Cosmo Bennett

Cosmo Bennett

Catholicism and persecution

Catholics surviving Persecution: Bennetts, Reids and MacHatties

Cosmo Bennett, born in July 1801, was the fourth and last child of James Bennett (b. 1740) and Jannet Reid (b. 1762). They had married on 20^th November 1792 in the parish of Rathven, Banffshire. Their marriage certificate records that James was living at the Mains o’ Buckie, and Janet in the village of Rannachy close by, in the Parish of Rathven. She was born on the Letterfourie Estate on 27 March 1762, and had moved with her family to Rannacky by the mid-1770s to summer 1782 at the latest. She was aged 30 when she married; he was aged 52 or 53. It is not known if it was his first marriage.

Janet Reid had three siblings, all younger brothers, James, William and Cosmo, who, therefore, were uncles to James Gordon Bennett, Margaret and Ann Bennett, and ‘our’ Cosmo. James Gordon, after a number of years working in in a shop in Keith, went to Aberdeen “in company of Uncle Cosmo and commenced business there” but “the Partnership only lasted a few years”. (Chronicles of Keith, p.328) This suggests’ never the less’ that Uncle Cosmo Reid was quite close to his sister’s family. There is also evidence that they went to the same Catholic church in Keith later in life (see below).

‘Our’ Cosmo’s maternal granny was Margaret MacHatty, who had two siblings, an uncle and aunt therefore to ‘our’ Cosmo: great uncle James McHatty and great aunt Elizabeth MacHatty. Cosmo’s wider family were part of a Catholic community south of Buckie and they were to remain Catholic: among the lists of communicants for St Thomas’s Catholic congregation in Keith from Easter 1849 to Easter 1852, inclusive were Janet Reid [or Bennet] and her daughters, Margaret and Ann, plus Cosmo Reid of Newmill (presumably ‘our’ Cosmo’s uncle Cosmo, born 15 August 1782. (St Thomas’s church was completed in 1831, as a successor to a very modest cottage and chapel which had been erected in 1785 at Kempcairn).

Turning to Cosmo’s brother and sisters, they were James Gordon Bennett (born c.1792), Margaret Bennett (b. c.1793-96), and Ann Bennett (b.1798) – see the genealogical trees. Cosmo’s father was a small crofter, therefore not well off. Maybe just before Cosmo was born or soon after, the family had moved from Mains o’ Buckie to Newmill, on the southern edge of the Enzie, about ten miles south of Buckie.
The Auld Brig at Keith Newmill village had been founded with new crofts in 1755 on the founder, Willam Duff, Lord Braco, later becoming the 1st Earl of Keith, also built Fife-Keith across the river in the early nineteenth century. A crossing place there, the Auld Brig (still usable today on foot) had existed since 1609. It was built – a plaque on it says – by Thomas Murray and his wife Janet Lindsay in memory of their son who had died crossing the ford there.

Cosmo, like his elder brother, received his primary education in Newmill, from a Mr. Donald Cameron, described in ‘The Chronicles of Keith’ (pp.137-8), as an “excellent teacher and a superior Arithmatician” [sic], and probably for quite a short time at Keith public school from Rev. John Murdoch, gaining some proficiency in Latin and Greek, before joining the seminary in Aberdeenshire. Following Cosmo Bennett’s life story allows us to understand the religious and social context in the north-east of Scotland where the Reids, Bennetts and MacHatties lived. He would have been brought up with tales of the Rising, the ’45, Bonny Prince Charlie and the defeat – then still within living memory – by the Hanoverian army on the battlefield of Culloden, about 50 miles from his home. More relevantly to Cosmo’s story, he could not have avoided being made aware of the ensuing persecution of Scottish Catholics.

Catholics of the north-east and particularly the Enzie, as we shall see, played vital roles in bringing the Catholic church in Scotland still intact through the century or more of persecution from 1732 onwards and during other difficulties such as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on the Continent.

Cosmo and his MacHattie cousin were to find themselves enrolled in seminaries at an early age, discovering, as we shall see, that training for the priesthood in that time and place often involved risking life and limb. Catholics had been under threat in Scotland since the Protestant Reformation and the successive penal laws of the 17th century. In the 18th century, after Culloden, military suppression of Jacobitism was interpreted by the victorious Hanoverian army, led by the ‘Butcher’ Cumberland, as necessitating the violent suppression of the whole Highland culture, including its religion. The clan system, the tartan, the bagpipes, the Gaelic language – a whole culture – was associated with the remnants of a religion – Roman Catholicism – that was dominant abroad, in Mediterranean Europe, where the exiled pretenders to the English throne, the Stuarts, were offered safe haven. The government in London assumed all Catholics to be Jacobites (not the case). Catholic priests were especially targeted; so, from the Catholic Church’s point of view, the training and ordination of new priests in seminaries become an existential issue.

Catholicism did, however, survive in Scotland thanks to its staunch supporters, though its geography and its numbers underwent real changes. After the Reformation and until the late 18th C., the Catholic communities were to be found overwhelmingly in the Highlands and Islands and north-east Scotland, particularly in Banffshire and the north-east. Catholicism was mainly a rural phenomenon, and Gaelic was the language of many Catholics, especially in the Highlands and Islands, whereas in the 19th C. their religion became a much more urban phenomenon, especially in the south-west and greater Glasgow. In terms of numbers Catholic practitioners in Scotland fell further after persecution due to conversion and later – during the Clearances – through emigration. Then, the upsurge in numbers to the Scottish urban areas came from immigration from Ireland, two reasons being the potato famines and the attraction of the industrial revolution.

After Culloden, the Roman Catholic religion could be practised – in Scotland – only in comparative secrecy. The Penal Laws against Catholics forbade the celebration of Mass, priests were liable to arrest, banishment and – if they returned from exile – to execution; add to this the Hanoverian army of occupation roaming the countryside from Fort George to Fort William and all points north-west on the lookout for forbidden activities. Even when things were quiet, catholic priests had to keep a low profile; often they were forced into hiding and holding services only after dark. There was a reward of 500 merks for the apprehension of any priest (see Marion Lochhead).

There were various other pressures on the availability of priests to their flock and this raises the administrative organization of the Catholic church in Scotland and migration. The ecclesiastical map of Catholic Scotland had been divided up in 1732, into two districts called Highland and Lowland, but each one’s coverage was based not solely on geography, but on language spoken, that is Gaelic or Scots; therefore recognising the existence of two distinct cultures. Initially, the Highland district – remote and inaccessible – proved most loyal to Rome. But after the ‘45, life was to change, also to the east of Inverness, in the “Lowland” district, especially in areas difficult of access to the outsider, like the Braes of Enzie or the Braes of Glenlivet.

The enforced ‘clearances’ – combined with voluntary and assisted emigration – depopulated vast tracts of land, affecting the north-east Braes as much as the Highland District. As the rest of the Lowlands moved on socio-economically to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the Highlands at best stood still. After Culloden some priests were reluctant to serve in the north; later, many priests had emigrated to Canada with their parishioners, sometimes leading them. (Devine, ‘The Scottish Clearances’, p. 60).

Additionally, the Scotch College in Rome was failing to provide a regular supply of secular clergy. So, the Catholic Church was increasingly short of priests in both Scottish districts.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the Church of Scotland, the Kirk, were actively sending ministers to Catholic strongholds attempting to convert them, by establishing schools where only the English language was used, thus promoting the idea that Gaelic language and culture was backward. (J. Kelly)

How many Catholics survived the persecution to the late 18th century depends on which source you use. What is known is that in the early 18th century, before the industrial revolution, there were only 50 Catholics in Glasgow, but 1000 in Banffshire, many of the latter in Cosmo Bennett’s area, the Enzie, where in 1790 Preshome Church was built to seat between 500 to 700 worshippers. A census of 1760 had shown the Highland District Catholic population (so, including the Islands) was perhaps twice as large as that in the Lowland District. But official figures sent to Rome by a Bishop 20 years later, claimed 9000 communicants in the Highlands and 8000 in the Lowlands. This statistic of 1780 – it is generally agreed – was the last time the Highland figure would exceed that of the Lowlands. Emigration from the West in particular was shifting the balance away from the remote areas. The Irish famines of the 1770s started a trickle of immigration to the Glasgow-Paisley area which in the next 40 years would become a flood and turned the demography of Catholic Scotland on its head. (Watts, pp. 211-12; On churches in the Enzie, see also B. Bishop, ‘A History of the Catholic Churches of the Enzie’.

It should be said, nonetheless, that not all the changes were due to migration. The Enzie had declined somewhat as a Catholic stronghold, especially around Fochabers, the seat of the Dukes of Gordon. An Episcopalian Bishop visiting the area on 1760s was told that many of the Duke’s tenants had by then converted to Episcopalianism, the religion adopted by their laird’s family for political reasons some thirty years before.

However, towards the end of 18^th century, the important statistics were that Catholic Church in Scotland was made up of only three bishops, forty priests, and some 30,000 lay folk, showing the imbalance between the number of priests and their flock , whom Marion Lochhead described as “bishops, priests and lay folk who, in poverty, homelessness and peril of their lives”, were to go on like those before them maintaining the faith.

The importance of the North-East and Preshome for Scottish Catholics

As we have indicated, post-Culloden, the key geographical area involved in the survival of Scottish Catholicism was the north-east of Scotland. The Catholics the least at risk of prosecution, death or migration were those living in areas where they formed the majority of the population; here they were usually safer; and from 1700s onward, this really meant two areas of the country – (1) certain remote parts of the Western Highlands and Islands; and (2) the lands of the Dukes of Gordon in the North East, that stretched from the coast of the Moray Firth into the Grampians and included the Enzie and Glenlivet. In all these areas the ‘clan chiefs’ were Catholic, and Catholics enjoyed their protection. Being more specific about the north-east, such as the Enzie, Strathisla, Glenlivet, Speyside, Strathbogie, and the Letterfourie estate (the Gordon cadet line and Baronets), Huntly, and the county of Banff, specifically for Buckie and Duff House, home of the Earls of Fife, and at least up to the 1760s, the Duke of Gordon’s strongholds of Fochabers (J. Watt). On Catholicism in the Enzie, see A. Fraser, ‘Enzie …’ 2012; also B. Bishop, ‘History of … Enzie’, 2009.

The most important part of the Gordon influence was Scottish Catholicism’s leadership from Preshome. For many years the auld religion had been without any formal spiritual leadership. Then, when a Catholic hierarchy was being re-introduced into Scotland from Rome, the first Vicar Apostolic was provided a home on the Gordon Estates near Preshome, south of Buckie and north of Keith, and between Fochabers and Letterfourie, so the Enzie. The Vicar Apostolic’s ‘Headquarters’ was in fact only a ‘butt ‘n ben’ but this single-storied, heather-thatched cottage known as Preshome was to remain the strategic centre of Scottish Catholicism for more than a century, that is until Bishop Kyle died there in 1869). He had transformed Preshome, into an information centre and archive of some 25,000 letters and other important Catholic records, alongside a library of 4,750 books. These “Preshome Letters" are now deposited in Aberdeen University Library; the so-called "Preshome Chapel Library” is now housed in the National Library of Scotland. (See Scalan News in www.scalan,co.uk; and the Journal of Bishop Geddes; and Appendix V: the Book of Zaknim, Innes Review 1963)

Preshome not only became the centre of administration and management of the Catholic church in the 18th C., but also, in 1788, the site of their “first new place of worship that looked like a church”. The 6th Baronet (and Laird) of Letterfourie, James Gordon, and his brother put their full weight behind the project and contributed liberally to its increasing cost. The local priest, Father John Reid, oversaw its building in an inconspicuous location, to avoid too much publicity. Baronet James Gordon, it was reported, enjoyed relating the story of the telling-off he received from the foot of the altar one Sunday when he heard: “Mass half over, sermon just beginning”, from the easily roused Reverend Reid: “Good morning, Letterfourie! Last in and first oot!” It may have been in the previous chapel, since the new Chapel was formally opened on Whit Sunday 23rd May 1790, and the Baronet died in bed on April 30th. The Reverend Reid, according to one source, was the John Reid who was born in the Enzie about 1739, sent to study for the priesthood at the Scots College in Rome in 1753, aged 14, ordained on 24 Sept. 1763, leaving Rome on 3rd May. Whether he was a relative of Cosmo’s mother is not yet established. (Scalan News, 1790 May 14th and also the St Gregory’s Preshome website, and D. McRoberts, Journal of Bishop Geddes … 1790) Part One; also Book of Zaknim.)

From what we have seen so far of the pressures on the identity and existence of the large Catholic community in the north-east of Scotland from the outside in terms of recent history and the penal laws and on the Enzie community and locally, from the inside, the resistance to it by important Catholic leaders from Letterfourie, Duff House and Preshome, it is not a surprise to learn that families like the Gordons, the Reids, the MacHatties and the Bennetts and others in the late 18th and early 19th century asked themselves what they could make the ultimate contribution to their faith: could they send a son to be educated for a career in the Church, which, although the career was not without its dangers, the first step – to the Lowland seminary – was not all that far away. In the early 19th century, following previous generations the Bennett-Reid family and the MacHattie family felt able to do their duty.

Notes and Sources

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