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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
There has been a tradition at Harvington Hall in Worcestershire that for twelve years (sometimes given as 1666-1678) it was the home of the martyr John Wall, who was hanged at Worcester in August 1679. The stock printed accounts are those of Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B., in Forgotten Shrines (1910, 1936), pp. 253-280, and in his Life of Blessed John Wall, The Martyr of Harvington Hall (1932, 1947). More recent views can be found in my “Blessed John Wall” (The Venerabile, May and November 1960), in Fr. Howard Docherty's “Blessed John Joachim Wall” (Westminster Cathedral Chronicle, August 1960), and in Mr. Frank Davets Blessed John Wall (Office of the Vice-Postulation, 1962).
1. The copy I have used is that in the British Museum (515 K. 25). There is another in the library of the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House, Piccadilly (Prattintoti Miscellanea II, 35, 1). The Proceedings and Tryal were reprinted by Cobbett in State Trials VII (1810), 730-764. There are also two MS copies. One, in Alban Butler's hand, is in the archives at Archbishop's House, Birmingham, and was formerly at Oscott (E.4.3, pp. 665-684). At the end Butler has noted: “This is writ in ye martyrs own hand in 26 pages in small folio, in a large hand in haste, as it seems, in white ink scarce legible”. This was the copy used by Camm for his Life (p. 53). The other MS copy is in the Franciscan archives at Forest Gate; the last page of it is illustrated in Plate 3 of Mr. Davey's pamphlet. Both the Butler and Forest Gate copies omit three paragraphs at the end, which Wall seems to have sent out of prison in a separate letter, though Mr. Davey (p. 13) quotes the substance of the second from Noake (There was another Objection, &c.: pp. 12-13 in the printed copies). Two variant readings should be noted. In the first, Camm (p. 29) and Mr. Davey (p. 10) say that on Wall's arrest the magistrate, Sir John Pakington, asked him “of what College I was”. This is Butler's text, though he inserts the caution, “If I read the word right”. The printed version however has “of what Calling”, which makes much better sense in the context. In the second variant, the printed version (p. 1), which is followed by Noake, has “I came to a friend's house in Worcestershire, not intending to stay there”. Butler and Camm (p. 26) omit the not, thereby confusing the whole paragraph.
2. The MS. is at Forest Gate; most of it is printed in Camm's Life, The Honorer has not been identified; the date is given by the reference to Wall's arrest “at the latter end of November last” (Camm, p. 18).
3. Nash gives his source as the passage of Dodd printed as (D) above.
4. Fr. Brownlow was priest at Harvington for much of the nineteenth century. His History, in one volume, and Genealogy of the Throckmortons in three, all finely bound in red leather, are among the MSS. at Coughton. For them and other writings of his, see H. R. Hodgkinson, Recent Discoveries at Harvington Hall, Birmingham Archaeological Society LXII (1938), pp. 1 ff. Fr. Brownlow was familiar with the Coughton deeds and from time to time cites Nash.
5. The paragraph is quoted by Camm (Life, p. 20); I have checked it with the original. The substance of this account of Harvington (Genealogy III, pp. 49-72) was printed in The Cabinet for February 1859 (cf. p. 49).
6. The original MS. was never printed and seems to have been lost but there is a typescript copy, made in 1896 by Sir Benjamin Stone, in Birmingham Reference Library (572,391). My quotation is taken from it.
7. Notebook at The Priest's House, Harvington. Quoted by Camm (Life, p. 20) and Mr. Davey (p. 8). There is a typed transcript of it at Coughton (Folder 41).
8. On pp. 867-8 Foley copies several paragraphs from Gervase Sacheverill which describe a meeting on All Hallows Eve 1678 between Wall and the Jesuit Claude de la Colombière. This scene was taken as solid history by Thaddeus, , The Franciscans in England (1898), pp. 311–314 Google Scholar, and by Gillow, C.R.S. XVII, p. 364, but it does not seem to have any source outside Galton's imagination.
9. This is the date given in Hodgkinson, H. R., Further Notes on Harvington Hall, Birmingham Arch. Soc. Trans. LXXIII (1955), p. 98 Google Scholar. Camm (Forgotten Shrines, p. 255) gives it as 1646. The sandstone is now crumbling and the figure cannot be read. Wall was in fact ordained in December 1645 but did not come back to England until 1648 (C.R.S. XL, 793).
10. The True Honorer (note 2 above) says “the latter end of November”.
11. This article first appeared in the Bromsgrove Weekly Messenger for 23 August 1884 (the issue nearest to the anniversary of Wall's martyrdom). The same year it was reprinted by the Messenger as a pamphlet, from which my quotation is taken. In 1886 Stanton included it as an appendix to the second volume of his Rambles and Researches in Worcestershire Churches.
A third revised ed. came out in 1895, a fourth in 1898 and a fifth in 1899. Copies of all of them are in Birmingham Reference Library. Stanton seems to be using (pp. 8-9) the “old account of Harvington Hall, printed a good many years back” which Camm mentions in Forgotten Shrines, pp. 260-1. He refers (p. 6) to “an account in the Catholic Magazine ajjout ten years ago, from which I have gleaned some information for this sketch”. This may be Camm's “old account” but I have not been able to find a copy of it. In the 1899 ed. (p. 14) Stanton mentions “pleasing and profitable interviews” he has had with Fr. Brownlow: both he and Camm probably used Brown-low's Cabinet article.
12. Reprinted in Humphreys, Studies in Worcestershire History (1938), p. 125 Google Scholar. Humphreys gives no reference, but his bibliography (omitted in the reprint) includes Stanton. In the reprint the wording is changed to run: “There was staying in London … Fr. John Wall, who for more than twenty years had been labouring as a missionary priest at Harvington, in the parish of Chaddesley Corbett, and also domestic chaplain at Harvington Hall” (my italics).
13. Camm got his information mainly from Humphreys. In the Life (p. 4) he says: “I have known and loved [Harvington] since Mr. John Humphreys first took me there nearly forty years ago”. Humphreys's paper of 1903 is quoted in Forgotten Shrines (p. 270), and the phrase “a man of science who acted as our guide” (p. 253) is a tasteful allusion to the fact that Humphreys was a dentist (Studies in Worcestershire History, p. 2). Humphreys in turn acknowledged help from Camm on p. 94 of his paper.
14. Proceedings and Tryal, pp. 4-5; Camm, Life, pp. 37, 39-40.
15. Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives, C. 414.
16. Life, p. 20.
17. Blessed John Wall, p. 8.
18. Harvington Registers 1752-1823 (C.R.S. XVII), pp. 371-418.
19. Same, p. 369.
20. Squiers, Secret Hiding Places (1934), p. 73.
21. Squiers, p. 36.
22. Westminster Cathedral Chronicle, August 1960, p. 205.
23. C.R.S. XVII, p. 367; Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives, A.3.
24. Lady Yate's endowment deed of 1677 does not mean that there must have been a resident priest at the Hall before then, still less that he must have been a secular. Plenty of houses in the third quarter of the seventeenth century were still served by any itinerant priest, secular or regular, who happened to be available. See Aveling, The Catholic Recusants of the West Riding (Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1963), pp. 240-242.
