Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (15 page)

The Bishop of Oxford directed Newman in future to marry the unbaptised, laying the responsibility on his own episcopal conscience.

As the movement developed and thrived, the members set out to make good a deficiency in devotional works in print. They recommended or republished with new prefaces works by Anglican writers such as Christopher Sutton’s
Godly Meditations upon the Most Holy Sacrament
, and Thomas Wilson’s
Sacra Privata
, which encouraged silent prayer, or meditation, and examination of conscience. Newman had been reading the
Imitation of Christ
since 1822, but he now turned to the seventeenth-century bishop Lancelot Andrewes’ book of meditations as suited to the spiritual renewal of the times. Newman translated the text from the Latin and published it as a tract. The simplicity of the prayers, sourced in Scripture, and the recommendation to pray at regular intervals of the day, seven times between rising and retiring, indicated devotional resonances from Roman Catholic monastic and priestly practices. It would go through several editions to 1873, and Newman would always keep a copy by him.

Meanwhile a parliamentary bill to admit Dissenters into the universities had been passing through both Houses. Newman and the religious conservatives in Oxford had been energetic in their opposition. As it happened, the bill failed in the Lords. The issue returned the following year when Oxford University’s Convocation met to vote on a liberal motion that would allow university entrants merely to declare their conformity to the Church of England (as opposed to declaring subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles). Again it was defeated by the conservatives. Among those present was Hurrell Froude. It was to be his last public act in Oxford. Soon afterwards he returned home to Devon, his TB having worsened. Nothing had worked, neither wintering in the Mediterranean nor spending time on the island of Barbados in the Caribbean.

Froude died at home on 28 February 1836, aged thirty-three. Newman was grief-stricken. He wrote to his undergraduate friend Bowden: ‘He has been so very dear to me, that it is an effort to me to reflect on my own thoughts about him. I can never have a greater loss, looking on for the whole of life – for he was to me, and he was likely to be ever, in the same degree of continual familiarity

which I enjoyed with yourself in our Undergraduate days.’
⁴
The reflection reveals sentiments that could be construed as youthful close companionship – ‘continual familiarity … in our Undergraduate days’. And yet, there was that stanza to Froude, when Newman had written of his ‘adoring gaze’ and ‘yearning heart’. Choosing a book from Froude’s library, Newman’s hand hovered over a copy of Butler’s
Analogy
, then he chose his dead friend’s Roman Breviary which he would treasure for the rest of his life. ‘I took it’, he would write in the
Apologia
, ‘studied it, wrote my Tract from it [75, June 24, 1836], and have it on my table in constant use till this day’.
5

The death of Froude was not the only loss Newman bore that year. His mother died after an illness that had undermined her very personality. He took it with fortitude:

My dearest Mother is taken from us [he wrote to his aunt Elizabeth]. If you knew how dreadfully she has suffered in mind, and how little her wanderings left her like herself, you would feel, as we do, that it really is a release. Who would have thought it! Every thing is strange in this world – every thing mysterious. Nothing but sure faith can bring us through.
6

Then, within a year, both his surviving sisters, Jemima and Harriet married his friends – the brothers Tom and John Mozley.

‘CREDO IN NEWMANUM’

By the time of Hurrell Froude’s death, Newman was entering the prime of his Oxford charisma. J. F. Russell, visiting Oxford from Cambridge in 1837, sum-marized his impression of Newman’s reputation:

all the men of talent in the University come to hear him, although at the loss of their dinner. His triumph over the
mental
empire of Oxford was said to be complete!
^7,
8

Newman’s tracts, combined with his preaching, exerted a powerful double effect. As Richard Church put it: ‘While men were reading and talking about the Tracts, they were hearing the Sermons; and in the sermons they heard the living meaning, and reason, and bearing of the Tracts, their ethical affinities, their moral standard.’
⁹
Contemporary accounts and recollections returned repeatedly to the moral and spiritual impact of Newman’s preaching rather than its doctrinal arguments. Church again noted the appeal ‘to conscience with such directness and force … a passionate and sustained earnestness after a high moral rule, seriously realized in conduct’.
1
0
Arthur Penryn Stanley, writing in the
Edinburgh Review
(‘The Oxford School’, April 1845), comparing Newman to Thomas Arnold of Rugby, thought that Newman’s congregations were drawn

by ‘chiefly the grasp of ethical precepts, the appeals to conscience, the sincere conviction of the value of purity and generosity’.
11

James Froude, Hurrell’s historian brother, wrote an impression of the critical targets of Newman’s sermons at this time:

A foolish Church, chattering, parrot-like, old notes, of which it had forgot the meaning

… selfishness alike recognized practically as the rule of conduct, and faith in God, in man, in virtue, exchanged for faith in the belly, in fortunes, carriages, lazy sofas, and cushioned pews.
12

Newman was fired up. He deplored the decline of piety and devotion, the physical decay of many churches. People, he said, came into church for gossip, to scoff at the sermons in pleasant vein. Non-believers were appointed to lay church positions, coats and hats and coats were dumped in the fonts; sanctuaries became orchestral stages. He referred to ritualists, those who fall in love with sanctuary choreography and vestments for their own sake, as ‘gilt gingerbread’ men.

Newman’s reputation as a scholar and superior Oxford mind had never been in doubt since he had settled in at Oriel twelve years before the Oxford Movement got underway. ‘But now’, according to his first biographer, Wilfrid Ward, son of one of his principal proselytes, William George Ward (W. G. Ward) ‘the character of a prophet and leader of men was added. And the movement in Oxford of which he was the life and soul aroused all the enthusiasm of the time.’
¹³
James Froude, brother of Hurrell, noted ‘a clearness of intellectual perception, a disdain for conventionalities, a temper imperious and wilful, but along with it a most attaching gentleness, sweetness, singleness of heart and purpose’. James Froude remembered:

I had then never seen so impressive a person. I met him now and then in private; I attended his church and heard him preach Sunday after Sunday, … He was … the most transparent of men. He told us what he believed to be true. He did not know where it would carry him.… Newman’s mind was worldwide. He was interested in everything which was going on in science, in politics, in literature. Nothing was too large for him, nothing too trivial, if it threw light upon the central question, what man really was, and what was his destiny … Thus it was that we, who had never seen such another man, and to whom he appeared, perhaps, at special advantage in contrast with the normal college don, came to regard Newman with the affection of pupils (though pupils, strictly speaking, he had none) for an idolized master. The simplest word which dropped from him was treasured as if it had been an intellectual diamond. For hundreds of young men
Credo in Newmanum
was the genuine symbol of faith.
^14,
15

And yet, was Newman himself entirely beyond reproach? If there was a note of egotism and oddity in Newman’s life at this time it was his occasional, jaun-diced attitude towards the marriages of his friends.

Fellows of colleges, excepting heads of house, gave up their fellowships on marriage, and it was the norm for a clerical don to find a bride and a parish living by his late twenties or early thirties. For Newman, who had admitted to confirmation of an option for lifelong celibacy by the age of 28, it was not simply an idiosyncratic lifestyle choice. From time to time he felt the marriage of his close male friends like a betrayal. At times he sulked. When his sister Harriet married Tom Mozley, Newman wrote to Albany Christie (who would later join him in the monastic-style community he was to establish at littletons): ‘Be sure of this, that every one when he marries is a lost man – a clean good for nothing – I should not be surprised to be told that Mozley would not write another letter all his life.’
¹⁶
And this was his brother-in-law. It was in character for him to be disgruntled, even angry, on the occasion of his male friends’ nuptials, including Pusey’s, and even Keble’s, which, Isaac Williams remarked, caused Newman ‘great annoyance’.

When Henry Wilberforce, one of the inner Oriel circle, got engaged, he was so anxious about Newman’s reaction that he funked telling him. Newman heard rumours, but refused to believe them. He wrote to Frederic Rogers, ‘By-the-bye, talking of H.W., do not believe a silly report that is in circulation that he is engaged to be married … I am spreading my incredulity, and contradicting it in every direction, and will not believe it, though I saw the event announced in the papers, till he tells me’.
1
7
Newman was devastated when he was finally ap-prized of the fact of the marriage and appears to have poured out his anger and disappointment in every direction. Wilberforce then wrote to Newman what he thought to be an assuaging letter, insisting on his continuing affection, but Newman seemed determined to behave the jilted lover. He penned a letter, which he never sent. Perhaps he never intended sending it, and it was a means of letting off steam; but he kept it while destroying many others. It reveals, as does no other document, the complex layers of Newman’s affections towards his close male friends, as well as his attitude towards women and marriage:

You surely are inconsiderate – you ask me to give my heart, when you give yours to another

– and because I will not promise to do so, then you augur all sorts of illtreatment towards you from me. – Now I do not like to speak of myself, but in selfdefence I must say, it is a little hard for a friend to separate himself from familiarity with me (which he has a perfect right, and perhaps lies under a duty to do,) and then to say, ‘Love me as closely, give me your familiar heart as you did, though I have parted with mine’. Be quite sure that I shall be free to love you, far more than you will me – but I cannot, as a prudent man, forget what is due to my own comfort and independence as not to look to my own resources, make my own mind my wife, and anticipate and provide against that loss of friends which the fashion of the age makes inevitable.
18

The telling phrase is his resolve to ‘
make my own mind my wife
’: written, it would seem, more in peevishness than determination. The anger, the injured

feelings, the jealousy (‘give your heart to another’), are expressed in the language of a disappointed lover:

You know very little of me, if you think I do not feel at times much the despondence of solitariness…. Why must I give my heart to those who will not (naturally, it would be a bad bargain for them) take charge of it? … My dear H. – you really have hurt me – You have
made
a
difficulty
in the very beginning of our separation. You should have reflected that to remove it, you would not only have to justify it to yourself but to explain it to me.
19

Apart from the self-pity, there is the bitterness of betrayal, of wasted emotional investment, a strong impression of distaste for the marriage state – ‘fashion of the age’. Newman was behaving as if he had rights over those to whom he had given his heart; and it is tempting to believe that, at times, his extravagant endearments were stratagems of control as much as heartfelt affection. Father Henry Tristram, an Oratorian Father of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote an entire book comprising Newman’s ornate dedications to friends. The dedications, published prominently for all the world to read, speak of affections that clearly, for Newman, contained no inappropriate sentiment. And yet, this was not entirely how the recipients saw such outpourings. Frederic Rogers (a ‘dear and intimate friend … that dear and familiar companion’) had earlier tried to talk some sense into Newman over Henry Wilberforce’s marriage. He declined to be the dedicatee of Newman’s
The Church of the Fathers
in 1839, since he believed that its sentiments might be taken amiss outside their circle. ‘If I knew the “dearest, sweetest, etc” was to be contained in those two little volumes I should never be able to see their very backs without colouring up to the eyes.’
²⁰
In the event, Newman dedicated the book, without permission, to Isaac Williams, whom he had loved for years, ending his letters to him ‘ever yours affectionately’, or with ‘most lovingly and affectionately’. The dedication was, for Newman, so toned down as to prompt a cynical aside from his brother-in-law, John Mozley, to his sister: ‘How do you like the dedication to
The Church of the Fathers
? … It seems to me as if it were a translation of some old patristic dedication rather than an original one.’
²¹
The lapidary dedication stated: ‘To my dear and much-admired Isaac Williams … the sight of whom carries back his friends to ancient, holy, and happy times.’