senior's third son and Edward's youngest brother, Thomas. Thomas Weld (1750-1810) and his wife had many children and great swathes of land which he distributed among his progeny. However, as a former pupil of the English Jesuit Colleges of St Omer and Liège, and already a philanthropist, he stepped in to save the refugee Jesuit schools over the Channel and resolved in 1794 to donate his Lancashire estate, including the buildings, with of land to the Society of Jesus for the purpose of settling them and their evacuated charges from Northern France and the Austrian Netherlands. The college The story of the school may be traced back to establishments in St Omer in what was then the Spanish Netherlands in 1593, where a college, under the Royal Patronage of Philip II of Spain, was founded by Fr Robert Persons SJ for English boys unable to receive a Catholic education in Elizabethan England. As such it was one of several expatriate English schools operating on the European mainland. In 1762, the Jesuits were forced to flee and re-established their school at Bruges. The school was moved in 1773 to Liège, where it operated for two decades before moving to Stonyhurst on 29 August 1794. Schooling resumed on 22 October that year. The college flourished during the 19th century: the Society of Jesus was re-established in Britain at Stonyhurst in 1803, and over the century, student numbers rose from the original twelve migrants from Liège. By the turn of the following century, it had become England's largest Roman Catholic college. Stonyhurst Hall underwent extensive alterations and additions to accommodate these numbers; the Old South Front was constructed in 1810, only to be demolished and replaced with much grander buildings in the 1880s. A seminary was constructed on the estate, and an observatory and meteorological station erected in the gardens. The 20th century saw the gradual hiring of a mostly lay staff, as the number of Jesuits declined. The seminary at St Mary's Hall was closed, and the school discontinued its education of university-aged philosophers. With the closure of Beaumont College in 1967 and the transfer away from the Society of Jesus of Mount St Mary's College, Spinkhill, Derbyshire, in 2006, Stonyhurst became the sole Jesuit public school in England. Since the Second World War, the buildings have been refurbished or developed. Additions include new science buildings in the 1950s and 1960s, a