Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  71 Ibid., p. 346.

  72 Gladstone Diaries, VII, 28 October 1869, quoted in Richard Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli (London, 2006), p. 209.

  73 Gladstone Diaries, VIII, p. 563, quoted in Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 209.

  74 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone: 1809–1898, pp. 91–92.

  75 Gladstone Diaries, VIII, p. 586, WEG to Laura Thistlethwayte (22 April 1870).

  76 Queen Victoria in her Letters and Journals, ed. Christopher Hibbert (New York, 1985), p. 234.

  77 William Hazlitt, “On Cant and Hypocrisy” (December 1828), in Selected Essays of William Hazlitt 1778–1830, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1930), p. 364.

  78 LD, 9:175, JHN to John Keble (20 December 1842). See also an excellent essay by John Kirwan, “Father Newman at Confession,” in John Henry Newman in His Time, ed. Philippe Lefebvre and Colin Mason (Family Publications, Oxford, 2007), pp. 209–22.

  79 Ibid., pp. 567–68, WEG to Laura Thistlethwayte (22 October 1869).

  80 Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, ed. Ramm, Vol. I (Oxford, 1952).

  81 Parochial Sermons, Vol. II, p. 30.

  82 The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. VI, p. 31 (December 1868).

  83 J. Moody, John Henry Newman (New York, 1945), p. 236.

  84 John Morley, Life of Gladstone, Vol. 1 (London, 1903), p. 381.

  85 Erastianism refers to the doctrines of Thomas Erastus, the sixteenth-century Swiss theologian, who argued that in states professing one established religion, ecclesiastical must bow to secular power. In Ecclesiastical Polity (1594) Richard Hooker reaffirmed the idea of state supremacy that Henry VIII had made law in the Act of Supremacy (1534). In an attempt to furnish the English Church with some autonomy, the Tractarians sought to replace Erastianism with an acceptance of the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession.

  86 Robert Gray, Cardinal Manning: A Biography (London, 1985), p. 133.

  87 Ibid., p. 133.

  88 John Morley, Life of Gladstone, p. 386.

  89 See Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (London, 2008), p. 41.

  90 Gladstone to Manning (26 January 1851), in Lathbury, Vol. 1, p. 359.

  91 G. M. Young, “Mr. Gladstone,” in Today and Yesterday (London, 1948), p. 39.

  92 M. Asquith, More Memories (London, 1933), p. 123.

  93 Jenkins, Gladstone, pp. 281–82.

  94 Vincent, Disraeli, p. 14.

  95 LD, 30:9–10, JHN to John Rickards Mozley (20 October 1881).

  96 LD, 29:336, JHN to Henry Bedford (6 February 1881).

  97 John Hungerford Pollen, “Newman in Dublin,” in The Month (September 1906), pp. 318–20.

  98 LD, 31:195, JHN to GM Hopkins (3 March 1887).

  99 R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London, 1988), p. 395.

  100 AW, p. 333.

  101 LD, 22:143, JHN to M. R. Giberne (29 January 1866).

  102 LD, 24:187, JHN to Edward Heneage Dering (15 December 1868).

  103 Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Abbott (Oxford, 1956), p. 293.

  104 See Froude quoted in Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude: A Biography, (Oxford, 1963), Vol. 2, p. 368.

  105 Ibid., p. 369.

  106 See Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London, 1988), p. 103.

  107 William Allingham, The Diaries, ed. H. Allingham and D. Radford (Folio Society, 2007), p. 180.

  108 The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. VIII, p. 216.

  109 A. G. Gardiner, The Life of William Harcourt, (London, 1923), Vol. 1, p. 250.

  110 F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London, 1971), p. 96.

  111 Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), p. 363.

  112 Ibid., p. 363.

  113 Richard Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898 (London, 1999), p. 123.

  114 LD, 17:146, JHN to Finlayson (31 October 1874).

  115 The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. VIII, p. 298.

  116 LD, 26:279, JHN to Robert Ornsby (23 March 1873).

  117 LD, 26:282, JHN to H. P. Liddon (27 March 1873).

  118 K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), p. 606.

  119 Ibid., p. 305.

  120 Shannon, Gladstone, p. 125.

  121 Ibid., p. 146.

  122 Philip Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1954), p. 70. Disraeli had called WEG this in 1845 when he resigned over and subsequently voted for the Maynooth endowment.

  123 Shannon, Gladstone, p. 147.

  124 Ibid.

  125 LD, 29:34, Lord Ripon to JHN (20 February 1879).

  126 LD, 27:124, Saturday Review (12 September 1874), p. 328.

  127 LD, 26:434, The Times (5 September 1874).

  128 Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (London, 2007), p. 235. See also Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford, 2004), pp. 141–79. Professor Owen makes some lively observations regarding the working relationship in India between Lord Ripon and Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer.

  129 Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence (London, 1997), p. 70.

  130 See Apologia, p. 18. Thomas Scott (1774–1821) was a Christian apologist and a crucial influence on Newman. In the Apologia he refers to him as “the writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking), I almost owe my soul.”

  131 See Edward Norman, The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History (California, 2007), pp. 148–49: “Ultramontanism itself was not a ‘movement,’ any more than Liberal Catholicism was. It was a prevalent ethos, a practical summation of the centralizing tendencies of the nineteenth-century curia, a party label in the divergences of view over Catholic order throughout the world. The publication of Joseph de Maistre’s Du Pape in 1819 provided an ideological pedigree, and had the effect of encouraging papal authority as a part of a revived emphasis on legitimacy which prevailed in the atmosphere of restoration following the fall of Napoleon … In the confrontation of Liberal Catholicism and Ultramontanism—in relation to social and political issues—the latter won the day in the Church, but in most countries most Catholics were probably untouched by the distinctions drawn by the literary combatants, and were loyal to the pope and hostile to the forces of the Risorgimento because that is what by instinct they knew to be right.”

  132 Shannon, Gladstone, p. 147.

  133 Elizabeth Longford, Queen Victoria (Folio Society, 2007), p. 386.

  134 Ibid., p. 386.

  135 LD, 27:133–34, JHN to Lord Emly (9 October 1874).

  136 Ibid., p. 133.

  137 LD, 27:122–23, JHN to Lord Blachford (2 October 1874).

  138 LD, 20:390–91, JHN to William Monsell (13 January 1863).

  139 LD, 27:123. See note 4.

  140 Lord Ripon also took Gladstone to task for his defamatory charges against English Catholics, forcing from him the admission “I do not think you ‘likely to be wanting in civil loyalty and duty.’” See Lucien Wolf, Life of the First Marquess of Ripon (London, 1921), Vol. I, p. 309.

  141 LD, 27:124, JHN to Lord Emly (2 October 1874).

  142 LD, 27:152, JHN to Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle (6 November 1874).

  143 Newman and Gladstone: The Vatican Decrees, ed. Ryan (Notre Dame, 1962), p. 78.

  144 LD, 27:148, JHN to Lord Emly (4 November 1874).

  145 Ibid.

  146 In October 1876, Disraeli wrote to Lord Derby: “Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstone—extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition; and with one commanding characteristic—whether Prime Minister, or Leader of the Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying or scribbling—never a gentleman.” See Lord Blake’s essay, “Disraeli and Gladstone,” in Victorian England (Folio Society, 1999), p. 218.

  147 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Martin Svaglic (
Notre Dame, 1982), pp. 159–60.

  148 LD, 27:148–49, JHN to Lord Emly (4 November 1874).

  149 LD, 27:145.

  150 LD, 27:183, JHN to Malcolm Maccoll (4 January 1875).

  151 D. C. Lathbury (ed), Correspondence on Church and Religion, Vol. II, p. 378.

  152 LD, 27:169–70, JHN to R. W. Church (10 December 1874).

  153 LD, 27:183, JHN to Malcolm Maccoll (4 January 1875).

  154 LD, 27:156, JHN to Lady Georgiana Fullerton (10 November 1874).

  155 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643), from Sir Thomas Browne: Selected Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago, 1968), p. 11.

  156 LD, 27:159, JHN to the Duke of Norfolk (22 November 1874).

  157 LD, 27:159, JHN to Lord Emly (23 November 1874).

  158 LD, 27:173, JHN to William Clifford, Bishop of Clifton (15 December 1874).

  159 LD, 27:158, JHN to the Duke of Norfolk (22 November 1874).

  160 LD, 8:23, JHN to Robert Belaney (25 January 1841).

  161 Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999), p. 760.

  162 DNB, ‘1912–1921’ (Oxford, 1927), p. 274.

  163 LD, 27:198, JHN to Charles Russell (19 January 1875).

  164 Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Vol. III, ed. Fears (Liberty Fund, Indianapolis), p. 350.

  165 See Positio (Rome, 1989), p. 376.

  166 LD, 27:202, Thomas Cookson to JHN (20 January 1875).

  167 LD, 27:200, James Jones, S.J. to JHN (21 January 1875).

  168 LD, 27:200–01, JHN to James Jones, S.J. (22 January 1875).

  169 LD, 27:193, JHN to WEG (16 January 1875).

  170 LD, 7:103, JHN to M. Giberne (11 July 1839).

  171 LD 26: 282, JHN to H. P. Liddon (7 March 1873).

  172 John Morley, Life of Gladstone (London, 1903), Vol. III, pp. 421–22.

  173 Correspondence on Church and State, ed Lathbury, Vol. II, p. 88.

  174 LD, 31:26.

  175 LD, 28:199, JHN to Lord Blachford (25 May 1877). Leon Gambetta (1832–1882) was a French statesman and prime minister who, during the Franco-Prussian war, escaped to Tours by balloon during the siege of Paris and declared the French Republic (1870) after Napoleon III surrendered. A radical liberal, he was passionately anti-clerical. Recalling Gambetta’s escape by balloon might have inspired Newman’s own witty description of how he felt while writing A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875): “I felt as if up in a balloon and till I got safe down, I could not be easy. I might be turned upside down by a chimney pot, left atop a tree, or carried out to sea” (LD 27:215, JHN to Alexander Fullerton, 6 February 1875). Then again, balloons were common in the London of Newman’s youth. His eldest sister Harriet wrote in 1824: “Mr. Graham ascended yesterday in his Balloon, we had a very good view of it; he alighted at Godstone, after having been an hour and a half surveying a splendid collection of clouds. I longed to be with him when I saw the Balloon ascending in such style, although I knew I have not courage, or according to myself bravery enough, for such an expedition.” See Newman Family Letters, ed. Dorothy Mozley (London, 1962), pp. 6–7.

  176 LD, 31:104, JHN to Bosworth Smith (22 December 1885).

  177 LD, 30:169, William Ewart Gladstone to JHN (9 November 1882).

  178 LD, 31:266, JHN to Gladstone to JHN (6 November 1888).

  179 D. C. Lathbury (ed.), Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1910), WEG to Lord Acton, 1 September 1890, Vol. I, pp. 404–05.

  180 Lathbury, Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1, p. 406, WEG to R. H. Hutton (6 October 1890), p. 406.

  181 See Roland Hill, Lord Acton (New Haven, 2000), p. 271.

  182 Lathbury, Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. I, p. 406.

  183 Huxley, quoted by David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone (Oxford, 2004), p. 3.

  184 M. G. Brock, “The Oxford of Peel and Gladstone,” in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Brock and Curthoys, (Oxford, 1997), Vol. VI, Pt. 1 p. 69. Newman “had none of the cautious conformism of his seniors. Where his convictions pointed he followed; it was not in him to modify his message from prudence or alarm. He stands in the Oxford tradition of Wyclif and Wesley—inspired, disruptive and a stranger to moderation.”

  185 Frank Turner, John Henry Newman and the Challenge of Evangelical Religion (New Haven, 2002), p. 641.

  186 LD, 27:24, JHN to Mrs. Margaret A. Wilson (23 February 1874).

  187 Gladstone to Meyrick (26 April 1875), in Frederick Meyrick, Memories of Life at Oxford and Experiences in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Spain, and Elsewhere (New York, 1905), pp. 24–25.

  188 See the excellent entry on Lord Westbury by R. C. J. Cocks in the ODNB.

  189 See ODNB.

  190 William Ewart Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years (New York, 1897), Vol. 8, p. 309.

  191 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 261.

  192 Newman and Gladstone: The Vatican Decrees, ed. Alvan Ryan (South Bend, 1962), p. 132.

  193 Ibid., p. 136.

  194 See Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI, pp. 81–82.

  195 LD, 28:351. This is from a moving speech that Gladstone gave at the opening of the hall and library of Keble College on 25 April 1878. After referring to the Oxford Movement, Keble and Pusey he told the audience: “But there is a name which, as an academical name, is greater than either of those – I mean the name of Dr. Newman (Cheers.) When the history of Oxford during that time comes to be written, the historian will have to record the extraordinary, the unexampled career of that distinguished man in the University. He will have to tell, as I believe, that Dr. Newman exercised for a period of about ten years after 1833 an amount of influence, of absorbing influence, over the highest intellects – over nearly the whole intellect, but certainly over the highest intellect of this University, for which perhaps, there is no parallel in the academical history of Europe, unless you go back to the twelfth century or to the University of Paris. We know how his influence was sustained by his extraordinary purity of character and the holiness of his life (Cheers.) We know also the catastrophe – I cannot call it less – which followed (Cheers.) We know that he who held the power in his hand found himself compelled by the action of conscience to carry his mind and gifts elsewhere …” (The Times, 26 April 1878, p. 6)

  196 The Gladstone Diaries, ed. Mathew, Vol. 3, p. xxix.

  197 LD, 7:470, JHN to Frederic Rogers (26 December 1840).

  198 J. H. Newman, “Wisdom and Innocence” (1843), Sermons on the Subjects of the Day, Sermon 20.

  199 Philip Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1958), p. 236.

  200 See David Bebbington The Mind of Gladstone (Oxford, 2004), pp. 310–11: “the master to whom Gladstone turned again and again … was Bishop Butler … whose doctrine of probability roused Gladstone decisively against Catholic teaching in the 1840s and it was Butler whose method seemed the ultimate remedy to Huxley’s agnosticism four decades later.”

  201 Ibid., p. 177: “There can be no doubt that in Studies of Homer (1858) [Gladstone] was defending an essentially Tory Christian worldview”—which Bebbington sees as “the climax of his intellectual career as a Conservative.” If this was the basis of Gladstone’s conservatism, it is perhaps no wonder that his peculiar brand of liberalism continues to confound historians.

  202 The Prime Ministers’ Papers: W.E. Gladstone 1: Autobiographica, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, p. 20.

  203 Gladstone, quoted in Peter Stanksy, Gladstone: A Progress in Politics (Boston, 1979), p. 181.

  204 In thanking Gladstone for sending a copy of his pamphlet Vaticanism (1875), Newman wrote: “Of course I … quite understand how grievous it must be to you, that a person like me, who was doing his best to serve the Anglican Church, should have been led to throw off his allegiance to it and to become its opponent. On the other hand stands the fact, that from the time I took that step, close on 30 years ago, I never have had a mom
ent’s misgiving about my conviction that the Catholic Roman Church comes from God, and that the Anglican is external to it …” LD, 27:236, JHN to Gladstone (26 February 1875).

  Chapter 8 Newman, Thackeray and Vanity Fair

  1 Kingsley, quoted in Apologia, pp. 373–74. The quote from Newman is from Anglican Difficulties, Lecture 8, p. 207.

  2 LD, 21:120, Charles Kingsley to Alexander Macmillan (8 June 1864). If Kingsley reviled Newman, he all but revered Thackeray. Vanity Fair was his favorite book. Whenever down in the dumps, he reread the book. Indeed, he confessed that he would have preferred drawing Rawdon Crawley “than all the folks I ever drew.” See Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London, 1974), p. 147.

  3 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Ray (Harvard, 1946), Vol. III, p. 66. In 1850, Giovanni Achilli, an apostate Dominican priest, was brought to England by the Evangelical Alliance to denounce the Catholic Church during the period known as the Papal Aggression, when Cardinal Wiseman was reconstituting the English hierarchy. After Newman called attention to charges brought against the defrocked priest for immorality, Achilli sued for libel. In the subsequent trial of 21–24 June 1852, Judge Lord Chief Justice Campbell would not admit evidence submitted by Newman and his lawyers, nor permit Newman to speak in his own defense, and as a result the jury found for Achilli and Newman was fined £100.

  4 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, pp. 676–77.

  5 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. I, p. cxxxiii.

  6 Ibid., p. 140.

  7 Gordon Ray, Thackeray: The Use of Adversity, 1811–1846 (New York, 1955), p. 182.

  8 D. J. Taylor, Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man (London, 1999), p. 126.

  9 See Thackerayana: Notes and Anecdotes. ed. Joseph Grego (New York, 1875), pp. 481–2

  10 See William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity Fair, (Everyman, 1991), Chapter XXVI, “Between London and Chatham,” p. 269.

  11 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. I, p. 487.

  12 DNB, 19:575.

  13 Thackeray may have been a spendthrift but he was also a prodigiously hard worker, whose toil eventually paid off: “Between 1837 and 1847 Thackeray contributed 450 articles to twenty-two periodicals; his first real book, The Paris Sketch Book (1840), earned him £50; in 1843, The Irish Sketch Book produced £385; he continued hand-to-mouth until Vanity Fair began to appear in 1847. Yet in the few years before his death in 1863 he was probably making £7,200 a year from literary activities (perhaps £350,000 in modern terms)—an extraordinary achievement after so grinding a start.” See K. Theodore Hoppen’s first-rate history, The Mid-Victorian Generation: England 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), p. 377.