Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  If Newman declined to march under the banner of party, he was never shy of holding politicians to account for policies he found reprehensible. Indeed, on whether priests should feel free to criticize public men, he could not have been more forthright:

  It is sometimes said … that a clergyman should have nothing to do with politics. This is true, if it be meant that he … should not side with a political party as such, should not be ambitious of popular applause, or the favour of great men, should not take pleasure and lose time in business of this world, should not be covetous. But if it means that he should not express an opinion and exert an influence one way rather than another, it is plainly unscriptural … If, indeed, this world’s concerns could be altogether disjoined from those of Christ’s Kingdom, then indeed all Christians (laymen as well as clergy) should abstain from the thought of temporal affairs, and let the worthless world pass down the stream of events till it perishes; but if (as is the case) what happens in nations must affect the cause of religion in those nations, since the Church may be seduced and corrupted by the world, and in the world there are myriads of souls to be converted and saved, and since a Christian nation is bound to become part of the Church, therefore it is our duty to stand as a beacon on a hill, to cry aloud and spare not, to lift up our voice like a trumpet, and show the people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.46

  In his Letter to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk (1875), Newman proved his readiness to take Gladstone to task for his misrepresentations of papal infallibility and the loyalty of English Catholics. In The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: An Expostulation (1874), Gladstone, under the mischievous tutelage of Dollinger and Acton, had impugned the loyalty of English Catholics and claimed, apropos the Church, that “no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom.”47 The pamphlet sold 150,000 copies. Newman disposed of Gladstone’s calumnies with remarkable forbearance. It is true that he was more interested in repudiating Ultramontanism than remonstrating with Gladstone but nevertheless he showed admirable restraint. William Ullathorne, Newman’s bishop in Birmingham, was considerably less restrained in his response. “It is something new and strange to maintain that the Church has no right to expostulate with the world at large, whilst the world at large has a right to expostulate with the Church,” this forthright Yorkshireman wrote. “The title itself of the Expostulation involves a false assumption, and expresses the fundamental error of the book. The Vatican Decrees have no bearing on civil allegiance …”48

  The tendency of public men to oversimplify complex issues, as Gladstone certainly did in his inflammatory pamphlet, was as common in Newman’s day as it is in our own. In the Grammar of Assent (1870), Newman wrote of the similar tendency to think in stereotypes in a way that recalls his own fuzzy notions of the Catholic Church before he converted: “I suppose most men will recollect in their past years how many mistakes they have made about persons, parties, local occurrences, nations and the like, of which at the time they had no actual knowledge of their own: how ashamed or how amused they have become since … they came into possession of the real facts concerning them … Thus, we must have cold and selfish Scots, crafty Italians, vulgar Americans, and Frenchmen, half tiger, half monkey … Those who are old enough to recollect the wars with Napoleon, know what eccentric notions were popularly entertained about them in England; how it was even a surprise to find some military man, who was a prisoner of war, to be tall and stout, because it was the received idea that all Frenchmen were undersized and lived on frogs.”49 After converting, Newman found the real Church a revelation. “I gazed at her … as a great objective fact. I looked … at her rites, her ceremonial, and her precepts; and I said, ‘This is a religion’ …”50 Later, he told his friend James Hope-Scott: “I have not had a single doubt, or temptation to doubt, ever since I became a Catholic … My great temptation is to be at peace …”51

  Newman’s idea of public life is of a powerful simplicity. If public life is not rooted in love of God, in service to God, it is rooted in idolatry, and where the visible idol replaces the unseen God, falsehood, heartbreak and unreality follow. This is the essential truth of Newman’s animadversions on public life. It is an uncompromising truth, though not a particularly novel one. Even Matthew Arnold, the inspector of schools, realized that:

  the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain …52

  Newman could have been addressing Arnold directly—or anyone in public life—when he said: “The world … praises public men, if they are useful to itself, but simply ridicules inquiry into their motives … All public men it considers to be pretty much the same at bottom; but what matter is that … if they do its work? It offers high pay, and it expects faithful service; but, as to its agents, overseers, men of business, operatives, journeymen, figure-servants, and labourers, what they are personally, what are their principles and aims, what their creed, what their conversation; where they live, how they spend their leisure time, whither they are going, how they die—I am stating a simple matter of fact, I am not here praising or blaming, I am but contrasting,—I say, all questions implying the existence of the soul, are as much beyond the circuit of the world’s imagination, as they are intimately and primarily present to the apprehension of the Church.”53

  For Newman, people in public life were not abstractions, not “workhouse apprentices” but children of God with immortal souls. And as such, they were accountable; they faced a reckoning. “Observe in the parable,” Newman reminded his Birmingham parishioners, “the Master of the Vineyard did but one thing … He did but ask what had they done. He did not ask what their opinion was about science, or about art, or about the means of wealth, or about public affairs … They were not required to know how many kinds of vines there were in the world, and what countries vines could grow in, and where they could not. They were not called upon to give their opinion what soils were best for the vines. They were not examined in the minerals, or the shrubs … this was the sole question—whether they had worked in the vineyard.”54

  The words of St. John haunt nearly everything Newman wrote about what ought to be the relation between religion and public life: “The world passeth away; and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.” That it is possible to be in the world but not of the world is one of Newman’s great themes. He means always to persuade his audience that the will of God can be done, indeed must be done in public life. This is not to say that he shared Gladstone’s “great object” of “religionizing the State.”55 On the contrary, he approved of the separation of Church and State. Towards the end of his life, in an address to the Catholic Union of Great Britain, he said: “I think the best favour which Sovereigns, Parliaments, municipalities, and other political powers can do us is to let us alone.” But he was adamant that public men cannot leave their religion behind them when they enter public life. There is not one vineyard for religion and another for public life. In this, he follows St. Francis de Sales, who held passionately that “It is a mistake, a heresy, to want to exclude devoutness of life from among soldiers, from shops and offices, from royal courts, from the homes of the married.” It may be true that “to touch politics is to touch pitch.”56 It may be true that a life of money-getting distracts us from religion, “from the constant whirl of business.”57 It is impossible “to recount the manifold and complex corruption which man has introduced into the world …”58 Yet “the abuse of good things is no argument against the things themselves.”59 Indeed, “things that do not admit of abuse have very little life in them.”60 In his moving funeral oration for his friend Hope-Scott, whom Newman extolled as a model of Catholic public life, he recalled that “He was one of those rare men who do not merely give a tithe of their increase to their God; he was a fount
of generosity ever flowing.” His building of churches, his acts of kindness to poor converts, single women, and sick priests proved that he was indeed “the steward of Him who had given what he gave away … the steward of One to whom he must give account. He had deep within him that gift which St. Paul and St. John speak of, when they enlarge upon the characteristics of faith. It was the gift of faith, of a living, loving faith, such as ‘overcomes the world’ by seeking a ‘better country, that is a heavenly.’ This it was that kept him so ‘unspotted from the world’ in the midst of worldly engagements …”61 Living, loving faith amidst worldly engagements: this was Newman’s idea of public life.

  Chapter 6

  Newman and the Female Faithful

  If Newman’s correspondence is the record of an immense epistolary apostolate that spanned nearly seventy years, the pastoral letters he sent to his female correspondents are some of the best he ever wrote. The women to whom he wrote are not, on the whole, household names. Most of them do not have entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or even its Catholic equivalents, the biographical dictionaries of Gillow or Boase. Some, like Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald, Lady Chatterton and Lady Georgiana Fullerton, were authors, but even these are largely forgotten and their writings only remembered for their historical interest. (Fitzgerald inspired an amusing response from Newman when she sent him one of her books: “I have begun your story,” he told her, “and it reads very well, with more ease and flow than your earlier Tales. But I dread what is to come. Old men do not like tragedy or sensation.”1) Those who were well known in their own day because of their rank, such as the convert peeresses Lady Lothian and the Duchess of Norfolk, are now only known to the historian or the devoté of Burke’s Peerage. Newman’s first circle of female correspondents left few memorials; the only reason why Mary Holmes, the governess, or Elizabeth Bowden, the wife of Newman’s closest friend at Oxford, or Maria Giberne, an old family friend who would go on to become a Visitationist nun, are known to posterity is because Newman befriended them.2 And yet his friendships with these and other women were some of the deepest he formed, and his letters to them and theirs to him document how deeply they shared the faith for which they sacrificed so much. In the chapter that follows, I shall look at this rich correspondence to show how sympathetic Newman was to the unique difficulties that Catholic women faced in Protestant England. I shall also show how some of his correspondence sheds light on his published writings. And, lastly, I shall show how his affinity with women often brought out the best in him.

  Something of Newman’s understanding of women stemmed from his early childhood. With no members of his family was he closer than with his mother and sisters. In a letter to his mother, written when he was 21, he gave heartfelt expression to this special bond.

  I am indeed encompassed with blessings for which I never can be properly thankful, but the greatest of them is so dear and united a home. If your fear is, lest my jesting letters to Harriett should unconsciously be written half in earnest, I can only protest, that however other places may agree with me, I am not in my own proper element when I am away from you and my sisters. Land animals may plunge into the water and swim about in it, but they cannot live in it; and, even for the short space they were in it, they must still drink in the air.3

  As a result of the female nurturing he had received as a child, Newman would always prize the sympathy and support he received from women, whether cradle Catholics, converts, nuns, or those in-between women, whom he called “nunnish ladies.”4 Isaac Williams once observed that Newman “never seemed to me so saintlike and high in his character as when he was with his mothers and sisters …”5 In 1844, a couple of months before he resigned his Oriel fellowship, he wrote to his Aunt Elizabeth of his grandmother’s house in Fulham where he had spent so many memorable days in his childhood: “Whatever good there is in me, I owe, under grace, to the time I spent in that house, and to you and my Grandmother, its inhabitants.”6 To Sister Mary Gabriel du Boulay (1826–1906), whom he received into the Church in 1850, prior to her joining the Dominican Nuns at Stone in Staffordshire, he confided the trials he had undergone in writing the Apologia. “I have done a book of 562 pages, all at a heat; but with so much suffering, such profuse crying, such long spells of work, sometimes 16 hours, once 22 hours at once, that it is a prodigious awful marvel that I have got through it … you must go on praying that I may not feel the bad effects of such a strain on me afterwards.”7 It is clear from his correspondence that women put him at ease in ways that men did not, which gave his pastoral letters to women an extraordinary candor and depth. It is also striking how often he chose to confide in his female correspondents about matters that concerned him most. In 1863, at what was perhaps the nadir of his personal life, when he felt misunderstood not only in England but also in Rome, when he might have said with Charlotte Bronte’s Mr. Rochester, “fortune has knocked me about … she has even kneaded me with her knuckles, and now I flatter myself I am hard and tough as an India rubber ball,”8 he wrote to Emily Bowles:

  This age of the Church is peculiar – in former times, primitive and medieval, there was not the extreme centralization which now is in use. If a private theologian said any thing free, another answered him. If the controversy grew, then it went to a Bishop, a theological faculty, or to some foreign University. The Holy See was but the court of ultimate appeal. Now, if I, as a private priest, put any thing into print, Propaganda answers me at once. How can I fight with such a chain on my arm? It is like the Persians driven on to fight under the lash. There was true private judgment in the primitive and medieval schools – there are no schools now, no private judgment (in the religious sense of the phrase), no freedom, that is, of opinion. That is, no exercise of the intellect. No, the system goes on by the tradition of the intellect of former times. This is a way of things which, in God’s own time, will work its own cure, of necessity; nor need we fret under a state of things, much as we may feel it, which is incomparably less painful than the state of the Church before Hildebrand, and again in the fifteenth century.9

  Newman wrote this, in part, in response to Miss Bowles’s urging him to play some greater part in the life of the Church in London. Whenever prodded in this way, Newman demurred, knowing that he could be more effective by remaining at his desk in Edgbaston. He also felt called on by his patron to resist involving himself unduly in public affairs. “We are not better than our Fathers …” he wrote to her. “The Cardinal Vicar called Philip, to his face and in public, an ambitious party man, and suspended his faculties. It is by bearing these things that we gain merit …” When Newman ended by noting, “I never wrote such a letter to any one yet, and I shall think twice before I send you the whole of it,” he confirmed the extent to which he chose to take Miss Bowles into his confidence. A week later, he confided in her how he saw his life as a Catholic at a time when even the newspapers were speculating that he might be contemplating returning to Protestantism, a rumor which prompted him to write to the Editor of the Morning Advertiser: “I have not, and never have had, any desire or intention whatever of leaving the Church of Rome, or of becoming a Protestant again …”10 His letter to Miss Bowles is also of interest because it serves as something of a prelude to his autobiography: six months later, he would be embroiled in the Kingsley controversy and preparing to write the Apologia.

  Sometimes I seem to myself inconsistent, in professing to love retirement, yet seeming impatient at doing so little; yet I trust I am not so in any very serious way. In my letter to the Bishop of Oxford, on occasion of Number 90, I said that I had come forward, because no one else had done so, and that I rejoiced to return to that privacy which I valued more than any thing else. When I became a Catholic, I considered I never should even write again, except on definite unexciting subjects, such as history and philosophy and criticism; and, if on controversial subjects, still not on theology proper. And when I came here, where I have been for 14 years, I deliberately gave myself to a life of obscurity, whi
ch in my heart I love best. And so it has been, and so it is now, that the routine work of each day is in fact more than enough for my thoughts and my time. I have no leisure. I have had to superintend two successive enlargements of our Church, to get the Library in order, to devote a good deal of pains to our music, and a great deal more to our accounts. Then, there was my Dublin engagement, and now there is the School …11

  Newman was not complaining of the way his Catholic life had unfolded. “I am not only content, but really pleased that so things are.” Still, being so capable a man, he would always have concerns as to whether he was using his talents properly. “First, lest my being where I am is my own doing in any measure, for then I say, ‘Perhaps I am hiding my talent in a napkin.’ Next, people say to me, ‘why are you not doing more? how much you could do!’ and then, since I think I could do a great deal, if I were let to do it, I become uneasy. And lastly, willing as I am to observe St Philip’s dear rule that ‘we should despise being despised,’ yet when I find that scorn and contempt become the means of my Oratory being injured, as they have before now, then I get impatient.” Aware that he was speaking with unusual candor, he signed off: “Now observe, the letter of which I send you … is a freer one than I ever wrote to any one before.”12

  Emily Bowles (1818–1904), or Miss Bowles as Newman always called her, was the devout, outspoken, ardent sister of Frederick Bowles, the Tractarian convert with whom Newman was received into the Church and who joined the Oratory for a time before moving on to the Isle of Wight and Harrow. Miss Bowles’s family was well-to-do and came from Abingdon in Berkshire, where they lived next to the Eystons, an old recusant family, who were descendants of Sir Thomas More. Miss Bowles first met Newman in 1840 when she was 22 and he was 39. A fine-boned, petite, vivacious woman with piercing eyes, she was received into the Catholic Church in Rome in 1843. When they first met, Newman must have seen in her something of his own independence of mind. Appropriately enough, it was another independent figure, Cardinal Charles Acton (1803–1847), the doyen of the English College, who received her into the Church, after his mother took her under her wing.