APPENDIX 4
To find out more about the Mathew/Matthews family and Earls of Llandaff, I went to the British Library, which houses a large number of Welsh genealogies. It soon became clear that the family was very large, with members scattered all over the territories that were once part of the British Empire, notably Canada and Australia. To my surprise, I also discovered that the title of Earl of Landaff was held by a branch of the family that lived in Ireland. In fact, it was a title held under the peerage of Ireland and not, as was implied by the name, of Wales and England. The family seat of the Earls of Landaff was actually at Thomastown Castle in the County of Tipperary, a property that now lies in ruins. The 1st Earl of Landaff was Francis Matthews, who was born in 1738 and died in 1806. He was succeeded by his son, Francis James Matthew, who was a member of Parliament and died in 1833. He was the last to hold the title of Earl of Landaff, which then became extinct.
There were, however, other descendants who are of interest, notably Theobald Mathew (1790–1856). He was born at Thomastown, but achieved prominence not in politics but the Temperance Movement. For a short time he was a Capuchin monk, but he abandoned the cloistered life, instead making the war against alcohol consumption his life’s work. From small beginnings in Cork in 1838, he won over millions of people to ‘take the pledge’ and give up drinking alcoholic beverages completely. The movement spread quickly to Britain and to America, where he gave sermons up and down the country. Soon, almost every town in both countries had its Temperance Society.
A descendant of Theobald Mathew was Arnold Harris Mathew (1852–1919), who founded the Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain. Born in France, he was baptized twice: once into the Catholic Church and then again into the Church of England. This sort of religious dual identity was prophetic of his life. Initially, he went into the Roman Catholic priesthood and received his Doctorate of Divinity from the hands of Pope Pius IX himself. He then went on to become a Dominican friar, historically the order most closely linked to the Spanish Inquisition. However, Arnold Mathew was too much of a rebel to be constrained by hierarchies or orthodoxies, and, in 1889, he left the Roman Catholic Church as a matter of conscience. In 1908, after years of soul-searching, he joined the breakaway Old Catholic Church of Utrecht; in due course, he was consecrated as its first Bishop in Great Britain. Still unhappy, he did not stay in this church either, but soon formed his own ‘Old Roman Catholic Church’ of which he was Archbishop. Despite its name, this was – and is – independent of both the Roman Catholic Church and the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht. For one thing, it had a different attitude to certain dogmas, and it allows its priests to marry. To safeguard what he saw as his line of apostolic succession, Archbishop Mathew consecrated a number of bishops and was unwittingly instrumental in the founding of the Liberal Catholic Church, a strange amalgam of Catholic rituals, theosophical ideas and Rosicrucianism.
We can only guess what David Mathew, the giant hero of the Battle of Towton and patriarch of the family, would have made of this. However, seen objectively, Mathew’s Old Roman Catholic Church was somewhat analogous to the pre-Norman clas church. Like those earlier churches, it had little connection with the establishment, but revolved around the personality and charisma of its founding ‘saint’: Arnold Mathew. Also, like a typical clas church, Mathew’s Old Roman Catholic Church gave rise to satellites, some in America and others in Europe. The Liberal Catholic Church, which even Mathew considered heretical, went much further and openly embraced continental Rosicrucianism. Unwittingly, this Mathew at least seems to have maintained the connection to certain ‘Rosicrucian’ ideals he may not have even known his family held 500 years ago.