Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Touchet, George
TOUCHET, GEORGE (d. 1689?), Benedictine monk, born at Stalbridge, Dorset, was second son of Mervyn Touchet, twelfth lord Audley and second earl of Castlehaven, and younger brother of James Audley, third earl of Castlehaven [q. v.] He made his solemn profession in the chapel of the English Benedictine monastery of St. Gregory at Douay on 22 Nov. 1643, taking in religion the name of Anselm (Collins, Peerage of England, ed. Brydges, vi. 555; Weldon, Chronicle, App. p. 10). He was sent to the mission in the southern province of England, and was appointed chaplain to Queen Catherine of Braganza about 1671 with a salary of 100l. a year and apartments in Somerset House. He was banished in 1675, and, by act of parliament in 1678, was expressly excluded from the succession to the earldom of Castlehaven. He probably died about 1689.
He was the author of ‘Historical Collections out of several grave Protestant Historians concerning the Changes in Religion, and the strange confusions following from thence; in the reigns of King Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Queen Mary and Elizabeth’ (anon.), sine loco, 1674, 8vo; with an addition of ‘several remarkable passages taken out of Sir Will. Dugdale's “Antiquities of Warwickshire,” relating to the Abbies and their Institution,’ London, 1686, 8vo; and ‘with an appendix, setting forth the Abbies, Priories, and other Religious Houses dissolved in Ireland, and an historical account of each,’ Dublin, 1758, 12mo. The authorship of this work has been erroneously ascribed to Dr. George Hickes [q. v.]
[Dodd's Church Hist. iii. 493; Jones's Popery Tracts, pp. 271, 485; Lowndes's Bibl. Man. ed. Bohn, p. 1074; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. x. 388; Oliver's Cornwall, p. 524; Rambler, 1850, vii. 428; Snow's Necrology, p. 74.]