When the architectural dispute – both aesthetic and financial – was at its height, Nicholas Wiseman was preoccupied with what he undoubtedly regarded as a far more dangerous division of opinion. Two increasingly polarised factions had grown up within the Catholic Church in England: quietists who were satisfied with toleration, and radicals who demanded the end of England’s missionary status and its acceptance, by Rome, as a fully participating part of the worldwide communion. Chief among the radicals was Daniel Rock, chaplain to the Earl of Shrewsbury. In May 1842 he had sent a circular to all his fellow clergy – a formidable task, which could not have been accomplished without the support of his employer. Its intention was the revival of the campaign for the restoration of the English Catholic Hierarchy. ‘Long has the yearning for such a measure been growing in the minds of several of the secular clergy of this land but … none of them would venture on the first step in this.’1 The circular went on to report that timidity and torpor had been defeated, that the subject was raised at the annual meeting of Midland clergy and that a petition was to be sent to the Pope. The Adelphi Club was formed to campaign for the restoration of the Hierarchy and boasted, as a proof of progress, that attendance at its weekly meetings increased from two dozen to one hundred and twenty. The subject was discussed at a meeting of Vicars Apostolic in 1843, but – because of hostility from Catholics who wanted a quiet life – no decision was taken. It was not until 1847 that the Catholic Church in England decided formally to request a change in its status. Then Nicholas Wiseman, supported by Father James Sharples, was despatched to Rome, deputed by the English Vicars Apostolic to negotiate the creation of a distinct English hierarchy.
The elevation of Vicars Apostolic to the rank of full bishop involved far greater changes in the status of the Catholic Church in England than the improvement in personal esteem that follows a new title being given to an old job. The creation of the Hierarchy meant far more than the autonomous right to ordain priests and the duty to set up Chapters to govern the new dioceses. It even meant more than a change in the relationship with Propaganda Fide, which would no longer regard the English Catholic Church as a religious colony that was governed from Rome. The creation of an English hierarchy was of fundamental importance because of the place that bishops occupy in the Catholic Church. Collectively they stand, if not side by side with the Pope, then only one step behind him in the inheritance of the Apostolic Succession. They too are the heirs of Peter and Timothy and, in consequence, have a role to play in the governance of the Church and the interpretation of doctrine. The application for the restoration of the Hierarchy was the request that English Catholics, by becoming bishops, be empowered to influence the whole future of their native Church.
Wiseman was a controversial choice of spokesman to argue England’s case. He was undoubtedly unpopular with his colleagues, who thought of him both as an ‘Ultramontane’ who regarded Rome’s word as law and as an ‘enthusiast’ who rejoiced in making new converts from the ranks of troubled Protestants. He wanted the Catholic Church to come out of hiding and had something approaching contempt for what he regarded as the timidity of many senior members of the clergy. Because of those attributes, it was assumed that he sided with the Curia in Rome rather than with the independently minded Vicars Apostolic. That suspicion seemed to be confirmed when the Pope made clear that he would want Wiseman to succeed Thomas Walsh as Vicar Apostolic in London. Discreet representations were made to the Vatican. As is usually the case, the Pope’s will prevailed, but in a concession to opponents of the appointment, Wiseman was initially to be known as Pro-Vicar Apostolic.
Yet, despite their doubts, the English Vicars Apostolic chose Wiseman to argue for a hierarchy. That was because he knew his way around Rome and could be relied upon to make England’s case with clarity and courage and at least the appearance of conviction. The English Vicars Apostolic needed a brave and lucid champion to counterbalance the influence of Charles Acton, the Pope’s adviser on English affairs. Acton – a little younger than Wiseman and equally clever – was essentially a Vatican bureaucrat who, working as Auditor of the Rota, was completely remote from parish life in England and, even after his appointment as Cardinal on the death of Thomas Weld, believed that his first obligation was protecting the Pope’s interests. Unfortunately he regarded the English priesthood as, in many ways, antagonistic to Rome. That required him to oppose granting England the semi-autonomous status of a separate hierarchy. Wiseman was rightly thought to be his intellectual match. So he became champion of the cause – supported and, if necessary, held in check by John Sharples, Coadjutor of the newly created Lancashire District.
A new Pope, Pius IX, had been elected in June 1846 to succeed Gregory XVI. ‘Pio Nono’ was a controversial choice. The conclave that elected him – although he had come bottom in the first ballot – was, in the opinion of formally minded Catholics, of dubious provenance. Because of wars and revolution in Europe, only forty-six of the sixty-two cardinals attended. The English emissaries had no clear idea how the new Pope would respond to their application, but assumed that he would regard a re-established hierarchy as no more than a long-term goal. But Wiseman and Sharples – despite the opposition of Cardinal Acton – determined to press for immediate full episcopal status. Then Wiseman became caught up in the politics of the Risorgimento.
The election of Pius IX had produced what Count Metternich (architect of the Treaty of Vienna in 1815) believed to be impossible: a liberal Pope. Austria – opposed to reform within the Papal States and fearful of losing what amounted to her Italian colonies – sent a warning message to ‘Pio Nono’ in the form of eight hundred soldiers who crossed the River Po into Ferrara. Hapsburg agents were suspected of being complicit in a plot to assassinate him. It was time for the countries that had called for the liberalisation of the Papal States to act in defence of the changes they had demanded. Approaches had to be made to sympathetic governments, but there were no diplomatic relations between the Holy See and London. So the Pope asked Wiseman to return to England as his emissary and plead for moral support, if not actual intervention. In those days diplomacy was a more informal business than it is today. Wiseman called, unheralded, at the Foreign Office, but found Lord Palmerston out. So he left a seven-page memorandum, which politely asked Her Majesty’s Government to endorse the introduction of the Roman reforms for which it had already called and to boost the reformers’ morale by the appointment of some sort of plenipotentiary to the Papal States. Palmerston obliged, insomuch as he sent Lord Minto to Rome without any title which might suggest that England had recognised the successor to the Bishop of Rome who had once given his blessing to the murder of Queen Elizabeth.
In much of Europe the liberal rising in Italy turned into the Year of Revolution. That was not what the liberal Pope and his allies had either anticipated or wanted. They were enemies of tyranny, not the friends of democracy. For a while, Pius IX – worried less about Austrian assassination than Italian populism – lived in exile. On his return he turned his mind to the English question and decided, after two Masses that were dedicated to his need for heavenly guidance, that God wished the English Hierarchy restored. The Congregation of Propaganda Fide ordered the English Vicars Apostolic to draw up plans for the new regime. The work was done but, for some reason, the result was never sent to Rome. Impatient Vatican officials drew up a scheme that they believed to be acceptable to the Curia. It was never officially promulgated, but a copy was sent to Lord Minto – the British Government’s man in the Vatican. He either failed to read it or chose not to report its contents to the Foreign Office. It was an omission that, when the Hierarchy was eventually re-established, was to heighten the tension between London and Rome, and which can only be explained and excused by the possibility that Minto judged that the negotiations – which it was said were to be based on the Vatican’s own proposals – would never take place.
Wiseman, on diplomatic business, and John Sharples, mortally sick, were both in London. And Thomas Grant (by then Rector of the English College and Agent of the English Vicars Apostolic in Rome) responded to an invitation to take over the negotiations with a request to resign the agency. Eventually Bernard Ullathorne – a Benedictine monk and a man of selfless integrity who had been transferred, as Vicar Apostolic, from the old Western to the new Central District – agreed to argue England’s case. His previous visit to Rome had been in response to an invitation to discuss the past liabilities and future prospects of the always controversial Prior Park. Advocating the creation, and negotiating the details, of a hierarchy probably seemed easy by comparison. That may have been why he ‘lost no time in departing’ on a journey which took him ‘through the revolutionary scenes that agitated Paris’.2
Ullathorne’s task was complicated by a request from the ‘Clergy of England’ that he present to the Pope a petition which ‘begged that bishops shall not be made titular till the rights of the clergy be settled, lest their last case be worse than their first’.3 Parish priests feared that they would lose the freedom that ‘colonial status’ allowed. The existence of the petition was embarrassing enough in itself. Ullathorne, a monk, was naturally anxious that he should not be accused of ignoring the needs of the secular clergy. But the clergy’s concerns were elevated into a much more controversial issue by the intervention of Father Thomas McDonnell – late of St Peter’s, Birmingham. Father McDonnell was a well-known troublemaker. A passionate opponent of Pugin and all his work, he had fought a long campaign against the building of St Chad’s Cathedral. During its construction he had barricaded himself inside his presbytery and, after the completion of the cathedral, he had first organised his parish fete on the day of its opening service, and later burst into the celebration dinner. His conduct – which later included accusing Wiseman of heresy – had provoked a heated correspondence with William Ullathorne, and McDonnell welcomed the opportunity to undermine his old adversary by writing to Propaganda Fide as an advocate for the Clergy of England. McDonnell was a minor irritant. Wiseman – at least according to Ullathorne’s biography – created a major problem.
The two men – piety aside – could hardly have been more different. Ullathorne was a blunt Yorkshireman who regarded administrative competence and financial prudence as important virtues. Wiseman exhibited neither quality. In a letter, written after Wiseman’s death, Ullathorne clearly struggled, and failed, to be charitable about the colleague who, when he became Archbishop of Westminster, was promoted into a position that many (perhaps most) English Catholics thought the Vicar Apostolic for the Midland District should occupy. ‘If there was success, there were also many failures in his career, owing to an utter deficiency of steady, straightforward business habits and a peculiarly sensitive temperament. He was in many respects a child, indeed I have long noticed that this is the character of men of genius. They carry the child through the life of a man with its intuitions and its susceptibilities.’4
In Rome, during the Curia’s deliberations on the re-establishment of the English Hierarchy, the first accusation against Wiseman was that he attempted to influence the course of the negotiations long after Ullathorne had been given the responsibility for representing England. The second charge – in its way, even more damning – was that his private interventions with his influential friends often concerned decisions about appointments to the several sees that would be created when the Hierarchy was re-established. Ullathorne, who clearly rejoiced in speaking plainly, set out his complaint in writing: ‘On the subject of lay interference … The most glaring cases have been ascribed to your lordship’s friends, to those over whom you have been supposed to have sufficient influence to guide them.’ He had reason to believe that ‘members of the aristocracy with Lord Shrewsbury at their head had petitioned Rome to place a particular bishop in the archiepiscopal see of Westminster’.5 The Curia’s subsequent decision to conduct what was left of the discussions in secrecy can be attributed to their suspicion of Wiseman’s conduct, to a response to Ullathorne’s warnings or to a reversion to normal operating procedures.
Alessandro Barnabo – then Secretary of Propaganda Fide – told Ullathorne that it would be difficult to confirm any plan, no matter how acceptable to the parties, until the seven cardinals, who were examining the options, had decided how to resolve the difficulty of choosing an English archbishop.6 The related question – would a young man be acceptable? – helped to encourage the myth of Wiseman’s insatiable ambition. Ullathorne claimed that Rome was determined that Thomas Walsh (to whom Nicholas Wiseman, after a period as Pro Vicar Apostolic, had become Coadjutor) would become the first Catholic Archbishop since the Reformation and was prepared to shuffle other appointments to bring that about. Age and time had made Walsh’s elevation impossible. But the character of Ullathorne’s negotiations make it clear that even the Princes of the Catholic Church argued – like ordinary mortals – about standing and status.
There is now little doubt that Wiseman was right to argue that Rome had decided to accept the principle of England’s claim to its own hierarchy before Ullathorne’s arrival. Long after the deed was done, he published the long memorandum in which he had initially outlined and sought to justify England’s claim:
The only regulation or code of government possessed by the English Catholics [is] the Constitution of Pope Benedict XIV … which was issued in 1753 … Now this Constitution has grown obsolete by the very length of time and, more happily, by change of circumstances … [In 1753] the Catholics were still under the pressure of heavy penal laws … All their colleges for ecclesiastical education were situated abroad … Religious orders had no houses in England … There was nothing approaching a parochial division and most places of worship were private chapels … Either the Holy See must issue a new and full Constitution … or the real and complete code of the Church must at once be extended to the Church in England … In order to adopt this second and more natural expedient one condition is necessary … the Catholics must have a hierarchy. The Canon Law is inapplicable under Vicars Apostolic … Many points would have to be synodically adjusted and without a Metropolitan and Suffragans, a Provincial Synod is out of the question.7
The argument was so elegantly advanced that it must be assumed that Wiseman – or the colleagues who advised him – intentionally omitted any mention of the most pressing reason for a change in Church governance.
Over a brief decade the character and size of the Catholic community in England had fundamentally changed. Converts from the Church of England – excited by the doctrinal arguments that John Henry Newman had stimulated – had added zest and confidence to its congregations. And during the ten years that began in 1841, the Irish-born population of England, Scotland and Wales increased from 415,000 to 727,000.8 As a proportion of the whole nation, they were an insignificant minority. But they concentrated in areas to which access from Ireland was easiest and where the chances of survival was greatest. In consequence, by 1851 they made up a substantial percentage of the population: 22.3 per cent in Liverpool and 18.2 per cent in Glasgow (on direct steamship routes) and 18.9 per cent in Dundee and 13.1 per cent in Manchester-Salford, where the growing textile industries offered the hope of work for women and children. More than 90 per cent of the Irish immigrants were Catholics. But they were Catholics of a sort unknown in England. They had been born and bred in a country in which their faith, although bearing the burden of civic disabilities, was dominant. So they took their Church for granted and often ignored its obligations. Their priests they regarded as the leaders – social and often political, as well as religious – of their communities, on whom they relied for help and advice. And most of the Irish Catholics who came to England in the early years of the nineteenth century were paupers, without jobs, homes or any experience of urban life.
Irish immigrants to England were, almost universally, the victims of prejudice and discrimination – sometimes because they were Irish and Catholic, and sometimes because they undercut the wages of the native-born workmen. The 1836 Report on the State of the Irish Poor had identified them as ‘an example of a less civilised population spreading themselves, as a kind of substratum, beneath a more civilised community and, without excelling in any branch of industry, obtaining possession of the lowest departments of manual labour’.9 While the working man accused the Irish immigrants of stealing English jobs, the establishment castigated them for being work-shy. The Times asked two rhetorical questions: ‘What is an Englishman for but to work? What is an Irishman for but to sit at his cabin door, read O’Connell’s speeches and abuse the English?’10 Disraeli called Irish immigrants ‘wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious’ and, in unconscious irony, listed bigotry among their defining characteristics. His imperial instinct might have prompted him to say that they gladly fought for the Queen Empress. During the first forty years of the nineteenth century 43 per cent of the ‘other ranks’ in the British Army were Irish-born.11
The Church was increasingly worried about not having the numbers of priests to serve the immigrants adequately and sustain their faith. The problems caused by the overall shortage of clergy were compounded by a particular shortage of Irish priests who were familiar with the mores, the accents and dialects of home. Father George Montgomery, of Wednesbury in Staffordshire, told the Rector of the Irish College in Rome ‘nineteen twentieths of my flock come from Connacht’.12 Sometimes the inability to make themselves understood prevented conscientious Catholics from making confessions. More often – particularly in the case of single men – they chose to ignore the obligations of their faith. The colloquial term for their behaviour was ‘leakage’.
The size of the problem was, in one sense, overestimated. Half of the Catholic immigrants to Britain were not regular worshippers before they set sail.13 So the ‘leakage’ was as much an Irish as an English problem. But although the immigrant Catholics were more likely to attend church than were their Protestant contemporaries, they were less likely to do so than the English-born Catholics. Very few of them repudiated Catholicism or converted to other denominations. They were indifferent to Catholic ritual and its demanding practices, not to Catholicism itself. They identified with the Church and, unhesitatingly, called themselves Catholics. And practising Catholics they became, when they needed the Church to officiate at weddings, baptisms and funerals.
Perhaps it was because the British Catholic immigrants – unlike their American counterparts – were Irish that they never came to dominate the Church in England as it was dominated by first- and second-generation citizens in the USA. But they did change its character. The Irish played a substantial part in completing the process of replacing lay control of the Church by control that amounted to the hegemony of the priesthood. And although English Catholicism never was, or could be, Ultramontane, antagonism towards Rome decreased with the assimilation of Catholics who had been brought up to believe that the Holy See could do no wrong. Perhaps most important of all, the increase in numbers made the Catholic Church a more visible part of British society. At the close of the eighteenth century there was one itinerant priest in Manchester. He said Mass in private houses. By 1846 thirteen priests served five distinct parishes. Although there were still people, inside and outside the Church, who argued that Catholics should give humble and unobtrusive thanks for the liberties they had lately enjoyed, bolder spirits began to break out from, the often self-imposed, isolation. Catholics also became a distinct community. That meant they enjoyed the benefits of solidarity, but also suffered the penalty of being different from the people around them.
The first half of the nineteenth century was notable for the extension and expansion of Catholic good works. The Asylum of the Good Shepherd rescued ‘young women from a career of sin and appalling misery … During their residence’ they ‘were not allowed to go out at all’ as they prepared for ‘employment in needlework and similar occupation’. The Benevolent Society for Relief of the Aged offered help to the ‘widowed, childless and aged’. The Society of Charitable Sisters provided shelter for ‘the poorest of the poor, principally natives of the Sister Isle, driven by necessity from their homes’. The Society of Catholic Butlers proposed to sponsor the creation of an Institute of Catholic Servants. And a Church which not so long ago had itself been regarded as a missionary enterprise applied to administer a proportion of the money that was allocated, by the government, ‘for the education of Youths in those British Colonies in which slavery previously existed’. The obligations of faith were not forgotten. The Society of Christian Ladies for Decoration of the House of God supplied ‘the poorer chapels of Great Britain and Ireland with vestments and altar linen’.14
Wiseman had been able to argue that England deserved, as well as needed, the benefits that a hierarchy would provide, and it was to support the argument (and not, as was later contended, to ensure that he was elevated above all other English Catholics) that he had exploited his personal connections. He had assumed that, when the Hierarchy was created, he would become Bishop, rather than Vicar Apostolic, in a diocese that corresponded to the London District. But in the high summer of 1849 he was instructed by Cardinal Antonelli, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, to return to Rome and attend Consistory, at which he would be nominated Cardinal. Denials that the news gave him either pride or pleasure were implausible, but there is no doubt that he regretted what he wrongly believed would be one consequence of his elevation. He assumed that he would become a member of the Pontifical Court and that ‘golden fetters’ would frustrate his ‘life’s wish to labour for England’.15
No doubt Nicholas Wiseman left England on August 24th 1850 prepared loyally to discharge whatever duties were imposed upon him. But the grace with which he accepted papal authority was never put to the test. He was granted a private audience on September 5th, the day of his arrival, but it was not until September 13th, when he had a formal meeting, that he was told what his future was to be. When he relayed the great news to friends in England, he cautiously described his destiny as ‘more than probable’. In fact he knew for certain that, at the Consistory, ‘the Hierarchy will be proclaimed and, in the spring, I shall return to London’.16 To avoid all doubt about what position he would occupy, he added that he would immediately hold the ‘first Synod [Provincial] since the Reformation’.
John Henry Newman – not then the figure he was to become – anticipated that the re-creation of the English Hierarchy would be deeply controversial. Although he did not number understanding of the English character among his many talents, he also forecast, with equal prescience, that the most vehement objections would be based on the bogus claim that English sovereignty was under threat. So he wrote to Wiseman, with what turned out to be highly pertinent questions: ‘Should his eminence wait a while in Florence until the ferment is over? … Ought he also to have about him not only a good canonist but some very good English constitutional lawyer?’17
Initially, Newman’s caution seemed misplaced. The English press reacted to the news from Rome with bored indifference. The Times described, at length, the Consistory that gave formal endorsement to the decision and celebrated England’s translation from a mission to an archdiocese. Its description of the occasion leaves no doubt about the grandeur and glory of the ceremony. The newspaper was less interested in the liturgy than in ‘the grand display of the diamonds of the old Roman families … the brilliant jewels of the Torlonias and the splendid heirlooms of the Doria, Borghese and others’.18
All might have been well had the new Cardinal Wiseman not reacted to the proclamation of the restored Hierarchy with an exuberance that must, in part, have been fuelled by the sin of pride. He immediately issued a pastoral letter, which he named From the Flaminian Gate – referring to the passage north, and therefore to England, through the old city wall of Rome. The pastoral began with understandable rejoicing:
The great work, then, is complete. What you have long desired and prayed for is granted. Your beloved country has been granted a place among the fair Churches which, normally constituted form the splendid aggregate of the Catholic Communion … Then truly is this day to us a day of joy and exaltation of spirit, the crowning day of long hopes and the opening day of bright prospects.
He then described his role and responsibilities under the new dispensation in words that were not chosen with care:
His Holiness was further pleased to appoint us, though most unworthy, to the Archiepiscopal See of Westminster … giving us at the same time the administration of the Episcopal See of Southwark. So at present, and till such time as the Holy See shall think fit otherwise to provide, we govern and shall continue to govern the counties of Middlesex, Hertford and Essex as Ordinary thereof and those of Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Berkshire and Hampshire (with the islands annexed) as Administrator with Ordinary Jurisdiction.
It took some time for the full text of the pastoral itself to reach England. But news of Wiseman’s badly worded description of his elevation travelled fast. The Times – which had initially been more interested in ceremonial than in constitution – thundered its defence of English sovereignty and denounced the encyclical as ‘an audacious and conspicuous display of pretentions to resume the absolute spiritual domination of this island’. Worse was to come.
Cardinal Archbishop Nicholas Wiseman left Rome for England on October 12th 1850 and stopped to be feted at every capital along the extended route. So London heard of his elevation some weeks before he arrived home. He learned of the reception that the news had received when he reached Vienna and was shown a week-old copy of The Times, which had extended its attack from an assault on the Pope’s pretensions to a condemnation of both Pius IX for re-creating the Hierarchy and Wiseman for accepting its leadership. Its editorial described the new Cardinal as seeing ‘fit to enter the service of a foreign power and accept its spurious dignities’ and accused his master of ‘one of the grossest acts of folly and impertinence which the Court of Rome has ventured to commit since the Crown and people of England threw off its yoke’.19
Much of the ridicule and abuse that were to follow were at the time – and have been since – attributed to Wiseman’s folly in publishing the triumphalist pastoral letter. But the English establishment would, under any circumstances, have attacked what they saw as the Pope’s presumption. The Times’ excoriating editorials were published before it knew the full extent of what came to be regarded as Wiseman’s blunder. The wording of From the Flaminian Gate only increased the outrage that the facts it described had already provoked. And the description of Wiseman’s new responsibilities added ridicule to resentment.
Queen Victoria – thirteen years on the throne – was congratulated by her uncle, the Duke of Nemours, on the ‘moderation of her response’ to what he regarded as a challenge to her authority.20 He said nothing about the realism of her proposal that diplomats should travel to Rome, in the hope of persuading the Pope to cancel Wiseman’s appointment. The initiative was vetoed by Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary – and, in Victoria’s opinion, ‘the obstacle to all that is good and right’. Despite her ‘sincere Protestant feelings’, she was disturbed by the ‘anti-Catholic unchristian and intolerant spirit exhibited by many people at public meetings’. But her journal suggests that she was eventually persuaded to take the threat seriously by politicians who hoped to increase their popularity by what they chose to call ‘Papal Aggression’. Wiseman ‘was doing all he could to Romanize this country – to detach Roman Catholics from their allegiance to me and bring them entirely under the sway of the Pope. This is very dangerous.’ Having read the list of counties that Wiseman had announced he ‘ruled’, the Queen was said to have asked – uncharacteristically amused – whether she still occupied the throne.
Charles Dickens encouraged the growing hysteria with an article in Household Words entitled ‘A Crisis in the Affairs of Mr John Bull as Related by Mrs John Bull to the Children’. The Duke of Norfolk temporarily left the Church. Disraeli was said to have been so genuinely troubled by the affair that his romantic attachment to Catholicism (as illustrated in Sybil) became a violent antipathy to Rome and its English adherents (as demonstrated in Lothair).21 Lord John Russell, the Whig Prime Minister – who did not know that his representative in Rome had been given notice of progress towards the Hierarchy’s restoration – took the opportunity to regain some of the friends whom he had lost through his wholehearted support of Catholic emancipation. When the Bishop of Durham wrote to him to complain about the Pope’s ‘insolent and insidious’ assumption of authority, Russell replied that he felt equally indignant and proved his point by denouncing, in manic language, the pastoral which, at worst, was risibly bombastic. However, he was confident that England was ‘strong enough to repel any outward attacks … and resist any foreign attempts to impose a foreign yoke upon our minds and conscience’.22 That did not excuse ‘the assumption of power in all the documents which have come from Rome – a pretension to supremacy over the realm of England and a claim to sole and undecided sway which is inconsistent with the Queen’s supremacy’.
The Prime Minister must have known that fears of ‘papal aggression’ were groundless. Rome had, long ago, lost both the hope and the ability to reconvert England. But Russell, under attack from the reactionary wing of his party because of his support for the 1832 Reform Bill, sought to placate his enemies by releasing a spectre that ignited the bigotry that smouldered under the surface of civilised middle-class England. The Tablet, still in its reckless phase, commented that ‘the devil is apt to howl when he is hurt’.23
Russell published both the Bishop of Durham’s letter and his reply. The popular reaction was what he must have known it would be. The Church of England bishops behaved as if they were competing with each other to determine which diocese could take credit for the most mindless abuse. The Bishop of London described the Catholic clergy as ‘emissaries of darkness’. The Bishop of Manchester warned that ‘Rome clings to her abomination’. The Bishop of Oxford abhorred the pastoral as ‘subtle and unclean’. The Bishop of Hereford feared the re-emergence of ‘the sorcerer’s cup’ and the ‘crafts of Satan’. The Bishop of Carlisle abandoned metaphor in favour of the simple claim that the pretensions of Rome were ‘profane, blasphemous and anti-Christian’.24 The Bishop of Chichester thought the pastoral was an act of ‘audacious aggression’ while the Bishop of Exeter regarded it as a ‘daring display of Roman ambition’. The Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol complained of a ‘revolting and frightful assumption’ of unauthorised authority.25 Fearful that they had not made their position clear, the English Episcopate – with the exceptions of Norwich and Wells – sent a loyal address to Queen Victoria swearing eternal opposition to any attempt to ‘subject our people to a spiritual tyranny from which they were freed at the Reformation’. The Queen replied that she ‘heartily concurred’. The Lord Chancellor lent his support by ending his speech at the Mansion House Banquet with two verses of doggerel: ‘Under our feet we’ll stamp the Cardinal’s hat / In spite of Pope or dignities of Church.’
The Prime Minister’s correspondence with the Bishop of Durham became public knowledge on November 5th 1850. So preparations were already in hand for celebrating the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. All over the country effigies of Guy Fawkes were swiftly converted into effigies of Pius IX or Nicholas Wiseman. Some cities went even further. In Salisbury torchlights and brass bands headed the procession, which led crude representations of twelve Catholic bishops, as well as Cardinal Wiseman and the Pope, towards the flames. At Ware a donkey was dressed in a cardinal’s robes and an effigy of the Pope, wearing ram’s horns as well as the triple crown, was hanged as well as burned. A procession, 10,000 strong, marched from Peckham Common to Camberwell, shouting ‘No Popery!’ and ‘God Save the Queen!’ Priests were assaulted in the streets and the windows of Catholic churches were smashed. Wiseman’s coach was stoned.
The spontaneity, as well as the extent, of the denunciations and demonstrations was depressing proof that England remained an anti-Catholic, as well as a Protestant, nation. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, wrote that ‘the ferment abates not a jot; meeting after meeting in every town and county in the country … It resembles a storm over the whole ocean; it is a national sentiment, a rising of the land! All sentiments seem for a while have to be submerged into one feeling.’26 It was generally agreed that England had seen nothing to compare with the commotion since the Reform Bill riots, and that the most vociferous and violent citizens were members of the middle class – ‘usually the calmest and most reflecting section of the community’. Their prejudices had moved with the times. Whereas their forefathers had feared Catholic-inspired external aggression from Spain, they warned against internal subversion – what The Times called ‘the terrible danger of the renegades of our national Church [exploiting] a foreign usurpation over the conscience of men to sow dissension within our political society’. Shaftesbury prayed: ‘Lord purge the Church of those men who, while their hearts are in the Vatican, still eat the bread of the Establishment and undermine her.’
Wiseman, when he eventually arrived home in England, took his detractors head-on. Wisely, he chose to defend the meaning, rather than the language, of his pastoral and graciously forbore to mention that a draft of it had been shown to Lord Minto, Lord Palmerston’s representative in the Vatican, who – failing either to read it or grasp its importance – had neglected to report its contents to the government that he served. Wiseman’s forbearance was rewarded. Lord Lansdowne, the Lord President of the Council, was admirably, if recklessly, frank. Lord Russell, he wrote, had published this letter to the Bishop of Durham without consulting colleagues – some of whom disapproved of its contents. Wiseman was encouraged to give a public explanation of what the restoration of the Hierarchy really meant. His exposition took the form of a sermon preached in St George’s, Southall. Thanks to the controversial nature of the subject, several newspapers, including The Times with bad grace, published the sermon verbatim. Thirty thousand pamphlets, also reproducing the sermon in full, were distributed within a week. Wiseman was determined to occupy the high ground. So he began:
At this moment of danger to the religious and civil liberties of Englishmen is not from any infringement of them by the Pope in granting to English Catholics what I hope to show you they had every right to obtain from him. It comes from those who are taking advantage of the occurrence to go back a step, if they can, in the legislation of toleration and take away from a large body of Englishmen what is lawful to them in regard to the free exercise of their religion.27
What followed was simultaneously apologetic, dismissive and categoric. The Pope could not, would not and did not claim any authority over secular matters and, despite his own new title, the ‘duties and occupation of the Dean and Chapter’ of Westminster Abbey ‘remain undisturbed’.28 The combination of reason with an appeal for justice worked surprisingly well. The newspapers that had made the wildest allegations of treason and subversion did not, of course, admit they had been wrong. Instead they claimed that Wiseman’s undoubtedly florid language had deceived them. The Times reduced its criticism to a complaint against ‘Empty gasconades and pompous manifestos’ and congratulated the new Cardinal on ‘his recovery of the use of the English language’. The London News accused ‘over sanguine priests’ of foolishly overstating the consequences of a ‘harmless domestic arrangement’.
Newman wrote to Rome to express his fear that Parliament, ‘which the Queen wishes to summon for the despatch of business earlier than usual’, would not let the subject rest. ‘I don’t think they can do us any harm,’ he told Talbot at the English College, ‘but they will insult us (which we must bear) and like mad animals will think that they have triumphed over us when we have the victory.’ Despite the strength of the Catholic Church’s position, he suggested a compromise over what, with remarkable prescience, he predicted would be the ground on which the establishment mounted its counter-attack, the naming of bishops. If ‘Bishop of Birmingham is made illegal, Bishop of the City of Birmingham might be used consistently with Catholic propriety’. He ended with the glad tidings that ‘the Cardinal is firm and vigorous’ and ‘the effect of his pamphlet (explaining the true meaning of From the Flaminian Gate had been enormous.’29
Despite Wiseman’s protestations, Lord Russell persisted – or pretended to persist – in the belief that the Pope had territorial ambitions and was a predator that had to be held back. In 1851, he introduced the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, which prohibited the Catholic Hierarchy from ascribing bishoprics to sees over which the Church of England presided, and made illegal the circulation of Papal Bulls. The Act, which remained law until 1871, was as pointless as it was vindictive. The Catholic bishops had already decided not to trespass on Church of England territory. Instead they simply created new sees. Southwark rather than London, and Leeds in place of Ripon. Birmingham, then within the diocese of Lichfield, was free for use by Rome.
Russell’s revenge contributed to his downfall. The Irish Members – ‘The Pope’s Brass Band’ – under the leadership of John Sadlier, ‘the pocket O’Connell’, turned on the government. The subsequent dilemma was summarised by Richard Cobden: ‘Any government which perseveres in the anti-papal policy will be opposed by the Irish Members on every subject and if an Administration were to do nothing against the Pope, they would be turned out by the English.’30
The damage to Whig prospects was even greater than Cobden supposed. The hope of forming a government in alliance with the Peelites and radicals was frustrated by prospective partners refusing to join a government that promoted an Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. Shaftesbury saw the crisis as confirmation of his worst fears. ‘Who could now assert that the Pope has no power in England? He has put out one Administration and now prevents the formation of another.’ Russell revived his government by introducing a bill with the same title, but that did little more than prohibit the use of specific titles to which the Catholic Church had never aspired and made no mention of Papal Bulls. It was carried on its second reading by 438 votes to 95. Amendments, passed in committee – making it a criminal offence to use, as an episcopal title, the name of ‘any city, town or place, or of any territory or district’ – produced a far more savage result than Russell’s original bill. It was passed on its third reading by 263 votes to 46 and was ignored until it was repealed in 1871.
Gladstone, though no friend of the Pope, was disturbed. The Act would ‘destroy the bonds of concord and good will which ought to unite all classes and persuasions of Her Majesty’s subjects’. During the debate in the House of Commons he had argued that the ‘great subject of religious freedom is not to be dealt with as one of the ordinary matters which you may, with safety and honour, do today and undo tomorrow’.31 Henry Grattan had made a less measured speech during which he had proposed an amendment that changed the title of the proposed legislation to ‘A Bill to Prevent the Free Exercise of the Roman Catholic Religion in the United Kingdom’.32 Neither of them spoke for England. The national mood was better represented by Lord Winchelsea, who told the House of Lords that the bill did not go far enough to redeem ‘the wounded honour of our illustrious Queen’. Charles Schofield, a Birmingham MP, claimed that cells were being built at Oscott ‘for the forcible detention of some of Her Majesty’s subjects’. Charlotte Brontë – the daughter of the Irish Evangelical ‘perpetual curate’ at Howarth – predicted that ‘a new Joshua [would] command the sun to set, not merely to stand still but to go back six centuries’.
Protestants, who were genuinely fearful of Wiseman’s intentions, failed to make allowance for a naivety that his admirers regarded as holy innocence. He was an incompetent administrator, irresponsible with money and – most disturbing of all, in an archbishop – a bad judge of character. Despite his intellectual brilliance he made pronouncements which, coming from a less revered figure, would have been regarded as proof of a feeble mind. The Earl of Shrewsbury constantly asked for the public correction of his more impractical proposals. Some concerned the life spiritual. ‘The Cardinal preaches a doctrine which is quite new to me and I believe to all Catholics – that everyone, even the Pope, is bound to have a Spiritual Director besides his Confessor … If this be so, surely the number of Clergy must be quadrupled.’33 Sometimes they related to sensitive political issues. ‘I fear that the Cardinal’s permission, if proved true, for a Public Collection in London for the Irish University will grant great offence to the Govt. It is more than the Archbishop would do in Dublin.’
English Catholics drew many different morals from the Flaminian Gate Affair. The Duke of Norfolk, who had always wanted the Catholic aristocracy to run the English Catholic Church, complained of a drift towards Ultramontanism. Fearful that he would be misunderstood, the Earl of Shrewsbury clarified his own position in a letter to Bernard Ullathorne in Birmingham:
I did not mean to say that the Hierarchy itself as a mistake – but the time and manner of doing it – & here I am glad to find yr L/p agreeing with me. Indeed, whether they be Protestant or Catholic, I have never found but one opinion on that point. The Hierarchy, per se, never have been a bad thing: we should have had it long ago or not quite so soon perhaps. But the manner has done, & will I fear still do us a world of mischief.34
He wondered why England could not be patient, like Scotland, and allow the passage of time to make the change acceptable. That alternative would have required a quarter century of forbearance. The Scottish Hierarchy was restored in 1878, immediately Leo XIII became Pope. But the Earl of Shrewsbury’s analysis of the national mood was accurate. In 1852 – with Wiseman established in his archdiocese and Protestant England apparently at peace with Rome – Lord Aberdeen, on the point of becoming Prime Minister, wrote to Madame de Lieven, wife of the Russian Ambassador, ‘There is more intense bigotry in England than in any other country in Europe.’35 It was intense, but – as was to be expected in Victorian society – it was clothed in the trappings of respectability. As long as Catholics knew their place and acted with humility, they were tolerated. When they emerged from reticence and obscurity, they felt the full force of unmitigated prejudice.
The restoration of the Hierarchy and the increase in numbers – which had, at least in part, brought it about – marked the point in English history at which the Catholic Church emerged from the gloom of the Reformation into the early dawn of security, acceptance and influence. But it did not justify the ornate encomium by which it was celebrated in the sermon that John Henry Newman preached, on July 13th 1852, to the First Provincial Synod of the new era:
The world grows old, but the Church is ever young … Arise, make haste, my love, my beautiful one for the winter is now past … Arise Mary and go forth in thy strength into that north country which was once thine own … A second temple rises on the ruins of the old. Canterbury has gone its way, and York has gone as Durham has gone, and Winchester has gone … But the Church in England has died and the Church lives again. Westminster and Nottingham, Beverley and Hexham, Northampton and Shrewsbury, if the world lasts shall be names as musical to the ear, stirring to the heart as the glories we have lost and saints shall rise out of them and Doctors once again shall give the law to Israel and Preachers call to penance and to justice as at the beginning.
After the passage that was at least as vainglorious as Wiseman’s address to England from north of the Flaminian Gate, Newman went on to describe, in equally extravagant language, the suffering in post-Reformation England. Catholics, like the early Roman martyrs, had lived ‘… in corners and alleys, and cellars, and the housetops, or in the recesses cut off from the populous world around them, and dimly seen, as if through a mist or in the twilight as ghosts flitting to and fro, by the high Protestants, the lords of the earth’. He then slightly amended his predictions about the future. In a metaphor based on the unpredictability of English weather, he warned that the spring of the revived Catholic Church might ‘turn out to be an English spring, an uncertain anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering – of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal, of keen blasts, and cold showers and sudden storms’.
Apart from unjustified triumphalism – Canterbury, York, Durham and Winchester had survived the restoration of the Hierarchy unscathed – it is not easy to attribute much real meaning to opinions that were charged with so much emotion and expressed in such elaborate images. But the sermon – thereafter known as ‘The Second Spring’ – certainly had a dramatic effect on the congregation of bishops who heard it. Most of them were in tears and Newman himself was led away, in a state of near-collapse, to recover from his emotional exertions. It confirmed his position as a major figure in the Catholic Church – a status which, at that time, was the result of his role as the most famous convert in English history since Alban, the Roman soldier who, preferring death to forsaking his new religion, became the country’s first martyr. But not even St Alban had agonised so publicly about his conversion, or accompanied the ebbing and flowing of the decision to abandon one faith and embrace another with a constant public commentary on each stage of his indecision. Equally important, Newman’s decision to join the Church of Rome had been accompanied by a determination to take with him as many Church of England apostates as he could induce to convert. Most important of all, he provided the English Catholic Church with a vernacular justification of its beliefs and behaviour and, by his uninhibited comments on the shortcomings of the denomination which they had left, he reassured converts that they had made the right decision.
Newman – although a man of both faith and learning – was crucially short of emotional reticence. He had moved, with much public as well as private agonising, from abhorrence of the Catholic Church to reverence of what he eventually decided was the one true faith. Although he had, eventually, embraced Catholicism with the certainty with which he had once condemned it, each step of his spiritual journey had been accompanied by the advocacy of notions about the history of Christianity that were unique to him. Few Protestants had been such constant or such strident critics of the Pope and all his works as the young John Henry Newman. Ten years before he forecast an English Spring he had dismissed a rapprochement between the Church of England and the Church of Rome as ‘impossible’. There had been some surprise – since it was an idea favoured by few people in either Church – that he had bothered to focus his acclaimed intellect on such a trivial issue, and it was assumed that he had simply created an opportunity to express his view on Papists and the Pope. ‘Rome must change her spirit. We must see more sanctity than we do in her at present. Alas I see no marks of sanctity or, if any, they are confined to converts from [the Church of England] … What Hildebrand did by faith and Holiness, they do by political intrigue. Their object is to pull down the English Church … Never can I think such ways the footsteps of Christ.’36 Hildebrand was a strange example of Rome’s previous moderation. As Pope Gregory VII, he excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor (Henry IV) and deposed him.
With a self-confidence that his disciples regarded as divinely inspired, Newman had then offered the whole Catholic Church advice on how to succeed. ‘If they want to convert England let them go bare-footed into our manufacturing towns – let them preach to the people like St Francis Xavier – let them be pelted and trampled on and I will confess that they are our betters far … I can feel nothing but distrust and aversion towards those who offer peace yet carry on war.’37 The compliment to the Jesuit saint, which illustrated the criticism of the Church that Xavier served, was not the only ironic element in his suggestion for improvement. Newman’s own preaching – rarely, if ever, bare-footed – was seldom directed towards the industrial poor.
John Henry Newman – graduate of Trinity College, Fellow of Oriel, curate of St Clement’s and Vice Principal of St Alban Hall of residence for undergraduates – was, in youth and early manhood, a thoroughly Oxford (and therefore a thoroughly Church of England) figure. The son of a banker, his background was essentially middle-class, though being a timid boy – frightened of bullying, both real and imaginary, at his preparatory school – he was spared the rigours of Winchester, for which he was originally destined. Newman was, by any standards, precocious. At the age of sixteen, having read and enjoyed Joseph Milner’s Church History, he described himself as ‘nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St Augustine, St Ambrose and other Fathers which I found there’.38 At the same age ‘a deep imagination took hold of him’. It convinced him that God ‘wished him to live a single life’. That was the obligation of his calling: ‘missionary work among the heathen to which I had a great drawing for some years’. The early sense of vocation also encouraged a characteristic which he described with neither pleasure nor regret. ‘It strengthened my feeling of separation from the visible world.’ Newman was not destined for missionary work, as it was conceived in Victorian England. When the Provost of Oriel was appointed Bishop of Llandaff, his deputy replaced him and resigned as Vicar of St Mary’s, Oxford’s parish church. Newman, at the age of twenty-seven, was invited to fill the consequent vacancy. He accepted and set out on what it was assumed would be a glittering career, which would end in Canterbury or in York.
By the time of his appointment to St Mary’s, Newman had already met Edward Bouverie Pusey (who was to become Oxford’s Professor of Hebrew) and two other Oriel Fellows, Richard Hurrell Froude and John Keble, who was to become Professor of Poetry. Each man influenced Newman in a different way. Pusey brought back from Germany work on the Greek and Latin Fathers, which helped to convince him that true Christianity was to be found in its early centuries. Froude encouraged Newman to believe in the significance of the medieval Church, urged him to accept the doctrine of transubstantiation and, perhaps more important, persuaded him that he had been wrong to regard the Pope as an Antichrist.
Newman’s first published work, The Arians of the Fourth Century, ostensibly an account of doctrinal disputes in the early Church, reflected his own preoccupations. The Arians were ‘guilty’ of attempting to explain by reason and logic the mysteries, which could be only accepted and understood by faith.39 St Athanasius embodied the importance of the ancient Fathers who ‘after the Apostles [had] been the principal instrument by which the sacred truths of Christianity have been conveyed and secured in the world’.40 That overtly historical work also contained a nascent statement of what was to become Newman’s motivating conviction. ‘There was something greater than the Established Church and that was the Church, Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she [the Established Church] was both the local presence and the organ. She was nothing unless she was this.’ At first, Newman believed that his duty and destiny were to revive and reinvigorate the Church of England by reconnecting it to its roots in the early Christian scholars. But, even as he asserted that it had a mystic connection with the Christianity of saints and martyrs, he harboured doubts about what his future allegiance should be. On June 13th 1833 – at sea on one of the regular excursions that reflected his restless spirit – he wrote the poem, ‘The Pillar of the Cloud’. Known by its opening line – ‘Lead, Kindly Light – it became one of the most famous of all Church of England hymns. The most revealing sentiment comes at the end of the first stanza: ‘I do not ask to see / The distant scene – one step enough for me.’
The next step was taken a month later, shortly after his return to England, and was recorded in his diary: ‘The following Sunday, July 14th, Mr Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was later published under the title of National Apostasy. I have ever considered and kept that day as the start of the religious movement of 1833.’41 The sermon warned of the moral degradation that would follow – perhaps had already followed – neglect of the Christianity of the early Church. Utilitarianism and the notion of democracy had eroded belief. The mysterious significance of the sacraments had been forgotten. Most significant and most corrupting, the Apostolic Succession, as set out in the writings of St Clement – the passage of theological authority from Peter to Timothy, from Timothy to Titus, and from Titus to generations of anointed bishops – had been ignored. As a result, the Church had accepted control by a lay Parliament.
Keble was not alone in his concern. A fortnight after the Assize Sermon, a group of anxious clergymen met in a Suffolk rectory to discuss the latest state intrusion into the affairs of the Church of England. The Irish Church (Temporalities) Bill proposed to eliminate ten Irish bishoprics and reduce the number of dioceses by amalgamation. The meeting broke up without coming to any clear conclusion about how the purity of the Church could be restored and maintained. But Froude, who was among the gathering at Hadleigh, retained the strong belief that something must be done. Newman’s solution was, as usual, based on a combination of mysticism and historical precedence. ‘The early Church threw itself upon the people … Now that the Crown and the aristocracy have deserted us, must we not do that too?’42 In practical terms, that meant ‘writing letters to our friends as if we were canvassing’. To prepare for composing the messages, Newman began what he described as ‘picking into the Fathers with the hope of rummaging forth passages of history which may prepare the imaginations of men for a changed state of things’.
The group of clergy who met at Hadleigh first agreed to circulate letters to friends and then evolved into a committee – which, at Newman’s insistence, had Keble at its head. The committee became a society and developed additional ambitions, including ‘rousing up the clergy’43 – the aspiration of Church reformers from Wyclif to Wesley. Because of its geographical origins, the society was initially known as the Oxford Movement.
Meetings were organised throughout England. But, believing that ‘living movements do not come out of committees, nor are great ideas worked out through the post’,44 Newman urged his colleagues to rely on the strength of their ideas as expressed through an extension of the letters initiative. The result was a series of pamphlets which came to be called Tracts for the Times. They were written by a variety of biblical and theological scholars, but always edited by Newman, and they achieved such an importance that the popular description of the organisation which sponsored them changed from the Oxford to the Tractarian Movement. The Tracts were published in the ‘hope of rousing members of our Church to comprehend her alarming position as a man might be given notice of a fire or inundation to alarm him’.45 It is easy enough, as Lytton Strachey demonstrated in Eminent Victorians, to ridicule the titles and contents of some of the Tracts. One pondered the significance of Abraham circumcising 318 of his housemen rather than his whole household. But even Strachey had to admit that they served their purpose, ‘for the sensation which they caused among clergymen throughout the country was extreme’.
The wave of excitement washed across the parish of Lavington-with-Graffham in Sussex, where – during the year in which the first Tracts were published – the Reverend Henry Edward Manning, a young Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, had been appointed curate with special responsibility for the hamlet of Upwaltham. Two months after the first publication, Manning began to distribute Tracts to selected parishioners. And his enthusiasm for the Movement grew. Henry Wilberforce – son of the great reformer and an Oxford contemporary – visited Lavington as a guest at the wedding of Manning to the vicar’s daughter. The following week he wrote to Newman with the news ‘Manning has revised his opinion and adopts the Apostolic Succession.’46 Newman and Manning – who were to dominate the Catholic Church in England for more than half a century – had one important characteristic in common. Each man was completely confident that he had been called to God’s service and each man was equally sure that he was supremely qualified to fulfil his destiny. They had a fundamental difference of belief about the English Church’s relationship with Rome. But it was neither their disagreement about doctrine nor their differences about authority that determined the fractious nature of their relationship. They were separated by conflicting temperaments: a collision of characters which could only have resulted in continual confrontation.
Although Newman wrote four of the original Tracts himself, the work was nothing like enough to satisfy his growing passion for committing the Word of God to print. In 1834 he published the first volume of Parochial Sermons. Had they been written in a less deferential time by a man who was not a soi-disant intellectual mystic, they would have been described as ‘blood and thunder’. In Religion of the Day Newman denounced what, not altogether accurately, he described as the contemporary view of the Christian faith. ‘It has taken the brighter side of the Gospel – its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love; all darker, deeper views of man’s condition being forgotten. This is the religion [which is] natural to a civilised age and well has Satan dressed and completed it into the idol of Truth … The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom … Our God is a consuming fire. Approach him with reverence and godly fear … Fear and love must go together.’47 Newman despised what he believed to be the godless decadence of his age, in the way that Pugin despised the godless decadence of its church architecture. Nineteenth-century English Christians ‘identified their vision of Christ’s kingdom with the elegance and refinement of modern civilisation’. That, Newman believed, amounted to spiritual decadence.
At more or less the same time, Manning was feeling doubts that were as great as Newman’s. However, he expressed them – even in his thoughts – in less metaphysical language. He was no less academically distinguished than Newman. He had graduated from Balliol with a First in Greats and had, immediately, been invited to become a Fellow of Merton. Newman’s Oriel Fellowship had been approached by a much more circuitous route. He had been forced to sit a special examination after graduating with Third Class honours rather than the First that everyone had confidently predicted. But Manning was less overtly intellectual than Newman and, as well as wearing his scholarship more lightly, he possessed two characteristics that distinguished him from his contemporary and eventual adversary.
Manning remained, true to his birth, a natural member of the Victorian establishment. His background – son of a Member of Parliament, captain of cricket at Harrow and an Oxford scholar of distinction – might have prepared him to govern one of the Queen’s dominions beyond the seas. The belief that the Church of England must contribute to the fulfilment of Britain’s imperial destiny informed his decision to take Holy Orders. ‘We must answer for the heathenism of India, for the destitution of Canada, for the degradation of West Indian slaves.’48 His view that the powers spiritual and temporal must work hand in hand was mistaken for the determination to work his way up the Church of England – an institution which, thanks to its reluctance to fill its international obligations, he regarded as ‘on trial like Tyre’. Curate, vicar, rural dean and Archdeacon of Chichester – Manning’s progress was swift and relentless. A few of his more charitable friends explained his weakness for success as the way in which he sublimated his grief. His wife had died of consumption. But open ambition was an unforgivable sin in the society in which he moved. So he received little or no credit for putting all hope of further preferment behind him when he left the Church, which he could well have gone on to lead. He was simply suspected of aspiring to the leadership of a different faith.
Newman, no less sure of himself, pursued his destiny with a humility that was more apparent than real. Both men – accused from time to time of possessing a sneaking sympathy with Calvin’s doctrine of predestination – were suspected of believing themselves to number among the elect. Although Newman changed his mind more often than Manning, he walked more firmly through the fog of doubt – often altering direction, but always proceeding with a certainty that he was in sight of his true destination. Sometimes he wanted the Church of which he was a member to be all-embracing. At others times he defined acceptable Christianity in the narrowest of terns. While still an ordained priest of the Church of England, he refused to officiate at the weddings of parishioners who had not been baptised and wrote to the British Magazine complaining about the proposal that, in order to permit Dissenters admission to the universities, subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles should no longer be an entrance requirement. In truth, he was less in favour of the retention of the Articles than the exclusion of Dissenters.
Convinced of his mission to purify the Church, Newman converted the Adam de Brome chapel in St Mary’s into a public lecture theatre. In 1837 he published an edited version of views that, during the previous three years, he had expressed there: Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism. It advocated what Newman perversely diminishes as ‘only a theory’ rather than the basis for a new denomination. He called it the Via Media – the middle way:
Protestantism and Popery are real religions. No one can doubt about them. They have furnished the mould within which nations have been cast; but the Via Media has never existed except on paper, it has never been reduced to practice. It is known, not positively but negatively, in its difference from rival creeds, not in its own properties and can only be described as a third system, neither the one nor the other.49
The Middle Way was the wrong metaphor. The Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church did not trace a careful path between two different theologies. They were the boulder in the stream that made it possible to cross from one bank to the other.