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The Leslies of Balquhain and the Burial of Bishop Hay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Ann Dean  and
Alasdair Roberts
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Extract

A year after the First Vatican Council of 1870 a five-volume edition of George Hay's works was published, and the opening words of Bishop John Strain's introduction left no doubt as to Hay's significance: ‘Since the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, to no man has the Catholic Church in Scotland been so much indebted as to Bishop Hay. He is preeminently her bishop of the last three hundred years.’ In 1874 James Stothert's Life of Bishop Hay was brought before the public by the Rev. J. F. S. Gordon, who felt moved to comment: ‘It is most dishonourable, not only to the Memory of this great Bishop, but to the Catholic Religion in Scotland, which he may be said to have kept alive during a dismal period, that not so much as a simple Stone marks his grave.’

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , October 1995 , pp. 536 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1995

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References

Notes

1 Works of the Right Rev, Bishop Hay of Edinburgh, Vol. I (Edinburgh, 1871), p. xiii.Google Scholar

2 Gordon, J. F. S., The Catholic Church in Scotland (Aberdeen, 1874), p. 453.Google Scholar

3 Scottish Catholic Archive/Blairs Letters; [SCA/BL] James Sharp, Aquhorties, to Bishop Cameron Edinburgh, 22 October 1811.

4 SCA/BL, James Gordon, Aquhorties, to his mother in Brechin, 29 December 1811. He reported a less simple cortège, the hearse being followed by five carriages and a gig. In fact Bishop Cameron was invited to the fineral but declined; he was temporarily in sole charge of the Edinburgh mission. The Aquhorties priests in 1811 were Sharp, James, Gordon, John and Johnson, James Kyle. C., ‘Secular clergy of the Lowland District, 1732–1829’, Innes Review [IR] xxxiv (1983), p. 80.Google Scholar

5 When Bishop John Chisholm died three years later the future Bishop Andrew Scott sent Bishop Cameron his proposed Latin inscription for a gravestone on Lismore.

6 Belfast Newsletter, 22 February 1828, copied from the Caledonian Mercury as evidence of wide public interest.

7 Gordon, J. F. S., The Catholic Church in Scotland (Aberdeen, 1874), p. 460.Google Scholar When Bishop John Geddes died at Aberdeen in 1799 he was given a civic funeral and buried, with a carved gravestone, in the Snow Churchyard of King's College.

8 Blundell, O., Ancient Catholic Homes of Scotland (London, 1907), p. 189,Google Scholar in reference to the books which made George Hay famous beyond the borders of Scotland, both in his lifetime and long after: The Sincere Christian (1780), The Devout Christian (1783) and The Pious Christian (1786).

9 Anderson, W. J., ‘St. Ninian's, Fetternear, and the burial of Bishop Hay’, IR xiv (1963), p. 199.Google Scholar When George Hay ended a life of great frugality his clothes in life were worth less than twenty shillings. One much worn item of clothing features in the account of his final dementia. He ‘would remain kneeling for quarter of an hour, fingering the buttons of his Cassock as though he were Saying his Beads.’ Gordon, Catholic Church; p. 452.

10 Anderson, ‘St. Ninian's, Fetternear’, p. 203.

11 For the points which follow see principally Leslie, Charles, Historical Records of the Family of Leslie, three vols. (Edinburgh, 1869).Google Scholar

12 Cloth of silver and gold from Islam survived into the present century in form of vestments. Blundell, Ancient Catholic Homes, p. 178.

13 Slade, H. G., ‘The house of Fetternear: a history and a description’, PSAS ciii (1971), pp. 178–91.Google Scholar Conservation was being planned in 1994.

14 Records of the Scots Colleges (Aberdeen, 1906), p. 191.Google Scholar

15 He was 34 and ‘in the vigour of manhood, as appears by an inscription on a stone above the gateway of the old family burying place.’ Leslie, Historical Records, iii, p. 133.

16 Henderson, J. A., Aberdeenshire Epitaphs and Inscriptions (Aberdeen, 1907), p. 292.Google Scholar

17 Leslie, Historical Records, iii, p. 134.

18 Four sons of Robert Duguid of Auchinhove and Teresa Leslie of Balquhain entered Douai between 1714 and 1722 of whom George, Alexander and Joseph became Jesuit priests, Alexander serving Buchan in the Scottish Mission. Records of Scots Colleges, pp. 67, 70, 72. Forbes Leith, W., Memoirs of Scottish Catholicsin the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, ii (London, 1909), p. 359.Google Scholar Patrick Duguid (Leslie) was a Captain in Lord Lewis Gordon's Regiment in 1745. Livingstone, A., Aikman, C. W. H. and Hart, B. S., Muster Roll of Prince Charles Edward Stuart's Army, 1745–46 (Aberdeen, 1985), p. 126.Google Scholar

19 Anderson, W. J., ‘Sir William Drummond-Steuart and the Chapel of St. Anthony the Eremite at Murthly’, IR xv (1964), p. 152.Google Scholar See also

Hansom, J. S., ‘Catholic records of the domestic chapel at Waterperry Manor House, Oxon, and St. Clement's Church, Oxford, 17017–1834’, Catholic Record Society [CRS], vi (1909), pp. 391–2.Google Scholar

20 Skeet, F. J. A., ‘Catholic registers of the domestic chapel at Slindon House and St. Richard's Church, Slindon, Sussex’, CRS, vi (1909), p. 386.Google Scholar

21 Costello, M. G., St. Richard's Parish, Slindon, Sussex (1953), pp. 4–7,Google Scholar 10. For an account of a neighbouring estate which shared confirmation services with Slindon see Holt, T. G., ‘Burton Park: a centre of recusancy in Sussex’, Recusant History, xiii (1976); pp. 106–22.Google Scholar

22 Leslie, Historical Records, iii, p. 203. Following a claim made on the estate of the Maxwells of Munches in Annandale by a Protestant relation, John Menzies of Pitfodels was mainly instrumental in seeing a Catholic Relief Bill through Parliament in 1793 which put Scottish Catholic property-owners on the same secure footing as had been achieved for their English counterparts in 1779. Gordon, Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 342–4.

23 Miss E. Fraser of Castle Fraser, Alex Burnett of Kemnay and Col. Home Dalrymple Elphinstone of Logie acted as guarantors of the loan.

24 There were Lumsdens at Pitcaple in the parish of Chapel of Garioch which includes Fetternear. New Statistical Account (1835) p. 563. Hary Keith Lumsden of Auchindoir (in the parish of Lumsden) is also listed as a Chapel of Garioch landowner. The Catholic Lumsdens of Clova (Lumsden) built their own chapel in 1880 and installed George Wilson, the priest who had served Fetternear. Johnson, C., ‘Scottish secular clergy, 1830–1878: the Northern and Eastern Districts’, IR, xl (1989), p. 39.Google Scholar

25 One of the guests at Bishop Hay's funeral was Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk, a neighbouring estate famous for agricultural improvement. Much of the early clerical correspondence between Aquhorties and Edinburgh was about the farm rather than the seminary. Johnson, C., Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1728–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 198–200.Google Scholar

26 Old Statistical Account (1793), p. 191. The soil of the parish was deemed to be ‘very improvable’, and wood, now ‘more scarce … (hadj risen greatly in value.’

27 Her English links have been noted along with those of other girls sent south of the border: ‘When she was at school in the convent at York, where she went in 1757, her grandfather's head, that is the head of Lord Kenmure, was still on Micklegate Bar and she saw it taken down.’ Anderson, W. J., ‘Some notes on Catholic education in pre-Emancipation days’, IR xiv (1963), p. 38.Google Scholar See also Blundell, Ancient Catholic Homes: p. 182.

28 Leslie, Historical Records, iii, p. 529.

29 SCA/BL, Violet Leslie, Fetternear, to Bishop Cameron, Edinburgh, 2 April 1812. Five of the Leslie boys, Charles, Anthony, Edward, Francis and Louis, were lay students at Aquhorties for periods of between two and four years in the period 1799–1810. Anderson, W. J., ‘The College for the Lowland District of Scotland at Scalan and Aquhorties. Registers and documents’, IR xiv (1963), pp. 171–2, 193.Google Scholar

30 Born in 1775, Ernest Leslie was a student at the Scots Benedictine monastery of Ratisbon (1788–95) before joining La Tour's Dragoons. Leslie, Historical Records, iii, p. 444.

31 Ibidem, pp. 135–6.

32 SCA/BL, Mrs. Leslie Jr, of Balquhain to Rev. Charles Fraser, 14 May 1834. He was of the Strichen family who also built a nineteenth century Catholic chapel.

33 SCA/BL, same to same, 8 October 1834. The most prominent feature of Aberdeen's Castlegate was the military barracks.

34 Other families with West Indian sugar plantations included the Gordons ‘of Newton and Tobago’ and the Lumsdens of Clova., W. Temple, The Thanage of Fermartyn (Aberdeen, 1894), pp. 159, 628.Google Scholar

35 Leslie, Historical Records, i, p. 127.

36 Ibidem, iii, p. 238.

37 The seminary was moved to Blairs, on Deeside a few miles west of Aberdeen, in 1829 and clergy records have no priest at Aquhorties after that date. Johnson, ‘Secular clergy of the Lowland District’, p. 80. However an 1833 letter shows a former procurator (by then fulfilling the same budgetary role at Blairs) being consulted, at Aquhorties, on drainage, ploughing and the spreading of lime. SCA/BL, Col. Leslie to Rev. James Sharp, Aquhorties, 26 September 1833. The 1841 Census shows the Rev. Donald Carmichael in residence. Based at Blairs between 1837 and 1844 (when the lease was given up to the landlord) he ‘paid weekly visits to Aquhorties, where he officiated every Sunday, took charge of the small Congregation, and superintended the Farm.’ Gordon, Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 532.

38 Linked originally with the Society of Jesus, the IHS or Jesus monogram was a Catholic symbol used on certain houses including Fetternear. Bryce, I. B. D. and Roberts, A., ‘Post-Reformation Catholic houses of north-east Scotland’, PSAS cxxiii (1993), pp. 363–72.Google Scholar IMI is the invocation, once familiar in school exercise books, to Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

39 Charles Leslie retired from the Grenadier Guards to become Deputy-Lieutenant of Derbyshire. After six years of marriage to Mary Holloway (who died in 1832 following the birth of their younger son) he took Lady Dorothy Eyre as his second wife in 1836.

40 Anderson, ‘St. Ninian's, Fetternear’, p. 197.

41 Wood, S., The Shaping of 19th Century Aberdeenshire (Stevenage, 1985),Google Scholar especially Part II, ‘A Country Community: Inverurie’.

42 New Statistical Account, p. 578. There were six Catholic families, as compared to one (the Leslies) in 1793. OSA, p. 191. A shortage of local Catholics is indicated by a letter from Mrs. Leslie in connection with a housemaid for Leslie Lodge. The old lady who had been a schoolgirl in the convent at York wrote to Preshome seeking domestic/spiritual comfort in her last years of life, ‘being so wishful if possible of engaging a Catholic’. SCA/BL, Mrs. Leslie, Fetternear, to Rev. Paul McLachlan, Preshome, 16 May 1834.

43 A good number of Catholic families is implied by the fact that the misleadingly named Lodge, close to St. John's, was built (but never used) as a school teacher's house. The school was to have been built on to it. Malcolm and Winifred Cairns, personal communication July 1994.

44 Watson, W., Glimpses o’ Auld Lang Syne (Aberdeen, 1905), p. 128.Google Scholar

45 Anderson, ‘Sir William Drummond-Steuart’, p. 152.

46 Leslie, Historical Records, iii, App. pp. lxiv, 593.

47 Gordon, Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 452–3.

48 Wilson came to nearby Inverurie after ordination and then took charge of St. John's Fetternear (1863–87) before moving as chaplain to another Aberdeenshire laird at Clova. Johnson, ‘Scottish secular clergy’, p. 39. It has been claimed that the Leslie history was ‘mostly, if not all, written by Rev. Mr. Wilson, Fetternear.’ Mitchell, A. K. and Cash, C. G., A Contribution to the Bibliography of Scottish Topography, Vol. I (Edinburgh. 1917), p. 42,Google Scholar and see Anderson, ‘St. Ninian's, Fetternear’, p. 199, but some form of collaboration seems more likely from Charles Leslie's acknowledgement. Leslie, Historical Records, iii, p. 598.

49 Ibidem, p. 224.

50 Letter (undated except 17 July) held by Mrs. Mathieson of Inverurie.

51 Blundell, Ancient Catholic Homes, pp. 187–8. According to Blundell's understanding, based partly on family memories of the original chapel walls standing four foot high in the middle years of the nineteenth century and partly on a 1769 plan of St. Ninian's and its cemetery (since lost), the 1848 building was not on ‘the correct site’. Ibidem, pp. 185–6.

52 Pamphlets, Catholic Truth Society (Edinburgh, 1912), 3,Google Scholar Scottish Catholic Directory (1912), pp. 249–51. Some of Hay's works were also republished in 1911.

53 Henderson, Aberdeenshire Epitaphs p. 292. Tuberculosis was responsible for the deaths of twelve Aquhorties students. Johnson. Developments in the Roman Catholic Church, p. 215.

54 Bulloch, J. M., ‘The burials in the Snow Churchyard, 1776–1876’, Scottish Notes and Queries, vii (Second Series), p. 150.Google Scholar

55 Following the fashion for hyphenated surnames, the laird seems to have died a Leslie-Duguid.

56 NSA, 578. The 29 Catholics of the civil parish came third, behind 52 Episcopalians.

57 Memorial for Charles Stephen Leslie Esq. of Balquhain in the County of Aberdeen for the Opinion of Counsel, 1888. MS Leslie Papers, King's College, University of Aberdeen. Most of what follows is from this source.

58 Census Returns, Chapel of Garioch, 1891.

59 The 1851 Census shows Charles McGregor (56), farmer of five acres at Hill of Fetternear, his wife Ann (54) and thirteen-year-old William as the third of four children still at home. No longer a Scholar for census purposes, the future grocer and merchant is not registered under any form of employment.

60 I. Murray Garden, 245 Union Street, Aberdeen, to C. S. Leslie, Fetternear, 30 August 1888. MS Leslie Papers.

61 Ibidem. See also Hunter Blair, David, OSB John Patrick, Third Marquess of Bute, K.T. (1847–1900): a Memoir (London 1921), p. 227.Google Scholar

62 MS Leslie Papers.

63 It now stands six feet tall in Blairdaff cemetery. The McGregor lair at St. Ninian's was uncomfortably close to the arched entrance, ‘as you enter the cemetery Gate the lenth of a lair off the wall and about three breaths off the small walk’. MS Leslie Papers.

64 Henderson, Aberdeenshire Epitaphs, p. 291.

65 Darragh, J., The Catholic Hierarchy in Scotland (Glasgow, 1986), 33.Google Scholar Chisholm was also in his eighties, dying two years after Leslie.

66 Charles S. Leslie, who died at Fetternear, called two lawyers to his bedside near the end, so that he could ‘follow Our Lord and die between two thieves’. Personal communication from Nicholas Bogdan, December 1994, on the basis of what C. S. Leslie said to his grandfather who was a neighbour of Leslie's in the Chanonry, Old Arberdeen.

67 Diack, H., Boy in a Village (Nottingham, 1962), p. 94.Google Scholar Hunter Diack implies that all was fair after the Laird of Fetternear had failed to pay his father, a tailor in Kemnay, for a suit.

68 Ibidem, pp. 96, 101.

69 Personal communication, March 1994. Fr. Grady was at Tynet from September i 948 to December 1951.

70 Anson, P. F.. ‘The Banffshire Bethlehem’, St. Ninian's Tynet: Scotland's Oldest Post-Reformation CatholicChurch (Aberdeen?, n.d., 1947?).Google Scholar

71 Parish Magazine, Sacred Heart Torry, April 1958. The passage is copied into a 1971 hand-written report by Fr. Grady to Bishop Michael Foylan and held in the Aberdeen Episcopal Archives. It makes reference to a more precise report (since lost) which was given to Bishop Walsh.

72 McRoberts, D. R., ‘The Scottish Catholic Archives, 1560–1878’, IR xxviii (1977), p. 125.Google Scholar

73 Anderson, ‘St. Ninian's, Fetternear’, p. 199. Bodies buried within the former walls (other than that of George Hay) are all known to be of the Leslies.

74 Hay was something of an ecumenist (though a convert from the Scottish Episcopal Church with a firm grasp of Catholic doctrine) during a period of growing religious toleration, cf. Goidie, M., ‘Bishop Hay, Bishop Geddes, and the Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, IR xlv (1994), pp. 82–6.Google Scholar

75 Kerr, C., Bishop Hay: a Sketch of his Life and Times (London, n.d., 1924?), p. 175.Google Scholar