by Harry Ludlum
This means that at this stage we cannot prove that a nun in the shape of a Waldegrave daughter was ever murdered at Borley. But was a Waldegrave daughter 'murdered' in a very different sense of the word, not physically murdered, but spiritually killed? Did Barbara Waldegrave die unfulfilled in her religious life, with some kind of inner burden on her conscience?
As part of my efforts to resolve the mystery of the nun, I contacted the present-day Waldegrave family to see if they could relate anything about their past history that might have a bearing on the subject, and my enquiries were passed to the Countess Mary Waldegrave.
Unfortunately, the Countess considered the Borley episode to be a fraud, partly on the basis of the 1956 Dingwall, Goldney and Hall allegations, and partly on the basis of her own private investigation of Harry Price's files in the London University.
In spite of her misgivings about the Borley episode, the Countess did relate one very important item relating to the various daughters of the Waldegrave family who became nuns, for which I am grateful.
The most important point to come out of this correspondence was that apparently the young Arabella Waldegrave, born to Sir Henry Waldegrave and Lady Henrietta and who up until now has been thought to have just vanished without trace, did not disappear at all! It was confirmed that Arabella did indeed become a nun in Paris, but more than that, she kept up a correspondence with her mother Henrietta, and also with her brother Lord James Waldegrave, when he was Ambassador to the Court in Paris.
What was also apparent from the details kindly provided by the Countess Mary Waldegrave was that the convent records, as held in this country, are probably incomplete because other records are in existence and which are held in Canada.
Of considerable interest is that at least two nuns from the Waldegrave family were in the literal sense of the word 'Borley nuns', both coming from the Borley arm of the Waldegrave family. Apollonia was one of them, mentioned a little earlier in connection with the Brussels house and born Barbara Waldegrave in 1603. She was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Waldegrave of Borley and his wife Catherine, née Browne, of Wellhall, Essex.
She entered the Brussels community in 1622, received the habit on September 12, 1623 and was professed on November 24, 1624. The curious thing about Barbara Apollonia was that when she died on April 18, 1638, she was only 36 years old. Why did she die so young? The bone fragments found at Borley in 1943 were said to be those of a woman possibly in her thirties.
Barbara Waldegrave had a sister, Jeromina, also from Borley, but she went to the nuns of Ghent rather than to Brussels.
Apart from the many other aspects of this mystery, there are various questions that arise concerning the nun's supposed status and order. One of the queries about the order to which she is thought to have belonged can be at least partly answered.
The Borley nun, alias Marie Lairre, has many times been described as a Sister of Mercy, but historically the Order of the Sisters of Mercy is neither French nor English in origin. Some time back I had occasion to deal with two members of this order in England, and noting that the sisters were of this order, asked them about their faith and any possible connection with the Continent.
One of them, Sister Paschal, told me that the Sisters of Mercy had no connection with the Continent at all. The order was founded in Ireland in 1780 by a Sister Macoy and celebrated its bicentenary in 1980. The main work of the Sisters of Mercy is in education and in ministering to the sick. Its history does not include any involvement in France, where nuns who are engaged in similar duties are sometimes known by the French equivalent of Souers du Compassion.
The Borley nun, therefore, had nothing to do with the Sisters of Mercy. The order was not even in existence until 23 years after the date of the supposed death of Marie Lairre.
Another thing to bear in mind is that it has always been assumed that both the story of the novice of Bures and the details that emerged during the table tipping and planchette experiments concerning Marie Lairre had all referred to Bures in Suffolk.
This pleasant little place, some six miles south of Borley, actually sits astride the county boundary between Essex and Suffolk, the River Stour passing right through the village. Bures St Mary with its clerestoried parish church sits on the Suffolk side, while Bures Hamlet is on the Essex side.
About a mile or so out of Bures, hard by the River Stour, stands the massive Smallbridge Hall, seat of the successive Williams and Richards of the Waldegrave clan who, as at Borley, have a family tomb inside the parish church. But have the chroniclers of Borley documented the wrong Bures?
Examination of a French monastic directory in the Palaeography Department at the Middlesex Library, London University, reveals that in the diocese of Rouen in Normandy, there is another Bures, its full name being Bures en Bray. Contained in the Repertoire Topo Bibliographique des Abbayes et Prieures, by Dom L. H. Cottineau OSB (published by Macon), there is an entry for Bures en Bray, recording the existence of the Benedictine Priory of Saint Etienne. Although the existence of this Bures was known about and investigated by a previous researcher, I felt that there would be nothing lost in rechecking this rather interesting possibility.
A footnote in The End of Borley Rectory acknowledges the existence of Bures en Bray, referred to therein as Bures Londiniers, but mentions there being no trace of a nunnery in this town. However, from Don Cottineau's directory, it is now quite plain that Bures en Bray/Bures Londiniers did have a monastery. If the monastery incorporated a convent or nunnery within its estate, there might well be a simple reason for a lack of mention of such an establishment.
To conclude this part of the debate, however, we come to another possible solution. This concerns the order of Austin Friars, at Clare, some four miles or so beyond Borley, and the site of an order re-established in 1953, after centuries of absence. It is here that we find yet another link between Borley and the monastic world.
One only has to see the name 'Clare' mentioned in connection with Borley and monastic associations to consider another possible origin of the name of the ghostly nun. The similarity between 'Lairre' and 'Clare' is close enough for this to be another possibility for a mix-up over a place and a person's name. There is also in the history of Clare Priory, a link with France, and repeated France and matters French reappear in connection with stories attached to the site on which Borley Rectory was built in 1863.
Richard de Clare was in France in 1248. He returned during the following year, probably bringing with him by invitation members of the Augustinian or Austin order to live under a Royal writ of protection at Clare in Suffolk, of which Richard of Clare was Earl.
Over a period of many years, the order established an extensive collection of buildings on the site. For most of its perimeter the estate was bounded by what was then the course of the River Stour. On the third side, the monks created an artificial ditch with floodgates. One is reminded of that curious description from the psychometrist Fred Marion, who at Harry Price's instigation attempted to obtain some sensation of events from the past from a piece of wood found at Borley Rectory. He spoke of, among other things, a feeling of some sort of collection of buildings, perhaps on an island.
Was it Clare Priory that he had picked up from this experiment? The idea could be a possibility relevant to the psychic side of the Borley story at that time, because at that period between the wars the Clare order was not then in existence at Clare. The Austin friars did not return there until after the Second World War.
Clare Priory in its original form, with various additions, remained a functioning order until November 29, 1538, having at first been exempt from the compulsory dissolution of all other monastic orders in England under King Henry VIII's edicts. On that date the monks at Clare Priory were required to surrender the priory to the King's agent, Richard Ingworth. They were not to return to Clare for 400 years!
Clare Priory, Suffolk: a modern view. After its suppression, one of the former Austin Friars eventually became a rector of Borley in 1565
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But our attention is drawn to one of Clare's now homeless monks, named Stephen Luskin. A year before the final dissolution of Clare Priory, Luskin obtained a dispensation to allow him to continue wearing a monk's habit under the clothes of a priest. The dispensation was granted on December 20, 1537, by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, at a cost of £4.00.
Luskin, like many others at that time no doubt, obviously hoped that there would be a reversal of the Dissolution. At that time it had already become illegal to wear a monk's or nun's habit in public. As the Rev. M. J. Loughran pointed out to me, Luskin could at least claim that he had never stopped wearing his habit, even if unseen under the cloak of a Protestant priest!
The interest in Stephen Luskin arises out of the fact that 27 years after the dissolution of Clare Priory, he reappears - as Rector of Borley! In 1565, four years after the death of Sir Edward Waldegrave, Luskin succeeded the Rev. William Cooper as rector, Cooper having been the incumbent at the time of the arrest for heretical practices of Sir Edward Waldegrave himself.
Some 40 years or so after the coming of Luskin to Borley, the wife of Sir Edward's grandson Nicholas bore him a daughter, Barbara Waldegrave, who was to become Sister Apollonia of the Brussels English Benedictine nuns in exile. She was one of the two granddaughters that Sir Edward never lived to see.
One can but wonder what had passed in Stephen Luskin's life in the 27 years between his leaving Clare Priory and his appointment to the Rectorship of Borley. How did he come to Borley? He could just as easily have taken the living of any of the other parishes in the district. During the whole of that time there had been a Waldegrave at Borley and these were, for long after the Dissolution, Catholic sympathisers who would not have baulked at the task of helping restore a Catholic monarch to the English throne.
Remember also that Luskin sought dispensation to continue wearing his monastic robes and was quite obviously living in the hope of a restoration of the Austin order. What matters of common cause with the Waldegraves could he have been involved with during that time? We can only guess at that!
As Rector of Borley whose living was, of course, in the gift of the Waldegraves, and as a one-time Catholic monk, it's possible that had he been asked to assist in the removal of any members of the Waldegrave family to the safety of France, he might well have acceded to such a request. In this respect, the reader is reminded of the possible role of the little harbour of Langenhoe in one of the many versions of the nun story.
As to the identity of the Borley nun, it is my opinion that we are left with two options.
One is that Stephen Luskin, at some time between 1538 and 1565, or even a little later, could have had some close involvement in the affairs of the Waldegrave family, during the course of which it became necessary to send someone from the family to France.
Another possible pointer to this arises from the belief that during the 15th century there was at least one Waldegrave who was a member of the Augustinian order, and that descendants of him may well have followed the same path.
That leaves us with the last choice for the identity of the nun, Barbara Waldegrave. In seeking to identify the ghost of a nun seen at Borley, it surely must be one of the two daughters of the Waldegrave family who both became nuns and were themselves born there.
Of the two sisters, we do know Jeromina died young from consumption and she belonged to the exiled English community of Ghent. That leaves Barbara. She also died young, but all that the chronicles say of her is that she was 'happily deceased'. This leads us to the question that the writer posed earlier. Are we not dealing with a ghost of a nun who died an unnatural death, but rather with the ghost of a nun who failed to find an answer to some deep, internal, and possibly spiritual conflict in her lifetime, and died thus troubled not in her native East Anglia, but in a foreign land?
It is perhaps the ghost of Barbara Waldegrave that haunted, and perhaps still haunts, that lonely corner of Borley, still waiting after some 400 years for release from her doubts and misgivings over some long-forgotten moment in history.
CHAPTER 20
The Katie Boreham Mystery
It was in the séance notes compiled by Sidney Glanville in his Locked Book on the Borley hauntings, some of which were incorporated by Harry Price in his two books of 1940 and 1946, that there appeared details which seemed to point to a sad and disturbing episode in the Bull family's life.
It was these details that the critics attacked, claiming that they were heavily edited, but Price had a very straightforward reason for editing the results. Relatives of the Bull family were then still alive and could therefore have been upset by some of the revelations. In consequence Harry Price felt he could not really take any other course, and some of the very personal details, such as certain names, had to be omitted from the draft, later incorporated into The Most Haunted House in England and The End of Borley Rectory.
The Bull family's troubles centred on the results of table tipping experiments and critics have seized on the whole episode as proof of Price's fabrication of much of the Borley story. According to the results of these experiments, a device which Price himself regarded with some doubt as to its acceptability without other evidence, a fact often ignored by his would-be critics, there had been a maid in the service of the Bull family at Borley Rectory, a girl who according to the séance was Katie Boreham.
The séance reveals that, following an affair, possibly with one of the Bull men folk, though they were not named as such in the published extracts, the girl became pregnant. In giving birth she died, according to local belief recorded by Glanville, in the arms of Harry Bull in the Rectory kitchen. Surrounding this alleged episode was also a suggestion that not only was the incident hushed up, which of course is what often happened in such cases, but that the unfortunate girl was helped into the next world by a dose of poison administered either by the Rector or his wife.
The date as recorded in the séance was Easter 1888, and following the results of the session, the Parish records of Borley were checked and therein was discovered a record of the death of a Kate Boreham, of Sudbury on Easter Day, 1888.
In the years following Harry Price's death, a number of critics have claimed that no such events ever took place at Borley Rectory. We do know that a similar suggestion that Harry Bull died by poisoning has not been proved, and that he is always recorded as having died from cancer.
Some people thought that Harry Bull was involved in the birth of an illegitimate child at Borley, and that the affair was hushed up. To begin with there is a practical problem with the supposed date of either Katie or Kate Boreham's death in 1888.
Concerning Harry Bull's possible involvement in the episode, we must note that he was away from Borley Rectory from 1886 to 1889, during which time he was a curate at Westoe in County Durham. But he could have been involved if he had come home to visit his family at the Rectory during the holidays.
If we suppose that one of the Bull family servants did become pregnant, the conception of the child would have been in June or July 1887. Westoe St Thomas Baptismal Records, now in Durham Record Office, show that Harry Bull was at Westoe on June 6, 1887, but he could have been home between then and September 9, 1887.
We also need to know whether the Bull family suffered a loss among its staff at the time alleged, be it a Katie or whoever, and if so, from what cause.
There was indeed a Kate Boreham who died in March 1888. The Kate Boreham who appears in the Death Registers of St Catherine's House died in Sudbury, not at Borley, from acute cerebritis and at the same time as the alleged death of Katie Boreham of the Borley Rectory séances.
That at least is what the death certificate says. However, given the social position of the Bull family in the community, and the disastrous consequences of any scandal becoming public, can we be sure that what appears on that death certificate is the truth?
It is entirely possible that the Bull family could have been faced with some serious scandal concerning a memb
er of the family and a maid at the Rectory. An episode that was potentially so damaging to their reputation that they used their position to procure the complicity of a physician in covering up the matter by misreporting the cause of death and the place, or plainly falsifying the death certificate!
One possibility, and an associated clue, lies in Glanville's Locked Book. While he was at Borley in 1937, Glanville was visited by Harry Bull's brother, Walter Bull, who reported the footsteps phenomenon. He also mentioned that of various physicians who visited the Rectory during his father's time, one in particular, Doctor Alexander, said that he would never enter the place again!
Sidney Glanville's locked book of information on Borley, now in the United States.
If that is true, was the good doctor referring to the hauntings and strange happenings in the house or was he referring to some matter concerning the family themselves? Was this doctor called to attend the birth of a child or the death of one of the servants? If so, in saying he would never enter the house again, was he implying that, had he been asked, he would not serve the Bull family further? The death certificate of Kate Boreham of Sudbury shows not a Doctor Alexander but a certain W. Nigel Mason to have been the attending physician at her death, so it seems that the man mentioned by Walter Bull was not involved in the Katie episode.
This does not mean that he was not involved in the medical aspects of another of the Bull household, and we will look later at the events relating to the death of Harry Bull's father, Henry Dawson Bull.
There is another possibility concerning Kate. It is possible that Kate Boreham of Sudbury might have been employed at Borley Rectory and simply have become seriously ill while in the Bull's service, and been taken back to her own home in Sudbury where she died - a perfectly innocent chain of events, with no scandalous connotations. If that is what happened, why should she appear in the burial registers of Borley and not in one of Sudbury's churches?
