An early American in Rome: tracing the life of Michael Herbert (1694–1720)
One of the joys of directing the Archives of the Venerable English College is that new potential research topics present themselves regularly. While not all can be followed up directly, some command immediate attention. The chance discovery at the beginning of July 2020 that this month marks the tercentenary of the death of the first American student of the Venerable English College, Michael Herbert (1694–1720), is a case in point.
Among the earliest Americans of European descent to study for the priesthood, Michael Herbert was born in Calvert County, Maryland, on 29 September 1694: he was the son of William Herbert or Harbert (c.1644–1718), a prosperous planter and ‘gentleman’, and his second wife, Eleanor Pattison Angell (c.1660–c.1700), the young widow of one John Angell. [1]
The first European to lay eyes on the peninsula which later became Calvert County had been Captain John Smith (bap. 1580–1631), president of the Council of Virginia, during his 1608 exploration of Chesapeake Bay. In 1632, Charles I had granted a charter founding an English settlement in Maryland – named after his Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria.
Established primarily as a haven for English Catholics escaping religious persecution, but also open to other Christians, colonial Maryland was placed under the proprietorship of Cecil Calvert, second Baron Baltimore (1605–1675), a Catholic convert, who began attracting settlers: these included Michael Herbert’s paternal and maternal grandparents. Cecil Calvert was partly responsible for the 1649 Maryland Act of Toleration, the earliest legislation in the English-speaking world explicitly guaranteeing toleration to all Christians: early settlers in Maryland included Catholics, Puritans, Huguenots and Quakers.
A New Map of Virginia Mary=Land And The Improved Parts of Penn=sylvania & New=Jersey, 1685, by Christopher Browne (c.1660–c.1740)
The initial capital of the colony was St Mary’s City, a relatively calm, tidal area near the mouth of the Potomac where it empties into Chesapeake Bay. In 1694, the year of Michael Herbert’s birth, the capital was moved to Anne Arundel's Town, named after the Catholic wife of Cecil Calvert, the Honourable Anne Arundell (c.1615–49), of Wardour, Wiltshire: it was shortly thereafter renamed Annapolis, after Princess Anne, soon to become Queen Anne (1665–1714, reigned 1702–14).
Anne Calvert, Lady Baltimore, née Anne Arundell (c.1615–49)
The Maryland county named after her has long been known as Anne Arundel County, dropping the second ‘l’ used by the Arundell family of Wardour
By 1695, following growth in the number of settlers, Calvert County was partitioned into three new counties – St Mary's, Prince George's and Charles County – and the Herbert family’s properties were thenceforth within the latter county. Documentary evidence suggests that, by that time, Michael Herbert’s extended family had become closely associated with the colony’s Jesuit missionaries: English members of the Society of Jesus had gone to work there as early as 1633, just a year after the granting of Maryland’s charter.
On the death of their prosperous Scottish grandfather, James Pattison (1634–98), of St Mary’s County, the four-year-old Michael, like each of his young siblings – Vitus, Eleanor, Francis, Mark and Luke, all of them born during the 1690s – inherited his own tract of land in Maryland. One of the witnesses to James Pattison’s will, signed on 23 September 1697, was the Lancashire-born Jesuit missionary, Thomas Hothersall (c.1642–98), then based in Maryland [2]: he was the great-uncle of William Hothersall, SJ (1725–1803), rector of the Venerable English College from 1766 until the Suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773.
Michael Herbert’s father, William Herbert, himself the Maryland-born son of one of the earliest settlers, owned plantations covering more than 1,500 acres. A justice in Charles County from 1700 to 1714, he was also captain of the local militia. From 1708 until 1714, he served in the Lower House of the Charles County legislature and, as a Justice or Gentleman of the Quorum, was a man of considerable standing: in colonial Maryland, the governor appointed justices to the county courts – and, without the presence of a least one Justice or Gentleman of the Quorum, a court sitting could not be held.
William Herbert’s wife, Eleanor Pattison Herbert, died in or about 1700, possibly in childbirth, leaving Herbert to look after seven children, including a newly born son, Matthew. In 1701, the widowed father married, as his third wife, a wealthy heiress, Sarah Bonner Bowles Douglas Smith (1636–1718), who herself had already been widowed three times. Sarah soon found herself fully involved in raising Michael Herbert and his six siblings.
The family was sufficiently prosperous to be able to send Michael to Europe for his education – to the English Jesuit college at Saint-Omer in Flanders, more familiarly known as St Omers College, no doubt on the recommendation of English Jesuits based in Maryland. No record survives as to when he was sent to St Omers, but he may well have been about sixteen years old before embarking on his formal education there. While it was not uncommon at that era for English-speaking Catholics to complete the equivalent of a modern secondary education as late as the age of twenty-one, Michael Herbert, for reasons which are as yet unclear, did not complete his humanities course until the age of twenty-five. [3]
At that juncture, he determined to study for the priesthood. Making his way to Rome, he was admitted as a student at the Venerable English College on 23 November 1719. The College annalist, noting his personal details in Latin in the Liber Ruber, or College Register, recorded with some surprise both that Michael Herbert was ‘iam 25’ (‘already 25’) and that he had not yet received the sacrament of Confirmation. [4]
Michael Herbert’s studies in Rome were to be cut short unexpectedly. At some point during the early summer of 1720, he appears to have contracted an unspecified illness from which he died sometime during the month of July 1720: the exact day of the month is unfortunately not recorded in the Liber Ruber.
As no Liber Defunctorum, or register of staff and students who died in the College and who were buried either in the College church or in its crypt, is known to survive for this period, we can but speculate that Michael Herbert’s mortal remains today lie in the ossuary in the crypt of the College church, created shortly after the re-opening of the College in 1818. This was created in response to the desecration of many tombs in the crypt following the sequestration of the College by the French in 1798 and the subsequent occupation of the premises by French soldiers.
Though there is much work yet to be done in the Archives of the College, and in other archives elsewhere, better to understand the short life of Michael Herbert, the tercentenary of his death provides a reminder that there are numerous American dimensions to the history of the Venerable English College and that these present a range of exciting opportunities for researchers.
Notes
[1] Much valuable information about the Herbert or Harbert family, extracted from records in the Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, may be found at www.anamericanfamilyhistory.com/Maryland Families/HarbartWilliam.html, a site developed by Roberta Tuller.
[2] See www.anamericanfamilyhistory.com/Maryland%20Families/Pattison.html
All of the above hyperlinks were accessed and functioning on 6 July 2020.