In 1841 Herbert, the eldest, went to study for six years at Stonyhurst College, then to the Jesuit school of Brugelette, Belgium (1846–1848), and then with the Benedictines at Downside Abbey, near Bath, England.

[2] In 1851 Vaughan went to Rome, and studied for two years at the Collegio Romano, where for a time he shared lodgings with the poet, Aubrey Thomas de Vere.

He convinced Cardinal Wiseman and the bishops to agree to a proposal to build a seminary in England that would train priests to serve on missions throughout the British Empire.

[5] That same year, the Tenth Provincial Council of Baltimore passed a decree exhorting all bishops to establish missions and schools in their dioceses for African Americans.

In 1892 Vaughan succeeded Manning as Archbishop of Westminster,[6] receiving the cardinal's hat in 1893 as Cardinal-Priest of Santi Andrea e Gregorio al Monte Celio.

"[7] Vaughan was an ecclesiastic of remarkably fine presence and aristocratic leanings, intransigent in theological policy, and in personal character simply devout.

In 1893 the US Mill Hill mission, based in Baltimore, Maryland, reorganised with Vaughan's blessing as an independent institution, known as Society of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart.

[8] It was due to this theological "purity" that Vaughan assisted in scuttling an opportunity for rapprochement between Rome and the Church of England that was put into motion by a high-church Anglican, Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax and a French priest, Ferdinand Portal.

[6] His body was interred at the cemetery of St. Joseph's College, the headquarters of the Mill Hill Missionaries in North London but it was moved back to the cathedral and reinterred in the Chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury (the "Vaughan Chantry") in 2005.