The leadership of the religious order founded by Cornelia Connelly – one of the most remarkable Catholics of the nineteenth century – is proposing to exhume her remains from the chapel of her beloved Mayfield School and transfer them to a purpose-built shrine in the United States

There is a story that the Devil, looking for a challenge, decided to tempt St Dunstan, who was working in his smithy. Dunstan would have none of it. He took red-hot tongs from the forge, seized the Devil by the nose and sent him flying to Tunbridge Wells, there to summon up cooling waters for his enflamed proboscis.

Visitors to Mayfield in Sussex today can see where the little smithy was, and will learn that Dunstan’s successors built a palace at the site, as a country retreat for the Archbishops of Canterbury. Gradually the place fell into ruinous disrepair, until at Whitsun 1863 a picnic party arrived in a charabanc from St Leonards-on-Sea, led by a truly formidable woman.

Cornelia Peacock was born in Philadelphia but left the city forever when she married, at the age of 22. Her husband, Pierce Connelly, was an Episcopalian priest and they moved to Natchez, Mississippi, where their first son, Mercer, and their elder daughter, Adeline, were born. Altogether they were to have five children, though two were to die tragically young.