by Edward Short
I believe the very passages of Simpson, which our Bishop censured, were specified by Propaganda. Moreover, I think I am right in saying that the Acts of Propaganda are the Pope’s in an intimate manner; a privilege which the other Sacred Congregations do not share. Therefore it gives great weight to the words of the Bishop of Birmingham, that the substance of them has the direct sanction of the Holy See. Nor have I any difficulty in receiving them as such. It has ever, I believe, been the course of proceedings at Rome, to meet rude actions by a rude retort; and, when speculators are fast or flippant, to be rough and ready in dealing with them; the point in question being, not the logical rights and wrongs of the matter, but the existing treatise or document in concreto. The Pope is not a philosopher, but a ruler. ‘He strangles, while they prate.’ I am disposed to think then that Simpson has no cause to complain, though he has been hardly treated. Why did he begin? why did he fling about ill sounding words on sacred and delicate subjects? I should address him in the words of the Apostle ‘Quare non magis injuriam accipitis? quare non magis fraudem patimini?’ I think he might have written a better pamphlet.138
Newman would not have shared so candid an assessment of Simpson’s indiscretion if he doubted Monsell’s own discretion.
As Gladstone’s close associate for many years, Monsell knew that the Liberal leader’s own personal experience must disprove his charges. “Ask yourself … not to speak of myself who have been in close political connection with you for 27 years … [whether] Dr. Newman, Lord O’Hagan, Aubrey de Vere or Lord Kenmare” had ever been mentally or morally enslaved or disloyal.”139 Gladstone conceded that the aspersions he cast on the loyalty of Catholics were unjust, but only after the controversy had run its course.140
Newman’s editorial advice to Emly was revealing: he must remember “that really you will be answering, not Gladstone, but Archbishop Manning … He ought to be answered and this is the opportunity—and you, as not being under his jurisdiction, have a great advantage, which an English Catholic has not …”141 Gladstone had “written so roughly of Catholic statesmen … to bring them out, and get if possible, a disavowal of what he has said of their captivity.” The tone of sympathy here is undeniable. Newman might have deplored Gladstone’s heavy-handed tactics. He might have exposed his ignorance of the technical language in which so many of the decrees were couched.142 He might have questioned his sense of fair play in attacking so vulnerable a minority as English Catholics.143 But he was not unsympathetic to what he considered the well-deserved black eye that Gladstone had given the Ultramontanes. What Newman was saying to Emly was that since Gladstone’s Expostulation had been particularly aimed at Manning and the Ultramontanes, it was necessary that any response to Gladstone’s charges include a response to Manning and the Ultramontanes as well. So when Emly took off the gloves and said what must have been on many Irish minds: “It is a serious thing to declare war against the Irish people,”144 Newman’s response was to counsel restraint: “I think you had better wait before you publish. It can’t be pleasant to a man like Gladstone to receive such private letters as you have sent, and we may damage the natural course of things by pressing him.”145 This was characteristic of the exceedingly considerate treatment Newman showed Gladstone throughout the controversy. Disraeli might have been convinced that Gladstone was not a gentleman but no one could say that about Newman.146 Indeed, one of the best descriptions of how the two controversialists conducted themselves in the debate can be found in The Idea of a University (1873), which Newman had first published over twenty years before. In describing how the gentleman should conduct himself in controversy, Newman described how he actually responded to Gladstone’s attacks, while “blundering discourtesy” fairly characterized his opponent’s behaviour.
[The gentleman] is never mean or little in his disputes; never takes unfair advantage; never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults; he is too well employed to remember injuries and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing and resigned, on philosophical principles … If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, though less educated minds; who like blunt weapons tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who re-state the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary and leave the question more involved than they find it …147
Newman often deprecated his political sense but he was accurate enough about the timing of Gladstone’s attack. “When the University Bill was thrown out in 1873, The Times gave a hint that, since there was need of a cry, perhaps a party might be formed on the ‘No Popery.’ And I don’t think they have forgotten it … The unanimity of the House against the unhappy Ritualists seemed to me … the very first step of a move against us and an omen of its success. Since then, Lord Ripon’s conversion must have sunk deeply into the Protestant mind, though there is an affectation of making light of it.”148 The stinging rebuke the Liberals dealt their leader had its intended effect: if it was No Popery they wanted, Gladstone would give them No Popery.
Newman, for his part, was amused to see that Gladstone’s Expostulation had done nothing to muzzle W. G. Ward, the Ultramontane firebrand, who was as minatory as ever. “The Pope, in virtue of his ecclesiastical office,” he pronounced in The Dublin Review, “has the power of deposing any sovereign, whose government he may consider injurious to the spiritual welfare of that country.” And furthermore, the Pope’s temporal power “is the very bulwark and citadel of Catholic order, liberty and progress.”149 If Newman was prepared to be magnanimous towards Gladstone, he was patience personified with Ward. In 1875, he wrote to a correspondent: “you can tell me nothing more extravagant about his view of me than I know already. He has told friends that I am in material heresy, that he would rather not have men made Catholics than have them converted by me, and that he accounts it the best deed of his life that he hindered my going to Oxford by the letters he sent to Rome etc. He is so above board, and outspoken, that he is quite charming. It is the whisperers, and I have long suffered from them, whom (as Dickens says) I ‘object to’ …”150 Gladstone also had a soft spot for Ward, about whom he said: “I believe more perhaps than most men in the capacity of the human mind for self-delusion, and I thought Mr. Ward infatuated without being dishonest.”151
Once Gladstone’s pamphlet was published, Newman expressed shock and dismay. To Dean Church, he wrote: “I grieve indeed that he should have so committed himself—I mean by charging people quite as free in mind as he is, of being moral and mental slaves. I never thought I should be writing against Gladstone!”152 To another: “As to Mr. Gladstone’s letter I think it is quite shocking. I should not have thought it possible that a statesman could be so onesided.”153
Newman was months writing and rewriting his rebuttal. Anxious to meet the high expectations raised by his promised response, he dreaded falling short. “Unless I really succeed, I shall do the Catholic cause harm. A failure would be really deplorable—Protestants would say, Now we know all that can be said—and we see how little that is.”154 He certainly did not want to come to the sort of controversial grief that Sir Thomas Browne had in mind when he spoke of those who: “from … an inconsiderate zeal unto truth have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as the trophies unto the enemies of truth.”155 Then, too, he was concerned that he “might get into great embarrassment, if the Pope knew.”156 In 1873, Newman still worried that he might wind up in the Vatican dog house. And there was always the added difficulty that Gladstone was “so rambling and slovenly” that one could not “follow him with any logical exactness.”157 Then, at the very height of his anxiety, Baron Friedrich von Hügel wrote from the Grand Hotel in Cannes expressing “how deeply, prof
oundly indebted” he was to Newman’s books and how grateful he was to Gladstone for forcing him to write another—praise which must have struck Newman as a cruel joke as he forged ahead with what he considered a “very wearisome occupation for an old man.”158 It was, he said, “the toughest job I ever had.”159
Then, too, Newman was never eager to embroil himself in controversy. Although he made mincemeat of Henry Brougham in The Tamworth Reading Room (1841) and made Charles Kingsley regret that he ever impugned his veracity in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), Newman disliked controversy. “I have great confidence in the maxim, Magna est veritas et prævalebit,” he told one correspondent in 1841. “Controversy does but delay the sure victory of truth by making people angry … Controversy too is a waste of time—one has other things to do.” That last consideration must have told heavily on him. One can imagine Newman recalling his letter of 1841 and being tempted to disengage. “Truth can fight its own battle. It has a reality in it, which shivers to pieces swords of earth. As far as we are not on the side of truth, we shall shiver to bits, and I am willing it should be so.” But, then, there is something in the same letter that might very well have recalled him to the pressing issue at hand. “The only cause of the prevalence of fallacies for the last 300 years has been the strong arm of the civil power countenancing them.”160 In refuting Gladstone, Newman could at least make some honorable stand against that “prevalence of fallacies.”
Even if Newman’s rebuttal had somehow fallen flat, the dedication of his work to Henry Fitzalan-Howard, the 15th Duke of Norfolk (1847–1917) would have been confutation enough of Gladstone’s charge that Catholics could not be loyal Englishmen. After attending Newman’s Oratory School, the Duke went abroad and lived for some time in the house of his uncle Lord Lyons in Constantinople. On returning home, from 1895 to 1900, he joined Lord Salisbury’s government as postmaster-general. Then, at the age of 52, he decided to go off and fight in the South African War, which caused Salisbury to quip, “We shall have old Cross going next,” referring to his 77-year-old Lord Privy Seal.161 After returning home, Norfolk sat on many royal commissions. In the House of Lords he was a great advocate for education. He was one of the co-founders of the University of Sheffield and its first chancellor; the parks he donated to Sheffield totaled 160 acres. In 1887, he was sent by Queen Victoria as special envoy to Pope Leo XIII. He had an exacting, scholarly, imaginative understanding of royal ceremony, as his conduct of the coronations of Edward VII (1902) and George V (1911) demonstrated. The old Dictionary of National Biography summed up his career with old-fashioned sententiousness, which nicely conveys the true distinction of the man: “He earned the respect and esteem which are due to strong patriotism, to sober judgement, to unassuming dignity, and to strong moral and religious conviction.”162 There was nothing disloyal about the impeccably Catholic Norfolk.
When the ordeal of refuting Gladstone was nearly over, Newman wrote a charming letter to Charles Russell, the Professor of Philosophy at Maynooth, who had helped him understand the claims of Rome when he was on his Anglican deathbed, thanking him for his “great kindness” in wishing him well with the work. “I am like a man who has gone up in a balloon,” Newman told Russell, “and has a chance of all sorts of adventures, from gas escapes, from currents of air, from intanglements in forests, from the wide sea, and does not feel himself safe till he gets back to his fireside. At present as I am descending, I am in the most critical point of my expedition. All I can say is that I have acted for the best, and have done my best, and must now leave the success of it to a higher power.”163
When the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk appeared, Gladstone wrote to Newman to say that it exhibited not only “severe self control” but “a genial and gentle manner”; Newman had been “able to invest … these painful subjects with something of a golden glow …” Lord Acton, whose assessments of Newman were always tinged with a certain condescension, thought it: “admirable in its strength, strange in its weakness, incomparable in its speculation, tame and emasculated in action.”164 John Pope Hennessy wrote from the Stafford Club: “Your letter to the Duke of Norfolk is the only thing we can talk about in this club at present; and indeed in other clubs and in society generally it seems to be one of the two absorbing topics of the moment … I never remember so unanimous an expression of Catholic opinion on any question of the kind before.”165 Thomas Cookson, Provost of the Liverpool Chapter, acknowledged the sureness with which Newman had hit one of his main targets when he thanked him “for the service you have done to the Catholics of this country by your much desired and crushing, yet persuasive, answer to Mr. Gladstone’s Expostulation … . I hope the reproach will not be fruitless, which you have given to some among ourselves whose language on Papal claims is usually high-flown, and not always accurate, and as a matter of course confirms the opinion of the governing class and of Protestants generally that they encroach upon civil rights.”166 Perhaps the most gratifying response came from an Irish Jesuit, Father James Jones, who wrote “I am sure you will bear with me when I say that your name was dear to me even before you became a Catholic, and that this feeling has been increased by every work that has since come from your hand, and by none more than this last … I cannot help saying that I sympathize very much in your aversion to extravagance and intolerance in matters where the Church has left us free to form our own judgment … . I would gladly speak of that great theological light I have obtained in each section of your letter, and of the encouragement to thorough loyalty to the Church and the Pope that breathes in every page of it …”167 In writing back to him, Newman confessed: “Great as the weariness of writing has been, my anxiety has been quite as great a trial. I have never considered theology my line or my forte, and have not written on it except when obliged. Under these circumstances you may think how exceedingly gratified I have been to receive your letter. It is a great thing to have cause to believe, that on the whole I have been prospered in what I have written. Please sometimes say a prayer for an old man …”168
Newman’s response to Gladstone encapsulated all the undiminished regard he felt for his unscrupulous accuser: “It has been a great grief to me to have had to write against one, whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and, from the time that you were launched into public life, you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude …” And he concluded by saying “I do not think I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”169 Something of the truth of this letter can be seen in a letter he wrote over thirty-five years before to his friend Maria Giberne after Gladstone’s sensational book on Church and State appeared: “When the Isis flows back, and St. Mary’s spire turns into a railroad train, he will begin to waver and repent of his book.”170 (Gladstone reminded Newman of railway trains, rather as George Bernard Shaw reminded Yeats of sewing machines.) Apropos the radical new political order that was taking shape, after Gladstone’s Irish University Bill was defeated, Newman wrote: “Everything is breaking up and the rudiments of a new formation are only seen by Him who has allowed such a disorganization to come to pass. It is not Gladstone’s fault—he has done all he could—but he might as soon be expected by eloquence or skill to change the course of a railway train, as to change the direction or slacken the speed of the movements which are bringing in a new world.”171
Gladstone and Newman were never more than associates. “I was not a friend of his,” Gladstone told Acton after his death, “but only an acquaintance treated with extraordinary kindness …”172 They met no more than a dozen times over 65 years. Yet there was a deep bond between them. What forged the bond is not easy to say. They both saw themselves as working to advance the cause of faith—“the great and sacred cause,”173 as Gladstone called it—though in later life Newman would tell Lady Simeon and a number of oth
er correspondents that Gladstone had publicly vowed “to give the few remaining years of his life to preparing for eternity, but in no long time we find him setting out on his Scottish (Midlothian) expedition, and ever since he has been in the hands of the enemies of all religion. Alas, Alas …”174 To Lord Blachford, Newman was categorical: the Party that Gladstone had joined is “as openly unbelieving and as consciously uniting politics and infidelity as Gambetta’s.”175
When Gladstone embraced the radicals in his Party, Newman was more pained than angry. To one correspondent he wrote: “I grieve for Gladstone with a tenderness which I do not recognize in you. (He has never prospered in any true sense of the word, since 1874 he attacked wantonly the Holy Roman Church and the Holy See in the person of Pius ix.)”176 “Tenderness” sounds an odd word to describe a relationship that had such little personal contact, but somehow it fits. “I cling to the hope of yet seeing you some day or other by some happy turn of fortune,” Gladstone wrote to Newman in November of 1882.177 One of Newman’s last letters to Gladstone returned this note of fondness. Gladstone was staying in Edgbaston in November of 1888 and wrote to Father Neville asking if Newman could receive him. Newman wrote back: “It is a great kindness and compliment asking to see me. I have known and admired you so long. But I can’t write nor talk nor walk and hope you will take my blessing which I give from my heart.”178
Still, Gladstone’s fondness for Newman was never unalloyed. In 1890, he wrote to Acton: “Ever since he published his University Sermons in 1843 I have thought him unsafe in philosophy …”179 To Richard Holt Hutton in the same year he said that Newman might have “done an incomparable and immeasurable work for the Church of England” but he “never placed the English Church upon its historical ground. I doubt if he was even tolerably acquainted with the history of the sixteenth century …”180 Gladstone pinched this charge from his good friend, Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890), the liberal apostate who said about the author of A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk: “Whole stretches of Church history and the history of European culture are unknown to him, as the darkest Africa. There is no way of explaining his naïve and daring assertions.”181 Yet Gladstone attacked more than Newman’s learning. “He was trained (as I was) in the Evangelical School, which is beyond all others … the school of private judgment. By private judgment he excogitated the scheme of doctrine and thought which he taught in his Anglican works. By private judgment he grew sore with the manifold abuses and defects of the English Church; but then, also by private judgment, he measured the corruptions of the Roman, and recoiled from them. It is wonderful, and shows the loyalty of his affection, that, leaving nothing but rags and shreds to hang on by, he remained in the English Church until 1845.”182 This was the flagrant table-turning of a seasoned House of Commons man. It nicely illustrates what T. H. Huxley referred to as Gladstone’s mastery of “the great art of offensive misrepresentation.”183 (Echoes of this willful misrepresentation can be found in M. G. Brock likening Newman to Wycliffe184 or Frank Turner calling him “the first great, and perhaps most enduring, Victorian skeptic.”185) Gladstone knew full well that Newman had always counseled against errant private judgment. “On certain questions, in certain emergencies,” Newman argued in one letter, though one could quote hundreds of other similar passages, “I would rather consult half a dozen men, than go by the opinion of any one … It never can be right for a man always to go by his own judgment, relying simply on what seems to himself the right thing to do.”186 In charging Newman with having recourse to private judgment in converting to Catholicism, Gladstone sought not only to defend his own recourse to private judgement but to imply that Newman was never as Roman as he wished to appear.