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.