Such a one was James Duckett, the pastor of a scattered flock that covered the plain of Gresham, of historic memory, to the fort of Edgehill, the last standpoint of the "lost cause" of the Stuarts.
The way in which his retreat was discovered, by a party of Catholics from one of the large country-houses of Gloucestershire, was very amusing as well as interesting.
They were returning from a picnic at a charming old Tudor manor-house, one of the seats of the Marquis of Northampton, by name Compton-Wyniatts, and where the family tradition asserts a portion of the Royalist army to have lain hidden the eve of the terrible battle of Edgehill. The house is full of holes and hiding-places, sliding-panels, and trap-doors, great ghostly chambers, and funereal beds, not to mention the vast cobwebbed garrets which the soldiers are alleged to have occupied. It has a very deserted appearance, and, indeed, its owner hardly ever lives there; but it is picturesque in inverse ratio of its desolation. Just outside the front courtyard is the lawn, shaded by chestnut-trees, and here the picnic took place.
Returning home, and passing through the hamlet of Brailes, two miles from Compton-Wyniatts, the party observed some curious things lying on the roadside hedges. Upon examination, they proved to be ecclesiastical vestments, and evidently genuine Catholic property, ritualism being as yet unknown in the country districts of England. It turned out that they belonged to Mr. Duckett, and the whole party repaired to Mr. Duckett's house. This was a cottage in a little garden, with a hay-field between it and the old parish church, Protestant now, but once the only home these costly vestments should have known. There was the old man, the priest of the past, in the homely peasant garb, now abandoned by the peasants themselves, in coarse blue woollen stockings and a snuff-colored coat, and leather garters at the knee. Huge-buckled shoes were on his feet, and a thickly-folded neckcloth was wound stiffly round his throat. I saw him myself, later on, when the existence of this living relic of the penal days was better known among the county circle. The lower room of his cottage, stone-flagged and bare, was a little school where a few children were taught catechism and reading; the upper rooms were reached by a steep wooden staircase outside the house. Here was a "large upper chamber, furnished," and this was the chapel. It was as cold, and bare, and poor as it could well be; the roughest workmanship was displayed in the altar, the rails, and the benches. The raftered and thatched roof that was immediately above was broken and untrustworthy, and the rain of the last thunder-shower had discolored both it and the floor below. The small sacristy, off the chapel, was in the same state of decay and dilapidation; hence the damage done to the vestments that had been put out in the sun to dry. Mr. Duckett had treasures here that many modern churches might, and with reason, have envied. The vestments—especially a white cope and a gold-embroidered chasuble—were very rich and beautiful, and such as must have been, no doubt, a gift from some persecuted Catholic family to the persecuted temple of God. But, better still, there was a small leaden chalice, said to have been used by many of the martyrs of Tyburn, by special permission given in consideration of the difficulty of obtaining gold and silver vessels for sacred purposes, and of the probable sacrilege and spoliation the known existence of such vessels would provoke. And, among other things, there was also a little bell, wide and round, like a low-crowned hat, and four little clappers inside, making a sweet chime when the bell was shaken. This was afterwards copied by the modern artificers of Birmingham, but they could not transmit to their copy the mellow, time-harmonized tone of the original.
In Mr. Duckett's sitting-room, a small, unpretending, and homely nook, was the portrait of his revered and beloved patron, Bishop Bishop, in Mr. Duckett's youth the only and supreme ecclesiastical authority in England. The priest was an old man now, seventy-five or thereabouts, but his heart was true yet to his friend and patron, whose praises he was never tired of repeating. He told, also, how, although parishes had been formed around him and churches had grown up at his side, yet once his duties carried him on midnight rides and to distances of forty or fifty miles, for a sick-call or a promised and occasional Mass at some one of the many places that claimed his care. Broadway, a village at the foot of the Coteswold Hills, just at the edge of the fruitful plain or vale of Gresham, was one of these stations, and now, as for many long years past, there stands in its midst the Passionist Monastery of St. Saviour, the novitiate house for the province of Great Britain. Two hundred Catholics and a spacious church, model schools under government inspection, and confraternities of many kinds, have turned the far-off hamlet, where a few stray and hunted Catholics were hidden, into a very centre of religion for twenty miles around. Wordnorton, the hunting-box of the Duc d'Aumale, and Chipping-Campden, a thriving little mission on the opposite ridge of the Coteswold, are both served from the monastery at Broadway; and so great is the personal ascendency of the monks, and so universal their popularity, that they need not fear the letter of the law, and do often contravene it by walking abroad in their monastic habit.
Here is one of the changes that have occurred in the straggling field of Mr. Duckett's early labors; and, while all this is happening around him, the calm old man waits for his summons in the same homely and unobtrusive dress he has sanctified by his daily work in the vineyard of Christ.
It is said, and I believe with truth—at least, I hope so—that the monastic garb of all religious orders was originally modelled on the coarse habiliments of the poorest and simplest of mankind—the shepherds and husbandmen of the hard-working rural districts. If so, it suggests a very beautiful and a very happy thought, and brings before our eyes the many parables in which God's church is likened to a field, a vineyard, an orchard, a garden. Tillers of the soil and sowers of the grain, reapers of the harvest and fosterers of the vine, are priests and deacons, bishops and monks; and all through sacred history runs this touching parallel. Nowhere is religion without her crown of nature's weaving: the blossoming rod and the sceptre of Christ's jurisdiction are one.
And so, to return to our friend, the priest and pastor of a forgotten and happily buried age of persecution, God's voice called him in time, and among the many who daily wait in the temple's outer court he was chosen to blossom forth in a higher life, and to wear his robe of glory in a nobler place than that where he had clothed himself like the poor and the unnoticed, and only wore by stealth the sacred garments of his priesthood.
He died in the year 1866, if I mistake not, and his place was filled by a young man, newly ordained, as if to bear witness how suddenly one state of things had died away and another had come in its stead, but also, perchance, to point out to us—too secure in our present safety—that as quickly as freedom had followed persecution, so we should be ever ready to see persecution follow freedom.