Sir Edward, 1st Baronet Hales
Sir Edward, 3rd Baronet Hales of Woodchurch, bought the Elizabethan mansion, Place House, in 1675 from Colonel Thomas Culpeper whose father had bought it from the Manwoods. This mansion was replaced in 1766-68 by ‘a new sumptuous edifice built on a more suitable site’ [Seymour, A New Topographical, Historical &Commercial Survey of Kent, 1776] by Sir Edward, 5th Baronet. The new mansion house, ‘more fit for the residence of a monarch than for a simple country gentleman’ [Cozens, Through the Isle of Thanet, &c., 1793] was fronted by a terrace overlooking the City and the Cathedral. On the southern side of the house, now named ‘Hales Place’ was a large chapel: the Roman Catholics of the area attended services there. The Hales family in the days of Edward, 1st Baronet Hales [died 1654], had been the wealthiest in Kent but, from the time of the Civil Wars, more of their properties in Kent and elsewhere were increasingly being sold to raise money. The building of the new mansion exacerbated the on-coming poverty.
After Sir Edward died in 1802 he was succeeded by his son, the sixth baronet, at whose death in 1829 the Baronetcy became extinct. The alienated estates passed to the son of his youngest sister, Eduard de Morlaincourt, who changed his name to Edward Hales. His only daughter, Mary Barbara Felicity, inherited the property in 1837 when she was only one year old.
Educated in a French convent, MBF became an inconveniently religious woman and, when she came to of age, became a novice in the Carmelite convent in Paris. Determined to build a convent in Hales Palace, after she had been professed and taken the solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, she transferred from Paris to the English Carmelite convent at Valognes.
Madonna and child, statue in the Hales Place Chapel
Although a nun under the vow of poverty, she returned to Hales Place and started to build the convent; she attempted – until her self-willed and uncompromising temperament ruined the plan – to bring the Carmelite nuns to Canterbury. Having failed in her first scheme, she succeeded in getting a dispensation from her vows of obedience and poverty: she had never been obedient and could hardly be called poor. She then started a Benedictine Priory on the partially-built Carmelite structure. In 1880 she declared herself bankrupt and the last of her estate, Hales Place, was sold to the Jesuits from Lyons. They greatly extended the mansion house on the northern side to form ‘St Mary’s College’.
Slightly above and to the north-west of the house, the old dove cote-this is its nomenclature on the 1840 Tithe Commutation Map: Seymour [op.cit.] refers to it in 1776 as a belvedere-had been converted by Miss Hales into a small chapel. The circular building with its curious construction, using flint and brick and decorated with animal knuckle bones, was converted by the Jesuits into a mortuary chapel.