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Herbert 1832-1903 Vaughan

priests, john and westminster

VAUGHAN, HERBERT (1832-1903), cardinal and arch bishop of Westminster, was born at Gloucester on April 15, 1832, the eldest son of lieutenant-colonel John Francis Vaughan, head of an old Roman Catholic family, the Vaughans of Court field, Herefordshire. His mother, a daughter of John Rolls of The Hendre, Monmouthshire, was intensely religious; and all the daughters of the family entered convents, while six of the eight sons took priest's orders, three of them rising to the episco pate, Roger becoming archbishop of Sydney, and John bishop of Sebastopolis. Herbert spent six years at Stonyhurst, and was then sent to study with the Benedictines at Downside, near Bath, and subsequently at the Jesuit school of Brugelette, Belgium, which was afterwards removed to Paris. In 1851 he went to Rome. After two years of study at the Accademia dei nobili ecclesiastici, where he became a friend and disciple of Manning, he took priest's orders at Lucca in 1854. On his return to Eng land he became for a period vice-president of St. Edmund's Col lege, Ware, at that time the chief seminary for candidates for the priesthood in the south of England. Since childhood he had been filled with zeal for foreign missions, and he conceived the determi nation to found a great English missionary college to fit young priests for the work of evangelizing the heathen. With this object

he made a great begging expedition to America in 1863, from which he returned with Li i,o0o. St. Joseph's Foreign Missionary College, Mill Hill Park, London, was opened in 5869. Vaughan also became proprietor of the Tablet, and used its columns vig orously for propagandist purposes. In 1872 he was consecrated bishop of Salford, and in 1892 succeeded Manning as archbishop of Westminster, receiving the cardinal's hat in 1893.

It was his most cherished ambition to see before he died an adequate Roman Catholic cathedral in Westminster, and he laboured untiringly to secure subscriptions, with the result that its foundation stone was laid in 1895, and that when he died, on June,19, 1903, the building was so far complete that a Requiem Mass was said there over his body before it was removed to its resting-place at Mill Hill Park.

See the Life of Cardinal Vaughan, by J. G. Snead Cox (2 vols., London, 191o).