Thomas Doyle

Thomas Doyle D.D. (1793–1879) was an English Roman Catholic priest, associated with the construction of St George's Cathedral, Southwark.

Life Doyle was born on 21 December 1793 in London, of Irish parents. He was studying at St. Edmund's College, Ware, where he had been organist, when in 1819 William Poynter made him a priest to counter a shortfall.

Doyle was sent to the site of the future St. George's Cathedral, then the Royal Belgian Chapel, on the London Road in Southwark, in 1820, and nine years later he became the senior priest there. St George's Fields was a site associated with the Gordon Riots, and Doyle was instrumental in the construction of the cathedral there, designed by Augustus Pugin. Work started in September 1840, and the building was consecrated on 4 July 1848. Doyle published frequently in The Tablet, as "Father Thomas". He died at St. George's Cathedral on 6 June 1879, and was buried there.

The case involved Craven Berkeley, Augusta's stepfather. He had married Augusta Talbot (née Jones), widow of George Henry Talbot and Augusta's mother, in 1839; she died in 1841. Doyle made a petition for access to Augusta (Doyle v Wright) in 1840. The custody petition of March 1851 continued that case. Popular interest in the issue linked anti-Catholic feeling with Augusta Talbot's status as an heiress to £80,000, around the allegation that the Catholic Church would profit if she died a nun.