Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/397

 the case of Miss Cass a vote for adjournment was carried against the government and led him to tender his resignation, which, however, Lord Salisbury refused to accept. His refusal to recommend the reprieve of Lipski was followed by the condemned man's confession of guilt. Lord Chief Justice Coleridge considered Matthews the best home secretary he had known. He returned to the House of Commons in 1892, and was in opposition for the next three years. His failure to speak or vote when Mr. Gladstone introduced his Bill for the removal of surviving Catholic disabilities (popularly known as the Russell and Ripon Relief Bill) was commented upon by his co-religionists. He voted against the Bill for the disestablishment of the Welsh Church. On the return of the conservatives in 1895 he was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Llandaff. He claimed a remote connexion with the Irish family which had enjoyed this extinct title. As a peer he took little part in public life; but he was active in securing the passing of the Accession Declaration Act, 1910, by which the old form of declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation, regarded as offensive to the Catholics of the Empire, was abolished. He was a loyal member of his own communion, and one of the founders of Westminster Cathedral. Yet he used to admit that on literary grounds he preferred the authorized to the Douai version of the Scriptures. He was for two years the vigorous chairman of the royal commission on the London water supply, which led to the formation of the Metropolitan Water Board (1902).

Although a leading figure at the bar Matthews was never regarded as a candidate for judicial honours. Amongst notable trials in which he appeared as counsel were Borghese v. Borghese (1860–1863), which involved complicated questions as to the devolution of the property of John, Earl of Shrewsbury; Lyon v. Home (1868), an action for the return of moneys and securities, brought against a ‘spiritualist’; the civil proceedings in the Tichborne case (1869); the Epping Forest case (1874), which concerned claims to common of pasture over the waste lands of the forest; and Crawford v. Crawford and Dilke (1886). His cross-examination of Sir Charles Dilke on the intervention of the Queen's proctor in the last case was skilful and effective. During his later years he was crippled by rheumatism. He died at 6 Carlton Gardens, London, 3 April 1913 and was buried with Catholic rites in the Anglican graveyard at Clehonger, Herefordshire. He was unmarried. He was caricatured by ‘Spy’ in Vanity Fair.

 MATURIN, BASIL WILLIAM (1847–1915), Catholic preacher and writer, son of the Rev. William Maturin, by his wife, Jane Cooke Beatty, was born at All Saints' vicarage, Grangegorman, Dublin, 15 February 1847, the third in a family of ten children. The Maturins were old-fashioned ‘Tractarians’: three of the sons became clergymen, two of the daughters, nuns. Educated at home, at a day-school, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his degree in 1870, Basil (or Willie as he was called at home) intended to join the Royal Engineers; but a severe illness about 1868 and the death of his brother Arthur altered his mind and he decided to take orders. He was ordained deacon in 1870 and went in that year as curate to Peterstow, Herefordshire, of which place Dr. John Jebb, an old friend of his father, was rector. In 1873 he joined the Society of St. John the Evangelist, founded in 1866 at Cowley St. John, Oxford, by the Rev. Richard Meux Benson [q.v.]. In 1876 he was sent to America in order to begin a mission in Philadelphia. He was first an assistant priest and in 1881 became rector of St. Clement's church there and gained much popularity, until, in 1888, doubts as to his position in the Anglican Church occasioned his recall. After a six months' visit (1889–1890) to the society's house at Cape Town, he spent the next seven years in preaching, conducting retreats, and holding missions. At length, in 1897, after much mental stress, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Beaumont, near Windsor.

Having studied theology at the Canadian College, Rome, Maturin was ordained in 1898 and returned to England, where he lived at first with Cardinal Vaughan at Archbishop's House, Westminster. After serving for a time at St. Mary's, Cadogan Street, he joined the new society of Westminster diocesan missionaries under Fr. Chase in 1905, and became parish priest of Pimlico, where his influence began to extend widely. Maturin, however, had always longed for a monastic life, and in 1910 he tried his vocation with the Benedictines at Downside, near Bath; but he was 371