Aubrey de Vere

Aubrey de Vere was an Irish poet, the son of the poet Sir Aubrey de Vere, and a friend of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and John Henry Newman. He had worked for famine relief in Ireland and had followed the Oxford Movement closely. In the autumn of 1851 he travelled to the Continent with Manning — himself received into the Catholic Church only that spring — and at Avignon, in the Archbishop’s chapel, on 15 November 1851, de Vere was received. He wrote that same day to a friend:

After my letter to you from Paris, it will be no surprise to you to learn that I was this morning received into what I believe to be that one Catholic and Apostolic Church confessed in the Creed, and commissioned from on high by God Himself.Aubrey de Vere, letter to Mrs. Coleridge, November 15, 1851, in Wilfrid Ward, Aubrey de Vere: A Memoir (1904)

With a poet’s self-knowledge, he judged that his own temperament had held him back for years:

I should probably have been a Catholic years ago if I had not been, in some sort, a poet, and had a poetical predilection for the vague in thought, and the vagabond in life.Aubrey de Vere, in Ward, Aubrey de Vere: A Memoir (1904)

Of what he had found, he wrote plainly:

The Roman Catholic Church is so very much more than I had expected to find it, and that, while a Protestant, I ever imagined that a Church could be.Aubrey de Vere, in Ward, Aubrey de Vere: A Memoir (1904)

De Vere returned to Ireland and to his writing, publishing poetry and essays for another half-century. He died at the family seat, Curragh Chase, County Limerick, on 21 January 1902.