A Question of Sovereignty: The Politics of Manning's Conversion

The subject of this lecture,^{1Citation: The lecture is dedicated to my former reacher and colleague, Dr. Flora Roy, with thanks.} Henry Edward Manning, is perhaps best known as he is depicted in the 1867 portrait now in the Pitts Theology Library. In it he sits as the reigning Archbishop of Westminster and future Cardinal, aloof, ascetic, autocratic-obedient to his papal superior and, in tum, awaiting obedience from his inferiors. At least such is generally the depiction. In a recent novel, for example, Manning is pictured as “a small, ascetic-looking prelate …. ‘the devil of the [Vatican] Council’ because of his intrigues, and indeed he had the look of a spider, being thin as a whip, with clenched jaw and a mouth like a slit."^{2Citation: Julia O’Faolain, The Judas Cloth (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1992), 402. Lacer, one of the novel’s characters comments: “The Jesuits are encouraging priests to cake an oath to fight for the dogma [of papal infallibility] ‘even unto bloodshed’ …. It seems that two bishops already have. Manning of Westminster is one. Converts … like that sort of thing. Having turned coat once, they feel a need to put themselves under restraint.” (445) With the Pope he hopes, it is said, “to arrest movement and conquer history.” (511) Even more unlikely depictions are found in Robert Player [Robert Furneaux Jordan], Let’s Talk of Worms, of Graves, and Epitaphs (London: Gollanz, 1975).} Nor has this caricature been left to stand on its own strength alone. A foil was always readily available in Manning’s fellow Cardinal, the venerable John Henry Newman, who continues to play the role admirably.^{3Citation: As early as 1912, J.E.C. Bodley questioned the appropriateness of the dichotomy. “It has always been incomprehensible to me,” he wrote, “why Manning’s hostility to Newman should be imputed to him as a sin, while Newman’s hostility to Manning is held to be a virtue.” (J.E.C. Bodley, “Cardinal Manning,” in his Cardinal Manning. The Decay of Idealism in France. The Institute of France [London: Longmans, Green, 1912), 15; see 15-28 for full discussion). For a more recent evaluation of the differences between the two men, see Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darron, Longman and Todd, 1990), 352-53; and above all, David Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning (London: John Murray, 1993).} Thus, Roy Jenkins' popular new biography of Gladstone describes Manning as “the future leader of the authoritarian populist tendency, largely Irish supported, in British Catholicism” and Newman as “the future patron of a gentler, older, more educated, more English approach to an apostolic and universal church."^{4Citation: Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1995), 49. See also John Harlow, “Jenkins Accused of Using Sex Slurs to Sell Gladstone Book,” The Sunday Times (Oct. 8, 1995), 3; and the review by Anthony Howard, “Most Eminent Victorian,” ibid., Book Review Section, 3.}

The negative portrayal of Manning this year celebrates its centenary. In 1895 Edmund Sheridan Purcell published his biography of the Cardinal in which he traced Manning’s life from his birth in 1808, his education at Harrow and Oxford, his work as an Anglican priest and Archdeacon in Lavington, Sussex from 1833 to his conversion in 1851, and his later career as a Roman Catholic priest and Archbishop until his death in 1892.^{5Citation: Edmund S. Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (2 vols.; London: Macmillan, 1895); and note Sheridan Gilley, “New Light on an Old Scandal: Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning,” in D.A. Bellenger (ed.), Opening the Scrolls: Essays in Catholic History in Honour of Godfrey Anstruther (Stratton on the Fosse: Downside Abbey, 1987), 166-98. Note, as well, Maisie Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition (2 vols.; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1934-37), 1:205ff. and 411ff. On Manning’s life see V. Alan McClelland, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence, 1865-1892 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Manning (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993; first published, London: John Murray, 1966); David Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: Newman and Manning, the 1992 Manning Centenary issues of Recusant History, The Allen Review, and The Chesterton Review, and V. Alan McClelland (ed.), By Whose Authority? Newman, Manning and the Magisterium (Stratton on the Fosse, Bath: Downside Abbey, 1995). Less satisfactory is Robert Gray, Cardinal Manning: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985). For the period as a whole, see Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (2 vols.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). On the Oxford Movement, note especially Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) as well as Geoffrey Rowell (ed.), Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), and Rowell’s The Vision Glorious: Themes and Personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; pb. 1991). For further details on Manning and topics treated in this paper see my forthcoming edition of the Manning-Gladstone correspondence. An earlier transcription of a part of the correspondence was made by Alphonse Chapeau in the appendix to his Sorbonne doctorate, “La vie anglicaine de Manning” (doctoral dissertation, Paris, Sorbonne, 1955; 1900 pp. + 280 pp). See as well his “Manning and Gladstone,” in La parole et les voix: Ecriture et mémoire. Mélanges offerts à André Bordeaux (Tours: Publications de l’Université de Tours, 1989), 113-28. A useful review of the Manning-Gladstone relationship can be found in Professor McClelland’s, “Gladstone and Manning: A Question of Authority,” in Peter J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone, Politics, and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1985), 148-70. I remain indebted to James Pereiro for his many helpful comments in our conversations on Manning, reflective of his published work in Recusant History ("‘Truth before Peace’: Manning and Infallibility," Recusant History, 21 [1993], 218-51) and McClelland, By Whose Authority? and for the opportunity of reading early drafts of his doctoral thesis, “Henry Edward Manning and the Teaching Office of the Church” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hull, 1995).}

For readers not fully acquainted with the life of Manning during the period treated in this paper, a brief biography may be helpful. He was born on July 15, 1808, at Tottetidge to a wealthy businessman and moved with his family to Combe Bank in Sundridge near Sevenoaks, Kent in 1815. In 1822 he entered Harrow, and in October 1827, he went up to Oxford (Balliol College) where he distinguished himself in the Oxford Union, the presidency of which he declined in November 1829, so as to study for his examinations; he was awarded a First in 1830. With the failure of his father's firm in 1831, his hopes for a political career were dashed. He worked for a time as a clerk in the Colonial Office and then prepared for ordination with a Fellowship at Merton in 1832.

On January 3, 1833, he took up a curacy at Upwaiden, under the rector of Lavington, John Sargent. At Easter he was engaged to Sargent's daughter, Caroline, whom he married in November of that year, following the death of Sargent in May and Manning's ordination as priest on June 9. In the same month Manning was inducted at Lavington by his future brother-in-law, Samuel Wilberforce.

Very soon he was actively pursuing the ideals of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, initiated after 1833 by a group of individuals primarily at Oxford who joined together to promulgate their position in a series of Tracts for the Times. Working out of the Anglican Old High Church tradition, the Oxford Movement understood the Church of England as a branch of the universal catholic church, linked to early Christianity (Antiquity) by apostolic succession and the preservation of traditional catholic faith and life in baptismal regeneration and the real presence in the Eucharist, among other doctrines and practices. Central to Tractarian concerns was the ever-increasing infringement of the state on prerogatives of the church. As the Tracts appeared, concern was often expressed about their "Romeward" leanings, especially in the work of the Movement's leader, John Henry Newman, who argued in his 1841 Tract XC that the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles could be interpreted in a Catholic sense and brought about the cessation of the Tracts' publication. Newman's own conversion to Rome in October 1845 increased tensions.

Few of these were apparent in 1837, when Manning was appointed Rural Dean. On July 24 of the same year Caroline died, and after a difficult bereavement (he was ever conscious of the loss, even throughout his Catholic years) he immersed himself in his work, assiduously supporting national education and poor relief, although regularly suffering extreme ill-health, which incapacitated him in the fall of 1838 and again in 1847. In 1840 he was appointed Archdeacon of Chichester and throughout the decade published and preached widely.

His activities in 1850, following the Gorham decision and his eventual reception into the Catholic Church are treated more fully in the body of this paper. Following his reception on April 6, he was ordained through minor orders on April 15 and as priest by Wiseman on June 14. On April 30, 1865, the Pope appointed Manning Archbishop of Westminster, a position he filled actively to his death on January 14, 1892. An able administrator, he played a significant role at the first Vatican Council in 1870 and was an active defender of the Council's infallibility decree, particularly against the attack of his friend, Gladstone, in 1874-75.

Two volumes in length and venomous in intent, Purcell’s biography established the basis on which most later treatments of Manning were formed: Manning’s actions, it was understood, were those of a highly ambitious and authoritarian individual. When a few years later Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians^{6Citation: Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918).} inimitably condensed and sharpened this characterization, there was no gainsaying it, and thereafter, any defense of Manning^{7Citation: Above all, see Shane Leslie, Henry Edward Manning: His Life and Labours (New York: P.J. Kennedy, 1921).} was forced to begin by accepting the opponent’s portrait. One of Bruce Marshall’s fictional characters, as a result, is made to exclaim: “[Strachey] erred … in two respects. As a clever man he ought to have known that the surprising thing is not that a Cardinal Manning should be on occasion an ambitious and an unscrupulous man, but that an ambitious and an unscrupulous man should ever have been Cardinal Manning."^{8Citation: Bruce Marshall, All Glorious Within (London: Constable, 1944), 124.}

Not every centenary need be celebrated and that of Purcell’s biography is one of them, but whatever their merit, anniversaries do direct us back to an earlier time and require some reflection on the past. Much more than a century, however, separates us from Manning’s day, and the distance between a North American republic and British parliamentary traditions is far greater than the few miles chat can be traversed so quickly—some of us may twice toast the arrival of a third millennium within five Concord hours. Obsessed with individual rights, we no longer look first to our obligations or grasp our identities, as our forbears once did, primarily in the context of a social whole. Sovereignty now rests in a people, not in the Crown, and supremacy, royal or other, arises with individual and majoritarian concerns. We dwell now in a different world than Manning’s and find it difficult to step beyond our voluntaristic view of the individual and our understanding of social and political units as merely contractual. In such a region of dissimilitude, earlier times appear as foreign places, and the way to understanding them “is guarded by a more than usual number of ambiguities."^{9Citation: Throughout this paper citations for quotations are not given when they appear on the same page and publication as the quotation following.} In the light of the Purcell heritage, wedded as it is to our modern worldview, these ambiguities surrounding the study of Manning increase. At times we are, as it were, “lost in a wilderness, where every pine and rock and bay appears to us as both known and unknown, and therefore as uncertain pointers on the way back to human habitation."^{10Citation: George P. Grant, Time as History (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1969), 52.} Yet, whether uncertain or not, pointers there are, and on the centenary of a particularly unloving description of Manning, it will be well for us to return to his conversion, the central event of his life, and to attend to it with care.

Notes

1: The lecture is dedicated to my former reacher and colleague, Dr. Flora Roy, with thanks.
2: Julia O’Faolain, The Judas Cloth (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1992), 402. Lacer, one of the novel’s characters comments: “The Jesuits are encouraging priests to cake an oath to fight for the dogma [of papal infallibility] ‘even unto bloodshed’ …. It seems that two bishops already have. Manning of Westminster is one. Converts … like that sort of thing. Having turned coat once, they feel a need to put themselves under restraint.” (445) With the Pope he hopes, it is said, “to arrest movement and conquer history.” (511) Even more unlikely depictions are found in Robert Player [Robert Furneaux Jordan], Let’s Talk of Worms, of Graves, and Epitaphs (London: Gollanz, 1975).
3: As early as 1912, J.E.C. Bodley questioned the appropriateness of the dichotomy. “It has always been incomprehensible to me,” he wrote, “why Manning’s hostility to Newman should be imputed to him as a sin, while Newman’s hostility to Manning is held to be a virtue.” (J.E.C. Bodley, “Cardinal Manning,” in his Cardinal Manning. The Decay of Idealism in France. The Institute of France [London: Longmans, Green, 1912), 15; see 15-28 for full discussion). For a more recent evaluation of the differences between the two men, see Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darron, Longman and Todd, 1990), 352-53; and above all, David Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning (London: John Murray, 1993).
4: Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1995), 49. See also John Harlow, “Jenkins Accused of Using Sex Slurs to Sell Gladstone Book,” The Sunday Times (Oct. 8, 1995), 3; and the review by Anthony Howard, “Most Eminent Victorian,” ibid., Book Review Section, 3.
5: Edmund S. Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (2 vols.; London: Macmillan, 1895); and note Sheridan Gilley, “New Light on an Old Scandal: Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning,” in D.A. Bellenger (ed.), Opening the Scrolls: Essays in Catholic History in Honour of Godfrey Anstruther (Stratton on the Fosse: Downside Abbey, 1987), 166-98. Note, as well, Maisie Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition (2 vols.; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1934-37), 1:205ff. and 411ff. On Manning’s life see V. Alan McClelland, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence, 1865-1892 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Manning (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993; first published, London: John Murray, 1966); David Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: Newman and Manning, the 1992 Manning Centenary issues of Recusant History, The Allen Review, and The Chesterton Review, and V. Alan McClelland (ed.), By Whose Authority? Newman, Manning and the Magisterium (Stratton on the Fosse, Bath: Downside Abbey, 1995). Less satisfactory is Robert Gray, Cardinal Manning: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985). For the period as a whole, see Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (2 vols.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). On the Oxford Movement, note especially Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) as well as Geoffrey Rowell (ed.), Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), and Rowell’s The Vision Glorious: Themes and Personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; pb. 1991). For further details on Manning and topics treated in this paper see my forthcoming edition of the Manning-Gladstone correspondence. An earlier transcription of a part of the correspondence was made by Alphonse Chapeau in the appendix to his Sorbonne doctorate, “La vie anglicaine de Manning” (doctoral dissertation, Paris, Sorbonne, 1955; 1900 pp. + 280 pp). See as well his “Manning and Gladstone,” in La parole et les voix: Ecriture et mémoire. Mélanges offerts à André Bordeaux (Tours: Publications de l’Université de Tours, 1989), 113-28. A useful review of the Manning-Gladstone relationship can be found in Professor McClelland’s, “Gladstone and Manning: A Question of Authority,” in Peter J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone, Politics, and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1985), 148-70. I remain indebted to James Pereiro for his many helpful comments in our conversations on Manning, reflective of his published work in Recusant History ("‘Truth before Peace’: Manning and Infallibility," Recusant History, 21 [1993], 218-51) and McClelland, By Whose Authority? and for the opportunity of reading early drafts of his doctoral thesis, “Henry Edward Manning and the Teaching Office of the Church” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hull, 1995).
6: Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918).
7: Above all, see Shane Leslie, Henry Edward Manning: His Life and Labours (New York: P.J. Kennedy, 1921).
8: Bruce Marshall, All Glorious Within (London: Constable, 1944), 124.
9: Throughout this paper citations for quotations are not given when they appear on the same page and publication as the quotation following.
10: George P. Grant, Time as History (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1969), 52.

Go back a page Back Previous Page (left keyboard arrow or swipe)
Next Go to next page Next Page (right keyboard arrow or swipe)

Site Title: A Question of Sovereignty: The Politics of Manning's Conversion

Other Formats

Cite this Page

The Politics of Manning's Conversion

Notes