No. V.
THE CATHOLIC REGISTERS KEPT BY THE REV. ARTHUR PACIFICUS BAKER, O.S.F. , LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, LONDON . 1747-78. CONTRIBUTED BY MONSIGNOR CLAUD REGINALD LINDSAY . INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
The following registers of baptisms and marriages appear to have been kept as a private memorandum by the Rev. Arthur Pacificus Baker, a Franciscan , who was born about the year 1694 , and died 1774 . Gillow, in his Dictionary of the English Catholics ( i , 117) , tells us that Fr. Baker seems to have been attached to the Sardinian Chapel , London," but this opinion receives little support from the registers , wherein Fr. Baker distinctly says that he lived, first, in Duke Street (in Camera mea , on 21 Feb. , 1750 , and on 6 March, 1752 ) —the street chapel stood and later in Little Wild Street (in Camera in which the mea , from 1 April , 1752 , until 8 August, 1770), " near Lincoln's Inn Fields. " If Fr. Baker was officially attached to the embassy chapel and mission , it is strange that his name is nowhere to be found in the chapel registers , or in any of the other records , still extant , of that period , among such records being the lists of the chaplains who received salaries from the King of Sardinia for serving the chapel and mission . The earliest of these lists now to be found is dated July, 1759. On the last day of November of that year a destructive fire occurred at the Sardinian Chapel , and it is more than probable that all records anterior to this date perished , together with older registers in which Fr. Baker's name may have appeared . Dr. Kirk (Biographies , 9) quotes a tribute to the excellence of Fr. Baker , which also tends to make it certain that ( 1 ) he died at the house of Mr. John Anderton, watchmaker, in Little Wild Street, and (2) that he had his private chapel there. The words are those of Mr. Cole, a Protestant gentleman He was my particular friend , and a very worthy, honest man. He had been long ailing, being near four score. He lived in [Little ] Wild Street, where he had a very elegant chapel . He was author of many books of devotion, most of which he sent me . Pray God rest his soul , and be merciful to mine on the like necessary occasion . Amen . " Fr. Baker draws a clear distinction when he officiated , once only, on 23 May, 1753 in Camera Capella Legati Regis Sardinia in Lincoln's Inn Fields . In the archives , moreover , of the Franciscan Monastery at Forest Gate , there are a number of letters addressed to Fr. Baker , dated within the period covered by this register. Many of them have been examined by the present writer, and the impression that they conveyed to him was that Fr. Baker, with other Franciscans , * was primarily engaged
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In 1758 there were eleven Franciscans in London : Fathers [ Bruno] Cantrill, [Philip] Loraine , [Arthur Pacificus] Baker , [Philip ] Andre , [ Thomas Andrew] Greswold, [George Joachim ] Ingram , [ ] Dixon , [John] Wheeler, [Romanus] Chapman , [ James] Rogerson , and [Charles Stuart alias] Stevens . For nine of them there were livings , the patrons of which were : L