Brendan Hoban: Priest & Parson – Thomas William Dixon (1793-1830)

Printed in the last edition of Western Star, a Western People publication, edited by James Laffey.

(After reading the original article, an ACP member suggested that other members might also find it interesting.)

It’s difficult indeed almost impossible to imagine what life was like for the young Thomas William Dixon (or ‘T. William Dixon’, as he later preferred to call himself) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as he grew up in the parish of Kilmore Erris, in probably one of the townlands not too far from where the town of Belmullet now stands.

At the time Erris was one of the most impoverished parts of pre-Famine Ireland and the most inaccessible part of Killala diocese – bleak, isolated, inhospitable, densely populated, a quasi-feudal society with a high population density and primitive agricultural methods. It was, as James McParlan described it, almost ‘a separate and detached county’. There were no roads as such. Access to Newport and Westport was via a bridle path. The road to Castlebar started in 1819; the road to Ballina in 1824. The building of Belmullet itself only started in 1825.

The name Dixon was relatively common in Erris right through the nineteenth century. There were several Dixon families living in the north of the Mullet peninsula and it appears probable that Thomas William was an antecedent of one of them. And a clerical connection with Thomas William might well be established through two priest-relatives, Francis and Thomas Dixon, natives of Kilmore Erris.

T. William Dixon was born circa 1793 and came from farming stock. We know this because in 1826 he described his father as a farmer ‘in humble circumstances’. However, relatively, the Dixons must have been fairly comfortable as young Dixon had the benefit of an early education from a man who lived in his home and who ‘devoted the greater part of his time to my education’. This may indicate that Dixon had a private tutor or, more probably, that a hedge-school teacher may have been given temporary accommodation in the Dixon household in lieu of tuition for Thomas William and other members of the Dixon family. Or it may have been that his education was paid for by priest-relatives Frs Francis and Thomas Dixon who were probably Thomas William’s uncles.

In any event, this latter situation may have been the case too when Thomas William arrived in Castlebar to be educated at Mr. Staunton’s Classical School in Castlebar, a well-known educational establishment, where John MacHale (later bishop of Killala and later again archbishop of Tuam) was also educated in Latin, Greek and English literature.

After his primary education in the Dixon home in Kilmore Erris and his secondary education in Staunton’s Classical School in Castlebar, Thomas William felt called to priesthood. It would have been obvious to him, through contact with his priest relatives, that priesthood in the diocese of Killala was one obvious workable option open to him and he would have made contact, through his priest-relatives, with the then bishop of Killala, Dominick Bellew.

Accordingly, on the recommendation of Bishop Bellew, Dixon matriculated in Maynooth on September 24, 1810 when he was circa seventeen years of age. (A co-diocesan in Maynooth in those days was John MacHale, a native of Lahardane, who had entered Maynooth three years earlier.)

It seems that Dixon progressed satisfactorily in Maynooth for some time but then there was some unspecified difficulty in his second year – associated with illness from over-work, he said – when he left for a few months and then again when he left during his fourth year, and didn’t return to Maynooth. The reason for his second departure from Maynooth was, he later explained, that he was ill or it may be due to a growing disenchantment with Catholic theology, for which there is some evidence. Dixon left Maynooth finally in 1814 and, presumably, headed home as ‘a spoiled priest’ to Kilmore Erris where he would spend the next two years.

There is no way of knowing Dixon’s mind in the two years (1814-6) he spent at home or what conspired to move him towards a decision to accept ordination to the Catholic priesthood. But, as priests were few at the time, pressure was exerted by the then bishop of Killala, Peter Waldron,  on Dixon to be ordained as the then priest-people ratio in Killala was 1:4,133, the third worst in Ireland. Dixon later commented: ‘He (Waldron) needed me more than I needed him’.

In any event, though Dixon later accepted that he had grave doubts about Catholicism in his mind by the age of twenty-one, strangely he agreed two years later to be ordained a priest in 1816.

Curate in Ballycastle, 1816-17

Ballycastle parish (or Doonfeeney and Kilbride, as it was known up to Penal times) was extremely isolated in 1816 when Dixon, immediately after his ordination, was appointed curate. Travel was on foot or on horseback. Ballycastle parish was at that time on the road to and from nowhere. The road to Ballina, for example, was little more than a pony track. The ‘town’ of Ballycastle was only founded in 1797 and the old chapel wasn’t built until 1827. Before that it isn’t clear where the people worshipped.

In Dixon’s time in Doonfeeney, Patrick Flanagan was the parish priest, living in Kilbride. Dixon was appointed in August 1816 before being transferred to his native Kilmore Erris in April or May 1817. His annual salary in Ballycastle was £200. In his own words he ‘vacated the parish for one of greater value’ and he made no secret that he was happy to accept the appointment to Kilmore Erris as it was more lucrative than Doonfeeney.

Administrator of Kilmore Erris, 1817-18

The elderly Charles Everard was PP of Kilmore, the northern part of the Mullet peninsula, with Edward Jordan PP of Cross, the southern part. Everard was reluctant to stand aside, though Dixon claimed he had been promised the parish by Waldron. Jordan, the PP of Cross, wasa volatile figure who had a drink problem. As Waldron was finding it difficult to attract priests to the then backward and isolated barony of Erris and even more so to the Mullet peninsula, a factor in Dixon’s appointment was that, as a native of the parish, he was happy to accept the position of Administrator as Waldron promised to retire the aged Everard.  

Financially and career-wise, the move suited Dixon. Waldron brokered an agreement with Dixon that he (according to himself) would receive ‘the whole emoluments of the parish’ and was to pay Everard £25 or £30 in lieu of them, as a form of pension.  

However, the Everard arrangement soon ran into difficulties as Everard, rather than taking a back seat continued his own parallel ministry despite the fact that Dixon was now in charge which annoyed the younger man and had the not inconsiderate effect of minimising his income.

It soon emerged that Dixon had other difficulties. One was with the Roman breviary, or the priest’s office, as it was called, which priests were expected to recite daily. Another was Dixon’s liberal approach to abstaining from meat on fast-days and a third was Dixon’s doubts about parts of his Catholic faith.   

The end result was that Dixon discussed his situation with James Verschoyle, the Church of Ireland bishop of Killala, and conformed to the Established Church on April 19, 1818.

Just three years after his ordination, Dixon ‘crossed the Thames’.

Dixon’s conversion, (1818)

Later it emerged that Dixon’s meeting with Bishop Verschoyle was set up by members of the Protestant gentry around Crossmolina who acted as go-betweens between the Catholic priest and the Protestant bishop, and who smoothed the path for Dixon. Verschoyle was tentative in his approach. He counselled  Dixon to reflect a bit more on his decision, aware that priests who were in difficulty in their own church imagined that joining the Established (Protestant) Church was a solution to their predicament. He knew too that sometimes Catholic priests were attracted to the Established Church for temporal, even for nakedly financial reasons.

It emerged that generally it was well known that Dixon had doubts about his faith and, as a result, was unsettled in his life and work as a Catholic priest. His bishop knew it as did his priest-colleagues and members of the Protestant gentry. When Dixon didn’t turn up for the Holy Week ceremonies in Ballina and instead stayed at the house of Colonel Jackson in Crossmolina, it was clear something was awry.

From Crossmolina Dixon travelled to Killala to inform the Protestant bishop of his intentions. He met Verschoyle and applied to be received into the Church of Ireland. Dixon’s recantation of the Catholic faith took place in the vestry room of Crossmolina Protestant church and was conducted by the then vicar of Crossmolina, Rev. Edwin Stock.

According to Dixon no inducement was offered to him to join the Established Church but he later claimed to have been offered a bishopric if he returned to the Catholic fold, a not very credible scenario. He later told a government commission that he was then suspended by Waldron and presumed that he was also excommunicated. Dixon received a recommendatory letter from Verschoyle, which he called ‘as high a testimonial as any man could procure’.

Curate in Ballysakeery, (1818-23)

Shortly after Dixon had conformed he was, it seems, distressed by the consequent tension with some of his family and friends. In 1819, as if to alert any interested parties that might be willing to employ him, he enlisted in the Global Christian Leaders Index and gave as his address, Laceby, Lincolnshire, England. Archdeacon Joseph Verschoyle, the rector of Kilmoremoy, possibly in league with his father, Bishop James Verschoyle, created a niche for Nixon as curate in Cooneal (Ballysakeery). As a result he would spend almost five years in Ballysakeery as a Church of Ireland curate, doubling on occasion to cover other parishes as the need arose.

It wasn’t a happy time for Dixon as he sometimes had to help out in Ballycastle where he had worked as a Catholic priest. Inevitably there was some resentment against him for abandoning the Catholic Church, his former colleagues avoided him and he was often jeered at by former parishioners. But worse was to come. The Ballina Impartial reported on May 19, 1823 that on the night of the May 11, when Dixon was returning home from the Castle of Killala where he had dined with the bishop ‘six fellows attacked him and after firing two shots at him, happily without effect – pursued him a considerable distance, with stones, etc.’ It was a second attempt on Dixon’s life, the paper reported, within the previous six weeks.

London, (1823-26)

On the advice of friends, Dixon thought it ‘imprudent to stay any longer in such a (dangerous) place’ (Cooneal) and he decided to go to London in 1823 where he was employed temporally by the Bishop of London, though he didn’t give him a curacy. In January 1824, he met Anne Hamilton-Ash, the eldest daughter of William Hamilton and Elizabeth Harriet Henderson of Ashbrook, Londonderry and six weeks later they were married in St Peter’s Church, Dublin on March 8, 1824. They would have three children: a daughter, Jane, who was born in 1825 and two sons, William Hamilton Victor and Thomas Burgess.

From their marriage in March 1824 until late October 1826, there is no clear evidence of whether Dixon was employed or even where he lived. All that is clear is that by 1826, Dixon had returned to Kilmore Erris and was living near Belmullet.

Curate in Drogheda, Bealieu, Jonesborough (1827-30)

In early 1827, Dixon’s fortunes changed when he was appointed curate in St Peter’s Church of Ireland parish in Drogheda. It isn’t clear if his position in Drogheda was temporary but that may be the case as the following year he moved to Beaulieu, also in Louth and the following year again, he moved to Jonesborough in County Armagh.

Shortly after Dixon arrived in Drogheda, he learned that a comment had been made ‘in one of the chapels’ in Drogheda, questioning his motives in joining the established Church. On February 9, he responded: ‘I am ready’ he told the readers of the Drogheda Evening Post, ‘to give to any and every one of you clear, convincing and satisfactory reasons for my abandoning the errors of the Church of Rome and attaching myself to the Church of England’.

For the following three years, Dixon made multiple responses to criticisms of him in the Drogheda Evening Post and other papers: explaining his difficulties with Catholic doctrines like Transubstantiation and Purgatory; rejecting the accusation that his conversion was ‘for monetary reasons’; challenging his opponents to an open debate; rejecting the contention of the Catholic archbishop of Armagh of misrepresenting the Catholic faith; and robustly rejecting an intervention by Fr Michael Conway of Kilfian that Dixon’s income in Killala was considerably less than what he represented it to be.

In 1828, Dixon was transferred to the curacy of Beaulieu, just outside Drogheda and in 1829 he was appointed curate in Jonesborough in Co. Armagh. It may be that his health deteriorated during his time in Beaulieu and Jonesborough as his contributions to local papers gradually tapered off during those latter few years. He died on October 11, 1830 and was buried in Drogheda. A plaque dedicated in his honour was erected in Jonesborough Church.

In the twelve years since his conversion in 1818 until his death in 1830, Dixon lived a hectic life: struggling to find employment as a Church of Ireland priest; surviving an attack that could have cost him his life; getting married and having a family; giving evidence before the House of Lords Inquiry into the State of Ireland (May, 1825); giving evidence before the House of Lords Commission on Irish Education, (October-November, 1826); writing and publishing Recantation of Popery, a series of seven letters explaining why he left the Roman Catholic Church and joined the Established Church; explaining how unease with Catholic theology which started in Maynooth College eventually led him out of the Roman Church; and robustly defending his position in the newspapers of his time.

While conversion, especially when simply moving from one Christian denomination to another, seems now a normal, acceptable and respected transition, at the time it was a huge statement with significant repercussions in terms of religious betrayal, familial disloyalty and social rejection. While in time conversion was sometimes regretted too, in Dixon’s case it was born of a genuine unease with Catholic doctrines from his early days in Maynooth College and a natural withdrawal from a church in which he never felt at home.  

Brendan Hoban is Killala Diocesan Historian and a Western People columnist. His biography of Thomas William Dixon, Priest & Parson, The Life and Times of  Thomas William Dixon is due in 2024.