Society of the Holy and Undivided Trinity
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The Society of the Holy and Undivided Trinity was an Anglican religious order for women in England. It was notable for having been founded by Marian Hughes, the first woman to take religious vows in the Church of England since the Reformation. The Society operated from 1849 to 1956.
Marian Hughes (1817–1912) was born in Shenington, Oxfordshire, where her father was the rector.[1] She became the first woman to take religious vows in the Anglican church since the Reformation when she privately made them in 1841 to Edward Bouverie Pusey at the home of Ann and Charles Seager. She then took communion with John Henry Newman.[2]
Hughes established the Order in 1849.[3] Although she was the first woman to profess, her order was not the first for women to be established: The Sisterhood of the Holy Communion had been established in New York in 1845 by Sister Anne Ayres; the Sisterhood of the Holy Cross (the Park Village Community) had also been established in North London in 1845;[4] and the Rev Canon Thomas Chamberlain had established the Community of St Thomas the Martyr at St Thomas the Martyr's Church, Oxford in 1847.
In 1866, work started on a purpose-built convent on land on Woodstock Road bought from St John's College. Hughes funded the building. It was designed by local architect Charles Buckeridge. After initially proposing a circular design based on the symbolism of the Holy Trinity, Buckeridge took a more traditional approach and drew up the plans sometime before 1865. While initially there were plans to enlarge the convent with a northern extension, for which place was made in the building's design, further building never took place. The convent finally opened in November 1868. The total cost of the initial build was £8,000, a considerable sum at the time. It is said that upon first seeing the convent's new premises, the architect William Butterfield commented that it was the 'best modern building in Oxford after my college', by which he meant Keble.[2] The chapel, by John Loughborough Pearson to Buckeridge's original design, was added in 1891–94; its apse was adorned with paintings by Charles Edgar Buckeridge (son of the original architect) and Ethel King Martyn.[5]
Hughes died in 1912 at the convent in prayer.[1] She and her nuns were buried in a special area reserved for the Society at St Sepulchre's Cemetery in Oxford.[2] Her order operated until after the Second World War in 1956.[2] In 1945, the sisters sold the convent and then bought a house but it was occupied by the British Council. In 1946, they were described in the Church Times as "homeless".[6] At that point the sisters moved to South Leigh, where they remained until 1956 when the remaining nuns joined the Community of the Holy Name at Malvern Link.[7]
