by Edward Short
Cecil Chetwynd Kerr, Marchioness of Lothian [née Lady Cecil Chetwynd-Talbot] was born in 1801 at Ingestre Hall, Staffordshire, the daughter of Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, 2nd Earl Talbot of Hensol and his wife, Frances Thomasine, daughter of Charles Lambart of Beau Parc, County Meath. Her father paid close attention to her education and, before she came out, had her studying Latin and reading Blackstone’s Commentaries. As for her religious upbringing, it was moderately High Church. After marrying John William Robert Kerr, 7th Marquess of Lothian, she took up residence in Scotland at Newbattle Abbey, Midlothian, where she and her husband had five sons and two daughters. Then, in 1841, tragedy struck when the marquess suddenly died on his estate at Blickling, Norfolk. Even before this terrible loss, Lady Lothian was one of Scotland’s most ardent and generous supporters of Tractarianism. After her loss, her devotion deepened. She gave much of her time and largesse to building and endowing the Neo-Gothic church at Jedburgh for the Scottish Episcopal Church, which had been built in accordance with specifications set out by the Camden Ecclesiological Society. At the consecration of the church, she was joined by John Keble and W. F. Hook.
After Newman’s secession and, then, the Gorham Judgment, in which Privy Councilors ruled that baptism need not be thought a sacrament, the marchioness began to have grave doubts about the legitimacy of the Anglican Church. Once Henry Manning converted in 1851, she confided to a correspondent, “I am very unhappy. I feel as if I were trifling with the concerns of eternity out of sheer cowardice, catching at every straw as an excuse for waiting.”67 Finally, in June of 1851, she embraced the Church of Rome. In December of the same year she visited Newman at the Birmingham Oratory and described to her brother how impressive she found him: “He was most kind. I was nervous, but without cause, for he is so full of sympathy and Christian love that he is the last person one need be afraid of. That which struck me most was his childlike sympathy and humility, and next to that, the vivid clearness with which he gives an opinion. He is a very striking looking person. His saying of Mass is most striking. I do not know what makes the difference, but one is conscious of a difference. It appeared to me very unearthly.”68 The “unearthly” quality that Lady Lothian saw in Newman was one that Newman saw in his dear friend Hurrell Froude, about whom he told Maria Giberne after Froude’s death: “As to dear Froude, I cannot speak of him consistently with my own deep feelings about him, though they are all bright and pleasant. It is a loss such as I never can have again. I love to think and muse upon one who had the most angelic mind of any person I ever fell in with -- the most unearthly, the most gifted. I have no painful thoughts in speaking of him, though I cannot trust myself to speak of him to many, but I feel the longer I live, the more I shall miss him. You will do me a most exceeding kindness in giving me your sketch of him.69
Once converted, the marchioness saw to it that her younger children were received as well, though her eldest son, William, the eighth marquess, who later became admiral of the fleet and senior naval lord, remained Episcopalian. As a Catholic, Lady Lothian aided female prisoners and the poor in Edinburgh and established the Refugee Benevolent Fund in London. The marchioness was joined in her charitable works by her friends, Lady Londonderry, the great beauty, and Charlotte, Duchess of Buccleuch, both of whom followed her into the Church. When Lady Lothian’s youngest son John, not yet 14, died at Ushaw College of pneumonia in January of 1855, while Lady Lothian was in Rome, Newman wrote her a moving letter of condolence: “I have heard that dear John has been thought too good for this world by Him who so lovingly brought him near Himself a year ago. Ever since I heard of his illness I have been thinking of him. I saw him last year at Ushaw, and was so struck by him that I talked of him to others for some time after. He came into my room of his own accord, and made friends with me in an instant. For him, how can I but rejoice that he should be taken out of this dark world in the freshness and bloom of his innocence and piety. But it comes over me most keenly that if once seeing him made me love him so much, what must it have been to you? And oh! how sad in a human light that you and his sisters should have been so far away – and poor Ralph in bed and unable to go to him!” Lord Ralph Kerr, John’s elder brother, was ill with pleurisy at the Birmingham Oratory.70 Later, in 1873, when she praised his eulogy for their dear departed mutual friend, James Hope-Scott, he wrote: “Who could know Mr Hope Scott without loving him! Whatever I said in my Sermon, however poor, would raise remembrances and affectionate thoughts in the minds of my hearers, better than any words of mine.”71 Newman’s Oratory accounts show with what consistent generosity Lady Lothian and Hope-Scott supported both the Oratory Church and School.
Of the many people who converted to the ancient faith in England in the nineteenth century, Lady Lothian was not untypical. She was ready to make enormous sacrifices for the faith, even though these meant estrangement from family and dear friends. She gave unstintingly of her time and money to Christ’s poor. She was at once deeply English and yet deeply devout. And she was familiar enough with the history of her country to know that the Protestant version of its history was profoundly false, though in this she had unusual advantages. Not all girls, certainly not aristocratic girls, grew up reading Blackstone.
Oddly enough, Newman blamed the Italians for the neglect of Catholic education, contending that such neglect had something to do with the fact that they enjoyed a “monopoly of the magisterium,” though, in the Apologia, he also noted that “certainly, if there is one consideration more than another which should make us English grateful to Pius the Ninth, it is that, by giving us a Church of our own, he has prepared the way for our own habits of mind, our own manner of reasoning, our own tastes, and our own virtues, finding a place and thereby a sanctification, in the Catholic Church.”72
In Newman’s correspondence, we can see how he helped the English take hold of this Church of their own by helping the female faithful grapple with their difficulties. In 1866, one year after she converted, the prolific popular novelist Lady Chatterton (1806–1876), began to have very serious doubts. One of the reasons why she doubted her new faith was that she had come from a strong High Church background: her father was the Reverend Lascelles Iremonger, Prebendary of Winchester, and like most Britons she found the doctrines of Catholicism hard to credit, especially those regarding the Real Presence and the Blessed Virgin. “These are trials,” Newman wrote to her, “which God puts upon us, and we cannot at our will put them aside. You have been so kind as to state fully your difficulties, and to say that you do not wish for an answer. Nor could I, without writing a volume, go through them all. Nor do I think, any more than you do, that it would fulfil any good purpose to attempt an elaborate answer to them. To make you happy, as a Catholic, is the work of God alone; if you put yourself into His hands, and ask for His grace perseveringly, He will gradually remove all your doubts and perplexities; of this I am most confident.”73 This resembled the advice that he gave to Lady Herbert of Lea when her son took it into his head to reject Christianity root and branch: “You know, it frequently happens that medical men say of a patient—’Leave him alone—give him no physic—let nature act’ … The best hope of his changing lies in his having no one to combat with him. Especially no one whom he loves or knows about. There is no substance in his scepticism, and this is most likely to come home upon him, if silence is offered to this restless activity of mind …”74 Still, if he would not refute Lady Chatterton, he would tell her what she was renouncing:
To me it is wonderful that you should speak as you do. Why, what exercise of devotion is there, which equals that of going before the Blessed Sacrament, before our Lord Jesus really present, though unseen? To kneel before Him, to put oneself into His hands, to ask His grace, and to rejoice in the hope of seeing Him in heaven! In the Catholic Church alone is the great gift to be found. You may go through the length and breadth of England, and see beautiful prospects enough, such as you speak of, the work of the God of nature, but there is no benediction from earth or sky which f
alls upon us like that which comes to us from the Blessed Sacrament, which is Himself.75
Later, when Lady Chatterton complained of Newman’s occasional asperity, her bishop William Ullathorne wrote: “I know Dr Newman’s vigorous way. Depend upon it, my dear friend, it was from no want of sympathy, but from strong sympathy restrained, that he wrote. He wished to give you an electric shock, to startle you out of security, and to urge the exercises of faith as the means of entering into faith. Surgical operations are painful even though they come from a loving hand. Prayer, and prayer with the heart open, and as near to God as it can come, is the way to win the grace and gift of faith.”76 Lady Chatterton confirmed the soundness of this counsel when she wrote to Newman in September 1875: “Dear Doctor Newman,—When I sent you a little printed paper of my ‘Confessions,’ two years ago, you expressed great sorrow, and that it pained you to read it. You will see, from what I now send you, that I have, thank God, been able gradually to see that I was wrong. It has been a long process, and has caused me many most painfully sleepless nights and suffering days; but I know you will be kindly glad of the result.”77 Newman’s response was exultant: “My Dear Lady Chatterton,—You will easily understand how I rejoiced to read your letter this morning. You will be rewarded abundantly, do not doubt it, for the pain, anxiety and weariness you have gone through in arriving at the safe ground and sure home of peace where you now are. I congratulate, with all my heart, the dear friends who surround you upon so happy a termination of their own anxieties and prayers. May God keep you ever in the narrow way and shield you from all those temptations and trials by which so many earnest souls are wrecked. This is the sincere prayer of yours most truly, John H. Newman.”78
Between 1868 and 1875, Bishop Ullathorne wrote Lady Chatterton a series of letters about the Catholic faith that are some of the most powerful he ever wrote. In one, he counseled his doubt-ridden friend, who feared that she might be fonder of her friends than God: “When the love of God is supreme in us, then every other love partakes in this Divine love, becomes exalted, purified, and sanctified. For this is the grandeur of divine charity, that it draws all loves into the divine love, and regulates them all … for this is the grand double law of Catholic charity, that whilst we love God, and are subject to God, we likewise love God in our neighbor and are subject to God in being humble to our neighbor. We love in them what is of God, and are subject to them in what is of God; and all this is referred to God, and not merely to the creature as such. Thus we learn to see God’s side, which is the beautiful side in all persons.”79 In this passage, Ullathorne might have been describing the relationship that Newman had with all of his contemporaries.
Unlike some of the other women covered in this chapter, Lady Chatterton can be vividly known from her memoirs, which show that she was disposed to asking religious questions from an early age: “I remember that one governess considered me unteachable, because I could not say the second psalm by heart, and especially the verse, ‘Why do the heathen so furiously rage?’ which she used to repeat over and over again to me in the vain endeavour to beat it into my head. The fact is, I was wondering all the time why the heathen did so furiously rage, and who they could be; so that the more my mind was made to dwell on the words, the more puzzled I became, and the less I remembered my lesson.” Later, after marrying, she spent a good deal of time in London society. “As we advance in life,” she noted in one journal entry, “time flies so fast that it seems composed of nothing but Mondays. During the season in London, perpetual tumult and bustle, scarcely possible to gain a quiet half-hour, and then the rest of the time moving about from one country house to another. Delightful for the moment, but impressing upon one the perpetual change of all things—the perpetual passing away.” In this fleeting world, she met some of the liveliest people of the age and always came away with amusing recollections of them. One was Walter Savage Landor, the poet and witty prose stylist, whose Imaginary Conversations are now so unjustly forgotten. “I sat next to Landor, without knowing who he was,” she recalled. “I have seldom seen the expression of a highly cultivated mind and courteous genius so beautifully stamped on any countenance as on the Landor of those days.”80 After expressing admiration for his writing, she recalled him doubting whether anything he wrote would survive: “I shall never be much read —still less remembered. I have filed away my mind by too much reading. Shakespeare would never have become such an immortal author if he had been a great reader, and Milton would have produced a greater poem if his head had not been so full of reading. He has confused us with his variety.”81 She also met other lions. “I sat next to Macaulay,” she jotted down in one journal entry, “who gave us a most interesting dissertation on painting, and related in short the history and vicissitudes of many of the most celebrated pictures in different countries. Sidney Smith waited in vain for what he called some of Macaulay’s ‘brilliant flashes of silence.’ On Saturday we met Carlyle and Dickens at his house.” When her first novel appeared, which was published anonymously, she made a point of bringing it up in conversation and “derived much amusement from hearing people talk about it and ask if I had read it. Of course I heard it abused as well as praised. I do not remember being much annoyed or pained by anything I heard; but I enjoyed the praise it received intensely, and the first bit of commendation that the Quarterly Review gave me kept me awake all night with joy.”82 When Queen Victoria ascended the throne, Lady Chatterton made this shrewd entry in her journal. “I am sure that the circumstance of a young girl coming now to the British throne has, at least, retarded the fall of the kingdom of England and legitimacy for a hundred years, and has tended to check the progress of revolution all over the world. I felt convinced of this when I heard yesterday at Lady Shelley’s some old hardened politicians talking with tears in their eyes of the delight and admiration the first sight of their young Queen in the Council Chamber had caused.”83 Her faith also enlivened her journal. “We cannot love God, we cannot think with pleasure on Him during long sleepless nights, unless we have endeavoured to keep His commandments. To obey is, at first, a strong exercise of faith, as well as of self-control. By ‘at first’ I mean before our hearts are imbued with love of God … We must all without exception submit to become children… . no doubt, it is hard … to acquire (I will not say to retain it, if they have it) that child-like Faith in things unseen, to become blind that [we] may see clearly, to obey that [we] may be free.”84 Reading these journal entries, it is easy to see why Bishop Ullathorne and, indeed, Newman became so fond of Lady Chatterton: she was an intelligent, charming, discerning woman.
After returning to the faith in the 1870s, Lady Chatterton, together with her second husband, Edward Heneage Dering, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, helped restore Baddesley Clinton, the moated manor house of grey sandstone in what was once the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire. In the 1590s, Catholic priests were hidden there in ingenious priest-holes. In the nineteenth century, under the direction of Marmion Ferrers and his wife Rebecca Dulcibella, the house became the center of a rather antiquarian, if passionate Catholicism, which was reflected in the Jacobean black velvet favored by the Ferrers. Despite her good works and popular writings, Lady Chatterton did not escape the mockery of gossips. After the death of her first husband, the Irish baronet Sir William Chatterton, the loss of whose rents during the potato famine sent him to an early grave, Lady Chatterton remarried. When Edward Dering, twenty years her junior, called on Lady Chatterton to pay court to her niece, the elder lady did not hear him correctly and thought he was paying court to her. He was too gallant to undeceive her and so they were married.85
As it happened, the marriage was happy. Dering was not only a devoted but a grateful husband, who appreciated how his wife’s hard-won faith strengthened his own. Shortly before her death, he recalled: “In 1874–5 I could perceive a change in her feelings towards the Church. Her mind began to find repose in the contemplation of it. Her sympathies were attracted. She prayed continually for guidance, and i
n the month of April, 1874, wrote a few lines on a scrap of paper which I value more than anything and everything I possess, or might possess in this world. The lines were written in pencil one morning when about to attend the Communion Service in a Protestant church. They are as follows:
Keep me steadfast if I’m right,
If I’m wrong, God give me light,
Let me feel Thy presence near,
Give me Faith to banish Fear!”86
In 1866, when Lady Chatterton confessed to Newman her difficulties with what she regarded as the foreigness of the Catholic faith, Newman responded with a letter of characteristic acuteness, in which he addressed the same ‘home thoughts’ that prevented so many Anglicans from even contemplating, much less acceding to, the claims of Rome. “Every society has its own ways; it is not wonderful then, that the Catholic Church has its own way of praying, its own ceremonies, and the like. These are strange and perhaps at first unwelcome to those who come to them from elsewhere, just as foreign manners are unpleasant to those who never travelled. We all like home best, because we understand the ways of home. Abraham doubtless found his life in Canaan not so pleasant to him, as his native Mesopotamia. We ever must sacrifice something, to gain great blessings. If the Catholic Church is from God, to belong to her is a make-up for many losses. We must beg of God to change our tastes and habits, and to make us love for His sake what by nature we do not love.”87 And he followed this up with an appeal that could not have been more direct. “At this sacred season then, my dear Lady Chatterton, I appeal to you by the love of Christ, and beg of you, to resolve to take on you His easy yoke. Do not attempt to live without any yoke at all; take on you the yoke of Christ. Submit your reason and your will to Him, as He speaks to you in His Church. In addressing you, I feel I am not addressing a common person, but one who can distinguish great things from little, and who will not, on seriously weighing the matter, put details and minutiae before the great matters of the law. St Paul says that the Church is the pillar and ground of the Truth. He says that there is One Body as there is One Faith. Our Lord has built His Church on Peter. These are great facts -- they keep their ground against small objections, however many the latter may be. I cannot call your objections great ones; nor would you, if you saw them from the proper stand-point.” And he signed off with a benediction, which Lady Chatterton must have recalled in the years ahead. “May God bless you, and give you grace, and lead you on, and may you bear patiently this time of darkness, till the True Light shines upon you.”88