Manning as Politician

Abstract

It is a convention—now hardened to cliché—of Victorian historiography that Henry Edward Manning and John Henry Newman lived parallel lives: both virtual contemporaries, both sons of bankrupt fathers, both Oxford Anglicans with promise of greatness, both converts to Rome, both ascetics, both Cardinals. Equally conventional are the differences: Newman’s subtlety, Manning’s stoutness, Newman’s ‘Englishness’, Manning’s Romanita, Newman the outsider, Manning an Establishment figure from the start. These conceits are serviceable, but a more useful linkage is this: Manning and Newman lived not parallel lives, but paradoxical ones, the paradox being that each, in a sense, lived the other man’s life. Consider how each developed in unimagined ways. Newman was one of the most private men of his day. To a temperament already solitary was added the isolation of conversion, then the loneliness of failure, finally the realisation that he represented only a minority in a flamboyantly Ultramontane church. Yet Newman was never left alone with his solitude. His inner life became public property: his soul-struggle debated in the popular prints, his spiritual journey subject of tract and pamphlet and letter to the editor. People thought they knew him better than he knew himself, and, were they a Henry Kingsley or a Robert Wilberforce or an Orestes Brownson, lost little time in telling him. The boundaries of a decent interiority were crossed again and again, until he became icon, symbol, Everyman’s Newman.