned to England and built their present convent, about a mile and a half from Chichester, Sussex. The monastery lies in a solitary spot, very far from any habitation, in the centre of the land owned by the religious, at a distance from the road, and surrounded by poplar and fir trees—a lovely spot for prayer and contemplation.
There died in this monastery, on the 4th of March, 1886, a venerable nun whose early history is linked with that of the communities of Carmelite nuns in the United States. The deceased was once Miss Pendrell, but for sixty-one years wearing the coarse and blessed habit, and for sixty years a professed of the Discaled Carmelites of St. Teresa's Reform.
It was at Canford house, in 1825, just before the departure of the community to France that the young Miss Pendrell, Sister Mary Baptist of St. Joseph, nineteen years old, was admitted to the Carmelite novitiate. Early in her religious life, as comes not rarely with those our Lord calls to the “Order of His Mother,” she suffered a severe illness, the pains of which followed her for the three-score years of her joyful pilgrimage. But of great virtue and heroic courage, her pains did not hinder her from the discharge, through most of her life, of all the most important offices of the fully occupied life of a true Carmelite, for which duties her unusual gifts of nature and of grace had fitted her.
In her first years of religious life, Mother Mary Baptist of St. Joseph had as nuns with her two of an English family (Jessop), in religion, Mother Mary Joseph and Sister Mary Nicholas. They were sisters in their family home, and had the grace to be Sisters in religion. The one and the other made the vows of fidelity to the rule and the constitutions of their great foundress, St. Teresa, "without mitigation till death," at the Hoogstraeten Carmel, in the hands of Mother Bernardina, then prioress in the Hoogstraeten Carmel, and afterwards first prioress, in 1790, of the Maryland Carmel. These two Sisters (of the Jessop family in the world) having lived for years with the three American Carmelites that had been (in the world) the Misses Matthews, were full of interesting reminiscences of their holy lives in the Hoogstraeten Carmel, and from them the Rev. Mother Mary Baptist of St. Joseph, who died piously the 4th of March, 1886, had learned to have the liveliest interest in the dear Carmel of Maryland.
Of the Jessop sisters, the one, Mother Mary Joseph, died in 1846, in the 81st year of her age, the 61st of her religious profession. The other, Sister Mary of St. Nicholas, died in 1857, ninety years old, and seventy-one years in religion. And finally Mother Mary Baptist of St. Joseph, who had learned from her early companions to have a deep spiritual affection for the Carmelites in Maryland, died, eighty years old and sixty-one years in religion.1
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1This account of the death of Mother Baptist is taken from the New York Freeman's Journal of April 10th, 1886, the editor of which, the late James A. McMaster, was a great friend of the Carmelite order, to which he had himself sacrificed two of his own daughters.
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