by Edward Short
106 LD, 14:29, JHN to Mary Holmes (31 July 1850).
107 Autobiographical Writings (15 December 1859), p. 251.
108 LD, 15:113–14, JHN to Sister Mary Agnes Philip (27 June 1852).
109 LD, 28:332, JHN to Stella Austin (21 March 1878).
110 LD, 14:292–93, JHN to Mrs. Lucy Agnes Vaughan Phillips (5 June 1851).
111 See LD, 17:272, note 3, “Obedience the Best Remedy for Religious Perplexity” (1830).
112 See “Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity” (1830), p. 230 and 241; and Ian Ker’s introduction to his John Henry Newman: Selected Sermons (1994).
113 LD, 25:68, JHN to Mary Holmes (26 March 1870).
114 LD, 21:182, JHN to Mary Holmes (3 August 1864). For such a literary governess as Miss Holmes, it was fitting that she should have been engaged by the Blounts, an old Catholic family, one of whose members was Martha Blount (1690–1763), who had a very rocky relationship with her fellow Catholic, Alexander Pope, whose Epistle to a Lady on the Characters of Women (1753) contains a long tribute to her. The poet was actually fond of both Martha and her sister Teresa, though as he wrote in a letter addressed to both of them: “I have some times found myself inclined to be in love with you: [but] as I have reason to know from your Temper & Conduct how miserably I should be used in that circumstance, it is worth my while to avoid it.” See ODNB entry for Martha Blount.
115 LD, 25:132, JHN to Mary Holmes (22 May 1870): “It amused me to find that Allies and Dalgairns found my book difficult. I don’t say it is not – but I know that, among clever men, they are the least clearheaded that I know – and I have long thought so.”
116 LD, 10:157, Miss Mary Homes to JHN (6 March 1844).
117 LD, 10:166, JHN to Miss Mary Holmes (15 March 1844).
118 LD, 9:184, JHN to Mary Holmes (27 January 1842).
119 Anglican Difficulties, p. 2.
120 LD, 12:267, Catherine Ward to JHN (22 September 1848). See also Ian Ker’s wonderfully witty demolition of Owen Chadwick’s claim that it was Newman, pace Catherine Ward, who was in search of an ideal church, which can be found in Ker, Newman and the Fullness of Christianity, pp. 103–22.
121 LD, 12:273, JHN to Catherine Ward (25 September 1848).
122 Henry Mayhew, London Characters and Crooks (Folio Society, 1998), p. 18.
123 What R. A. Soloway found in his study of the Anglican clergy and the poor still rings true: “More often [Anglican clergymen] distrusted the poor, feared them, and in some instances clearly loathed them. Since the lower orders could not be loved as they were, it was necessary that they be changed. It was necessary to strip them, scrub them, clean, and reclothe them in the reassuring and recognizable garments of middle-class virtue …” One does not need to share Soloway’s distaste for soap to agree that nineteenth-century Anglican clergymen found the poor’s aversion to soap an often insuperable barrier to considering them fully Christian. See R. A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England 1783–1852 (Oxford, 1969), p. 164.
124 LD, 12:273, JHN to Catherine Ward (25 September 1848).
125 See Daily Mail (13 August 1890).
126 LD, 12:274–75, JHN to Catherine Ward (25 September 1848).
127 LD, 12:291, JHN to Catherine Ward (12 October 1848).
128 LD, 12:334, JHN to Catherine Ward (18 November 1848).
129 LD, 12:335, JHN to Catherine Ward (18 November 1848).
130 LD, 12:354 JHN to Catherine Ward (30 November 1848).
131 See Apologia, p. 543 and Essays, Vol. I, p. 101.
132 LD, 12:354, JHN to Catherine Ward (30 November 1848).
133 LD, 12:378, JHN to Catherine Ward (19 December 1848).
134 LD, 12:335, JHN to Catherine Ward (18 November 1848).
135 LD, 24:275, JHN to Louisa Simeon (25 June 1869).
136 LD, 24:275–76, JHN to Louisa Simeon (25 June 1869).
137 See James Joyce, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revised edn (Oxford, 1982), p. 678. Joyce said this apropos his schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, in a letter to his old friend from university days, C. P. Curran: “It is terrible to think of a vessel of election as the prey of impulses beyond its control and of natures beneath its comprehension and, fervently as I desire her cure, I ask myself what then will happen when and if she finally withdraws her regard from the lightning-lit revery of her clairvoyance and turns it upon that battered cabman’s face, the world.”
138 John Hungerford Pollen, “Newman in Dublin,” in The Month (September 1906), pp. 318–20.
139 LD, 22:247–48, JHN to Marianne Frances Bowden (8 June 1866). This Marianne Bowden should not be confused with the Mary Anne Bowden (1831–1867), who was the oldest daughter of Elizabeth and W. J. Bowden and became Sr. Mary Frances Dominica, to whom Newman was very close and who died young, like her father, of tuberculosis. Newman regarded her as one of his most faithful friends. See Joyce Sugg, Ever Yours Affly, pp. 177–85.
140 William Ullathorne, Patience and Humility: A Handbook for Christians (Sophia Press, 1998), p. 5.
141 Cf. Christina Rossetti’s poem, “Cardinal Newman,” which opens with these lines, “O weary Champion of the Cross, lie still/Sleep thou at length the all-embracing sleep/Long was thy sowing day, rest now and reap/Thy fast was long, feast now thy spirit’s fill.” See Complete Poems (Penguin, 2001), p. 584.
142 See “Love, the One Thing Needful” (1839) in Plain and Parochial Sermons, Book 5, Sermon 23, pp. 339–40.
143 Ibid., p. 340.
144 Sugg, Ever Yours Affly, p. 5.
145 Ibid., p. 298.
146 LD, 13:419, JHN to Miss Munro (11 February 1850).
Chapter 7 Newman and Gladstone
1 Sir Robert Ensor, England 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1936), p. 137.
2 According to one historian of bibliomania, “William Gladstone … bought and sold whole libraries at a time; book dealers were often able to sell his own books back to him, and he didn’t notice.” See Julie Rugg. Buried in Books: A Reader’s Anthology (London, 2010), p. 7. It was in 1840 that Newman began systematically putting together his wonderful library, which is preserved at the Birmingham Oratory. His account books show that he spent £858 on books during the course of this year alone. See The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. 8, p. 34, n. 4; also Vol. 7, p. 231, n. 4. The Letters and Diaries are hereinafter cited as LD.
3 Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Horne (London, 1999), p. 80.
4 In August 1846, Newman attended the consecration of Cheadle Church with Lord Shrewsbury, the patron of Pugin and benefactor of the Catholic revival in the Midlands; later, Newman described the ordeal to St. John Ambrose: “A house full of company and I looking like a fool …” (LD, 11:241). As Meriol Trevor remarks, Newman “was never comfortable at parties in high society.” (Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud. p. 392.
5 E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep Show (London, 1930), p. 47.
6 T. B. Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, ed. Young (Harvard, 1970), p. 610: “Why go as deep into a question as Burke, only in order to be, like Burke, coughed down, or left speaking to green benches and red boxes.” See also Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (London, 2008), p. 259: “It has been suggested that Gladstone, who like Irving had been expected by his mother to be ordained into the Church, learnt some of his oratorical techniques from studying Irving’s performances.”
7 K. T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), p. 688.
8 M. Ward, Young Mr. Newman (New York, 1948), p. 315.
9 Coleridge, quoted in LD, 15:284.
10 Guizot’s Lectures on European Civilization also informed aspects of Newman’s understanding of doctrinal development. See John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. J. M. Cameron (London, 1974). Newman quotes Guizot at length in Chapter 1, Section II. One of Guizot’s observations tallies with a good deal of Newman’s th
inking on the relationship between faith and the doctrines that the Church has adopted to define it. “There are problems in human nature, in human destinies,” Guizot wrote, “which cannot be solved in this life, which depend on an order of things unconnected with the visible world, but which unceasingly agitate the human mind with a desire to comprehend them. The solution of these problems is the origin of all religion; her primary object is to discover the creeds and doctrines which contain, or are supposed to contain it.” (P. 112)
11 William Ewart Gladstone (WEG), quoted in Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: A Biography (New York, 1995), p. 281.
12 LD, 1:219, JHN to Charles Newman (24 March 1825).
13 John Henry Newman. Rise and Progress of Universities and Benedictine Essays (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 31: “There are those who, having felt the influence of this ancient School, and being smit with its splendour and its sweetness, ask wistfully, if never again it is to be Catholic, or whether at least some footing for Catholicity may not be found there. All honour and merit to the charitable and zealous hearts who so inquire!”
14 G. M. Young, “Mr. Gladstone,” from Today and Yesterday (London, 1948), p. 18.
15 G. M. Young, “The Schoolman in Downing Street,” from Daylight and Champaign (London, 1948), p. 56.
16 Gladstone quoted in H. C. G. Matthew. Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 633.
17 LD, 11:7, JHN to F. W. Faber (8 October 1845).
18 LD, 22:241, JHN to W. J. Copeland (27 May 1866).
19 Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Newman (London, 1912), Vol. II, pp. 429–30. Edward White Benson (1829–1896) was also struck by the lines on Newman’s face. In 1848, when he first heard him preach at St. Chad’s, he told a correspondent: “His appearance was exceedingly interesting; he was very much emaciated, and when he began his voice was very feeble, and he spoke with great difficulty, nay sometimes he gasped for breath; but his voice was very sweet … But oh, Lightfoot, never you turn Romanist if you are to have a face like that—it was awful—the terrible lines deeply ploughed all over his face, and the craft that sat upon his retreating forehead and sunken eyes. He was a strange spectacle altogether …” See Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud, pp. 431–32. Trevor’s response to this is characteristically sensible: “Benson was perhaps too young to realize that other things besides craft may line a man’s face” (p. 432). Benson was 19 and Newman 46 at the time.
20 Philip Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1954), p. 217.
21 Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999), p. 366. It is interesting that this view of Gladstone should have passed from Salisbury to one of his sons, Lord Robert Cecil (1864–1958), the architect of the League of Nations. After hearing his brother Lord William Cecil (1863–1936) preach on England’s duty to show moral leadership in the world, he wrote: “I have had a great feeling that I have been ‘called’ to preach the League spirit in public affairs and there seems so much in the Bible about that kind of thing … And yet there is the great danger of hypocrisy and self-deception as with Gladstone.” See Kenneth Rose, The Later Cecils (London, 1975), pp. 159–60.
22 See William Allingham, The Diaries, ed. H. Allingham and D. Radford (Folio Society, 2007), p. 311.
23 D. C. Lathbury (ed.), Correspondence on Church and Religion of W. E. Gladstone (London, 1910), Vol. 1, pp. 248–49.
24 Ibid., p. 281, WEG to Manning (24 October 1843).
25 Lathbury, Correspondence on Church and Religion of W. E. Gladstone Vol. 1, p. 281.
26 LD, 9:585, JHN to Henry Edward Manning (25 October 1843).
27 Gladstone to Manning (28 October 1843), from Lathbury, Vol. 1, p. 283.
28 Gladstone to Manning (24 October 1843), from Lathbury, Vol. 1, p. 281.
29 Gladstone to Manning (30 October 1843), from Lathbury, Vol. 1, pp. 286–87.
30 Gladstone to Manning (28 October 1843), from Lathbury, Vol. 1, p. 283.
31 Gladstone to Manning (31 December 1843), from Lathbury, Vol. 1, p. 291.
32 LD, 10:165, JHN to James Hope (14 March 1844).
33 Gladstone to Manning (20 October 1845), from Lathbury, Vol. 1, p. 349.
34 Gladstone, Letter to The Times (31 January 1842), from Lathbury, Vol. 1, pp. 277–78.
35 LD, 4:67, John Bowden to JHN (28 October 1833).
36 See C. G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A Family Biography 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971), p. 96.
37 See H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 317: The daily routine at Hawarden involved Gladstone in a good deal of exercise: “the early morning walk through the Park to the Church and back (along a specially built path to ensure privacy), walking in the surrounding countryside and, of course, silviculture, felling and planting trees. Gladstone always used an axe, and in these years many were presented to him. It became almost a totem among his admirers. Margaret de Lisle, daughter of the convert to Catholicism, always wore an axe to indicate loyalty to Gladstone, until Gordon’s death in 1885, when she took it off.”
38 See Checkland, The Gladstones, p. 96.
39 John Campbell, F.E. Smith: First Earl of Birkenhead (London, 1983), p. 73.
40 John Morley, The Life of Gladstone (London, 1903), Vol. I, p. 637.
41 Ibid., p. 640.
42 Ibid., p. 638.
43 Ibid., p. 43.
44 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone: 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 53.
45 Ibid., p. 94.
46 Benjamin Disraeli, in The Times, 29 July 1878.
47 Philip Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1954), p. 35.
48 The Jerusalem Bishopric, the brainchild of the Anglophile Baron Bunsen, was a joint bishopric established in 1841 to serve both Lutherans and Anglicans in Syria, Chaldaea, Egypt and Abyssinia. The scheme went kaput in 1886 after Lutherans decided that they had enough of episcopacy. Originally, many English Evangelicals supported it because it would ‘uncatholicize’ the Tractarians; some High Churchmen because it would extend the principle of episcopacy; and most liberals because they thought it would help realize their ideal of a non-dogmatic Church. In his protest to the Bishop of Oxford, Newman wrote: “I have now been for a long while assuring persons that the English Church was a branch of the Church Catholic. If then a measure is in progress which cuts from under me the very ground on which I have been writing and talking, and to prove that all I hold is a mere theory and illusion, a paper theology that facts contradict, who will not excuse it if I am deeply pained … ?” (JHN to J. R. Hope, 24 November 1841, LD, 8:345) Once the bishopric became reality, Newman predicted, “I shall not be able to keep a single man from Rome. They will be all trooping off …” (JHN to J. Bowden, 10 October 1841, LD 8:289). Four years later, he himself would be one of those troopers. Gladstone sensed as much himself and referred to the episode as “one of the saddest and most anxious” in which he had ever been engaged (P. Butler, Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism (Oxford, 1982), pp. 177–78.
49 In 1847, Bishop Phillpots of Exeter refused to install Charles Gorham to the living of Exeter in 1847 because he would not accept the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. When Gorham appealed against the ruling, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overruled the Bishop, and Gorham was installed to the living after all, which outraged High Churchmen and led to William Ewart Gladstone’s two closest friends, Henry Edward Manning and James Hope seceding to Rome. Although Gladstone deeply regretted these defections, he nonetheless recognized that the Judgment went “to the very root of all life and all teaching in the Church of England” by not only undermining the doctrine of baptismal regeneration but allowing the English state to overrule the Church on doctrinal matters.
50 Richard Shannon, Gladstone: 1809–1865 (London, 1982), pp. 79 and 43–44.
51 LD, 7:8, JHN to Charles Marriott (8 January 1839).
52 For a spirited argument to the contrary, see David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone (Oxford, 2004), pp. 77–104.
53 Gladstone, quoted in Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the Unive
rsity of Oxford, ed. James David Earnest and Gerard Tracey (Oxford, 2006), p. xlv.
54 Ibid., p. 39.
55 Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford, 2008), p. 66.
56 In his preface to the second volume of Newman’s sermons collected by Vincent Blehl, the former archivist of the Birmingham Oratory, Gerard Tracey, wrote: “The reputation of John Henry Newman as a preacher is so long-standing and so widespread that it needs no comment.” Well, my gentle reader being the general reader, I am assuming that he may not have encountered Church’s lively eyewitness account of the sermons, or if he has, that he will not mind reading it again.
57 Church, quoted in Lathbury, Vol. 1, p. 262.
58 Lathbury, Vol. 1, p. 262.
59 Ibid., p. 265
60 Philip Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1954), pp. 98–99.
61 John Vincent, Disraeli (London, 1990), p. 48.
62 George Malcolm Young, “Mr. Gladstone,” in Today and Yesterday (London, 1948), pp. 34–35.
63 David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone (Oxford, 2004), p. 302.
64 LD, 23:234: “What a sad thing this Gladstone controversy is … It is smelling out a Powder Plot.”
65 The Gladstone Diaries, ed. H. C. G. Matthew, Vol. VIII, pp. 563 and 578.
66 Matthew, H. C. G., “Gladstone, Vaticanism and the Question of the East,” in Derek Baker (ed.), Studies in Church History (Oxford, 1978), Vol. 15, p. 441.
67 F. D. Maurice, “Three Letters to the Rev. William Palmer” (1842), in To Build Christ’s Kingdom: F.D. Maurice and His Writings., ed. Jeremy Morris (London, 2007), p. 111. It was only after Newman’s via media had run its futile course that Newman could appreciate how incontrovertibly right Maurice was. The agents of the Reformation had done their work all too well and by the seventeenth century the English had indeed been transformed into a Protestant people.
68 Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (London, 1953), p. 128.
69 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 242.
70 Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: The Political Journals of Lord Stanley 1849–1869, ed. John Vincent (New York, 1978), p. 346.