Cosmo Bennett

Cosmo Bennett

‘Secret seminaries’

The Lowland Seminaries

In November 1812, when the 11-year-old Cosmo Bennett set out, maybe with his father, maybe his elder brother, for the Lowland seminary near Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, he knew there was at least one person already there not completely unknown to him, a cousin, James MacHattie. Cosmo’s maternal grandmother was a MacHattie; his mother was from Letterfourie, the big house of the Baronets Gordon – a cadet line of the Dukes of Gordon – who employed a number of Reids, including – until she married – Cosmo’s mother. The Baronets of Letterfourie, the lairds of the Drybridge area, supported and protected their fellow Catholics, in terms of schooling, keeping a place of worship on their lands. There was a Catholic presence in the Enzie in the shape of the chapels of St Margaret of the Craigs and St Ninian’s of Chapelford, and Tynet for many decades before St Gregory’s, Preshome. (St Peter’s Pastoral Area), to the cost of which the Baronets contributed liberally in 1788; after Culloden, Catholic churches like St Ninians were destroyed by soldiers returning home from Culloden, and a more anonymous place of worship looking like a cottage and called St Ninian’s, was built at Tynet. The Letterfourie Baronets also sponsored seminary fees of some poorer local boys (payable only in the first year). There is no evidence so far either way whether Cosmo was sponsored by them.

James was 18 months older than Cosmo. Two years earlier he had made the same journey himself from the Enzie, arriving in Aquhorties on 27 October 1810, as entrant no. 41, born 14 January 1800, to follow the Ecclesiastical course. (The Seminary kept very good records – in Latin, now available in Aberdeen University Library Special Collection under “GB 3380 Scottish Catholic Archives: De Rebus Aquortisianis”.) They both would likely have heard of Enzie boys from earlier generations who had been to Aquhorties and its predecessor, the famous “secret seminary” of Scalan, much nearer their home.

There was an earlier MacHattie from the Enzie, John, the son of an Alexander MacHattie and Helen Mitchell; he had been to Scalan and then to the Scots College in Spain, but had left unordained, in April 1774. There was a William Reid, (b. 1758), from Fochabers, who had studied in Scalan from 1768 and then at the Scots College in Douai, France, where he was ordained. Since 1784 he had been the priest in Kempcairn (very close to Keith and Newmill). Cosmo’s brother James Gordon Bennett often visited him to discuss his own waning faith, but Cosmo may not have been aware of this. Seminarians, it was said, were discouraged from seeing their parents or relatives, especially if they were from lower-class backgrounds. The reason alleged was that they were being trained to become ordained priests and needed to be able to mix easily with the middle and upper classes, so to lose their Enzie twang and turn of phrase. Another William Reid (b.1766 in Enzie) had studied in Scalan in 1778-79, and then the Scots College in Valladolid, before being ordained in Edinburgh in 1792. (J. Watts, 248-51).

The one person they had certainly heard of, both from their families and from school, was Bishop John Geddes born locally in 1735, on the Letterfourie estate south of Buckie north of Keith in Banffshire, like Cosmo’s mother thirty or so years later. The Geddes family were witnesses to the deadly consequences of the military persecution of Catholics after Culloden. The bishop described himself as a prodigy, saying he had learned to read when he was four, to write aged six, and studied Latin from age seven. What is certainly true is that he became a legend in his own lifetime and beyond. He had been through the seminary system as a scholar, progressing to the Scots College in Rome where he was ordained in 1759. By 1762 he had risen to the position of Rector of Scalan, an institution still forbidden by the anti-Catholic Penal Laws of 1700, whereby Catholic worship was punishable by banishment or even death. The seminary had gone through a bad patch, but Geddes established it as a centre of excellence spiritually, academically and in terms of forming humane young men. He also brought in the most up-to-date agricultural methods to Scalan which was part of a small “fermtoon”. The people in the nearby dwelling houses soon looked up to him and helped one another in seasonal work.

He also impressed the Church hierarchy. After five years in Scalan he was given a missionary post on home territory in Preshome, which was the administrative centre and meeting place for the Church in Scotland and its Bishops. They set Geddes the task of finding a location for a new Scots College in Spain, in Valladolid as it turned out, to replace the original Scots College in Spain (Madrid), which in its latter years had hardly produced any priests for the mission in Scotland.

Within 3 years of negotiation with the Spanish court and the Scottish Bishops over money, and supervising work on the building, Geddes could announce that the College was ready to take its first seminarians. He was asked, of course, to become its first Rector. Nine years later he was appointed Bishop and Vicar Apostolic back in Scotland. Geddes had become a model to the Catholics of the north-east – for his achievements, but also for his forbearance. Aged fourteen, he sailed from Peterhead for Rome, a long and difficult journey, to train for the priesthood, never again to see his mother, who died four years later. He returned to Scotland with his friend Hay, both then ordained priests and destined to become bishops. High winds in the Firth of Forth forced their ship into Buckhaven, (Fife), instead of Leith – which was fortunate because security in Buckhaven was reputed to be lax, whereas in Leith there was the danger of being unmasked as Catholic Priests. The price of this security, legend has it, was having to walk all the way to Edinburgh. Even greater forbearance was needed when he took up his first mission in the Cabrach, the upland moor straddling Banffshire and Aberdeenshire, an unpopular posting among clergy – they called it “Siberia” for its severe weather.

Life in a “secret seminary”

So, Cosmo had opportunities to know what to expect of seminary life, and something of what a subsequent career as a priest might involve. As a place of worship, Catholic seminaries in Scotland had to be situated in out-of-the-way places, perhaps even more so than churches. To train new priests to service the spiritual needs of the Scottish Catholic flock was not easy. From as early as the 1600s and the years of the Reformation some of the training for the priesthood had to be done abroad, where Catholics were not in danger, at least once they had disembarked. Full relief from the penal laws was not given in Britain until 1793. Even then, though Catholics might worship in peace, they were still excluded from public offices and from teaching.

Before the hard years of persecution had ended, a Highland seminary was functioning from 1732 until 1803 at Samalaman, Moidart, then transferred to Lismore off Oban in 1803. Also, from 1732, the new, equally secluded place was founded as the first Lowland seminary, Scalan in Glenlivet, little more than a barn. The few seminaries that did exist in Scotland in the 18^th century were tiny and could not supply the numbers of priests required for the Catholic population. So, since 16th & 17^th century, the Church had maintained seminaries or colleges in Europe, notably France and Rome. However, the Scots College in Rome began to struggle to meet the incessant demands to provide a steady supply of “secular clergy” (parish priests) to work in Scotland. Worse was to come, from the 1790s Scottish seminarians could not be sent directly to France, nor indeed further afield on account of the Revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic wars. And anyway, parents, if caught, could be impeached for the crime of sending their sons abroad. Ships’ captains were similarly at risk.

For most of the 18^th century the secluded Braes of Glenlivet was the only place in Scotland where the Catholic faith remained visibly strong, with the relatively public support of the Gordons, and more particularly from the cadet Gordon branch at Letterfourie, notably Baronet James Gordon who sponsored the Saint Gregory’s church at Preshome. The Seminary of Scalan was the only place in the Lowlands district where young men continued to be trained for the priesthood, but not without difficulties – which were overcome. The college was destroyed after Culloden, but rebuilt the other side of the Crombie Water on a site that still exists today.

The model of Scalan for the training of priests, as set by Geddes, was to be passed on, as far as possible by his successors. Life in the seminary was austere. The boys rose at six o'clock, bathed in the River Crombie, summer and winter, and breakfasted on porridge. They had meat two or three times a week, but no more, their common fare being vegetables, oatcakes and porridge. One room served them as chapel, refectory and schoolroom, as required by the time of day.

John Watts – in his study of Scalan’s six and a half decades of existence – identifies 63 named priests who had spent some time training at Scalan. Of these, only 3 trained entirely at Scalan – these were known as "heather priests." For the rest, Scalan was really just a Junior Seminary, mainly sending students to complete their studies in the Scots Colleges Abroad. It produced nine priests for every decade of its existence; not many, one might think. However, of these, it is worth mentioning, six became influential Bishops and Vicars Apostolic. Five others became Rectors in the Colleges Abroad. Others served their flock, some for over 60 years in the Highlands and the north-east. At the other extreme, Watts draws attention to a “surprisingly large number who died young” – that is within five years of ordination.

The influence of the north-east on the future of Scots Catholicism is clear if we look at the origins of those Scalan students eventually ordained – note the top three areas by birth, all from the north-east:

Lower Banffshire (Enzie & nearby)	20
Upper Banffshire (Glenlivet & Strathavon)	12
Other North-East (Strathbogie, Mortlach, Cabrach, etc.)	9
Edinburgh	2
Glasgow	1
	Watts (p.231)

Not all boys at Scalan studied for the cloth, some were lay students (not counted in the numbers above). Quite a high proportion of Scalan boys, and especially its lay students, were from prominent local families. Among them were the sons of the “tacksmen” – they held and distributed the tenancy of land for the Lairds – thenceforward they exerted influence on the local community, and improved agriculture by bringing barren land under the plough. But they appear to have hastened the decline of Gaelic as a spoken language, certainly in upper Banffshire, by the use of Doric (Aberdeenshire) or Lallans (Lowlands Scots) with the boys it took from the east and south of Scotland. (Watts, pp.248-51)

Aberdeen becomes the Catholic centre of gravity in Scotland

The eventual passing of the Scottish Catholic Relief Act in 1793, allowed the Catholic faith to take its place again among the ‘legal’ religions – in theory. By the last two decades of 18^th C the Catholic Penal Laws were seen as out-of-date in the rest of Britain, and the standing of Catholicism in Scotland was changing; religion was not the divisive issue it had been in the decades immediately following Culloden. Scalan priests no longer felt the need to use aliases and coded language. This, with inadequacies in size of the secret seminaries, plus the impact of the Revolutionary Wars led the Scottish Catholic hierarchy to look for a new, “all-through” school at home in Scotland, to cover all the stages of education for the priesthood. The Highland seminaries and Scalan had functioned really only as Junior Seminaries.

A larger site was found to cater for Lowlands boys. The timing of the move to Aquhorties was largely due to the closure of the Scots Colleges Abroad during the French Revolution, and to subsequent difficulties of travel to – and in – mainland Europe until after Waterloo. So, after the land was purchased on behalf of the Church by the Vicar Apostolic (Bishop Hay), Aquhorties officially replaced Scalan as the college for educating the future Lowland District clergy. This included the students still at Scalan, who promptly transferred to Aquhorties.

The new seminary opened in 1799, located in Aberdeenshire, four miles west of Inverurie, looking out over the River Don. The authoritative Catholic Innes Review (W J Anderson, 1963) has pointed out the significance of choice of the new site being no longer on Gordon land as before, but on Leslie land within reach of Aberdeen, which became “for a time … the Catholic ecclesiastical headquarters of Scotland” – so, replacing Preshome in the Enzie. “The Headquarters could not yet be Edinburgh where the anti-Catholic riots of 1779 were of recent memory.” There were more practical considerations too: the opening up of Don-side by the new Aberdeen–Inverurie canal provided the regular route for transport to and from Aquhorties, Aberdeen and the outside world during this period of Aquhorties as a seminary.”

Aberdeen’s prominence for the Catholic community was also due to demographic and political shifts. The Enzie area was declining somewhat as a Catholic stronghold, especially around Fochabers, the seat of the Dukes of Gordon. Between the two Jacobite rebellions the Duke had switched to supporting the Hanoverians and adopted Episcopalianism and by the 1760s many of the laird’s tenants had clearly followed suit. The Catholic community in Aberdeen and the Garrioch was of long standing and it grew through immigration in the 19^th century, although less rapidly than the towns in the West-Central belt.

In 1829 Aberdeen’s status within Catholicism in Scotland was to be confirmed when Blairs College became the sole seminary, the national Seminary of Scotland. The mansion-house and estate of Blairs was made available to the Vicar-Apostolic by John Menzies of Pitfodels (1756-1843), a wealthy Catholic laird descended in a direct line from the brother of Bishop James Gordon, known as the founder of Scalan.

Cosmo and James in Aquhorties

Now, let’s follow the progress of two boys from the Junior Seminary to the college abroad. We have already gleaned some details about James from his entry in the Aquhorties records. Cosmo’s details tie in with what little we know of him from other sources linked to his elder brother’s later celebrity: James Gordon Bennett, who was to emigrate to North America in 1819, was still in Scotland, probably in Aberdeen, when Cosmo entered the seminary. The Aquhorties records say of the younger brother:

Born 1801, [entrant number] 49, / / entry year 1812 / name Cosmo Bennet[sic] / [from] Banf. [for Banffshire] [initially written as Aberdeen, but this was overwritten] / [born] July 1801 / [admitted] 24 November [1812] / [course taken] Eccles[iastical].

There were a few admissions of Lay students as opposed to the Ecclesiastical ones, but Cosmo’s brother’s name is not mentioned, despite claims by Pray in the earliest biography of James Gordon Bennett Snr that he had attended the seminary before losing his vocation. Cosmo was 11 years old. Watts affirms that seminarians were discouraged from seeing their parents or relatives, especially if they were from lower-class background since they were being trained to become ordained priests able to mix easily with the middle and upper classes.

The other boy already at Aquhorties, James MacHattie, had arrived in 1810, two years earlier than Cosmo. They almost certainly knew each other. Cosmo’s maternal grandmother was a MacHattie from Rannacky [Rannachy] between Buckie and Letterfourie two of Cosmo’s three uncles on his mother Janet’s side had MacHattie godparents. It is not necessarily to be taken for granted, but it is probable that at some time, the elder of the two boys looked out for his younger cousin. However, James was two years ahead of Cosmo in their studies. The first two years of study were called Humanities, which included languages, ancient and modern.

Who were the teachers in the seminary? Two of them we shall meet again in a Scotch College Abroad : William Wallace (quite a name to carry in the 18^th century!) and John Cameron (there were a lot of Camerons in high places in the Catholic Church in the late 18^th and early 19^th) centuries).

John Cameron came through his seminary studies from 1803 at Aquhorties and entered holy orders there in 1814. He did not go abroad – this was explainable because of travel difficulties during the French Revolution and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He spent the next two years teaching the younger scholars at Aquhorties. Here he came into contact as a teacher with Cosmo, less so with James MacHattie; that said, the number of seminarians was so small that everyone recognized everybody else. John Cameron was sent to the Valladolid College to perform the office of Vice-Rector as well as teaching.

William Wallace, having already taught in Valladolid and having accompanied some students back to Scotland in 1808 over land and sea in order to avoid getting caught up in the Iberian Peninsula War, he was thought to be sufficiently, probably uniquely, familiar with the demands that were to be put upon him. It was in Aquhorties almost certainly that he joined up with the group that he was to lead alongside Rev. Cameron. He had been sent to a post at Saint Ninian’s in Fetternear, close to Aquhorties, in 1809, then in 1812 to Stobball, near Perth. Was Wallace looking forward to another sea voyage of at least four weeks in November and December? Was he looking forward to the teaching? Had the Valladolid summer quarters in the countryside with its vineyard suffered during the war, what would the vines he had tended look like after eight years? Rumour had it that Wellington’s army had marched through it. And would the Rector Alexander Cameron be as difficult to work with as before?

Notes and Sources

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