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‘In the Sincerest Intentions of Studying’: The Educational Legacy of Thomas Weld (1750–1810), Founder of Stonyhurst College

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Maurice Whitehead
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Extract

Thomas Weld (1750–1810), of Lulworth in Dorset, is remembered today principally on three counts: his rôle as the founder of Stonyhurst College in 1794; his benefactions to religious orders at the height of the French revolution as they fled from political upheaval and danger in continental Europe; and his friendship with George III, including his hosting of several visits of the king to Lulworth Castle in the 1790s. Weld’s munificence in making available his Lancashire seat, Stonyhurst, to the English ex-Jesuit ‘Gentlemen of Liège’ has received attention from historians. In contrast, his own education as a young man, at the hands of the English and French Jesuits in continental Europe, has hitherto received little more than passing notice.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , May 2002 , pp. 169 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 2003

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References

Notes

1 Gerard, John, Stonyhurst College: Its Life Beyond the Seas, 1592–1794, and on English Soil, 1794–1894 (Belfast: Marcus Ward, 1894)Google Scholar; Chadwick, Hubert St. Omers to Stonyhurst: A History of Two Centuries (London: Burns & Oates, 1962)Google Scholar; Muir, T. E, Stonyhurst College 1593–1993 (London: James & James, 1992)Google Scholar.

2 Berkeley, Joan, Lulworth and the Welds (Gillingham: The Blackmore Press, 1971), pp. 143–148 Google Scholar; Holt, Geoffrey, The English Jesuits in the Age of Reason (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1993), p. 117 Google Scholar.

3 Foley, V, pp. 891–895.

4 DRO, D/WLC, C30.

5 John Weld’s illness and death at St. Omers are reported in two letters from Fr. John Darell, rector of St. Omer’s College, to Edward Weld, senior, of Lulworth, dated Bruges, 29 September and Bruges, 3 October 1759, DRO, D/WLC, C25.

6 After completing his studies at St. Omers in 1759, Edward Weld, junior, together with his Jesuit preceptor, the newly ordained Fr. Thomas Angier (1730–1788), had proceeded to the Jesuit college at Rheims, where he defended his thesis in Natural Philosophy in the summer of 1761 before embarking, with Fr. Angier, on the Grand Tour. A series of letters and accounts relating to Edward Weld’s education at St. Omers and Rheims, and his preparations for his Grand Tour in Italy, covering the period 1754–1761, can be found in DRO, D/WLC, C22, C25, C26, C38, C42 and C52. A rare and possibly unique printed copy of Edward Weld’s Conclusiones Phylosophicœ ex Physica, defended at the Jesuit college at Rheims, ‘in Aula minore ejusdem Collegii, die Mercurii 13a Maii, hora matutina sequioctavâ, & promeridianâ secunda, anno Domini 1761’, is preserved in DRO, D/WLC, C22. The surviving correspondence reveals that Edward Weld excelled as a scholar at Rheims and was elected as Prefect of the Sodality there: see Fr. Thomas Angier to Edward Weld, senior, 2 December 1760, DRO, D/WLC, C26; and footnote 41 below.

7 For a full account and analysis of the La Valette affair and its consequences, see Kley, Dale Van, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

8 Interestingly, no mention is made in the appeal to the possible sale of the English Jesuit house and preparatory school at Watten.

9 Hazard, Paul, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century from Montesquieu to Lessing, translated by May, J. Lewis (Cleveland and New York, 1963), p. 167 Google Scholar.

10 AMAE, Petit Fonds 1694: Correspondence de Choiseul, 1762–1766, Appeal of the English Jesuits of St. Omers to the Comte de Choiseul, August 1762, ff. 134r-136r, with appended letter of Fr. Thomas Lawson to the Comte de Choiseul, Paris, 10 August 1762, f. 137r. An undated letter of Fr. Thomas Lawson to Edward Weld, written probably towards the end of August 1762, is addressed to ‘Monsieur De Weld, Seigneur Anglois, chez Gallen Bagneur, rue Jacob, à Paris’, DRO, D/WLC, C61.

11 AMAE, Petit Fonds 1694: Correspondence de Choiseul, 1762–1766, Comte de Choiseul to Fr. Thomas Lawson, 28 August 1762, f. 138r.

12 For a detailed account of the flight from St. Omers to Bruges, see Chadwick, pp. 281–311.

13 Van Kley, op. cit., p. 199.

14 AGR, Archives du Conseil Privé, 838A, Jésuites Anglois de Bruges, 1762, Catalogus Officiorum Collegii Anglicani Audomarensis. This undated document of 1762, which lists the functions (but not the names) of the English Jesuits of St. Omers and Watten, reveals that, immediately before the flight of the St. Omers community to Bruges, there were eleven priests, ten brothers and six masters at St. Omers, and three priests and three brothers at Watten.

15 DRO, D/WLC, C61, Fr. Thomas Lawson (St. Omers) to Edward Weld (Paris), 16 August 1762. Among those accompanying the St. Omers boys on their long walk to Bruges were the Jesuits Joseph Reeve [alias Haskey] (1733–1820) and Thomas Aspinall [alias or vere Brent] (1719–1773), in the first group mentioned; and Thomas Meynell (1737–1804), James Jenison (1737–1799), James Adams [alias Hacon and Spencer] (1737–1802); and Robert Tucker (1710–1790), a laybrother: see Holt (1984). John Gastaldi was the son of a Mr. Gastaldi, sometimes referred to as Count Gastaldi, a former ambassador at the Court of St. James in London, then resident in Saint-Omers so as to be near his two sons, John and Charles, who were pupils both at St. Omers and at the English Jesuits’ new college at Bruges. See Chadwick, p. 289 and Holt (1979), p. 111. Joseph Reeve, leader of the first group to leave St. Omers, subsequently composed a manuscript account of the expulsion from St. Omers, entitled A Plain and Succinct Narrative, which is preserved in SA, A.III.19.

16 It was designated as the Great College, or Grand Collège to differentiate it from the Little College or Petit Collège, that is, the preparatory school at Watten, which eventually migrated to Bruges in 1765.

17 For some further details of the Simeon Weld family of Brussels, see the exhibition catalogue Charles-Alexandre de Lorraine, Gouverneur general des Pays-Bas autrichiens (Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale, 1987), p. 198 Google Scholar. A magnificent English porcelain china table centrepiece of 1755, by Eliza Godfrey of London, bearing the Weld coat of arms, was exhibited at the 1987 exhibition in Brussels. It was commissioned by Thomas Simeon Weld, was in use at his Brussels townhouse, and was sold by his widow in or about 1764, to Charles of Lorraine. It is now in Vienna (Bundesmobilienverwaltung, ehemalige Hoftafel und Silberkammer, inv. 180 112/040–049).

18 In December 1761, the young Marylander, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737–1832), a future signer of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, then based in London, in a letter to his father in Annapolis, Maryland, reflected on the narrowness of outlook of his former St. Omers school-fellow, John Ireland, who had left the college in 1760 after seven years’ education there. Carroll attributed the young man’s ignorance and inexperience to his being schooled too long at St. Omers, where he had studied Latin badly and where he had received an ‘education . . . only fit for Priests’: see Hoffman, Ronald, Mason, Sally D. and Darcy, Eleanor S. (eds.), Dear Papa, Dear Charley: The Peregrinations of a Revolutionary Aristocrat, as told by Charles Carroll of Carrollton and his Father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, with Sundry Observations on Bastardy, Child-rearing, Romance, Matrimony, Commerce, Tobacco, Slavery, and the Politics of Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 3 volumes, I, pp. 240–241 Google Scholar. In a later letter, of 1770, the Jesuit Fr. Charles Plowden attacked the quality of education being given by the English Jesuits at Bruges and declared that it would be a wonder if Thomas Weld would ever want to see the place again: see Berkeley, op. cit., p. 143.

19 ‘Compositions’ involved the translation of a passage from a classical author into the native tongue of the student, followed by its retranslation back into Latin, without the aid of the original. Students then had to compare their own Latin with the original and correct their texts as necessary: see Schwickerath, Robert, Jesuit Education: Its History and Principles Viewed in the Light of Modern Educational Problems (Herder: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1903), pp. 498–506 Google Scholar.

20 Berkeley, op. cit., p. 145, quoting letters of Thomas Weld to Edward Weld in DRO, D/WLC, C52.

21 Ibidem, p. 146.

22 Ibidem.

23 For an account of this school, see Holt, T. G., ‘A Jesuit School in the City in 1688’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 1981, Vol. 32, pp. 153–158 Google Scholar.

24 Butler, Rohan, Choiseul, Volume I, Father and Son 1719–1754 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 63 Google Scholar.

25 For a recent historical analysis of Jesuit educational organization, see Codina, Gabriel, ‘The “Modus Parisiensis”‘, in Duminuco, Vincent J. (ed.), The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400th Anniversary Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 28–49 Google Scholar; and Louis B. Pascoe, ‘Response to Gabriel Codina’, in Duminuco, op. cit., pp. 50–55.

26 Hay died in Rome in 1594 as Assistant for Germany and France to Claudio Aquaviva (1543–1615), fifth general of the Society of Jesus and creator of the Ratio Studiorum: see Foley, VII (Part I), p. 347. In 1581, Mary, Queen of Scots, established a seminary for Scottish students at Pont-à-Mousson, but this institution removed to Douai in 1593, and later to Louvain, before finally settling at Douai: see Delattre, IV, p. 89.

27 Delattre, IV, p. 122 and Foley, VII (Part I), pp. 193–194. Darbyshire was the nephew of Edmund Bonner (ca. 1500–1569), bishop of London from 1539 to 1559.

28 Delattre, IV, p. 134.

29 Ibidem, p. 149. Besides Molyneux, the other English Jesuits known to have studied at Pont-à-Mousson were Henry Cattaway (1675–1718), in 1699–1701; Francis More (1698–1727) and John Robinson alias or vere Gazain or Gazin (1699–1742), both in 1725–1726; William Gibson (ca. 1711–1742), in 1742, where he died; Ralph Booth alias Sims (1721–1780), in 1743–1744; Joseph Smith (1725–1768), in 1757; and Augustine Jenison alias Sandford (1735-ca.l794), in 1761: see Holt (1984).

30 Delattre, IV, pp. 138–139.

31 Ibidem, pp. 114–115.

32 Ibidem, pp. 162 and 167.

33 Ibidem, p. 109.

34 Ibidem, p. 151. The eighteenth century library furnishings of the former University and College of Pont-à-Mousson today adorn the Bibliothèque Municipale in Nancy.

35 Delattre, IV, p. 155.

36 Ibidem, p. 159.

37 DRO, D/WLC, C53, James Jenison to Edward Weld, 24 February 1766. In this letter, Fr. Jenison explained that though Stanislas had been treated promptly, gangrene quickly set in and hastened his death soon after the accident.

38 DRO, D/WLC, C53, James Jenison to Edward Weld, 24 February 1766.

39 DRO, D/WLC, C52, Thomas Weld to Edward Weld, 28 December 1766.

40 DRO, D/WLC, C52, James Jenison to Edward Weld, 3 January 1768.

41 Delattre, IV, pp. 123–124. Edward Weld has risen to become ‘Janitor et Secretarius’ of the Sodality at the Jesuit college in Rheims, circa 1760: see undated manuscript list of the officials of the Rheims sodality in DRO, D/WLC, F28. Sodalities existed in every Jesuit college to advance students in true and solid piety, as well as learning. They concentrated on an élite group of students, who were meant to be young men ‘of energy, common sense, fine character [and] good personalities who were aware of how to make themselves acceptable to their fellow pupils, students who were successful in their studies, at least relatively’. By this means, it was hoped that they might exert a powerful moral influence on the character of the wider student body. For a discussion of the rôle of sodalities in Jesuit colleges, see Schwickerath, op. cit., pp. 560–562; and for their continuation in nineteenth century France, see Padberg, John W., Colleges in Controversy: The Jesuit Schools in France from Revival to Suppression, 1815–1880 (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 244–247 Google Scholar.

42 DRO, D/WLC, C52, James Jenison to Edward Weld, 27 June 1768. ‘Mr. Wright’ was almost certainly Francis Wright (1751–1786), son of Anthony Wright and Anne (née Biddulph), of Wealside, Essex, who had been a student at the Great College at Bruges from 1765–1768: see Holt (1979), p. 295. His cousin, John Biddulph (ca. 1750–1835), son of Charles Biddulph and Elizabeth (née Bedingfeld), of Biddulph Park, Staffordshire and Burton Park, Sussex, had also been a student at Bruges since 1762. John Biddulph was soon to accompany Thomas Weld to Colmar to continue his education. By 1769 he was in Rome with his preceptor, Fr. Edward Walsh, evidently studying under the young Jesuit, Charles Plowden and in the company of his Bruges schoolfellow, Thomas Gage (1751–1778): see Holt (1979), p. 36, Holt (1984), p. 257, and Ingamells, John, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 89 and 386Google Scholar (entries under GAGE, Thomas and GAGE—(1769]).

43 DRO, D/WLC, C52, Thomas Weld (Pont-à-Mousson) to Edward Weld, 23 July 1768.

44 Delattre, IV, p. 157.

45 For details concerning the queen’s death, see DRO, D/WLC, C52, James Jenison to Edward Weld, 27 June 1768; and ibidem, Thomas Weld to Edward Weld, 23 July 1768.

46 Delattre, I, p. 1505.

47 Delattre, I, p. 1508.

48 Thomas Weld appears to have written to his brother, Edward, at Lulworth, in or about August 1768, sharing his passing thoughts about abandoning his studies. The letter does not appear to survive among the Weld of Lulworth Castle Papers at the Dorset Record Office.

49 DRO, D/WLC, C52, Thomas Weld (Colmar) to Edward Weld, 30 October 1768.

50 Ibidem, footnote to Thomas’s letter to Edward Weld, 30 October 1768. Fr. Jenison generally added supplements to all correspondence between Thomas and Edward Weld, providing extra details and private observations on Thomas’s health, conduct and progress.

51 DRO, D/WLC, C52, Thomas Weld (Colmar), to Edward Weld, 4 June 1769.

52 DRO, D/WLC, C52, James Jenison (Colmar), to Edward Weld, 30 July 1769. No copy of Thomas Weld’s ‘defensión’ appears to survive among the Weld of Lulworth papers at the Dorset Record Office.

53 Fr. Edward Walsh set off to Rome with John Biddulph to continue the latter’s studies there; Charles Gastaldi, a former student of the English Jesuit colleges of St. Omers and Bruges, who had joined the group at Colmar during the academic year 1768–69, was also scheduled to set off for Rome with them, evidently as an ecclesiastical student, ‘to hunt after Church preferments’; and Charles Biddulph, John’s younger brother, was ‘desirous of taking to business’, though precisely where is not recorded: see DRO, D/WLC, C52, James Jenison (Colmar) to Edward Weld, 9 July 1769.

54 DRO, D/WLC, C52, James Jenison (Colmar), to Edward Weld, 30 July 1769.

55 After the death of Edward Weld, Maria Smythe married Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton Park, Staffordshire. After the latter’s death in 1781, she entered into a secret and morganatic marriage in 1785 with the then Prince of Wales, the future George IV.

56 AAB, 8-E-7, Fr. William Strickland to Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore, undated letter of 1810, written shortly after the death of Thomas Weld. The letter quotes, in extenso, a tribute in French from Thomas Weld’s chaplain at Lulworth in 1806, the French Jesuit Fr. Claude Jean Corbe (1734–1815), detailing the seriousness with which Weld undertook his religious observances.

57 Chadwick, p.355. The harsh treatment of English Jesuits at Ghent was part of a wider paranoia among the authorities of the Austrian Netherlands that the Jesuits in general, Flemish, Walloon and English, had secreted a large quantity of ‘treasure’ around the time of the suppression: see Bonenfant, Paul, La Suppression de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les Pays-Bas Autrichiens (1773) (Brussels, 1924)Google Scholar, particularly chapter 4.

58 DRO, D/WLC, C91, Thomas Weld (Britwell) to ‘Dear Cousin’ [most probably Mary Gertrude Simeon Weld, at the English Franciscan Convent at Prinsenhof, Bruges], 12 November 1773.

Giles Hussey (1710–1788), a member of a noted recusant family of Marnhull, Dorset, was educated at St. Gregory’s, Douai, and at St. Omers, before studying art for seven years in Italy. Returning to England in 1737, he worked in London from 1742 until 1767, principally as a portrait painter, after which he returned to Dorset. He was commissioned by Thomas Weld to undertake a series of pencil portraits of Weld family members and relations from the 1770s until the mid-1780s: see Sotheby’s sale catalogue of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Drawings and Watercolours, Thursday, 12 March 1987, for details of the collection of portrait drawings by Hussey, formerly the property of Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, a descendant of Thomas and Mary Weld, whose portraits formed lot 3 of that day’s sale.

59 SA, Liège Account Book, f. 94.

60 AAB, 6–0–8, Fr. Charles Plowden (Liège) to Bishop John Carroll (Baltimore), 24 November 1792.

61 Ibidem. Fr. John Carroll had been consecrated bishop of Baltimore in Thomas Weld’s private chapel at Lulworth in 1789. He was raised to the rank of archbishop in 1808.

62 Berkeley, p. 238; Delattre, IV, p. 159.

63 Between October 1793 and the final fall of Liège to French forces in July 1794, Père Beauregard delivered a total of thirty-three sermons in the Cathedral of Saint-Lambert in Liège, prior to the latter building being razed to the ground by the revolutionaries: see Pierre Guérin, ‘Les 33 derniers sermons prêches à la cathédrale Saint-Lambert à Liège’, Cercle Historique de Fléron, June 1992, pp. 60–76. I am indebted to Père Pierre Guérin, S.J., of Liège, for bringing this article to my attention.

64 Chad-wick, p. 381.

65 AAB, 6–0–9, Charles Plowden to Bishop John Carroll, 10 March 1793; and AAB, 6–0–12, Plowden to Carroll, 4 August 1793. For Edward Weld, see SA, Liège Account Book, f. 94. Edward Weld remained at Liège until July 1794 and then returned to Lulworth. In November 1794, he resumed his higher studies at Stonyhurst and in October 1795 petitioned the President of the college to be admitted as a probationer, as a first step to proceeding towards holy orders. However, he became ill shortly thereafter and died at Stonyhurst on 17 January 1796, aged twenty. A memorial card of 1796 for Edward Weld can be found in DRO, D/WLC, F69. Edward’s younger brother, John, succeeded him as a candidate for the priesthood. After ordination as a Jesuit in 1807, Fr. John Weld became successively Prefect, Minister and Rector of Stonyhurst, dying in the latter capacity at Stonyhurst in 1816, aged thirty-six: see Foley, V, pp. 807–808.

66 AAB, 6-P-2, Fr. Charles Plowden (Liège) to Bishop John Carroll (Baltimore), 1 March 1794.

67 By the Brief, Catholici Praesules, of 1778, Pius VI had approved the action in 1773 of François-Charles de Velbruck (1719–1784), prince-bishop of Liège, in allowing the English ex-Jesuits to continue living corporately as members of the Académie anglaise at Liège, but as secular priests, without any external display of their original Jesuit affiliation. The president or director of the Academy was to be elected by the chief members of the staff and he was to appoint the other officials—all subject to the prince-bishop’s approval. There was no provision made for what should happen in the event of the Academy removing from Liège and transplanting itself in Britain or elsewhere, temporarily or permanently: see Holt, Geoffrey, William Strickland and the Suppressed Jesuits (London, 1988), p. 11 Google Scholar.

68 Chadwick, pp. 384–400.

69 Ibidem, p. 344. A contemporary Internet search for ‘Jean Nicolas Grou’ will reveal that his maxims and meditations are as popular as ever, chiefly today on web sites devoted to spirituality.

70 Though it was never to gain a faculty of medicine and law, Stonyhurst had affiliated itself by 1840 to the University of London for the award of external degrees. The English Jesuit philosophical and theological traditions of higher studies at Liège, begun in 1614, were continued at St. Mary’s Hall, Stonyhurst, where philosophy was taught from 1830 to 1926, and theology from 1830 to 1848. St. Beuno’s College in North Wales was opened as a theologate in 1848, continuing this work until 1926. The two traditions coalesced again at Heythrop College in Oxfordshire from 1926 and survive into the twenty-first century, after several migrations, as the present day Heythrop College, London, now a constituent college of the University of London.

71 Chadwick, p. 400.

72 For a detailed account of this period, see Holt, G., ‘The English Province: The Ex-Jesuits and the Restoration (1773–1814)’, Archivům Historicum Societatis lesu. Vol. 42 (1973), pp. 288–311 Google Scholar.

73 Muir, op. cit., p. 81. It is worth noting that it was not until 1857 that another English school, Rugby, had facilities for the teaching of science comparable to those of Stonyhurst.

74 Chadwick, pp. 400–401.