Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (35 page)

Manning’s influence at Rome absolutely a personal influence with the Pope. The Pope, a man of strong will, though of intense vanity, cannot bear the slightest contradiction, but very fond of all who take his absolute dicta as law. This Manning has played upon, and got on. He is more Papal than the Pope … repeats to the Pope all his own ideas, which pleases him exceedingly … Manning’s appointment [as Archbishop of Westminster] protested against by all the old Roman families in England, but the Pope would not listen. Manning most obsequious: creeps on hands and knees to kiss his toe, and, even when bidden to get up, remains prostrate in awe. This delights Pio Nono.
34

DEPRESSION

Reflecting on the five years following his resignation from the
Rambler
, Newman wrote: ‘The cause of my not writing from 1859 to 1864 was my failure with the
Rambler
. I thought I had got into a scrape, and it became me to be silent. So they thought at Rome, if Mgr. Talbot is to be their spokesman.…’
³⁵
There had been a host of other, minor irritations and frustrations, including criticisms from old adversaries in the Church of England: ‘little and ridiculous things taken separately’, he wrote, ‘but they form an atmosphere of
flies
– one can’t enjoy a walk without this fidget on the nerves of the mind. They are nothing in the eye of reason, but they weary.’
³⁶
Nor was he in good health. He complained of losing weight: ‘I am an old man, and cannot get accustomed to the look of my fingers.’
37

After the exertions of Dublin and the problems with Faber and Rome, New-man appears to have suffered a form of depression marked by insomnia and dark moods. He confided in his journal: ‘Old men are in soul as stiff, as lean, as bloodless as their bodies, except so far as grace penetrates and softens them. And it requires a flooding of grace to do this.’ Again, he notes, ‘the deadness of my soul.’
³⁸
He felt he was like ‘a grey grasshopper or evaporating mist of the morning’.
3
9
He felt abandoned as well as persecuted: ‘I am nobody. I have no friend at Rome, I have laboured in England, to be misrepresented, backbitten, and scorned. I have laboured in Ireland, with a door ever shut in my face. I seem

to have had many failures, and what I did well was not understood. I do not think I am saying this in any bitterness.’
⁴⁰
Despite his many attainments, he could say of himself: ‘everything seems to crumble under my hands, as if one were making ropes of sand’.
4
1
He provides a vivid description of his sense of misery; although it was clear, even in the act of recording his feelings, that his literary talent was intact as was his sense of empathy for the sufferings of others, past and present. ‘The wounds which one bears speechlessly’, he wrote, ‘the dreadful secrets which are severed from the sympathy of others, the destruction of confidences, the sense of hollowness all around one, the expectation of calamity or scandal, this was a portion of St Paul’s trial, and all Bishops, as it is of all, in their degree, who have to work for God in this world. It is as real a penance as a hair shirt.’
42

He goes on to reflect on his own ‘hair shirt’. ‘For myself, now I am deeply deficient in that higher life which lasts and grows in spite of the ills of mortality – but had I ever so much of supernatural love and devotion, I could not be in any different state from the Apostle, who in the most beautiful of his inspired epistles speaks with such touching and consoling vividness of those troubles, in the midst of which these earthen vessels of ours hold the treasures of grace and truth.’
4
3
Was it possible that he was regretting becoming a Catholic? In time there would be rumours to this effect, which he would emphatically deny. But in the absence of Catholic appreciation of his worth, he could confide to his journal an intriguing temptation: ‘of looking out for, if not courting, Protestant praise.’
44

During this ‘real purifying “dark night” ’,
4
5
as Stephen Dessain put it, Newman had busied himself with the founding of a second educational establishment – a school in Birmingham for the sons of Catholic professional and upper class families. It would be a palpable achievement, but there would be swarms of flies and cold showers in plenty. Newman, in common with other Anglican converts, believed that there was a gap to be filled in Catholic secondary education in England. The public schools were unsuitable, closed, even, to the children of Catholics, and alternative Catholic institutions, like Oscott, St Edmund’s, and Sedgley Park, which mixed ‘church’ and ‘lay’ students, and the monastic schools, were too much like seminaries. Newman believed strongly that women, or ‘dames’ (matrons in later parlance), banned from these institutions, should have charge of pupils’ health and physical welfare.

Again, he saw the involvement of the laity as crucial. He turned to friends such as Edward Bellassis (a barrister who handled the legislation in the expansion of the railways), James Hope-Scott (who had defended him in the Achilli trial) and Acton. He was determined, moreover, to involve parents in every aspect of the school’s formation and life. He wanted his school to offer a liberal education, carefully balanced with instruction in Catholic beliefs and practice.

He believed that boys should be trusted and he was against harsh discipline.
⁴⁶
He started with just seven pupils, all sons of converts, and delegated much of the day-to-day running of the school to competent staff. The school was owned by the Oratorian Congregation with Newman as its President. The Oratorian Father, Nicholas Darnell, who had been with Newman since 1848, was appointed headmaster and the school quickly began to prosper, expanding to seventy boys by 1861. Newman was soon to discover, however, that delegation, especially in the case of a boarding school, has its problems. Under Darnell’s headship the school was moving more in the direction of a regular public school and away from Newman’s vision of a civilised, homely Catholic community. Darnell refused to listen or to accept counsel, a circumstance that served, it seems, to exacerbate Newman’s depression and ill-health. As Newman would write the following year to Henry Wilberforce: ‘I have been more and more elbowed out of the school – till I knew nothing about any thing. This state of things was one of the trials which hung so heavily upon me in the summer. There seemed no way of righting matters. My rule has ever been to give a generous liberty to those I put in trust with any work – and, having put power out of my hands, there was no way of getting it back.’
⁴⁷
The catastrophe, as he put it, came unexpectedly, after he had absented himself from Birmingham for several months.

TROUBLE AT THE ORATORY SCHOOL

In 1861 Newman turned sixty. He later wrote of his feelings that year:

I, when I was 60, was seized with an all overishness, which I could not analyze. I could not sleep – I could do nothing. This was my condition for several years and for a time I thought any thing might happen. My spirits were unaccountably low …
48

His doctor had prescribed a break to shake off depression and insomnia, so in July he took himself off on holiday with William Neville, who had joined the Oratory ten years earlier and whom Newman described as ‘a sort of Guardian Angel or Homeric god’.
4
9
He had a desire to visit the scenes of his childhood, and their journey took them first to London, then to Ham in Wiltshire, scene of childhood holidays, before going on to Brighton where his sister Mary was buried. It was a thoroughly modern, high-speed journey. They travelled by rail to Waterloo Station and crossed the town to King’s Cross where they took a train to Cambridge. While sight-seeing they were stalked by‘a little man’, who ‘fastened his eyes on us’. Neville, wrote Newman, ‘instantly enveloped me in darkness, rustling with his wings, and flapping about with a vigor which for the time was very successful’.
5
0
Returning to Birmingham, Newman spent most of the

summer at Rednal in the Lickey Hills followed by a week at Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, where he had not been since 1825. By November he was still on his break, for he was back in London on a month’s stay with Henry Bowden, younger brother of his old deceased student friend, John Bowden. Here he received a letter from Faber, who had absented himself on many occasions over the years from the London Oratory on account of debilitating illness. Newman wrote mischievously to Ambrose St John back in Birmingham:

Fr Faber, having been in his own belief given over, and in immediate prospect of death, suddenly got up, shaved himself, and announces his intention of coming to town next Monday … Bowden gave us a sort of hagiographical account of it, said that the doctor pronounced that there had been an organic or structural change suddenly effected, and gave the Brompton judgment that it was a grazia.

Father Faber has dictated a letter to me to beg pardon for any wilfulnesses of his in his – noviceship! and any disedification he gave any of our Fathers when he was a novice.
51

Newman was still in London when he received news of an upset at the school, comical in itself but with serious implications in the long run for all concerned. There was a boy in the first year called Chomely, whose mother was anxious about his health. Chomely had developed chilblains and the Oratory’s dame, Mrs Wootten (she who had fended off four kisses to the face and one to the hand by Brother Brendan), decided to take him out of classes and games until they healed. Mrs Wootten, considering it important that the boy should con-solidate his convalescence with pleasurable outings, took him to a dog show in Birmingham. While at the show the pair ran into a group of Oratory boys led by the young Duke of Norfolk who said to them: ‘Won’t Father Darnell be in a wax?’ On returning to school the noble youth evidently peached on Chomely and Mrs Wootten, whereupon Father Darnell did indeed get into a wax. He pinned up a notice proclaiming:
1. No boy to go to the Dame’s rooms without permission of his tutor. 2. No boy on the sick-list to leave the premises without permission of the Headmaster.

Mrs Wootten now offered her resignation to Newman who immediately be-came involved in a power struggle with Darnell over who was to be judged the ultimate authority at the school. From Darnell’s point of view Mrs Wootten was mollycoddling the boys and she needed to be kept more firmly in check. He was furious that she had appealed to Newman, and he was even more angry at Newman for interfering. Questions arose as to whether Newman was ultimately responsible for the school or the collective body of the Birmingham Oratory Fathers. Newman made it clear where authority lay: Darnell was attempting to thwart ‘the right of the appeal on the part of a subordinate in the school to me as President – and this I cannot for an instant allow’.
5
2
Newman nevertheless offered a compromise involving a separation of spheres of duty. Meanwhile

Darnell informed friends in London that he and the staff were determined to resign if he did not get his way: namely the dismissal of Mrs Wootten.

Newman refused to give way and found himself at New Year without any teaching staff to continue the school; but he still had Mrs Wootten. He solved the immediate problems by offering himself as a teacher, and getting Thomas Arnold, who had been a professor in Dublin, to join the school. The trusty Ambrose St John stepped in as headmaster. A letter to his old friend Henry Wilberforce about the affair reveals Newman’s fairness and compassion as an employer:

Tho’ [Darnell] had never urged a formal complaint against her before, and now had nothing definite to say except one act of hers, which she fairly explained, he insisted as the alternative of his and the Under-masters’ immediately leaving, that she, in the depth of winter, should instanter be sent out of all our houses, she, who had lately been spitting blood and been confined to her room, she who had done us so many services, and had been our great benefactress. I should not have been a man, if I had consented to so cowardly an act. And, since I would not, (never, observe, refusing that she might
ultimately
go,) he would not to stay even till Easter, tho’ I pressed him again and again