Ambrose Lisle March Phillipps de Lisle - Early Life

Early Life

He was the son of Charles March Phillipps of Garendon Park, Leicestershire, and Harriet Ducarel, a lady of Huguenot descent. He assumed the name of de Lisle in 1862, when on the death of his father he inherited the estates of the ancient family of de Lisle. He spent his earliest years at his birthplace and was brought up as a member of the Church of England, receiving his first religious instruction from his uncle, William March Phillipps, a High Church clergyman. In 1818 Ambrose was sent to a private school in South Croxton, whence he was removed in 1820 to Maizemore Court School, near Gloucester, kept by the Rev. George Hodson; The Bishop of Gloucester, having married Sophia March Phillipps, was his uncle by marriage, and so the boy spent Sundays and holidays at the bishop's palace.

At school he met for the first time a Catholic, the Abbé Giraud, a French émigré priest, whose holy lifestyle contrasted with what he had always heard of Catholics. A visit to Paris in 1823 gave him his first acquaintance with Catholic liturgy. The effect on his mind was shown on his return home when he persuaded the Anglican rector to place a cross on the communion table, but this first effort to restore the cross to English churches was stopped by the Bishop of Peterborough. He converted to Catholicism, and immediately removed from Mr. Hodson's school, and returned home with his father, who arranged for him to continue his preparation for the university under the private tuition of the Rev. William Wilkinson. He was obliged every Sunday to attend the Anglican church, but did not join in the service.

Ambrose Phillipps was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge in November 1825, though he did not go into residence there until 16 October 1826. At the university he found a congenial friend in Kenelm Digby, author of Mores Catholici and The Broadstone of Honour, who was, like himself, a member of a long-established family of the gentry and a recent convert. There was no Catholic chapel then at Cambridge, and every Sunday for two years these two young Catholics used to ride, fasting, over to St. Edmund's College, Ware, a distance of twenty-five miles, for Catholic Mass and Communion. It was on one of these visits to St. Edmund's, in April, 1828, that Phillipps was seized with a serious illness, having broken a blood-vessel in his lung. The doctors recommended his father to take him to Italy for the winter, and this necessarily cut short his Cambridge career, so that he had to leave the university without taking his degree.(He could not have received it anyway, before Catholic Emancipation.) On his return to England in 1829, he became acquainted with the Hon. George Spencer, then an Anglican clergyman, and his conversation was largely instrumental in leading to Spencer's conversion, as the latter admits in his Account of my Conversion - "I passed many hours daily in conversation with Phillipps and was satisfied beyond all expectations with the answers he gave me to the different questions I proposed about the principal tenets and practices of Catholics." The following winter (1830–1831) he again spent in Italy, on which occasion he met Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, who made a great impression on him.

On 25 July 1833, Ambrose Phillipps married Laura Mary, eldest daughter of the Hon. Thomas Clifford, son of Hugh, fourth Baron Clifford of Chudleigh. Charles March Phillipps gave his son possession of the second family estate, the manor of Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire, which before the Protestant Reformation had been the Augustinian Grace Dieu Priory. Here Ambrose Phillipps built a new manor-house Grace Dieu Manor, 1833–34, and in the meantime he and his wife resided at Leamington, or at Garendon Park. Writing a few years before his death he thus summed up the chief aims of his own life:

"There were three great objects to which I felt after my own conversion as a boy of fifteen specially drawn by internal feeling for the whole space of forty-five years which have since elapsed. The first was to restore to England the primitive monastic contemplative observance, which God enabled me to do in the foundation of the Trappist monastery of Mount St. Bernard. The second was the restoration of the primitive ecclesiastical chant, my edition of which is now recommended by the Archbishop of Westminster for the use of churches and chapels. The third was the restoration of the Anglican Church to Catholic Unity."

In the foundation of the Cistercian Mount St. Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire he received generous support from his friend John, Earl of Shrewsbury, but it was he himself who conceived the idea, believing it necessary that the ascetic aspect of Catholic life should be presented to the English people. He gave both land and money, severely depleting his own resources in providing the necessary buildings. This work was begun in 1835 and completed in 1844, while, during the same period, he founded missions at Grace Dieu and Whitwick. His disappointment was great when he found that the Trappists were prevented by their rule from undertaking active missionary work, because he attached the greatest importance to a supply of zealous missionary priests who would labour in English villages; he said, "I would have them go about and preach everywhere on the foreign plan, in the fields or in the high roads even".

In 1838 he joined his friend Rev. George Spencer in establishing and propagating the Association of Universal Prayer for the Conversion of England. In a continental tour he and Spencer made together, accompanied by Mrs. Phillipps and two of her children, in 1844, they passed through Belgium, Germany, and North Italy, meeting many distinguished Catholics and enlisting the sympathy of prelates and clergy in the cause. Nicholas Wiseman was co-operating in Rome, and soon the movement spread widely through the Catholic world. He was for some time the only Catholic who was in confidential correspondence with the leaders of the Oxford Movement, including John Henry Newman, receiving them at Grace-Dieu. He saw the Movement as a step towards his desire of reconciling the Anglican Church with Rome. As his son stated:

"National Conversion by means of Corporate Reunion he likened unto the Apostolic practice of fishing with a net 'gathering in multitudes of all kinds of fishes.' And this he considered to be his own special call from on High, to prepare the way and hasten the time when the Divine Word should again be spoken to Peter, 'Cast your nets into the deep'."