Old St. Pancras.
Father Arthur O'Leary died in London on January 8, 1802. The remains lay in state; a grand dirge was sung; an imposing funeral cortège followed them to Old St. Pancras, where a fine monument to his memory, inscribed with words of praise, soon marked the spot. Tradition states that Old St. Pancras was the last church in London where Mass was said after the Reformation: hence the wish felt by Catholics in penal days to sleep within its precincts. A visit to this historic graveyard in its present desecrated state awakens emotion. No ground, however, is sacred to the engineer. Old St. Pancras is now traversed by two lines of railway—more regard being paid to the 'sleepers' above than to the sleepers below. Passing trains ever and anon cause this resting-place of the dead to tremble violently as if by earthquake. Indeed a seismic shock, had it passed through the churchyard, could hardly have produced more wreck. Here many an old tombstone inscribed 'Requiescat in pace'—others displaying grand heraldic sculpture—even a bishop's mitre and a shattered coronet—proclaim the irony of fate. The scorched and begrimed soil, once green and rural, but now split into a hundred fissures—almost tends to remind one of a great Scriptural picture, where shrouded dead are seen rising in protest from the riven earth. Tablets and tombs sufficient to represent the life of a city are rudely removed and ranged far from the graves they ought to mark. 'Old Mortality' will find them piled—close as cards in a pack—beneath a dark archway, over which locomotives rush, their shrill scream suggesting a cruel travesty of the last trumpet. A few massive mausoleums are certainly spared, and amongst them that to the memory of O'Leary. Another part of the disused cemetery creates quite a contrast to the scene of desolation just described. Parterres smiling with flowers may be seen; also winding walks, and an occasional shaded seat, where whispering love repeats a story older even than Old St. Pancras.
PRIESTS AS SECRET AGENTS
Dr. Hussey was not the last Catholic priest sent by the Court of England on a private mission to the Continent. The subsequent Duke of Wellington, writing from London to Dublin Castle on March 18, 1808, says:—
'It would be very desirable to have a person to send over to Holland and France just at the present moment, and I know nobody that would answer our purpose so well as ——, the Scotch priest. I wish, therefore, that you would desire him to come over to me.'
On the following day he writes:—
'As I intend to send —— to Paris, it might not be inconvenient to know the person through whom the disaffected communicate with the French Government in order that —— might watch him.'[809]
The chief blank may be filled with the name of the Rev. James Robertson. The nephew of this man, Mr. A. B. Fraser, found among his papers, 'A Narrative of a Secret Mission to the Danish Island in 1808.' The priest had been sent by Wellington to the Spanish general Romana, and the result was the transmission of the Spanish army from the service of France, by the British fleet, from North Germany to Spain.
Spain was the theatre of a still more important case of secret service rendered by a Catholic priest. In 1860 I wrote to Field-Marshal Lord Combermere as the only man then living likely to know of the relations which subsisted, during the Peninsular War, between Wellington and Dr. Curtis, Rector of the Irish College of Salamanca. The following is a portion of his reply:—