History of Reading Society

THE subject of the May talk was “The return of Catholicism in Reading” and the speakers were John and Lindsay Mullaney.

Both John and his wife, Lindsay, were teachers at the Catholic Blessed Hugh Faringdon School in Reading. Later, they opened a bookshop in Caversham and co-founded the Scallop Shell Press.

In 1532, Henry VIII ordered Parliament to pass legislation to curb the authority of the papacy in England and Wales.

This grudging break with the Roman Catholic church by the King was caused by his failure to obtain from Pope Clement VII a divorce from his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon.

In Reading the most tangible concomitant of this policy was the dissolution of the abbey whose gaunt ruins are a reminder of the church’s once significant power in the kingdom.

In 1539, its last abbot, Hugh Cook Faringdon, was ignominiously executed after being found guilty of treason.

Protestant reformers demanded that all the accoutrements of Catholic religious ritual, including the images of the saints and the high altar, were to be banished from the town’s churches; thenceforth, the focus of church services would be readings from the Bible and the preaching of sermons.

In the reign of Elizabeth I, Cardinal William Allen, an Englishman in Rome, was appointed to set up colleges to train priests, or Jesuits as they became known, who would return to England, undetected, in order to celebrate the mass to the recusant Catholic population.

The Blount family at Mapledurham House was a notable recusant household which provided a safe house for Jesuit priests.

In 1829, Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Act, which permitted Catholics to sit in parliament, a necessity after the unification of the British and Irish parliaments in 1801.

It also restored religious and property rights removed under the Tudor monarchs.

The Cowslade Manuscript, an important document believed to be the work of Ellenor Cowslade, would chronicle the return of Catholicism to Reading.

In 1792 a small group of French priests arrived in the town; they had fled the persecution at home in the wake of the Revolution.

The priests came to Reading at the invitation of the Smart and Cowslade families, who were respected Catholics and proprietors of the Berkshire Mercury newspaper.

The priests settled in a house at Castle Hill, then known as the King’s Arms. It was they who planted the cedar of Lebanon tree in the garden.

Among their number was Francois Longuet, a young student from the seminary in Caen. When it was safe for the priests to return home, Longuet chose to stay on.

During his time in Reading, Longuet founded his own chapel which he named the Chapel of the Resurrection. The chapel is believed to have stood near Valpy Street.

Longuet was assisted by two nuns and the congregation grew quickly.

Tragically, while travelling at night along Pangbourne Lane (modern Oxford Road), he was brutally murdered during a robbery for the £200 that he was carrying.

Today, the culmination of the return of Catholicism to Reading was the building of St James’s Church opposite the abbey ruins in 1837.

This was made possible by the generous benefaction of James Wheble, of Woodley, who was then the High Sheriff of Berkshire and the owner of the former abbey site.

For more information about membership and future talks, visit history
ofreadingsociety.org.uk

Sean Duggan