23 Facts About Herbert Vaughan

Herbert Alfred Henry Joseph Thomas Vaughan was an English prelate of the Catholic Church.

Herbert Vaughan served as Archbishop of Westminster from 1892 until his death in 1903, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1893.

Herbert Vaughan was the founder in 1866 of St Joseph's Foreign Missionary Society, known best as the Mill Hill Missionaries.

Herbert Vaughan founded the Catholic Truth Society and St Bede's College, Manchester.

In 1871 Vaughan sent a group of Mill Hill priests to the United States to minister to freedmen.

Herbert Vaughan was born at Gloucester, the eldest son of Lieutenant-Colonel John Francis Vaughan, of an old recusant family, the Vaughans of Courtfield, Herefordshire.

Herbert Vaughan's mother, Eliza Rolls from The Hendre, Monmouthshire, was a Catholic convert and intensely religious.

All five of the Herbert Vaughan daughters became nuns, while six of the eight sons received Holy Orders and became priests.

Two were later called as bishops in addition to Herbert Vaughan: Roger became Archbishop of Sydney, Australia and John became titular bishop of Sebastopolis and auxiliary bishop in Salford, England.

In 1851 Herbert Vaughan went to Rome, and studied for two years at the Collegio Romano, where for a time he shared lodgings with the poet, Aubrey Thomas de Vere.

Herbert Vaughan became a friend and disciple of Henry Edward Manning.

Since childhood, Herbert Vaughan had been filled with zeal for foreign missions.

Herbert Vaughan convinced Cardinal Wiseman and the bishops to agree to a proposal to build a seminary in England that would train priests to serve on missions throughout the British Empire.

Herbert Vaughan succeeded in opening St Joseph's Foreign Missionary College, Mill Hill Park, London, in 1869.

In 1871, Herbert Vaughan led a group of priests to the US to establish a mission society to minister to freedmen in the South.

In 1872 Herbert Vaughan was consecrated as the second Bishop of Salford, succeeding Bishop William Turner.

Herbert Vaughan relinquished his position as superior at St Joseph's College, but in 1876 established St Bede's College, conceived as a "commercial school" to prepare the sons of Manchester Catholics for a life in business and the professions.

Herbert Vaughan chose to live at Hampton Grange, on the St Bede's College campus, with his own Bishop's residence on Chapel Street in Salford being given over to a Seminary.

In 1892 Herbert Vaughan succeeded Manning as Archbishop of Westminster, receiving the cardinal's hat in 1893 as Cardinal-Priest of Santi Andrea e Gregorio al Monte Celio.

Herbert Vaughan was a man of different type from his predecessor; he had none of the ultramontane Manning's intellectual finesse or his ardor for social reform.

Herbert Vaughan worked untiringly to secure subscriptions for a capital campaign, with the result that the foundation stone for the cathedral was laid in 1895.

When Herbert Vaughan died in 1903 at the age of 71, the building was so far complete that a Requiem Mass was said there.

Herbert Vaughan's body was interred at the cemetery of St Joseph's College, the headquarters of the Mill Hill Missionaries in North London but it was moved back to the cathedral and reinterred in the Chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury in 2005.