Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (36 page)

… And now I can’t get him to say one single syllable in the way of sorrow for what he has done.
53

Newman would call it ‘family trouble … for the faults of children are thrown back rightly upon their Fathers’, but he could confide to Wilberforce that the local ‘Protestants’ were saying that Darnell had run away with Miss French, an assistant matron, who had also resigned. ‘I am malicious enough’, Newman jested in a PS, ‘to wish this to get to her ears.’ He goes on: ‘They say “You don’t mean to tell me that there is nothing more at bottom etc etc”.’
54

Under St John’s headship the school began to flourish. Several years on, in 1865, we get an impression of the settled contentment of the place under New-man’s benign presidency. On St Philip’s Feast Day that year the boys acted in a Latin comedy by Terence. Newman had put enormous energy and enthusiasm into the casting and rehearsing. His friend and frequent correspondent Emily Bowles, who would fill in as matron after Miss Wootten’s death in 1876, left a record of the day. The play was performed in the morning, followed by High Mass at which a pupils’ orchestra played. Then the entire school went out to Rednal in carriages and omnibuses where lunch awaited in a marquee. ‘Everything was bright, gay with flowers, and festive with delightful conversation’, wrote Bowles. ‘The Father himself attending to the guests and providing for their accommodation and comfort until absolutely forced by Fr Ambrose, with playful violence, to keep his seat and take his own food.’
⁵⁵
Lunch was followed by a cricket match and croquet, and at the end of the day the boys took walks with their parents. Emily Bowles walked with Newman up the hill behind the Rednal house. ‘I remember his stopping with finger upraised at an opening as

the breeze brought the sound of far off bells, and as we looked over what seemed a boundless stretch of blue distance, he spoke of the necessity of human life and its claims and interests coming in to make up the whole beauty of the picture or the poem, whichever you choose to call it, that a wide outlook creates.’
56

NEWMAN THE ‘CLERICAL PERVERT’

While the rumour circulated, quite inaccurately, among the Birmingham Protestants that the Oratorian Father Darnell had absconded with the assistant Matron, Newman himself became the victim of misinformation. A correspondent to a Linconshire paper claimed that Newman, the ‘clerical pervert’, had left the Oratorians and the Catholic faith and run off to Paris. Newman wrote to the edi-tor bringing him up to date on the truth of his predicament: (‘I have had the spiritual charge of various large districts, called missions, in Birmingham and its neighbourhood …’
⁵⁷
).

Meanwhile, Newman learnt from J. Spencer Northcote that it was put about by Catholics that he, Newman, had attempted to dissuade an Anglican clergyman from converting. Newman wrote back: ‘I dare say I have said to
many
Protestants that they would be disappointed in the Catholic body, if they knew it experimentally; and I have said so, in order by that
anticipation
, to hinder them from being disappointed in
fact
. Protestants not unfrequently view us in an imaginative way, and are in consequence likely to suffer a reaction of mind.’
⁵⁸
He goes on to draw up a catalogue of Catholic shortcomings. Catholics are not a ‘powerful
organization
’, but more often act in a ‘second best way in a worldly aspect’. They do not possess ‘deep, subtle, powerful intellects’; they lack education. They are not rich, but ‘commonly live from hand to mouth’. As for spirituality, ‘first rate direction is rare’, and ‘theological schools are sparse’.
5
9
Their advantages were not ‘natural excellence, but supernatural’.

In June of 1862, he decided to scotch the rumour that he was on the way out of the Catholic Church with a letter to the
Globe
. First he denied that he was about to leave the Oratorians, then he asserted that he had never ‘had one moment’s wavering of trust in the Catholic Church’. His one hope was that Protestants could be ‘partakers of my happiness’. Finally came his view of the Church he had left:

Therefore, in order to give them full satisfaction, if I can, I do hereby profess
ex animo
, with an absolute internal assent and consent, that Protestantism is the dreariest of possible religions; that the thought of the Anglican service makes me shiver, and the thought of the Thirty-nine Articles makes me shudder. Return to the Church of England! No; ‘the net is broken, and we are delivered’. I should be a consummate fool (to use a mild term) if in my old age I left ‘the land flowing with milk and honey’ for the city of confusion and the house of bondage.
60

Yet Newman’s attitude towards the Church of England and his former co-religionists was complex, as was his attitude toward the Catholic Church. New-man told Manning that while he had referred to the Catholic Church as a land of milk and honey, in fact ‘looking at it in a temporal earthly point of view, it was just the contrary. I had found very little but desert and desolateness ever since I had been in it – that I had nothing pleasant to look back on – that all my human affections were with those whom I had left.’ Newman would regret that confidence. Some years later, writing to his friend Maria Giberne, who had just received a visit from Manning, he ventured:

He is quite violent sometimes in his effort to gain secrets. He does not fish, but extorts by force … I was always frank with him when he called here, till the Autumn of 1863. He saw
at once
the change, tho’ my manner was quite free and easy;
because
he did not get what he came for.
61

From 1863 onwards Newman was inclined to maintain a diplomatic silence, generally in public, on the shortcomings of the Curia and the Holy See. Writing in May to his friend Emily Bowles, he confessed: ‘The only reason why I do not
enjoy
the happiness of being out of conflict is, because I feel to myself I could do much in it. But in fact I could not do much in it. I should come into collision with everyone I met – I should be treading on everyone’s toes.’
⁶²
He added: ‘I never wrote such a letter to any one yet, and I shall think twice before I send you the whole of it.’ It is indeed the most frank and devastating criticism of Roman authority he ever penned.

The Holy See, he wrote, was once the ‘court of ultimate appeal’ and not the ‘extreme centralization which now is in use’. But, ‘
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 to fight
under the lash
.’
63

CHAPTER 13
‌‌

Apologia

‘… what I want to trace and study is the real, hidden but human life, or the

interior,
as it is called, of such glorious creations of God …’

J. H. NEWMAN,
HISTORICAL SKETCHES

Towards the end of 1863 Newman received through the post an advance copy of
Macmillan’s Magazine
for January 1864, sent by an anonymous correspondent. There were pencil marks against a review article which charged that he along with the Catholic priesthood taught that lying is morally legitimate.

Macmillan’s
was one of a number of literary periodicals that started up at the end of the 1850s, employing new high-speed, steam-driven methods of print production. By 1863 the magazine was in its fifth year, priced one shilling with a sale of 15,000 and rising. Its founders saw themselves as men of social conscience; they included Alexander Macmillan (bookseller, publisher, and son of a Scottish crofter), Thomas Hughes (author of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
), and F. D. Maurice, moral philosopher, socialist, founder of the Working Men’s College in London. One of its frequent contributors was the popular author and Cambridge historian the Reverend Charles Kingsley, famous for his promotion of Christianity as a ‘manly’, tough, honest, no-nonsense avocation, a living promotion of the ideals and qualities of Victorian patriarchy. These men had been involved since 1848 in furthering the cause of the poor in the wake of the failure of the Chartists’ movement, invoking what they deemed a robust Christian socialism. Newman’s anonymous correspondent, a Catholic priest, had drawn attention to a review of J. A. Froude’s
History of England
. The review was anti-

Catholic in tone and content as was the book, which was initialled ‘CK’. The offending passage read as follows:

Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether this notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.
1

Here were three allegations: that Catholic priests did not believe lying wrong; that there was a link between clerical cunning and celibacy; and that John Henry Newman was guilty of both propositions. The reviewer’s remarks, offensive as

they were to Newman personally, reflected a familiar Protestant prejudice – that the Catholic clergy were equivocators; that their religious celibacy was a sham deriving not from the early Christian Church but from the reforming Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.

Newman wrote with lofty indignation to Messrs Macmillan and Co.:

Gentlemen,

I do not write to you with any controversial purpose, which would be preposterous; but I address you simply because of your special interest in a Magazine which bears your name.

That highly respected name you have associated with a Magazine, of which the January number has been sent to me by this morning’s post …