Author: Brittain, Thomas Lewis
Biography:
BRITTAIN, Thomas Lewis (1745-1827: Palmer)
He may have been baptised on 5 Jan. 1745 at Barthomley near Chester, Cheshire, to Protestant parents, William Brittain and his wife (name unknown). He converted to Catholicism in 1763 in Picardy. He was ordained priest in 1767 at Bornheim, near Antwerp, and in Nov. went to study at Louvain. He returned to Bornheim College and was made Prefect, on 9 Oct. 1772. He was later appointed Regent and awarded a degree, Sacrae Theologiae Magister (Master of Sacred Theology, which he anglicised as DD), on 16 June 1790. He moved to Brussels on being appointed Confessor to the exiled community of English Dominican nuns on 20 Aug. 1790, a post he held for thirty-seven years. During the Revolutionary War he fled along with the sisters back to Bornheim on 22 June 1794 and thence with them to England. After a brief stay in London, they finally settled at Hartpury Court, near Gloucester, when two sisters, Jane and Catherine Berkeley, placed a house at their disposal. It was a small Catholic community usually consisting of nine Dominican nuns and two chaplains and survived until 1839. In addition to his religious duties, he ran a school with the nuns and advertised for pupils. He died at Hartpury on 3 May 1827 and was buried on 9 May at St. Mary the Virgin. Besides the volume of verse listed here, he published Rudiments of English Grammar (Louvain 1788), Principles of the Christian Religion and Catholic Faith Investigated (London 1790), The Divinity of Jesus Christ and Beauties of His Gospel Demonstrated (1822). (C. F. Raymund Palmer, Obituary Notices of the Friar-Preachers, or Dominicans, of the English Province [1884], 25 and The Life of Philip Thomas Howard, O.P., Cardinal of Norfolk [1867], 227-37; Hugo Hurter, Nomenclator Literarius Recentioris Theologiae Catholicae [1886], 3: 740; ancestry.co.uk 21 Sept. 2022; Chester Courant 8 May 1827; Chester Chronicle 11 May 1827; hartpuryheritage.org.uk) AA
Other Names:
- T. L. Brittain