A Great Man’s Mother

New Zealand Tablet, 11 April 1912, Page 7

A Great Man’s Mother

;In the early part of the eighteenth century, in the little village of Claxby, England, dwelt. a carpenter named Lingard and a yeoman named Rennell. The latter had a daughter,, Elizabeth, who was five years old when John Lingard, her future husband, was born, in the white-washed cottage known as ‘ Lingard’s Place. The Lingards, ‘ living under the very shadow of the village church,’ were probably members of the Established Church of England. ‘For those were days ’ (says the biographer) ‘ when recusancy was a serious offence, abstension from church punishable by fine and imprisonment,' and the statute book still,bore those penal laws of which Burke was one ; day to say never did anything more savage proceed from - the perverted ingenuity of man.”’ These laws (says the Sacred Heart Review), however, did not prevent Elizabeth Rennell’s father from harboring priests' and hearing Mass. ‘ We : used to go in a cart at night to hear Mass, the priest dressed in a round smock to resemble a poor man,’ Elizabeth related in after years, also recalling the penalties inflicted on her father foradhering, to his Faith. Reduced to poverty by the heavy fines and other penalties imposed on the father, the Rennell children were scattered, and ( Elizabeth found her way to London, where John Lingard had preceded her. They met eventually, and the friendship of their childhood ripened into love, but circumstances delayed their marriage until the man was thirty years of age and his wife thirty-five. Before or after ms marriage John r Lingard' became a Catholic. Of the union two children were born, a daughter who died m infancy, and a son,' John, the future historian, who C c m ®. mt 1 o tlle world, February 5, 1771, in the ; village ot . Winchester, where his parents had settled in- the preceding autumn. ' ’ ■ ’ v ‘ 4 ** - Like other great men, John Lingard owed the development of his genius -to his mother. - The biographer gives a charming picture of the child eagerly learning trom his mother the rudiments of education, and of the mother’s efforts to feed the boy’s desire for books, particularly history. She could always ‘keep him quiet.’ by giving him a book. The handsome, studious boy

was dearly loved, and carefully ; nurtured under wise ■ parental care I . When the time came to give him up, the mother, made the sacrifice heroically. She sent him "across the sea to. the English college at Douay, where > the priest who had baptised him had secured a burse for him. At the age of eleven, John Lingard entered the college doors * Deo - Gratias,’ he - wrote sixty-five years ►after, recalling the ; date that was always dear,to him. ‘We may assume,’ says the writer, ‘that it was during the Easter holidays of 1793 that Lingard went •to Winchester to see his parents, after an absence of more than ten years. Mrs. Lingard’s happiness may be imagined to see her son, who had left her as a boy, returned with all the promises of childhood fulfilled the gifts in which his parents had rejoiced developed into the fairest fruits, the light in his merry eyes not dimmed, but heightened, and his vocation to the priesthood confirmed.’ - The -elder Lingard did not live to see his son’s first work published, but the mother was spared to see him reckoned by Protestants and Catholics alike among the literary glories of his country.