Note 146 — Chapter XLIV

— The Mounteagle Letter is a remarkably clever composition. Its liveliness, its pithiness, its directness, and its force, in spite of its designed obscurity, gain upon one more and more the oftener one ponders it. But Father Oldcorne was a very clever man. His combination of qualities, theoretical and practical, shows him to have been a man of distinct genius.

In Foley’s “Records,” vol. iv., there is, as has been already remarked, a portrait of this great Yorkshire Jesuit, showing a portion of Old Ouse Bridge, York, and St. William’s Chapel in the left-hand corner. The face depicted betokens an intellect of great acumen, a heart of great benevolence, both controlled by a will strong with the strength of persistent discipline. The keenness of the countenance portrayed struck a distinguished Oxford friend of mine forcibly the moment he beheld the picture, for he remarked forthwith, “He has an acute look!” The countenance, moreover, as another Protestant friend in effect observed, has that look of infinite patience, of calm resignation, and of sweet melancholy, which was so characteristic of the best of the old English Roman Catholics during “troublesome times.”

This phrase, “troublesome times,” was used in my hearing about the year 1890 by an ancient lady, the late Mrs. Ann Matterson, widow, of High-field, Bishop Thornton, near Ripon. Mrs. Matterson was an interesting specimen of the solid, calm, old, Garden-of-the-Soul type of English Catholic, or as they proudly and touchingly put it, “Catholics that have never lost the Faith.” My informant said she was the daughter of one Francis Darnbrough — a family well known in that part of Yorkshire, a Darnbrough being Wakeman (or Mayor) of Ripon in 1542: that her father’s branch of the Darnbrough family had regained the Catholic Faith through marriages with the Bishop Thornton Hawkesworths, hereditary Catholics, who were formerly tenants under the Lords Grantley and Markenfield, of Markenfield Hall. Mrs. Matterson furthermore told me on that occasion that she was distantly connected (through the marriage of her aunt with a Mr. William Bickerdyke) with one of the York Catholic Martyrs, whose cause of canonization had been, in 1886, introduced at Rome, namely, with “the Venerable” Robert Bickerdyke, a gentleman born at Low Hall, near Scotton, in the Parish of Farnham, near Knaresbrough, and who suffered at the York Tyburn, in 1586, for being “reconciled to the Church of Rome.” The aged lady also said that her uncle, William Bickerdyke, had lived at Brampton Hall, on the River Ure, close to Mulwith: that Brampton Hall had belonged to the ancient and now extinct Yorkshire Catholic family of Tankard, or Tancred — one branch of which had their seat at Whixley: and that at Brampton Hall there had been a place to hide the priest in during “troublesome times.”

For an interesting work on priests’ hiding-places see “Secret Chambers and Hiding-places,” by Allen Fea (Bousfield, 1901).