One of Manning’s strengths was his ability – unlike many obsessives – to be obsessive about several subjects at the same time. So, as he was pursuing his destiny to make the Catholic Church in England accept the authority of the Pope, he was also actively promoting a whole series of social aims which could, in any sense of the word, only be described as political. From time to time he certainly made pronouncements which made him sound like an imperialist. He was said to have told Disraeli, ‘Having an empire we must either give it up or keep it up. To give it up would be extinction as a power in the world.’1 That may have accounted for Disraeli changing his caricature of Manning from the obnoxious Cardinal Grandison in Lothair to the much more sympathetic Cardinal Penruddock in Endymion. But Manning was certainly a social radical. Indeed, his position on Home Rule, the great divide in Victorian politics, was far more progressive than the policy of most of the Liberal Members of Parliament who supported Gladstone’s first administration. And, he always insisted, ‘I was a friend of Ireland before Mr Gladstone’ himself.2
Manning’s concern for Ireland was built on a combination of compassion and an instinct for natural justice. He told Gladstone that England ‘held Ireland by force, not only against the will of the majority but in violation of all the rights, natural and supernatural’.3 He was happy to admit that he saw the Irish Question as an opportunity for promoting the Catholic Church as a natural and integral part of British society. He told Archbishop Cullen, ‘I have never known a more propitious time for making the Government feel that they cannot do without us.’ But he felt a deep sympathy for a people who had been pauperised by the Protestant ascendancy. Together with the Irish bishops, he proposed to Gladstone an answer to the ‘land question – a somewhat heartless euphemism for hunger, thirst, nakedness, notice to quit, labour spent in vain and the toil of years seized upon’.4 Their scheme of agricultural reform was very like the ‘Three Fs’ provision of the Second Irish Land Act: fixity of tenure, fair rents and freedom of sale. But the proposals were ten years ahead of their time. Gladstone described Manning as advocating ‘changes which neither the nation, nor the Parliament, nor the Cabinet could adopt. We might as well propose repeal of the Union.’5
A diary entry in 1847 records that a serious illness had made Manning ‘realise much more than I otherwise should the state of the famishing in Ireland’.6 But evidence provided by refugees from ‘The Great Hunger’, encountered during his early years in the Catholic Church, was certainly the most powerful influence on his courageous – some would say reckless – support for a change in Ireland’s status from a virtual colony to a self-governing province of the United Kingdom. The cause attracted a wide spectrum of adherents, which ranged from the gentlest of ‘Home Rulers’ to the Fenians, who believed that violence – the assassination of politicians, the burning of crops and the maiming of cattle – was the only plausible route to independence. Manning’s pastoral letter for Easter 1864 denounced Fenian outrages. But it condemned the method by which the revolutionaries pursued their aims, not the aims themselves. And even his condemnation – limited though it was – seemed to contain both the hint of an excuse and the implication that violence was to be condemned as much because it was counterproductive as because it was wrong in itself. He denounced the bloodshed because it ‘prevented the necessary reforms which would remove their spawning grounds of discontent’. In his 1868 pamphlet, Ireland: A Letter to Earl Grey, Manning challenged the political establishment head-on. Robert Lowe – soon to become Gladstone’s Chancellor of the Exchequer – had observed, ‘It has been the pleasure of Ireland to pass upon herself a sentence of perpetual poverty.’ Manning retorted with a question: ‘Who checked its agriculture, its cattle trade, its fisheries and its manufactures by Act of Parliament?’ He concluded, ‘if poverty has ever been inflicted on one party by another it has been inflicted on Ireland by England’. Greater offence was to follow. In 1869, he repeated to a group of Fenianists the message of his 1864 pastoral letter: agreement with the objective but rejection of the means. Charles Newdegate, MP, asked the House of Commons, ‘Is this not aiding treason?’
Although Manning could claim that he rarely, if ever, deviated from the pursuit of his boldly defined principles, there were wild inconsistencies in the choice of measures by which he advocated they be implemented. His initial opposition to the 1870 Education Act was based on the fear that state intervention in the provision of elementary schools would undermine the essential requirement of Catholic teaching for Catholic children. But he chose to extend his objection to all that he called government ‘intrusion’ into what, at the time, he chose to define as essentially private responsibilities. ‘The English people ought to educate themselves with such state aid as individuals require. The state did not create our commerce or our empire. The intelligence and will of the people did all these things.’7 Yet, when he became a member of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Class – sitting alongside the Prince of Wales – he advocated public intervention in the private relationship between landlord and tenant: ‘Some authority might be provided to decide what is extortionate rent.’8 And he advocated statutory limitation of the working day: ‘If the hours of labour, resulting from the unregulated sale of a man’s strength and skill shall lead … to turning fathers and husbands into creatures of burden … the domestic life of man exists no longer.’9 There were times when his convictions were in conflict with each other. Henry George – the American advocate of land reform – was sternly told that ‘the law of property is founded on the law of Nature, sanctioned in Revelation, declared in the Christian law and taught by the Catholic Church’.10 But Manning robustly opposed – eventually with success – the Vatican’s attempts to have George’s work included in the ‘index’ of forbidden work.
Although his policy pronouncements lacked a unifying theme, his public assertions of moral obligation – in both sermons and speeches – invariably included the duty of providing succour and support for the labouring poor. Sympathy with the depressed and destitute had been a theme of his Lavington sermons during his days as a Church of England vicar. When Manning achieved the eminence – and could speak with the authority – of a Catholic bishop, he developed the idea into a series of lectures on the Christian attitude towards the working man. His 1874 address to the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute on ‘The Dignity and Rights of Labour’ was explicitly critical of ‘the accumulation of wealth in the land, the piling up of wealth like mountains in the possession of classes or individuals’.11 His lectures, in 1880 on ‘The Catholic Church in Modern Society’, and in 1891 on ‘The Rights and Dignity of Labour’, described the conflict in a modern industrialised society and – again abandoning his earlier objection to state interference – called for legislation to remedy the discrepancy between the powers of masters and men. On January 25th 1891, he set out why he regarded it as essential for the Catholic Church to be on the side of labour rather than capital. ‘The coming age will belong neither to the capitalists nor to the commercial classes, but to the people. The people are yielding to the guidance of reason, even of religion. If we can gain their confidence, we can counsel them. If we show them blind opposition, they will have the power to destroy all that is good.’12 It is not necessary to endorse Manning’s analysis to accept that, whatever the reason, he was on the side of the masses rather than the classes.
Manning’s determination to make Catholic working men and women feel that the Church belonged to them (as well as that they belonged to the Church) made him break new ground on which his predecessors would not have dared or condescended to set foot. One of his more successful initiatives was the foundation of the Catholic Herald. It began life, in 1884, with the avowed intention of promoting ‘Catholic Industrial Democracy’ and, to further that objective, published local editions in all the large industrial towns. It maintained that role and character for more than fifty years before it turned its attention to news – home and foreign – but always reported from a Catholic perspective. Manning would have approved of its extensive correspondence column as a sign of the respect in which it held its readers.
The Catholic churchmen who feared that concern for improving life on earth would sometimes deflect attention from the hope of life hereafter found cause for much anxiety in Manning’s criticisms of the condition of the poor in Victorian England. His social conscience – combined with his observation of life in the city slums – made him thoroughly unreliable on the subject of original sin. ‘The bloated and brutal man, if he had been nurtured by a loving mother in a house fit for man to live in, if he had grown up in the consciousness of Divine law and presence, if he had lived in honest labour … would not have become the wreck in body, mind and speech which we may see in our streets every day.’13 But he was far too rigid a Catholic ever to espouse a cause that was in conflict with his faith. He would have claimed that everything he did was inspired by his religion. The long campaign to save children from life on the streets cannot be separated from the campaign to ensure that young Catholics received a Catholic education.
There were influential laymen in the diocese who did not share the Archbishop’s view that the first call on whatever funds the Church was able to raise should be an assault on the parallel evils of child poverty and secular education. Ever since the restoration of the Hierarchy, powerful voices had been raised to demand the creation of a metropolitan cathedral which celebrated and proclaimed the fact of the Catholic Church’s status as an established part of English society. On May 25th 1865, Henry Manning – the recently appointed Archbishop of Westminster – told a public meeting, ‘The See of Westminster needs a Cathedral proportionate to the chief diocese of the Catholic Church of the British Empire.’14 Enthusiasts for a great new basilica reinforced their argument with the proposal that it should be dedicated to the memory of Cardinal Wiseman, the man who had presided over the Second Spring. A building fund was set up and within weeks it had raised £16,000. But Manning – despite his earlier protestations – was not prepared to allow building a cathedral to become the Church’s first financial priority. ‘Could I leave 20,000 children without education and drain my friends and my flock to pile up stones and brick?’15 He did, however, prepare for the physical manifestation of a reinvigorated Catholic Church by buying the land on which the stones and bricks would one day be piled. Two sites – on either side of Carlisle Place in Victoria – were bought by the Church. They lay fallow for fifteen years. Then they were exchanged for the land in nearby Tothill Fields on which the old Middlesex County Prison had stood. It was another fifteen years before Westminster Cathedral was consecrated. By then, both Manning and his successor were dead, and not one Catholic child remained in a Board of Guardians workhouse.
On June 6th 1866, the first anniversary of his consecration as bishop, Manning issued a pastoral letter devoted to education. It proposed that a Westminster Diocesan Fund be set up to finance the provision of Catholic education for children without schools who had broken the law and were confined in reformatories, and the thousand or more from the Westminster Diocese who were in workhouses or the few ‘ragged schools’ that existed in the capital. Within a year, £7,855 was raised and twenty new schools opened. But the initiative – ambitious as it was, and as successful as it seemed likely to be – was overtaken by the Education Act of 1870. The Forster Act (so called because of the Vice President of the Council whose work it was) aimed at augmenting rather than replacing the traditional school system. In England elementary schools had, for years, been provided by the Churches, which received small grants from the Privy Council as a contribution towards the education of pauper children.
The idea of state-provided secular education had been considered in 1850 and abandoned because of the Churches’ hostility. Forster hoped to disarm the opposition to state provision by leaving untouched the denominational schools that were working well. Where they did not exist – or where they were clearly inefficient or inadequate – school boards were to be created with powers to levy a rate, set up schools and employ teachers. Grants to efficient denominational schools were to be increased. The churches were provided with further reassurance by an amendment to the bill, which forbade the religious instruction provided in so-called board schools to include any ‘catechism or religious formulary distinctive of any denomination’. Not all the Churches were persuaded. Bishop Bernard Ullathorne of Birmingham urged the Catholic Churches of England to boycott the new system.
Ullathorne made his position clear in a pastoral letter in October 1870: ‘We are left then to make the choice, whether we will establish and support sufficient schools and teaching of our own for our own Catholic children or whether, through our neglect, we are to leave our children under the compulsion of having to attend schools in which they either learn no religion or a teaching which is in opposition to the catholic religion.’16 He strongly supported the heroic alternative. But the idea that the Catholics of England could raise the funds adequately to educate all their children was clearly unrealistic. The Act gave denominations six months to provide schools where previously none existed. Then board schools would fill the gaps. Manning argued, simultaneously with the government, for an extension of the period of grace and – with the large majority of English bishops – against ignoring the demands of the Forster Act. His argument in favour of negotiating a more acceptable arrangement – ideally Catholic schools continuing to receive grants direct from the Privy Council – was pragmatic, but also deeply revealing about Catholic educational priorities. If the Church acted as if the Act does not exist, ‘the Boards may destroy our lesser schools by reporting them as insufficient or inefficient.’17 He estimated that half of London’s Catholic schools would be forced to close and would be replaced by board schools. What he accepted was that less-than-adequate schools were to be protected and preserved because they were Catholic. T P O’Connor, MP – writing, in 1905, about the Liverpool Catholic Church’s attitude to its schools – explained, perhaps even defended, what he called ‘the quality deficit’:
Honest religious conviction was the very salt of the life of any nation and it was through such convictions that Catholics preferred their own, poor, and often squalid schools wherein they were taught their own faith, to the well endowed, well equipped schools that they might have used during the past thirty five years.18
There was partisan disagreement as to whether the outcome – grants direct from the Privy Council, though less than the school boards would have provided, and the preservation of existing Catholic schools, whatever their quality – was the consequence of the threat of a boycott or the result of a willingness to negotiate. Both sides of the argument – one wishing to praise and the other to blame – agreed that an even more satisfactory outcome would have been obtained, had Manning not been in Rome during the early stages of the bill’s discussion.
The passion to guarantee a Catholic education for Catholic children – or, at least, to ensure that they were protected from exposure to the corrupting influence of secular schools – was regarded as admirable by priests and laymen alike. But there was also the feeling, among more traditional Catholics, that Manning wasted his time and risked the Church’s credibility by the championing of other, more outré, causes. Amongst the least popular was temperance – not moderation, but total abstinence. In 1868 he had publicly called on William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, to ‘control the terrific domination of Brewers, Distillers and publicans’.19 The failure of the 1871 Licensing Act drove him to the brief conclusion that the only way to defeat the vested interests was legal prohibition. Calmer consideration convinced him that personal example and public exhortation were the better course. In 1872 he ‘took the pledge’ and founded the League of the Cross. Members swore a holy oath to attend Mass every Sunday and to resist, for ever and completely, the temptations of the demon drink.
Manning never found it easy to follow any of his favoured causes with moderation and discretion, and the zeal with which he campaigned for total abstinence was – obliquely and vicariously – to inflict permanent damage on his reputation. The story was told by Herbert Vaughan after Manning was dead and his Ultramontane protégé had succeeded him as Cardinal Archbishop. Vaughan thought it necessary to explain, to his private secretary, why he had felt obliged to decline an invitation to the Annual Dinner of the Manchester and Salford Licensed Victuallers’ Association. He had attended one ‘a few years before, much to Cardinal Manning’s disgust’,20 and had been the subject of a severe reproof from his mentor:
I could not accept his views and I suppose, on the contrary, strongly maintained my own. I saw he was a bit put out – but what do you think he did? He went upstairs, took out his will and struck out my name as executor. It was a mistake. If I had been his executor, his private papers would never have fallen into the hands of Mr Purcell.
Edmund Sheridan Purcell was the author of the scurrilous biography on which Lytton Strachey based the brilliant but wildly prejudiced first essay in Eminent Victorians. In consequence, outside the Catholic Church – and sometimes inside it – Manning is best remembered for the part he played, or failed to play, in John Henry Newman becoming a cardinal.
The story cannot be separated from the continuing dispute about how Catholics should face the challenges of science and scepticism. Although Newman has gone down in history as the theologically more progressive, there were many occasions when their conflicting view of life – hopeful versus pessimistic – made Manning the more radical. Manning argued strongly for the disestablishment of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland as essential to reconciliation of the two religious communities. When it happened, Newman saw it as proof of secularism’s irresistible advance. He was, however, undoubtedly less rigid about respect for papal authority. In 1878, Leo XIII’s election to succeed Pius IX was greeted by much rejoicing among the Church’s ‘liberal’ tendency, and their optimism about the nature of his pontificate seemed to be confirmed by a letter which he published soon after his election. A statement of papal policy was, in itself, unusual. A declaration of determination to work for reconciliation of Rome and the modern world was unique. Newman described the letter as ‘most excellent’ and wrote that he had ‘followed, with love and sympathy’ the newspaper accounts of the new Pope’s ‘every act’.21 Herbert Vaughan, by then Bishop of Salford, prepared for the fight against liberalism by acquiring the ownership of the Dublin Review.
The new Pope seemed as pleased with Newman as Newman was with the new Pope. In January 1879, Manning received, from the Papal Secretary of State, a letter which asked him to discover how Newman would respond to an invitation to join the College of Cardinals. It more or less crossed in the post with a letter from Bishop Ullathorne to the Vatican which reported that the new Duke of Norfolk – nephew of the man who had left the Church in protest against the Flaminian Gate encyclical – was pressing for Newman’s elevation. A second letter – direct from Duke to Pope – confirmed that a group of influential English Catholics supported the idea. ‘In the rise and revival of the Catholic Faith in England, there is no one whose name will stand out in history with greater prominence.’22 There is no doubt that Norfolk and the men on whose behalf he wrote all felt both admiration and affection for Newman. But it is equally certain that they saw the award of a red hat as papal endorsement for a brand of Catholicism that Manning regarded, at best, as unorthodox.
Ullathorne urged Newman to accept. But Newman – knowing that cardinals who were not diocesan bishops were required to live in Rome – chose to reply that he hoped to end his days in the Oratory. He did not mean to reject the offer. Indeed he asked Ullathorne to send his letter to Manning with a covering note which made clear that he would gladly accept the honour if he were allowed to remain in Birmingham. But to other Catholic luminaries he gave the impression – and probably meant to give the impression – that he would decline. He had emphasised his selfless opposition to promotion for years. As early as February 3rd 1851 he had written to Talbot, ‘there has been a report [for] some time that my name has been sent to Rome for one of the Sees. We thought nothing of it until it appeared in one of the leading articles in the Tablet. We are all of us in a great fright about it.’23
After ten years of protestation that Newman wished for nothing but to be left alone and cared nothing for status and rank, Manning can hardly be blamed for taking the refusal letter at its face value and sending it on to the Vatican without the covering note. A flurry of correspondence followed. Manning wrote to Newman to tell him that the proposal was the result of Norfolk’s initiative. Newman replied with an explanation of his reservations. A letter from Manning to the Duke informed His Grace that Newman had declined the honour. Bernard Ullathorne, discovering that rumours were circulating about Newman’s rejection of the Pope’s proposal, sent a copy of the original covering letter direct to the Vatican. The Times, source unknown, published the news of Newman’s decision to choose Birmingham rather than Rome. Newman rushed to assure the Duke that The Times was wrong. But he was still not ready to admit, outright, that what he wanted was elevation on his own terms. ‘As to the statement of my refusing a Cardinal’s hat which is in the papers, you must not believe for this reason … If so high an honour were offered me, I should not answer with a blunt refusal.’24 Linguistic analysis of the sort that Newman employed would have focused attention on the qualifying adjective ‘blunt’ and would have asked what sort of refusal he would have chosen.
Newman had no doubt that the rumours about his refusal had emanated from Manning but, instead of contradicting them, answered all enquiries with the technically correct but ambiguous statement that, not having received a formal offer, there had been no opportunity to either accept or decline. However, the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to become a cardinal. He was not, he assured himself, motivated by pride or lust for fame and glory. Indeed, such base considerations never influenced his judgement. His only concern was, as he made clear when the furore had died down, the welfare of the Church that he served:
For 20 or 30 years ignorant or hot-headed Catholics had said almost that I was a heretic … I knew and felt that it was a miserable evil that the One True Apostolic Religion should be slandered as to cause men to suppose that my portrait of it was not true. And I knew that many would become Catholics, as they ought to be, if only I was pronounced by Authority to be a good Catholic.25
Another round of letters began with the Duke of Norfolk writing to Manning, by this time once more in Rome. The Duke wanted to know who had told the Pope that Newman did not wish to become a cardinal. He assumed that, knowing the facts, Manning would tell His Holiness of Newman’s true position. Manning accepted responsibility for the confusion – which he promised to rectify – but insisted that it had been the genuine mistake of a friend. In March 1889, Newman received a message from the Vatican. The Pope proposed to make him a cardinal and the rule, which required him to live in Rome, would be waived. Of course he accepted. But he still found it necessary to make clear that he did so with some reluctance. His second explanation, unlike the first, revealed that, as was so often the case, self-esteem was a major influence on his behaviour:
A good Providence gave me the opportunity of clearing myself of former calumnies in my Apologia … And now he gave me a means … to set myself as regards new calumnies … How could I neglect such a loving kindness?26
Newman’s elevation was celebrated in London with ecumenical rejoicing. There were evening receptions at Norfolk House, which began on May 10th and went on – during every weekday evening – until the 16th. As is to be expected, the now faded guest lists contained the names of most of the Catholic aristocracy: the Earl of Gainsborough, Lord Lyons, Lord and Lady Talbot.27 But the presence of the Dean of St Paul’s and the Bishop of London must have come as a surprise to the ardent Protestants in the capital. It can only be attributed to the near-universal esteem in which Newman was held. But it does not explain why he was held in such widespread regard.
There are a series of wildly different, and sometimes conflicting possibilities. His conversion – as well as making him a hero to Catholics – combined with his wilful espousal of controversy to give him the aura of celebrity. But there are other, more substantial, reasons for his lasting fame. The Church that he joined was notable for clerics who – notwithstanding their command of Greek and Latin – wrote ugly English. Newman’s prose, although florid and convoluted, showed a respect for the language. A graduate seminarian in the English College in Rome believed that Newman’s lasting importance lay in his demonstration that it was ‘possible to ask questions without being a heretic’. A related and more usual explanation of his theological significance is his conclusion on the subject of conscience.
In A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk Newman discussed the relationship of, and possible conflict between, conscience and ecclesiastical authority. Conscience, he wrote, is the will of God as ‘apprehended in the minds of men’.28 It may suffer some ‘refraction [i.e. differences of interpretation] as it passes through those minds, but that should cause neither distress nor surprise – as witness arguments between the saints’. In his Epistle to the Galatians (2:11) Paul wrote, ‘when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face for he was to be blamed’. Peter and Paul – disagreeing about the necessity of the early Christians respecting Judaic law – provided a perfect example of conscience in action. ‘Conscience is not a judgement upon any speculative truth, any abstract judgement but bears immediately on something to be done or not to be done’ and cannot therefore ‘come into direct collision with the Church’s or Pope’s infallibility’. However, for conscience to justify defiance of authority, it must be guided by ‘serious thought, prayer and all available means of arriving at a right judgement’. If those conditions are met, conscience should prevail. Newman expressed his view on the right order of priority in language that excited his devotees, infuriated his critics and ensured his notoriety. ‘If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, which indeed does not seem quite the thing, I shall drink – to the Pope if you please – still, to Conscience first and the Pope afterwards.’29
Newman’s gentle bravura certainly antagonised his theologically more reticent colleagues, but there is no way of knowing if Manning’s failure to pass on Ullathorne’s covering note was the product of malice, carelessness or the determination that theological deviance should not be publicly rewarded. The idea that it was prompted by malice is reinforced by the knowledge that Manning and Newman were divided by more than their rival views on the authority of the Pope. Manning was precise and direct in thought and speech. Newman was diffuse in both. He was also consciously and overtly unworldly. Manning regarded involvement in the secular controversies of his time as not so much an option as a duty. It was a duty which he discharged with such constant enthusiasm that even The Tablet – a consistent supporter of Manning’s view on Catholic orthodoxy – admitted that, although it was impossible to separate ‘his work for the world from his work for the Church’, there was increasing concern about what it described as his ‘state socialism’.30 Even his closest friends – commenting on the subsequently lauded intervention in the London dock strike of 1889 – admitted to the ‘uneasy feeling that it would have been better had the peacemaker been another’.31 It is unlikely that ‘another’ could have done it.
In the spring of 1889, the recently unionised London dock workers had made a claim for improved wages and terms of employment – an increase in basic pay from four pence to six pence an hour and a guaranteed minimum of four hours’ work for casual labour hired on the dockside. The claim was not so much rejected as ignored by the employers, and the union – motivated by pride as well as concern for its members’ standard of living – announced that, unless its demands were met, a strike would close the docks from August 14th until whenever the men’s legitimate grievances had been remedied. The employers did not respond and the strike began. After a week of paralysis, during which the employers waited for hunger to drive the men back to work, and the union called for a general strike in support and sympathy, Manning decided to intervene – not in the interest of the striking dockers, but to avert the national catastrophe which he feared would follow. If a ‘drunkard or madman’ had set fire to the warehouses, ‘the commercial wealth of London and the merchandise of the world, the banks and wharves of the Thames might have been pillaged’.32 To avert the ‘unimaginable loss’, he determined to act as mediator and conciliator.
Ben Tillett, the dockers’ leader, was not a religious man. His most famous recorded reference to matters even obliquely concerned with faith was a remark he made during a subsequent dock dispute. Exasperated by the chairman of the London Port Authority, he prayed, ‘Oh God strike Viscount Devonport dead.’33 But he had been in earlier correspondence with Manning about the deprivations suffered by his members, and it was to Tillett that the Cardinal made his first unsolicited approach. Tillett could not be moved towards abandoning the strike or even seeking a compromise. Indeed, he argued his case with such passion that Manning was convinced of the righteousness of his cause. Pressure had to be exerted on the employers.
The President of the London Chamber of Commerce did not reply to Manning’s letter. A joint meeting of the dock companies’ directors – which Manning attended without invitation – rejected his overtures. The Home Secretary and the Lord Mayor (from whom he hoped to gain support) were both on holiday. So Manning set up his own Conciliation Committee. Its members included William Temple, Bishop of London, and Sydney Buxton, the Labour Member of Parliament for Poplar. They proposed, as a compromise, that the employers should accept the union’s proposals but not implement them until March of the following year. Tillett accepted the postponement of the new terms, but insisted that that they must be put in place in January 1890. The employers were persuaded to agree. But the rank-and-file of the union – claiming that some of the smaller companies had already accepted the original demands – refused to countenance anything except immediate and complete capitulation.
Tillett, hotfoot from a rally of his members in Hyde Park, called on Manning with the news that October 1st was the latest date for the new agreement that there was any chance of the dockers accepting. Manning was not ready to admit that he could not reconcile management and men. So he asked Tillett’s permission to address the strike committee. Out of respect for the teetotal Cardinal, the meeting took place in Kirby Street Elementary School rather than at Wade’s Arms, the strike committee’s headquarters. After four hours of argument it was agreed – by twenty-eight votes to fifteen with six abstentions – to accept November 4th as the starting date. It took four more days to convince the employers that the deal served their best interests. But on September 14th 1889 the London dock strike was over. Manning received a message of congratulations from the Pope and the assurance, from the Daily Telegraph, that his behaviour had helped to rehabilitate Catholics in the estimation of the British public. The grateful dockers raised £160 to endow a bed in the London Hospital and emblazoned Manning’s portrait on one of the banners which they paraded in the May Day march. It swung in the breeze alongside the more traditional representation of Karl Marx.
Manning, growing old, increased his public involvement in political affairs. He first refused to believe that Charles Stewart Parnell was an adulterer and then, when the courts had confirmed that Katharine O’Shea was his mistress, called for Parnell’s resignation as leader of the Irish Party. His interference in Irish affairs did not end there. Fearful that William Walsh, the Archbishop of Dublin – a passionate supporter of Home Rule – would rally to Parnell’s defence, Manning told him, ‘This is the supreme moment to convince Rome that you do not put politics before faith and morals.’34
That was the impertinence of an octogenarian who had outlived his days of sober judgement. But even in old age he retained the passion for social justice that was as much the product of a cool appraisal of the interests of the Catholic Church as it was of his instinct for compassion. Manning’s concern for the working poor was part of a movement in the worldwide Catholic Church that contributed to its success and survival in the secular and sinful twentieth century. In France, Action Catholique de la Jeunesse Française argued that Catholicism was the faith of cooperation and community, not individualism. In the United States of America, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore gave such determined support to the Knights of Labour – an organisation of Catholic trade unionists which the Vatican’ attempted to condemn as heretical – that the plan was abandoned. The instincts of the Church’s more radical members had been elevated into a philosophy by Professor Francesco Nitti of Naples University, who had published Il Socialismo Cattolico. But the most compelling evidence to support the view that times were changing was the election of Leo XIII. The new Pope had a long history of involvement in the social problems of the diocese of Perugia.
On May 15th 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum – Revolutionary Change or The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour. It was a proclamation of the Catholic duty to ameliorate ‘misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on a majority of the working class’. It asserted that ‘the interests of all, whether high or low, are equal’ and that a fair day’s work should be rewarded with a fair day’s pay. It had much to say about freedom of worship and freedom from oppression. But its most controversial, and therefore most memorable, paragraphs concerned the rules of free collective bargaining. ‘Let the working man and the employer make free agreement and in particular let them agree freely to wages.’ But as Adam Smith and Karl Marx both made clear – and as William Gladstone recognised in the Second Irish Land Act – an agreement between parties of unequal strength is rarely free. ‘If, through necessity or fear of worse evil, the workman accepts harder conditions [than are fair and just] because his employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made victim of force and injustice.’ Rerum Novarum was clear how that injustice should be remedied. It identified within ‘civil society … private societies’ through which men and women organised and managed their daily lives. Some of them would have evil objectives. The Pope did not intend to allow the suspicion that he endorsed Freemasonry. But most of the private societies were both benevolent and beneficial and ‘the most important of these,’ pronounced Rerum Novarum, ‘are the workmen’s unions, and it is greatly desired that they should become more numerous and more effective’.
Manning’s friends insisted that without his influence there would have been no Rerum Novarum. That was certainly an exaggeration. There had been discussion about the Catholic Church’s obligation to the working man at the Congress of Mainz in 1848 – two years before his conversion. But Manning certainly helped, by example and exhortation, to stir the Church’s social conscience. And he demonstrated that to hold an Ultramontane view of papal authority was neither inconsistent with a social conscience nor incompatible with scepticism about the legitimacy of the authority that comes with secular power and worldly wealth. After his death, the Ultramontane tradition survived at Westminster thanks to Herbert Vaughan, Manning’s protégé and successor as both Archbishop and Cardinal. But the social conscience of the diocese faded and almost disappeared. The Tablet, outflanking even Vaughan’s position, combined denunciation of what it called ‘Cisalpine disloyalty’ with antagonism to social and political reform. It abandoned its traditional support for Home Rule (thereby acquiring a reputation for being ‘anti-Irish’), insisted that maintaining the religious character of existing Catholic schools was more important than an overall expansion in elementary education, and opposed women’s suffrage.
Vaughan’s unbending nature, as well as his theological orthodoxy, was illustrated by his attitude towards St George Jackson Mivart, a distinguished biologist and Catholic convert. Mivart believed that the Catholic Church was increasingly exposed to advances in all the sciences, which would lead to a loss of faith unless they were accommodated. In particular he warned against the outright rejection of evolution. He developed his own version of the theory. It endorsed the Old Testament story of creation, but God – having created Adam and Eve – allowed natural selection to influence the physical development of their issue. Mivart’s extreme view on social questions (he described proposals to make cruelty grounds for divorce as ‘hideous sexual criminality … unrestrained licentiousness’) did not save him. His scientific work was placed on the Index Expurgatorius and Herbert Vaughan, by then a cardinal, asked for written assurances that Mivart accepted the Church’s teaching in every particular. When Mivart refused to supply them, Vaughan forbade him to take Communion. He died excommunicate.
Manning had done his best to impose his posthumous will on Herbert Vaughan. He had urged his assumed successor to be ‘more human and less ecclesiastical’, told him that he would be ‘a better Christian when his sympathies were capable of being enlisted in causes which had no concern with his work’ and urged him ‘not to let the Old Testament close over you and bury you in the sacristy’.35 By ‘Old Testament’, Manning meant the Catholic gentry from which Vaughan came. Vaughan shared the ‘Old Testament’ view that building a metropolitan cathedral as ‘a symbol of Catholic resurgence, a visible monument to the triumphalism of the ultramontane church’, was a duty that outweighed other obligations.
The obligation to provide a Catholic education for Catholic children was fulfilled by Vaughan taking an admirably pragmatic view of the 1902 Education Bill. The extension and improvement of the Forster Act raised the predictable complaint that the government was making yet another attempt to impose Church of England education on the whole nation. David Lloyd George led a nationwide Nonconformist campaign which, he assumed, would make his name and bring down the government. His first ambition was realised, the second was not. Vaughan described the new Act as ‘a large and important advance’ and rejoiced that it would ‘make Christian and Catholic education a part of the law and constitution of England … Our hope for the future lies in our schools and our schools can never be self supporting. The idea that we in England could ever hope to throw off state aid and maintain effective schools, such as the government would recognise as efficient, out of our private means is pure chimera.’36 Lloyd George’s fury was increased with the discovery that Vaughan had told the Irish Members to stay in London during the summer recess to ensure the passage of the bill.
The Westminster Cathedral foundation stone was laid, with suitable pomp and ceremony, on Saturday June 29th 1895. Even those who supported the project greeted the occasion with as much apprehension as joy. The Catholic Church had chosen to prove that it was strong enough, sufficiently rich and possessed the organising ability to construct a basilica that stood comparison with the great cathedrals of the world – all of which had taken centuries to build. And Vaughan had announced that he hoped to finish the Westminster work in five years and guaranteed that it would take no longer than eight.
Vaughan originally intended that the cathedral’s architect should be determined by a competition which only Catholics would be allowed to enter. But the pressure of time, combined with a host of recommendations, induced him to appoint John Francis Bentley without even considering rival candidates. Bentley was already the architect of a dozen London Catholic churches – the Sacred heart in Hammersmith, St Mary’s in Cadogan Square and Corpus Christi in Brixton. He was, however, open to suggestions from his employers. During the years in which the site of the old prison lay fallow, it had been assumed that what was needed was a church of ‘ancient Basilica style, taking Constantine’s Church of St Peter in Rome as the model’,37 and Bentley travelled to Italy to find inspiration. But Vaughan decided it was unwise to invite comparison with the ancient cathedrals of England and insisted on a ‘combination of a Roman Basilica with the constructive improvements introduced by the Byzantine architects’.
Most of Vaughan’s hopes were unfulfilled. The cathedral was not finished in eight years. Indeed, it is not finished yet. Work was delayed by a bricklayers’ strike, and the marble columns, quarried in Thessalonica, were lost or destroyed during the war between Greece and Turkey. The plan for the liturgy to be supervised by Benedictine monks – members of an Order which had been expelled from Westminster during the Reformation – foundered on disagreements about what exactly their role should be and to which authority they should answer. The news that, after many vicissitudes, the bones of St Edmund, King and Martyr, had found their final resting place in the church of St Sernin in Toulouse prompted Vaughan to apply for their repatriation, thus giving Westminster Cathedral a relic to compare with the remains of Edward the Confessor down the road in Westminster Abbey. But the Toulouse bones, on closer inspection, turned out to belong to someone with no English connection.
Progress, although slower than was hoped, was faster than it had been reasonable to expect. Mass was said in the almost-completed Chapter House on May 7th 1902, and on Lady Day, the following year, the local parish mission was given use of what was to become the Lady Chapel. In June 1903 Edward Elgar’s oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, was performed in the still-incomplete nave. It was the perfect choice of a work with which to celebrate the creation of the first Catholic metropolitan cathedral in England since the Reformation. Father Bellasis – a Birmingham Oratorian and son of Elgar’s closest friend – recorded in his diary how it came about. Walking with Elgar in the Worcester countryside, he mentioned that General Gordon’s effects had been recovered from Khartoum and that they included a copy of The Month, a paradoxically bimonthly intellectual magazine in which Newman’s poem, The Dream of Gerontius, was published. During the days before he was murdered by the Mahdi’s Dervishes, Gordon had made notes in the margin. Elgar, who had long thought of writing a religious oratorio and had greatly admired the Christian soldier, regarded the news as a message from a source which he could not ignore. The history of the poem might be said to confirm that its role as consolation to the doomed general – ‘I am near to death and Thou art calling me’ – had been divinely inspired. Newman wrote it and forgot about it and, years afterwards, found it – by chance – among other papers.
Westminster Cathedral was still not complete – or ready for the installation of Eric Gill’s sculptured Stations of the Cross – when, on June 19th 1903, Herbert Vaughan died. ‘Into the vast space of that still unfinished church, his body was taken … for the solemn requiem which, unforeseen, was to become the opening ceremony.’38 On the centenary of his birth, The Tablet wisely wrote that Westminster Cathedral was Vaughan’s ‘great material work’. In 1932 that was a minority view, even among Catholics. A red-brick cathedral was unheard of – hence the jokes about Vaughan’s railway station and, thanks to its single tower, the Roman Candle. Today, the fair-minded observer must see it differently. The shops that once hid it from the passing world have been demolished. Opened up and set back at the west of a piazza, its massive proportions symbolise – just as Vaughan intended – the strength that allowed the Catholic Church to withstand the centuries of persecution and retain the ambition which Vaughan, more than most post-Reformation Princes of the Church, was prepared to articulate – the Reunion of Christendom. When, in 1894, he described it in detail it sounded more like the eventual absorption of the Church of England into the Church of Rome. ‘The Real Presence, the sacrifice of the Mass offered for the living and the dead, reservation of the Sacrament, regular auricular confession, Extreme Unction, Purgatory, the devotion to our Lady …’ He went on to complete the list of beliefs and practices which he implied were certainly respected and probably coveted by Anglicans.39 To nervous Protestants it sounded like another vision of England as seen through the Flaminian Gate.