Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (48 page)

Another Oratorian, William Neville, picks up the story. He joined St John on the road to Harborne and they attended the Mass together. St John, overweight, and out of breath with heavy smoking, arrived overheated, but was now obliged to don heavy vestments. The new chapel was in the conservatory of the house and stifling. As St John sat through a lengthy sermon with his back to the glass under the full intensity of the sun’s rays, he felt a violent pain in his head and thought he was going to pass out. As he sat there, petrified, he heard, or thought he heard, the preacher speaking about Newman’s difficulties with Rome, and referring to one of the community going mad. Was this himself? After Mass he hastily quaffed a glass of liquid he thought was lemonade. It was whisky.

Back at the Oratory, St John was convinced that his experiences were a pre-monition of Newman’s persecution. On encountering Newman he cried out ‘Let
me
suffer:
I
am ready to bear it.’
²
Despite feeling ill he continued his usual workload, translating, hearing confessions, teaching, making visits to the sick around the parish. One evening he came into Newman’s room and drank brandy and orange juice. He complained of a ‘weight, heat or pain at the back of his neck’.
³
He begged Newman to pray with him, just as they had done in Rome when they were younger. He could not concentrate on the prayers by himself.

St John was now persuaded to stay in the room next to Father William Neville, the infirmarian. When a doctor was called, St John became agitated, terrified that he was going to be sent to an insane asylum. He settled down for a day or so, and even took a walk with Newman. But again he acted strangely. He stopped to root up some wild flowers in the school yard, convinced that they were poisonous.

A specialist was called in the second week of May, as St John’s mind and speech seemed to be rambling. The doctor suggested he be removed to Ravenhurst Farm, for better air and quiet. St John said accusingly to Newman: ‘I knew you would expel me from the Oratory.’
⁴
Newman thought that St John was los-ing his mind. He went out to Ravenhurst with him, returned to the Oratory, felt anxious, and went back again.

The following Sunday Newman had to return to the Oratory to preach, but no sooner had he arrived back in Birmingham than the message came that St John was in distress, accusing the doctor of poisoning him. Newman returned once more to his friend. ‘He threw his arms round my neck’, Newman would write, ‘and called me his best friend, and said I would be able to defend him against all evils.’
5

As the days passed St John became violent by turns, and had to be tied to the bed. He shouted incoherently while Newman struggled to pacify him. ‘I had to say to him’, Newman wrote, ‘“Don’t you think you had better speak lower?” … he used to turn round and look hard at me with eyes like sapphires, not his usual eyes, but with a steady translucent gaze and answer: “Whisper, better whisper”, with a child-like simple sweetness which I think and hope I shall never forget … [It] was very much beyond any thing I had ever seen in him – His face was so like a child’s; so tender and beseeching.’
6

For a period St John grew quieter, less violent, but kept speaking incoherently in a gentle, affectionate low voice. On 24 May Newman was writing letters in the room below when St John rose from his bed and was halfway through the door. Newman and William Neville struggled with him and got him back on the side of the bed. ‘I sat by him and he threw his arm round my neck and hugged me close to him, so close that I laughed and said “he will give me a stiff neck”. I did not understand he was taking leave of me.’ Newman continued: ‘So he kept me some time, and even in that position ate some bread and butter, folding it with great deliberation with the right hand still around my neck.’ The doctor had apparently recommended that St John eat as much as possible. ‘After a time I got free; then he took my hand, and clasped it so tight as to frighten me, for in one of his wild moments some days before he had seemed as if he could not help hurting me, by the violence of his grasp; so I called to those about him to loosen his hand, little thinking it was to be his last sign of love.’
7

Newman left the house and returned to the Oratory, but he was woken at midnight with a message that St John was much worse. He went straight to Ravenhurst Farm. ‘We found him dead’, wrote Newman.
⁸
According to New-man’s first biographer, Wilfrid Ward, who knew both men, and may have got the information from Newman himself: ‘Newman threw himself on the bed by the corpse and spent the night there.’
⁹
This has been challenged by subsequent biographers. What is not in dispute is that, according to the reliable William Neville, Newman said the office for the dead that night, wrote telegrams and letters, and in the early hours celebrated Mass for his deceased friend.
10

The Oratory church was packed for the funeral. Father Denis Sheil, who died in 1962, was a boy in the school in 1875. He told Newman’s biographer, Meriol Trevor, that he watched the ceremony from the gallery at the back of the church.

‘When Newman was giving the absolutions after the Mass, he broke down … [there was] an extraordinary noise all over the church, and for an uncomfortable minute he thought everyone was laughing. But they were crying.’
11

In the following weeks and months, Newman would write many letters to those who had sent condolences. His replies reveal the depth not so much of their mutual love as Newman’s remorseful realisation of the love St John bestowed upon
him
. ‘As far as this world was concerned I was his first and last. He has not intermitted this love for an hour up to his last …’; ‘From the very first he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable …’; ‘he has been to me Azarias the son of Ananias … Raphael to my Tobit … Ruth to my Naomi …’; ‘… this sudden blow … is a shock parallel to that of a railway accident …’; ‘… since his death, I have been reproaching myself for not expressing to him how much I felt his love …’; ‘I am under the greatest affliction which has ever befallen me.’
¹²
What comes across is that Newman had taken St John’s love for granted; that he had not understood his emotional dependence on him until after he had died. In the depths of his grief he wrote to a correspondent: ‘I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one’s sorrow greater, than mine.’
13

LATE LITERARY LABOURS

In the 1860s, Newman had undertaken the remarkable feat of editing his own complete works. His motive was to provide the Catholics of his country with a body of work that would edify. Writing to a religious sister, he noted: ‘Catholics are so often raw. Many do not know their religion – many do not know the reasons for it … If we are to convert souls savingly they must have the due preparation of heart.’
¹⁴
In 1863, he had commented in his journal that ‘the Church must be prepared for converts, as well as converts prepared for the Church’.
15

After St John’s death, he settled into a working routine, doing ever more for the Oratory school, hearing the confessions of penitents who had been used to going to Ambrose, and preaching. Meanwhile, convinced that he had not long to live himself, he continued to sort his papers and prepare for republication a new edition of
Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church
. It was to be published as volume one of
The Via Media of the Anglican Church
with an eighty page preface written for Anglicans who were attracted to Catholicism but who held back. Here he wrote eloquently of Christ as Priest, Prophet and King; these roles, he argued, were reflected within the Church – the Christian community as the flock around its pastor, the Church’s school of theologians, and the eccle-

siastical government of papacy and Curia. All three, he pointed out, have their tendency to excess: some devotions can be overdone and even lead to superstition, theology can degenerate into abstract rationalism, and Church rule to bullying.

By 1877 Newman had republished the writings of his entire Anglican period; save for his treatises on Saint Athanasius. Many old friends had come back into his ambit after the publication of the
Apologia
, and now new correspondents emerged as people read him and turned to him for advice. Many of his correspondents were women. There were women of his family, and the families of his friends; but then there were nuns, like Maria Giberne, whom he had known since the 1830s, and members of religious congregations who would write to him without introduction, as well as an expanding constituency of converts, and intending converts. Among this circuit of women, were aristocrats, teachers, governesses, and such as Margaret Hallahan, who began her working life as a servant girl, and Jane Todd who was a seamstress. Some of his women sought to engage him in theological discussion, others simply asked him for money. Of the enormous range of topics broached in these letters, charitable work ranks very high. But even higher, are references to the literary works of these ladies, including poetry, hagiography, biography, and novels.

Then on 14 December 1877, at the age of 76, he received a letter from the President of Trinity College, Oxford:

My dear Sir,

I am requested to say that it is the desire of this College that you would be pleased to accept the position of an Honorary Fellow of the College.

I may mention that if you should do so, you will be the first person in whose case the College will have exercised the power which was given to it in 1857, and that at present it is not contemplated to elect another Honorary Fellow.
16

Newman wrote by return of post:

No compliment could I feel more intimately, or desire more eagerly at once to seize and appropriate than that which is the subject of your letter just received. Trinity College is ever, and ever has been, in my habitual thoughts. Views of its buildings are at my bed side and bring before me morning and evening my undergraduate days, and those good friends, nearly now all gone, whom I loved so much during them, and my love of whom has since their death ever kept me in affectionate loyalty to the college itself.
17

Newman travelled to Oxford to receive his honorary fellowship in February, 1878. He stayed for two days, and while he felt it had been successful, he noted that ‘it was a trial both to my host and to me’. He saw his old Tutor, Thomas Short, aged 87, in his rooms, so blind that he could not see his distinguished former pupil. As he approached Short’s rooms on the staircase, Newman heard

the old man crying out: ‘Is that dear Newman?’ He called on Pusey, and found him ‘much older since I last saw him in 1865 – as I suppose he found me’.
18

THE HAT

The final years of Pio Nono’s reign were marked by stagnation. Even his firmest supporters were beginning to suspect that the great longevity of this papacy lay at the root of its torpor. Reflecting on the matter in 1876, Archbishop, now Cardinal, Manning, dwelt on the Holy See’s ‘darkness, confusion, depression … inactivity and illness’.
1
9
As for the man himself, Pio admitted: ‘Everything has changed; my system and my policies have had their day, but I am too old to change my course; that will be the task of my successor.’
²⁰
After his death on 7 February 1878 his corpse was eventually taken from its provisional resting place in St Peter’s to a permanent tomb at San Lorenzo. When the cortege approached the Tiber, a gang of anticlerical Romans threw mud, and threatened to throw the coffin into the river. Only the arrival of a contingent of militia saved his body from final insult.