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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2015
At first glance, the actions of Fr. Charles Bowden, a member of the Brompton Oratory in London, toward a troubled, adolescent, Roman Catholic girl, Eliza (in some reports referred to as Ellen) McDermot, would appear as a praiseworthy and unselfish example of Christian charity. Fr. Bowden, a young cleric, acted on information he allegedly learned from Miss McDermot in the confessional and worked to save her from a possible life of ruin on the London streets. Fr. Bowden eventually urged the young sixteen year old pregnant girl to seek refuge at a local convent where she would have the opportunity to repent and reform her life. McDermot followed his advice, but this seemingly innocent plan to save her soul fanned the flames of hatred against Catholicism and sisterhoods. Without informing her family, Miss McDermot secretly took up residence in a convent, and she did not reveal the location to her mother. When her family complained about this so-called ‘abduction’, critics of Roman Catholicism, and sisterhoods in particular, took their campaign to the public and attacked the actions of Fr. Bowden in letters to the press, graphic pamphlets, and speeches in Parliament. The case of Eliza McDermot quickly emerged as another example which illustrated the evils of Catholic convents, but it failed to capture public attention. Several reasons help to explain the short-lived notoriety of this story, especially the failure to prove that Bowden had broken any English laws.
1 The Appalling Records of Popish Convents, And the Awful Disclosures of Tortured Nuns (London: F. Farrah, 1865), p. 1.
2 Left Home or Convent-Life (London: F. Farrah, 1865), p. 43.
3 Ibidem.
4 Charles Newdigate Newdegate’s 1865 speech in the House of Commons in favour of government inspection of convents made specific reference to Mary Ryan and a Roman Catholic convent at Colwich. Ryan, an English nun, was transferred to an insane asylum in Belgium against her will, and some viewed this as a crime against the rights of English citizens. ‘More harrowing still was the… infamous Colwich Nunnery case’, which Newdegate ‘recounted to the House of Commons in detail: the underground cells, the desperate flight over the convent wall, the intervention of [Bishop] Ullathorne, and the investigation sponsored by Newdegate and the Protestant Alliance’, Arnstein, Walter L., Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England. Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), p. 67 Google Scholar. A contemporary anti-Catholic attack against convents, including the Ryan and Colwich cases, is Kensit, J., English Convents, What Are They? Or, Is There Any Necessity For Convent Inspection? (London: Macintosh, 1870)Google Scholar. In the 1890s, the Catholic Truth Society published a number of pamphlets to refute accusations of abuses in convents. See especially, Smith, Sydney F., Calumnies against Convents (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1894)Google Scholar.
5 For the growth of religious life for women in the nineteenth century, see Edward Cruise, ‘Development of the Religious Orders,’ in Beck, George A., ed., The English Catholics 1850–1950. Essays to Commemorate the Centenary of the Restoration of the Hierarchy of England and Wales (London: Burns Oates, 1950)Google Scholar.
6 Wheeler, Michael, The Old Enemies. Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 5.Google Scholar
7 The London Oratory 1849–1949 (London: The Oratory of St. Philip Neri, 1949), p. 6. See also Napier, Michael and Laing, Alistair, eds., The London Oratory Centenary 1884–1984 (London: Trefoil Books, 1984)Google Scholar.
8 Ibidem, p. 14.
9 The West-End News, 14 January 1865, printed in Brompton Revelations. An Exposure Of The Iniquities As Practised In Foreign And English Convent Prisons (London: The West-End News Office, 1865).
10 Brompton Revelations, p. 4.
11 Daily Telegraph, January 1865, printed in Bompton Oratory.
12 Daily Telegraph, 26 January 1865, printed in The Appalling Records of Popish Convents, And the Awful Disclosures of Tortured Nuns.
13 Left Home or Convent-Life, p. 50.
14 Daily Telegraph, 25 January 1865, printed in The Appalling Records of Popish Convents, And the Awful Disclosures of Tortured Nuns.
15 Daily Telegraph, 27 January 1865, printed in ibidem.
16 See Kollar, R., ‘Bishop William Ullathorne and His Defence of Convents: The 1851 Bill for Parliamentary Inspection of Convents’, Tjurunga. An Australasian Benedictine Review 55 (November 1998)Google Scholar.
17 Arnstein, Walter L., Catholic versus Protestant in Mid-Victorian England, p. 63.Google Scholar
18 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 177 (1865), cols. 1045–64. Newdegate’s speech was also printed in Monastic and Conventual Institutions. Speech Delivered in the House of Commons By C. N. Newdegate, ESQ., M.P., On The 3rd Of March, 1865 (London: Scottish Reformation Society, 1870). For an analysis of Newdegate’s campaign to legislate for parliamentary inspection of convents, see ibidem.
19 Ibidem, col. 1045.
20 Ibidem, col. 1051.
21 Ibidem, col. 1056.
22 Ibidem.
23 Ibidem, col. 1057.
24 Newdegate drew attention to the highly publicized cases of Miss Mary Ryan, an alleged imprisonment at a convent at Atherstone, unregistered burials at a convent in Derby, and the purported mistreatment of a nun at the Benedictine convent at Colwich.
25 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 177 (1865), col. 1064.
26 Ibidem, col. 1066.
27 Ibidem, col. 1072.
28 Ibidem, col. 1074.
29 Ibidem, cols. 1074–75.
30 Whalley claimed that since Mrs. McDermot, a woman of ‘unimpeachable character… had not continued to conform to the views of the Roman Catholic priests she had become an object of persecution’. In 1849, according to his account, a number of Catholic priests ‘carried away her three children, at four o’clock in the morning, to the workhouse, on the pretence that she had neglected them’. After hearing the testimony of a policeman, who said that ‘she was a drunken woman’, the magistrate sent her to prison for seven days. Whalley argued that she did not have a drinking problem and that the court never heard Mrs. McDermot’s testimony. He concluded with the following observation: ‘A mingled system of terror and force characterized the Brompton Oratory’. Ibidem.
31 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser. Vol. 177 (1865), col. 1077.
32 Ibidem, cols. 1077–78.
33 The Times, 4 March 1865.
34 Left Home or Convent-Life. The anonymous author of this pamphlet did not identify where the fictional story appeared, but only stated: ‘the foregoing tale of “Left Home; or, Convent Life”, was written for the pages of a highly popular magazine, the case of Eliza McDermot possessing nearly identical incidents, and claiming public indignation and attention, has induced the author to publish it in its present form’, p. 50.
35 Ibidem, p. 16.
36 Ibidem, p. 18.
37 Ibidem, p. 41.
38 Ibidem, p. 43.
39 Ibidem, p. 44.
40 Ibidem, p. 46.
41 Ibidem, p. 50.
42 Brompton Revelations.
43 Ought We To Allow Catholicism in Britain (London: Elliott, n.d.), quoted in Brompton Revelations, p. 16.
44 The Appalling Records of Popish Convents, And the Awful Disclosures of Tortured Nuns, p. 1.
45 Ibidem, p. 2.
46 Ibidem, p. 8.
47 Ibidem, p. 9.
48 Evening Standard, 25 January 1865, printed in ibidem.
49 The Appalling Records of Popish Convents, And the Awful Disclosures of Tortured Nuns, p. 12.
50 Ibidem, pp. 13–14.
51 Arnstein, Walter L., Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England, p. 149.Google Scholar
52 Abbott, S. J., Revelation of Modern Convents (London: R. Banks & Son, 1899)Google Scholar and Walsh, Walter, The Secret History of The Oxford Movement (London: Church Association, 1899)Google Scholar did not mention Eliza McDermot. Lancelot Holland, W., Walled Up Nuns And Nuns Walled In (London: J. Kensit, 1895)Google Scholar and J. Kensit, English Convents, What Are They? both made specific reference to Mary Ryan, and then quoted Newdegate’s 1865 speech in the House of Commons where Eliza McDermot’s name appeared in connection with Ryan’s. No explanation of the McDermot case was given.
53 Conventual Enquiry Society, Brief Abstract of Parliamentary Evidence on Monastic & Conventual Institutions. A Voice of Warning for 1889–90 (London: John Kensit, 1889).
54 Ibidem, p. 31.