A 400-year-old prayerbook owned by a Catholic priest who helped save the life of Charles II, son of the executed King Charles I, has gone on public display at the house where he sought refuge after being defeated by Oliver Cromwell’s forces.
The rare missal was bought by the National Trust (NT) at auction, more than 60 years after a man paid sixpence for it in a Liverpool secondhand bookshop.
The prayerbook, published in Paris in 1623, bears the signature and annotations of Father John Huddleston, a Benedictine priest who lived at Moseley Old Hall near Wolverhampton and who had stayed loyal to the royalist cause after the execution of Charles I in 1649.
Charles’s son was proclaimed Charles II by the parliament of Scotland after his father’s death but, two years later, his royalist forces were defeated by Cromwell’s parliamentarians at the Battle of Worcester, in England. Charles II hid in an oak tree before fleeing to Moseley Old Hall, the home of the Catholic Whitgreave family.
Father Huddleston helped Charles II find refuge in a first-floor room with a view of the approach road and an escape route by a back staircase. There was also a “priest hole” – a hiding place for Catholic priests – accessible by a trapdoor beneath a cupboard. It would provide a space for Charles to hide should armed soldiers arrive at the house.
While sheltering at Moseley Old Hall, Charles is understood to have consulted books in Huddleston’s library. The prayerbook is thought to have been among them.
Charles spent the next nine years in exile in Europe, before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and his accession to the throne. The king appointed Huddleston as chaplain to his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, and later to his wife, Catherine of Braganza, both Catholics.
In 1685, as Charles II was dying, Huddleston heard the king’s confession, administered the eucharist and received him into the Catholic church.
Tim Pye, the NT’s national curator, said: “The Huddleston missal is a wonderful acquisition for Moseley Old Hall. Not only is the 1623 edition of the Missale Romanum a rare book – just one other complete copy is recorded in UK libraries – it is also crucial for our understanding of how Roman Catholic books were used and circulated at a time when it was dangerous to be anything other than Anglican.
“The way in which Huddleston has inscribed and annotated his missal highlights just how precious and personal this book would have been to him.”
According to Sarah Kay, the NT’s cultural heritage curator, if the trust had not bought the prayerbook, “it is likely to have gone into private hands and not been accessible by the public”.
The prayerbook was bought with a donation from a NT volunteer and funding from the Friends of the National Libraries. It was previously owned by the family of Joseph J Proctor, who bought it in the 1950s.
