Father William Houghton, O.P.: 1736–1823

Extract

All but five of Father Houghton’s sixty-three years of priesthood were spent in the care of a small and scattered missionary centre in the unobtrusive way of life forced on priests by the still-active penal code; a seclusion however that undoubtedly made possible the literary activity which was a marked characteristic of the Catholic clergy in the half-century preceding the Act of Emancipation. On literary grounds more than a score of Father Houghton’s clerical contemporaries have been included with him in the Dictionary of National Biography, whilst at least an equal number appear in Gillow’s extensive Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics. When we reflect that the total number of priests in England during Houghton’s life never exceeded four hundred, it can be seen that the percentage of those who wrote was very high. Moreover, there must have been many studious priests who from an excusable diffidence never published what they wrote. One remembers that even so industrious a scholar as the eminent historian Père Mandonnet admitted his dislike of putting pen to paper, leaving on his desk when he died a note with these words: ‘Lire, joie; penser, délices; écrire, supplice’.

Father Houghton was born in 1736 in the hundred of West Derby, Lancashire, where his family, a branch of the Catholic family of Hoghton Tower, near Preston, had lived for some generations. In baptism he received the names of William and Narcissus, the second one for its classical flavour being much to his taste in later life and he kept it in constant use.