My chief news [he wrote on October 24, 1868] is that I have begun to keep the laws of the Church about fasting and abstinence, and had my first fish dinner yesterday. The series of messes, fish and eggs and puddings, nearly made me sick.
In the same letter he refers to a more important matter, the breaking off of his projected marriage. He had formed an attachment to the sixth of the seven beautiful daughters of a well-known peer; but the rumours of his conversion, which was now known to be certainly impending, had caused the lady's parents to withdraw their sanction to the proposed engagement.
To-day's post [he writes] brings me a long letter from the Duchess of ——. It is very disheartening. Unless the woman lies, she will do everything in her power to prevent the marriage. She is, I think, too upright a woman to deceive.
1868, A ghostly warning
This autumn was overshadowed for Bute by an event which he felt much for several reasons, the death (on November 10), when only in his twenty-seventh year, of his cousin the fourth and last Marquess of Hastings, to whose unfortunate career reference has already been made. Bute had gone up to Scotland a few days previously, leaving at Cardiff Castle Mr. John Boyle (the brother of one of his former curators and a trustee of his father's will), who on November 10 was expecting a friend to dinner. Seated in the library, he heard a carriage roll through the great courtyard and stop at the door. After an interval, thinking the bell must be broken, he came into the hall, but the butler, who was waiting there, assured him that no carriage had come. Next morning he received a telegram announcing that Lord Hastings had died suddenly the night before. He only heard later, for the first time, that the arrival of a spectral carriage was said always to foretell the death of some member of the Hastings family.[[11]]
[[1]] Hartwell Grissell, M.A., of Brasenose, and for many years attached to the Papal Court.
[[2]] The late Father James MacSweeney, Bute's principal collaborator in his opus magnum, the translation of the Roman Breviary.
[[3]] The Senior Students (now called "Students") of Christ Church correspond to the Fellows of other colleges.
[[4]] The writer was told by Mr. Chamberlain himself, in his old age, that he had first worn a red chasuble at St. Thomas's Church on Whit Sunday, 1854. Dr. Neale, however, had certainly worn the Eucharistic vestments before that in his chapel at East Grinstead; and they were introduced at Wilmscote (Warwickshire) as early as 1849.
[[5]] "I remember when I was at Oxford," he said in his Rectorial address at St. Andrews a quarter of a century later (post, p. [187]), "and was going one Long Vacation to Iceland in company with an English friend (now the secretary of one of Her Majesty's ministers), I stopped the yacht here [at St. Andrews] in order to show him with pride the only place in Scotland, as far as I know, whose appearance can boast any kinship with that of Oxford."