James Weld, owner of Archers Lodge and a prominent Reform politician in Southampton was a member of one of the leading Roman Catholic families in England. His father, Thomas Weld (1750-1810), had succeeded to the family estates in the 1770s: those in Oxfordshire on obtaining his majority in 1771, following the death of his uncle Sir Edward Simeon three years earlier and those in Dorset, Hampshire and Lancashire in 1775, on the death of his elder brother Edward.
His formative years were spent on the continent, educated by English and French Jesuits at St Omer and Bruges in Flanders. Three of his sons – Joseph, John and Edward – were educated at the English Academy at Liege, the only Jesuit educational institution to survive the suppression of the Order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.
Many of the staff and students of the English Academy fled to England in July 1794 in advance of the French occupation of Flanders. These Thomas resettled at Stonyhurst -part of Weld’s property in Lancashire – in the hope that the infusion of new blood would stimulate a renaissance of English Jesuit education.
Mr Weld was a founding member of The Yacht Club