Oxburgh Hall: A Family’s Faith Through the Centuries

As we celebrate our fifty years as the diocese of East Anglia, let us remember the great places and events that mark the living Faith of places and people here in East Anglia. This month Mary Bedingfeld, assisted by Laura Bedingfeld and Fr John Morrill explore how steadfast Catholic faith, quietly sustained through persecution, war and hardship, helped preserve and strengthen Catholic life in East Anglia over more than 500 years.

This article recounts the trials and triumphs of the Bedingfeld family and their ancestral home, offering powerful testimony to faith enduring through persecution. Oxburgh Hall, now in the care of the National Trust, contains many reminders of the Bedingfelds’ courageous Catholic witness. The house and grounds are open daily until their Christmas closure.

The Bedingfeld family ‘rose’ in the fifteenth century and built the wonderful Oxburgh Hall at the end of the Wars of the Roses (and hence fully moated). It was completed in time for a visit by Henry VII and his Queen in 1497. Sir Edmund, son of Oxburgh’s builder, served as Steward to Queen Catherine of Aragon, and his wife was the person charged by Henry VIII to carry out his instructions for Catherine’s funeral in 1536. [Her tomb in the Anglican Cathedral in Peterborough is still there.] Loyalty to this wronged Queen probably left deep scars. Sir Henry, son of Edward, was the first to rally to Catherine’s daughter Mary Tudor in Framlingham as she set out on her successful march on London to claim the throne in 1553, and he served on her Privy Council. When Mary died, Sir Henry accepted her sister Elizabeth as Queen but refused to take the oath of loyalty to her Protestant Church. From that day forward, the Bedingfelds struggled to maintain a dual loyalty to Crown and the Catholic faith. They did not join any of the rebellions against Elizabeth or James I, but neither did they compromise their faith.

When Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, Catholics came to be seen as a political threat, not only a religious nuisance. In 1585, it became high treason for a Catholic priest ordained abroad to enter or remain in England; if caught, the punishment for these courageous priests was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. To help protect them, St Nicholas Owen, a lay Jesuit, built priest holes in Catholic homes in case a raid was made. Oxburgh Hall has such a priest hole, still in existence today, as witness to the courage of its owners and the priests they sheltered. (When you visit Oxburgh you will be surprised just how cramped these priest holes were!)

This was one form of quiet defiance. Another was to send their children abroad where they could receive a Catholic education and practise their faith freely. In the penal times, at least fifteen Bedingfelds (from Oxburgh and cadet branches) studied in northern France and what is now Belgium. One Bedingfeld gave fourteen daughters and granddaughters to the convent, and at least twelve Bedingfelds became priests, several returning with great courage to England, one (at a time of particular danger during the Civil Wars of the 1640s) serving as Provincial of the 150+ Jesuits then in England and Wales.

Successive heads of the family, living at Oxburgh, were at the heart of a small but persistently loyal group of Catholic gentry families with whom they intermarried. Through their quiet witness, and willingness to endure double taxation and heavy fines for refusing to attend the national Church, the family helped to keep the faith alive and, incredibly, to help it grow.

During the Civil Wars, the Bedingfelds fought loyally for the Crown. In retaliation, Oxburgh Hall was pillaged and partially burnt down by parliamentarians, and Sir Henry (known as the Cavalier) was imprisoned in the Tower for two years with all his lands confiscated [he had to buy them back through mortgages that crippled the family for generations]. At the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the King conferred a baronetcy (hereditary knighthood) on Henry’s son, also Henry, but did not pay off the debts incurred. Some people were converted to Catholicism by the courage of the martyrs, others by the persistent witness of families like the Bedingfelds.

Lesser forms of persecution (amounting to exclusion from public life and some spasmodic financial penalties) continued down to 1829, and apart from some flirtation with Jacobitism in the early eighteenth century, the family lived in debt-ridden peace until three heirs to Oxburgh married into leading Catholic families, the brides bringing with them dowries that allowed the Hall to be renovated. One of those marriages, to the daughter of Lord Montagu, also brought to Oxburgh priceless tapestries (still on display) made by the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots during her captivity in England.

The second fortuitous marriage was that of Sir Henry, 6th Bt, to Margaret Paston in 1826. She was the last of her famous Norfolk family and a considerable heiress. Following the Emancipation Act of 1829, the young couple made extensive renovations to the house and built a private chapel in the grounds, dedicated to the Immaculate Conception and St Margaret. Sir Henry’s effigy is in the mortuary chapel, dressed in the robes of a Knight of Malta. The chapel pews were recuperated from the family chapel of Henry’s mother, Charlotte Jerningham, in Costessey. Finally, the marriage of their son to the only child and heir of Edward Clavering of Callaly Castle, Northumbria, brought a pre-Reformation altarpiece to the chapel, a very precious work of art made in the 1530s, which depicts the Passion of Christ and the martyrdoms of St James and St Catherine.

The family continued to be important supporters of Catholicism in the area, not least in helping to welcome to Swaffham nuns from Austria who opened a convent and a school where, among many others, they educated several generations of the Bedingfeld family. The family today is deeply embedded in the parish of Our Lady of Pity in Swaffham and still welcomes parishioners to the chapel at Oxburgh (they still live in one wing and own the chapel) on the first Saturday of each month and at Corpus Christi.

A short but colourful biography is available for those interested in more details about the Bedingfeld family and Oxburgh Hall, on sale in the National Trust bookshop. And there is so much to evoke the story told here – not least the priest’s hole, the tapestries, and the wonderful altarpiece in the chapel. Do come and see them!

Picture credit: DeFacto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oxburgh_Hall_-_viewed_from_the_west.jpg)

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