Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (51 page)

Then, on Saturday, 9 August 1890, Father William Neville was surprised by approaching footsteps, ‘firm and elastic’. Newman entered the room, ‘unbent, erect to the full height of his best days in the fifties; he was without support of any kind’. His carriage, according to Father William, was ‘soldier-like, and so dignified’:

his countenance was most attractive to look at; even great age seemed to have gone from his face, and with it all careworn signs; his very look conveyed the cheerfulness and gratitude of his mind … his voice was quite fresh and strong: his whole appearance was that of power combined with complete calm.
17

Such is the stuff, one might think, of retrospective hagiography. But why would William Neville, who acted as the Oratorian infirmarian and was used to factual reporting, have exaggerated? Neville retired later that evening to the bedroom next to Newman‘s, believing that ‘the Father’, as he was known at the Oratory, had gained a new lease of life. After midnight Newman called out, complaining of hunger. Father William gave him something to eat. An hour later Newman called out again, saying that he felt ‘very bad’. Doctors were summoned and pneumonia in one lung diagnosed. All day Sunday and into Monday he lay mostly unconscious, save for an hour on Sunday morning, when he asked Father William to read the Divine Office with him. Monday morning he received the last rites. His final words were: ‘William, William …’ Around his neck was tied an old silk scarf given to him thirty years earlier during a bad period in his life. He liked to wear it as a comforter when troubled. Newman had once reflected that one passed, each year, without knowing, over the date of one’s death, ‘as if walking over one’s own grave’. It was a quarter to nine in the evening, Monday, 11 August.

His body, mitred and vested, was placed within an open coffin on a catafalque in the Oratory church. The people of Birmingham came in their hundreds through the week. The
Catholic Times
reported: ‘The effect of the pallid face with its clear cut features and aquiline nose, protruding chin and drawn lips, contrasting with the sable drapery of the church is startling in the extreme.’
¹⁸
A child who had strayed into the church declared to her mother that she had seen ‘Mr Punch’.

The day after he died
The Times
newspaper confirmed his reputation for holiness: ‘Of one thing we may be sure, that the memory of his pure and noble life, untouched by worldliness, unsoured by any trace of fanaticism, will endure, and that whether Rome canonises him or not he will be canonised in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds in England.’
19

His Requiem Mass was celebrated in Birmingham on Monday, 18 August. In London, at the Brompton Oratory, there was a Mass at which his Eminence Cardinal Archbishop Henry Manning, Newman’s chronic old antagonist, now aged 82, preached the eulogy. It was said of Manning during the winter of his life that ‘the love of domination emanates from every pore of his body’. He appeared, according to the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius, as a ‘grey man looking as if encompassed with cobwebs’.

In his eulogy Manning emphasised not Newman’s powerful and prophetic influence within the Catholic Church, but his past contributions to the Church of England which he had left forty five years earlier. He finished with this prayer: ‘May our end be painless and peaceful like his.’
²⁰
Two years later Manning himself would be dead.

If Manning’s peroration was tepid, most others were fervid. Newman’s friend

R. H. Hutton wrote to the bereaved Oratorian Fathers, that ‘to the world that really knew him’ his death left the impression of ‘a white star extinguished, of a sign vanished, of an age impoverished, of a grace withdrawn’.
21

Reflections on Newman’s contribution to the Anglican and Catholic Churches were summed up by the lead article in
Guardian
:

Cardinal Newman is dead, and we lose in him not only one of the very greatest masters of English style, not only a man of singular purity and beauty of character, not only an eminent example of personal sanctity, but the founder, we may almost say, of the Church of England as we see it. What the Church of England would have become without the Tractarian Movement we can faintly guess, and of the Tractarian Movement Newman was the living soul and the inspiring genius. Great as his services have been to the communion in which he died, they are as nothing by the side of those he rendered to the communion in which the most eventful years of his life were spent.
22

During the week of his death, the
Spectator
delivered perhaps the most thoughtful of all the eulogies in the secular press:

There was nothing in him of the spiritual pride and grandiosity of detachment from the world. He was detached from it in the simplest and most sensitively natural manner, as one who was all compact of the tenderest fibres of human feeling, even tho’ he did not permit himself to plunge into its passions and its fascinations. Yet how delicately, how truly he read human nature – its smallness as well as its greatness; its eagerness about trifles; its love of the finest gossamer threads which connect it with its kind; … all this Newman represented to himself and to his hearers with a vivacity which made his own detachment from the world all the more impressive, his own passionate absorption in the spiritual interests of life all the more unique and emphatic.
23

The coffin was carried on a carriage to the graveyard in the Lickey Hills, a quiet spot among tall trees and rhododendrons, close to the Oratorian summer house. The
Birmingham Post
of 20 August 1890 takes up the story:

When the rites had been achieved, the crowd without the gates was suffered to enter by batches and see the grave; and then the coffin was covered with mould of a softer texture than the marly stratum in which the grave is cut. This was done in studious and affectionate fulfilment of a desire of Dr Newman’s which some may deem fanciful, but which sprang from his reverence for the letter of the Divine Word; which, as he conceived, enjoins us to facilitate rather than impede the operation of the law ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’.

For some, in retrospect, that hope for rapid bodily corruption signified his acceptance of physical annihilation, in certain hope of the resurrection.

In a note in Father William Neville’s keeping, following instructions on the funeral, Newman had written: ‘If a tablet is put up in the cloister, such as the three there already, I should like the following, if good Latinity, and if there is

no other objection –
eg.
it must not be, if persons to whom I should defer thought it sceptical.’
2
4
The inscription on the tablet is as follows:

JOANNES HENRICUS NEWMAN EX UMBRIS ET IMAGINIBUS

IN VERITATEM DIE – A.S.18

Requiescat in pace

It is interesting that Newman should think that the inscription might be taken amiss as ‘sceptical’. Given the brevity of the epitaph, the scepticism Newman had in mind might have speculated on a Platonic view of life – the Cave, perhaps, where human beings are depicted as prisoners in an illusory world of images, which only dimly and inaccurately represent the truth.

CHAPTER 19
‌‌

Connubium in death

‘He came to me as Ruth to Naomi …’

J. H. NEWMAN LETTER TO LADY KERR, 1875

The wish to be buried with Ambrose St John was first recorded on 23 July 1876, a year after St John’s death, in the notebook carefully kept by William Neville for more than twenty-six years. ‘I wish with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will.’
1

In February of 1881, Newman had added to the above instruction ‘This I confirm and insist on’, to which he had added ‘and command’. He could not have been plainer:
confirm, insist, command … wish with all my heart.

Yet this is not the whole story of his instructions for burial. There is a small pencilled plan, close to these notebook burial instructions, made up of lines and initials. There is a sketch of what is clearly St John’s grave, marked by ‘
asj
’; and on either side two other pencilled plots: one marked ‘
e
’, the other marked ‘
joseph’
. The significance becomes clear to any visitor to the Oratorian graveyard at Rednal, which I first visited on that rainy day as a student at Oscott. The grave Newman shares with St John is flanked by those of Edward Caswall and Joseph Gordon, who had died in 1853 and 1878. It was Gordon who had died shortly after his exertions in Italy while attempting to find evidence to defend Newman in the Achilli libel trial. Caswall had in many respects taken on the heavy duties of St John, after his death in 1875. After Caswall’s death, Newman had written a letter:

Though I want to do many things before I die, it seems unnatural that those who are so much younger than I am, should be called away and that I should remain. Three great and loyal friends of mine, Frs Joseph Gordon, Ambrose St John and Edward Caswall now lie side by side at Rednal, and I put them there.
2

Did he mean that he had merely ‘put them’ side by side, or that he had actually ‘put them’, sent them, as a result of the burdens he put upon them, into early graves? From all that we know of Newman’s remorse at their early deaths, he almost certainly meant both. While St John had a special place in his heart, confirmed by his insistence on their joint burial, he also saw himself in a loving relationship beyond death with his two other friends and helpmates. What is

more, the companionship he envisages in death pointed forwards, while New-man was still alive, and backwards, in his imagination, to the communion of friends whose pictures looked down upon the altar in his room, drawing all of them into the fellowship in life and beyond death of the Eucharist – locating their immortal love in the Body of Christ – the very centre and ground of his spiritual life.