He was born at Gloucester, the eldest son of lieutenant-colonel John Francis Vaughan, head of an old Roman Catholic family, the Vaughans of Courtfield, Herefordshire. His mother, a daughter of John Rolls of The Hendre, Monmouthshire, was intensely religious; and all the daughters of the family entered convents, while six of the eight sons took priest's orders, three of them rising to the episcopate, Roger becoming Archbishop of Sydney, and John Bishop of Sebastopolis. Herbert spent six years at Stonyhurst, and was then sent to study with the Benedictines at Downside Abbey, near Bath, and subsequently at the Jesuit school of Brugelette, Belgium, which was afterwards removed to Paris.
In 1851 he went to Rome. After two years of study at the Accademia dei nobili ecclesiastiae, where he became a friend and disciple of Manning, he took priest's order's at Lucca in 1854. On his return to England he became for a period vice-president of St Edmund's College, Ware, at that time the chief seminary for candidates for the priesthood in the south of England. Since childhood he had been filled with zeal for foreign missions, and he conceived the determination to found a great English missionary college to fit young priests for the work of evangelizing the heathen. With this object he made a great begging expedition to America in 1863, from which he returned with £11,000.
St Joseph's Foreign Missionary College, Mill Hill Park, London, was opened in 1869. Vaughan also became proprietor of the Tablet, and used its columns vigorously for propagandist purposes. In 1872 he was consecrated bishop of Salford, and in 1892 succeeded Manning as archbishop of Westminster, receiving the cardinal's hat in 1893. Vaughan was a man of very different type from his predecessor; he had none of Manning's intellectual finesse or his ardour in social reform, but he was an ecclesiastic of remarkably fine presence and aristocratic leanings, intransigeant in theological policy, and in personal character simply devout.
It was his most cherished ambition to see before he died an adequate Roman Catholic cathedral in Westminster, and he laboured untiringly to secure subscriptions, with the result that its foundation stone was laid in 1895, and that when he died, the building was so far complete that a Requiem Mass was said there over his body before it was removed to its resting-place at Mill Hill Park.
See the Life of Cardinal Vaughan, by JG Snead Cox (2 vols., London, 1910).
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