Charles Sidney Beauclerk

Fr Charles Sidney de Vere Beauclerk SJ (1 January 1855 – 22 November 1934) was a Jesuit priest who attempted to turn the town of Holywell into the "Lourdes of Wales".

He was assisted by Father Fletcher who established the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom in the town and predicted that Holywell would become the "centre for the conversion of England" to Catholicism.

[1] Beauclerk's assertions about conversion and his attempts to dominate the public space with Catholic imagery caused a backlash from Protestants, especially nonconformists.

In April 1895, the writer Frederick Rolfe, then using the pseudonym "Mr Austin", arrived in Holywell and was engaged by Beauclerk to paint some new banners for use in the town's regular Catholic processions.

However, it was not long before Rolfe's relations with the parish priest began to deteriorate, and broke down altogether when Beauclerk rejected his request to be paid a hefty sum for painting the banners.

In his later years his personal hobby was the accumulation of evidence to prove that his ancestor Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays, an idea first suggested in 1920 by J. Thomas Looney.

He was the first person to propose that de Vere was the subject of the Ashbourne portrait, an idea he passed to Looney's follower Percy Allen.