CHAPTER VI
MARRIAGE—HOME AND FAMILY LIFE—VISIT TO MAJORCA
1871-1874
Included in Bute's great inheritance were a considerable number of advowsons, carrying the right of presentation to livings in the Established Church. Nearly a dozen of these benefices were in Glamorgan, two (St. Mary's and Roath) being within the town of Cardiff. Bute was, of course, from the time of his conversion to the Roman Church, legally disabled from the exercise of his right of patronage in regard to these livings; but instead of allowing them to "lapse" (as the technical phrase is[[1]]) he from time to time made over the next presentations to two quasi-trustees, friends of his own, and members, of course, of the Church of England. One of these "trustees" was for a time Canon John David Jenkins, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, with whom Bute had become intimate during his university career. Dr. Jenkins became vicar of Aberdare, one of the Bute livings, in 1870, and we find Bute writing to an Oxford friend about a year later:
Canon Jenkins has just appointed the Revs. Puller[[2]] and Stuart to two out of the three parishes here; and Puller, at any rate, will be inducted in Ember week.
1871, Church Patronage in Wales
The practice adopted by Bute with regard to the livings in his gift—a practice probably unique among Roman Catholic patrons, and one which, in the case of a man less conscientious and honourable than himself, might have been open to obvious objections—was not continued by his successor after his death; nor, indeed, could it have been, after the assignment of next presentations ceased to be legally permissible. The ten family livings in the county of Glamorgan fell accordingly, as provided by the statute, to the gift of the University of Cambridge.[[3]] The advowsons of other livings, in Monmouthshire and Northumberland, were sold in Bute's lifetime or by his successor.
The friendship between Canon Jenkins and Bute was maintained until the death of the former in 1876[[4]]; and he was one among the little group of learned men—scholars, antiquarians, and ecclesiastics—much senior in age to the young Scottish peer, whom he gathered round him at this time, and often invited to share the solitude of his Welsh castle or his island home in Scotland. That it was something of a solitude, and that he felt it to be so there are many indications in his letters at this period. His only intimate friend of his own age was his old schoolfellow George Sneyd, with whose views on many subjects, sincere as was his affection for him, he was (as has been seen) in some respects entirely out of sympathy. What he was longing for and looking forward to, as he found himself approaching his twenty-fourth birthday, was domestic happiness and the home life of which he had known so little since his early boyhood; and this, as was natural, he hoped to secure by an early and happy marriage.
In the summer of 1871 his name was connected by the rumour, or gossip, of the day with that of the charming ward of a well-known Catholic peeress, whose hospitality had often been extended to him on the occasions of his visits to London. Bute took the opportunity, when writing to an old friend on whose sympathy he could rely, to deny categorically the truth of the rumour in question, and at the same time to give expression with his usual frankness to the feelings of dissatisfaction and discontent with which he was entering on his twenty-fifth year.
Cardiff Castle,
July 29, 1871.
MY DEAR MISS SKENE,
As there is, I fear, little chance of my being in Oxford just now, I will not delay longer in replying to your kind letter.
I had not seen the reports to which you refer, although I knew that they had been circulated by the scandalmongers of the press. I may tell you at once—I had meant to do so before—that there is no truth in them whatever. There is no engagement between Miss —— and myself, and nothing is less likely than that there ever should be. I will tell you all about it some day when I see you, or in a future letter: I cannot write more about it at present, except to say that here I am thrown out on the world again, feeling very lonely and desolate. My future, indeed, looks pretty blank just now, as you may imagine easily enough. There is nothing for it but to go on one's way, trying to do one's duty—and literature. I have also a considerable taste for art and archæology, and happily the means to indulge them. When I return from Ober Ammergau, whither I go next month, to see the Passion Play, I shall do a little yachting in home waters, and then return here for the autumn and winter. There is plenty to do here, of course; and building, archæology, and writing will perhaps help me to forget my troubles. After Christmas this place will be unbearable, and I think I shall go to Bute.
Yours ever very sincerely,
BUTE.
1872, Engagement and Marriage
Whatever may have been the disappointment or mortification occasioned to Bute by the episode in his life referred to in the above letter, they were amply compensated for, and indeed wholly forgotten, in the happiness of the event which he was able to announce to his friends at the close of this year. This was his engagement to the Hon. Gwendoline FitzAlan Howard, eldest daughter of the first Lord Howard of Glossop by his first wife. The marriage took place at the Oratory Church on April 16, 1872, Archbishop Manning officiating, assisted by five Oratorian fathers. Bute's cousin, Lord Mauchline (afterwards Earl of Loudoun), wearing Highland dress, was the best man, the principal bridesmaid being the Hon. Alice Howard of Glossop, who married Lord Loudoun in 1880. Mgr. Capel said the Nuptial Mass and preached the sermon; and the register was signed by the Duke of Cambridge, the Dukes of Northumberland and Argyll, and Mr. Disraeli. The wedding aroused an extraordinary amount of popular interest and even excitement; and the Spectator commented with satiric surprise on the fact that the London newspapers devoted entire pages to describing the ceremony, which actually occupied—but that perhaps was less astonishing—thirty columns of the Cardiff Western Mail. How distasteful this public excitement was to the chief actors in the ceremony may be gathered from a letter written by Bute to a friend in Rome a fortnight later:
Cardiff Castle,
April 29, 1872.
The whole thing went off very well; the religious part of it, which most concerned us, was very well done, and, I hear, pleased and impressed the many Protestants who were present. I suppose you will have seen descriptions and pictures of it. You will understand that to the principals the whole thing—I mean the secular part of it—was absolutely detestable. As Lord Beauchamp says: "There is only one thing more disagreeable than being married in London, and that is being married in the country." Of course we have been extremely quiet ever since, and expect to be so. My Lady is the last person in the world to "rout one out" and want to make a flare-up and a splash.
The Pope sent presents to us both,[[5]] and I wrote to Mgr. Howard to express our gratitude, enclosing a letter of thanks in very indifferent Latin, which I composed and we both signed; but it was not to be given if it was contrary to etiquette.
I find it the custom of Protestants, when they are married by an Archbishop, to present that dignitary with a pair of gloves—theirs being always white kid sewn with gold. I think I shall have a pair of cloth-of-gold chirothecæ made for Abp. Manning, and shall get Burges to design them. I know the Roman ones are often made of spun silk, but you can have them of other stuff, too, can you not?
A relique of St. Margaret of Scotland has been got for me, and I think of having a bust made for it, of silver-gilt; but I have not yet received it and don't know what it is like. I think also of sending to Chur (Choire) for a relique of St. Lucius of Glamorgan (Lleurwg Mawr).[[6]] A propos of Reliques, they have been making wonderful discoveries of the shrine of St. Alban in his abbey.[[7]]
1872, Reception at Cardiff
Lord and Lady Bute had gone immediately after their marriage to Cardiff, where they received a very cordial welcome, the mayor reading an address to them at the Castle gates. "I assure you," said Bute in his brief reply, "that my wife comes here to-day with a sincere desire to do what is right, and to be of service not to me only, but to all by whom she is surrounded, and among whom her life is to be henceforth spent." It is sufficient to say here that Bute's anticipations of the new happiness that this step would bring into his life were more than justified by the event. "I cannot but thank God, and congratulate myself, on this marriage," he wrote in May, 1872; "and I hope and believe that it will bring me many blessings." A little later he wrote to the same friend:
I have done two good things (besides some foolish ones) since my twenty-first birthday; the first on December 8, 1868, when I was reconciled to the Catholic Church; the second on April 16, 1872, when the same Church blessed my happy marriage. It is a satisfaction to feel that twice in one's life, at any rate, one has done what one is certain never to repent of nor to regret. Do you not agree with me?
Bute's marriage brought him into intimate relations, and indeed some degree of kinship, with some of the ancient Catholic families of England, of whom he had up to that time known very little. Profoundly interested as he always was in every phase of religious belief and practice, he welcomed the opportunity now afforded him of witnessing a traditionally religious life as unostentatious as it was obviously sincere, and contrasting alike with the austere Puritanism of his childish days and the fussy restlessness which was the chief characteristic of the earlier adherents of the advanced school of Anglicanism. Writing of some Catholics of the old school, to whose country home he and his wife had been paying a visit, he says:
They have edifying habits of piety, but of a very Low Church type—the school of "Hymns Antient and Modern without the Appendix," red baize boxes in galleries, family prayers and daily Mass in the most unadorned of private chapels, and an absolute minimum of ritual. You will understand that the unassuming simplicity of it all appeals to a person like me—especially when I see the goodness that accompanies it. But some of our "advanced" Anglican friends would stare if they saw the good old-fashioned practices which prevail in old Catholic circles. I only wish they could.
1873, Old English Catholic homes
A visit to Arundel Castle in the year following his marriage gave him evident pleasure; and a letter thence gives a pleasant glimpse of the home circle in that historic Catholic home:
The party here is an entirely family one;[[8]] and Whitsuntide and the Month of Mary [May] add by a shade to the amount of church-going, which is considerable here always: for, as you know, they are a very devout as well as a very merry and very nice family. I am rather looking forward to the procession of the Blessed Sacrament on Sunday week for Corpus Christi. The "Fête-Dieu" in the streets of an English country town will be rather an experience.
We have been down at the sea for the last month. We have no London address, neither of us caring for the place, where no one left me an house and where I have not the least intention of buying one.
Having at this time, as mentioned above, no London residence, Lord and Lady Bute spent their year chiefly between Cardiff and Mountstuart, with occasional visits to Dumfries House, for which Bute had always a particular affection. The stay at Cardiff after their marriage was unexpectedly prolonged owing to Lady Bute being laid up there with scarlet fever, while he had the misfortune to break his arm. As soon as they could travel they went to Mountstuart for the autumn and winter, and Bute dictated thence the following letter, the last sentence of which illustrates the curious displeasure with which, notwithstanding his theoretical and archæological admiration of monastic institutions, he always received the news of any friends of his own entering a religious order:[[9]]
Mountstuart,
September 23, 1872.
You will perceive by the handwriting that I am still incapable of using my right hand, which is, indeed, tied up with a piece of wood. I am glad to say that my Lady is now very nearly well; and I trust that her escape from the climate of Cardiff will soon complete her recovery.
The quiet routine of my life here is the same as formerly. My Lady plays the harmonium in our little chapel: we venture on nothing more than hymns, and get along pretty well.
The histories one hears from Rome seem all to be so "cooked" to suit the varying views of people who retail them, that one really feels quite uncertain as to how things are going on. I am told that there is an Italianising party among the Cardinals, from which much trouble may be expected in the event—may it be very far distant!—of the election of a successor to Pius IX.
I greatly regret to report that H—— G——[[10]] in a convent as a Redemptorist novice. I can only say that I most sincerely trust, as far as I lawfully may, that he may soon find that he has made a mistake.
1873, Oxford revisited
The reference to the learned Jesuit Father MacSweeney in the following letter, written to his old Oxford friend in the spring of 1873, shows that Bute was now entering on what was to be the most considerable literary work of his life, namely, the translation into English of the entire Roman Breviary.
Mountstuart,
April 27, 1873.
We are really coming south for a little, after a peaceful sojourn here of many months; and I hope for an opportunity of seeing you. I am not forgetful, and it will be a great pleasure. There is not much to bring me to Oxford now, as except yourself and very few others I have no friends there now, and I have not the footing I should have had if I had taken my degree. One day, however, I am to come, and my wife is to be "lionised" by old Mr. Parker, between whom and me archæology has formed ties. I have also business with the erudite Jesuit Fr. MacSweeney,[[11]] who has just been sent there. Most of my Oxford friends are married and changed and away—and I suppose I am very much changed myself. I fear I am not less indolent than I was, and my life is devoid of stirring incidents. My luxury is art, and perhaps the favourite pursuit Antiquarianism, as History is the favourite reading. I study, too, a little science. I wish I were better as regards devotion—I want stirring up in that; but my associations of that kind are so much with the South, and so difficult to adapt (though I know I ought to try to adapt them) to the environment in which one has to live. We are both, however, looking forward to a Mediterranean trip next winter.
The projected visit to Oxford—Bute's first since his change of religion five years previously—duly came off, and he thus refers to it:
To "do" Oxford in a day is suggestive of the American tourists who "do" Rome in three; but my wife saw the most noteworthy things under the skilled guidance of old Parker, whom I fear we unduly fatigued. You may imagine the feelings and memories that came over me as I led my young wife through Christ Church. It is difficult to estimate exactly what I owe to Oxford, but the debt is a heavy one.... Materially the place seemed to me very little changed. The newest thing I noticed was St. Barnabas's, which impressed me. Only I wish they'd had the courage to Romanise it enough to put the Altar so—
Apropos of Americans "doing" Italy, Story told me that Gibson, the American sculptor, once met and talked with a countryman of his, who was "doing" Italy in some incredibly short space of time. "Yes, I guess I have been nearly everywhere," he said (the conversation took place in a North Italian railway-carriage), "and one place that struck me very much was—I can't remember the name, but it begins with R." Gibson suggested Ravenna, Reggio, Recanati, and other names. "No, no, it was a shorter name than any of those: there was a big church with a dome, and a colonnade and fountains in front." "Good heavens! you surely don't mean Rome?" said Gibson, aghast. "Yes, that was it—Rome. I knew it was a short name, but I couldn't recall it for the moment." This is a fact, as newspapers sometimes say after telling a more than usually unbelievable story.
1873, A winter in Majorca
The second winter after his marriage Bute had the pleasure of spending in the south which he loved so well, and in more congenial and sympathetic company than he had always secured for his bachelor journeyings, even those which in some degree partook of the nature of a pilgrimage. "Our plan," he wrote on November 6, 1873, "is to dawdle through France and winter by the Mediterranean—we have been thinking of the Island of Majorca." The project was successfully carried out, and we see, from a letter written early in the following spring to the same friend, how much quiet enjoyment he was deriving from the rest and sunshine which he found in the Balearic Isles. The latter part of the letter refers to the recent death of his first cousin Edith Countess of Loudoun, who, it will be remembered, had been one of the party that accompanied him to the Holy Land a few weeks after his reception into the Roman Church.
Bendinat,
Palma, Mallorca,
February 24, 1874.
This is a very fair place indeed, the best of it being the climate. I'm nearly always happy when I'm abroad, particularly in the Mediterranean. I suppose there's something in fogs and perpetual rain and cold and darkness which is especially uncongenial to me. Also there are no business and bothers here to speak of, which is certainly a great change from home. We have the quiet and peace which we both enjoy and value, and I am glad to say that I have been getting on very well with the Breviary; for whereas I had hoped before returning to have reached Ascension Day, I now venture to think of the third Sunday after Pentecost.
A drawback (my Lady reminds me) to our residence here is its distance from any church, our only accessible service being one Low Mass each Sunday. There's an impressive, and very Spanish, Cathedral at Palma, with functions well and carefully done; but it is remote from us here.
The death of Edith[[12]] was a great shock to me, as well as a source of sincere sorrow. Requiescat in pace. We shall all go the same way in the long run, 100 years hence it'll be all the same; but it does seem rather hard that the axe should fall on the neck of all of us (however much it may grieve or inconvenience the survivors), and cut us off from the only world we have any experience of. Not, for the matter of that, that it's much worth stopping in—still, it's all we've got. However, crying over this spilt milk—and I confess to having shed some tears since I heard the news—will never put it back into the pitcher, so perhaps there is not much use in crying. But I am sincerely grateful for your kind sympathy.
1874, Domestic happiness
Later in the same year, after his return to England, Bute took occasion, in a letter to his ever-faithful friend at Oxford, to repel with indignation some malevolent rumours which had reached him to the effect that he had not found in his home life the happiness which he had anticipated.
Not one jot of truth is there, or has there ever been, in these iniquitous calumnies. Our happiness indeed is complete, and the terms on which we live completely affectionate and intimate. I find myself more attached to G. the longer I have the privilege and honour of living with her, and of seeing, as St. Augustine says of St. Monica, "her walk with God, how godly and holy it is, and to us-ward so sweet and gentle."
This letter was written from Heath House, Weybridge—"a little house," writes Bute, "which we have hired for a month or two. I go hence to London nearly every day to read Hebrew with a Rabbi [this was in view of the new version of the Psalms for his projected translation of the Breviary], and all sorts of things with a Jesuit. Besides the sacred language 'in which the Eternal spoke,' and certain branches of Liturgiology, I continue, as formerly, to read history and science—very humbly.
"We go to Scotland this month, but perhaps shall be at Cardiff for Christmastide, though Mountstuart, as you know, is the home of our predilection."
Before Christmas of this year, which Bute spent not at Cardiff but at Mountstuart, he published (anonymously) a little book containing a translation of the Christmas Offices from the Roman Breviary. "I hope and believe," he wrote, "that it may be of some service to those (there must be many) who desire to follow with intelligence the Liturgy of that holy season, but are prevented from doing so by their partial or total ignorance of the language of the Church. For this reason I should wish the booklet made known through the ordinary channels—a matter in which I confess to thinking our Catholic publishers very much less enterprising and business-like than those who cater for devout Anglicans. But for this state of things, I fear, non c'è remedio."
In Bute's own chapel he was accustomed to have the church offices (with the exception, of course, of the Mass) recited in the vernacular. "Christmas went well here," he wrote to a friend in January, 1875. "We had the Monsignor [Capel] down. Mattins and Lauds were said in English, the altar being incensed at the Benedictus; and Mgr. C. treated us to a short and rather eloquent fervorino after the gospel at Mass. By the way, the progress of my Breviary is most discouragingly slow: eppur si muove."
[[1]] "Lapsed" livings are those in the gift of Catholics, who are legally incapable of presenting to them. By statutes passed in 1603 and 1715, the patronage of such livings is vested, according to their situation, in the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. All such benefices in Glamorgan were assigned to Cambridge.
[[2]] The Rev. F. W. Puller, the well-known Anglican divine and controversialist, resigned the vicarage of Roath in 1880 to join the Society of St. John the Evangelist at Cowley.
[[3]] The Welsh Disestablishment Act of 1920 has, of course, abolished private patronage in Wales.
[[4]] Canon Jenkins had held one of the "missionary fellowships" founded at Jesus by his namesake Sir Leoline Jenkins in the seventeenth century, and had accordingly gone out to Natal in 1853, and become a canon of Maritzburg. He had returned to Oxford when Bute came into residence at Christ Church, and was successively dean and bursar of Jesus between 1864 and 1870. A fine portrait of him by Holman Hunt hangs in the common-room of his college.
[[5]] Pius IXth's wedding gifts were beautiful cameos set in gold.
[[6]] The (probably mythical) "king of Britain" whom Bede reports to have written to Pope Eleutherius asking for instruction in Christianity. Lucius is supposed to have left Britain, preached among the Rhætian Alps, and died at Chur or Coire, where he is still venerated as a saint. The Welsh legend makes him founder of the churches of Llandaff, Roath, etc. Lleurwg or Lleurfer (Light-bearer) is the Welsh rendering of Lucius.
[[7]] More than 2000 fragments of the fourteenth-century base of St. Alban's shrine were discovered in 1872, built into the walls, and were pieced together again with extraordinary patience and skill, and re-erected on the original site.
[[8]] The Duke of Norfolk and his four unmarried sisters were at this time living at Arundel with their widowed mother.
[[9]] One recalls in this connection the cases of two of the most devout and accomplished Catholic writers of the nineteenth century, the Count de Montalembert and Kenelm Digby. Both expended the utmost enthusiasm and eloquence in their description of the religious life of the Middle Ages; and both resisted to the utmost, and not without bitterness, the entry into religion of members of their own immediate family circles.
[[10]] A contemporary of Bute's at Harrow and Christ Church. He had become a Catholic in 1871.
[[11]] In the preface to his translation of the Breviary, published six years later, Bute pays a handsome tribute to the "long pains and unwearied patience and kindness" which the learned Jesuit had expended in assisting him in the work. Father MacSweeney read the whole of it in proof, and contributed much valuable criticism, especially in connection with the translation of the Psalter.
[[11]] One of the testamentary dispositions of Edith Lady Loudoun, who had succeeded to the Scottish earldom in 1868 on the premature death of her brother, fourth and last Marquis of Hastings, curiously recalls a provision afterwards made by Bute in his own will. Lady Loudoun directed that her right hand should be severed after death, and buried apart from her body (which was interred in the family vault in Scotland) in the park at her husband's seat at Donington, her home before she inherited her brother's title. Curiously enough, a similar provision had been made by her grandfather (and Bute's), the first Marquis of Hastings, the distinguished Governor-General of India, who died in Malta in 1826, his wife and children being at the time in Scotland. He was buried at Malta, but his right hand was by his wish carried to Loudoun, and placed in the grave destined for his wife. When the latter was dying fourteen years later, her daughter Sophia, afterwards Marchioness of Bute, wrote a note to the parish minister, asking him to bring her a small iron box which he would find in the family vault. "There must be no delay," the missive ended. The young minister did Lady Sophia's bidding: the box was taken to her mother's deathbed, and two days later was enclosed in her coffin according to her husband's desire. This minister was the Rev. Norman Macleod, afterwards the chaplain and intimate friend of Queen Victoria.