Father John Hudleston and Charles II
David Lunn explains how, on his death-bed, King Charles II received the sacraments from a priest he had first met some thirty-four years earlier, and at length made his submission to the Roman Catholic Church.
Charles II first met John Hudleston after the King’s defeat at Worcester in 1651. The priest was aged forty-three at the time, the son of a landed gentry family of Faring-ton in Lancashire. He had been brought up as a Catholic and had studied at Rome, where in 1637 he was ordained.
We know that, shortly after leaving Rome in March 1639, he became chaplain to the Preston family of Furness in Lancashire, because his missal, which still survives, contains his jottings on the dates of their deaths, starting from this period.
During the Civil War many of the Prestons were killed, and the Hudleston estate at Farington was lost. Thomas Blount, in his Boscobel, adds that Hudleston was: ‘a gentleman volunteer in his late Majesty’s service, first under Sir John Preston the Elder... and after under Col. Ralph Pudsey at Newark.’
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