There is a legend, popularised by Lytton Strachey, that Henry Manning, on becoming a Catholic, studiously resolved to expunge from his mind all memories of his Anglican past. The letters of his young wife, Caroline, who had died only four years after their marriage, were to be destroyed; her grave to be left untended; all past associations of Lavington, Oxford, Harrow, Coombe Bank, and Copped Hall at Totteridge would be too much of a burden for him to bear on his journey to a position of active influence within the Roman Church; so, like Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress, he willed that the burden should roll from his back that he should see it no more. The truth is very different. Caroline’s letters he took with him to Rome in 1851, where he was to begin his studies at the Accademia Ecclesiastica, only to discover to his profound grief, that the bag in which they were contained, had been stolen at Avignon. So devoted to her memory was he, that—on his deathbed— he amazed his successor in the See of Westminster, Herbert Vaughan, by extracting from beneath his pillow a ‘small, worn volume’, and handing it to him, saying ‘I leave it to you. Into this little book my dearest wife wrote her prayers and meditations. Not a day has passed since her death on which I have not prayed and meditated from this book. All the good I may have done, all the good I may have been, I owe to her. Take precious care of it’.

Henry Manning has proved to be a figure of considerable interest for biographers, and versions of his life story have been committed to print in various different forms. First, came E. S. Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning: full of subtle insinuation and open attack, constructed around a cab load of pilfered papers, riddled with errors, and therefore, of course, immensely popular. Several other smaller works of some interest but no great merit appeared subsequently, but then came Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians: Purcell’s animus against Manning was transplanted into a man who had little to say for the Victorians and a great deal to say against them. The result was malicious, unfair, vitriolic, and even more popular. So Shane Leslie, when a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, set out a few years later to write a fairer study and to restore the damage, but his book lacks sustained scholarly depth and, as I shall attempt to show in this study, cannot always be relied upon in its opinions.

Between 1845 and 1850 Manning, as Archdeacon of Chichester, published four volumes of collected sermons. They are not his only published sermons as an Anglican, but they are the ones with which this article will be concerned. They were published by the firm of William Pickering, whose list included the liturgical works of the Revd. William Maskell, chaplain to the High Church Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, sermons by Manning’S nephew, W. H. Anderdon, and reprints of Bishop Wilson’s Sacra Privata and Lancelot Andrewes’ Preces Privatae, as well as Jeremy Taylor, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. In 1882 as a Catholic Manning claimed that he had never been concerned that his Anglican sermons should be re-issued. ‘£250 was offered to me for an edition of the four volumes of Sermons. But I always refused. I wished my past, while I was in the twilight, to lie dead to me, and I to it.’ Yet, as Purcell points out, in 1865 he had consulted Dr. Bernard Smith in Rome about their re-issue. Smith’s verdict was negative. ‘These were the works of Dr. Manning, a Protestant. They were the fruits of the Anglican not of the Catholic Church.’ He was, nonetheless, impressed. ‘What I admired most in the perusal of these volumes was not the many strong Catholic truths I met with, but that almost Catholic unction of a St. Francis de Sales, or of a St. Teresa, that breathes through them all.’

On whit Monday, June 1st, 1857, the first general chapter of the Oblates of St. Charles Borromeo in the diocese of Westminster was held at Bayswater, one month before the splendid new gothic-conceived church of Thomas Meyer was solemnly blessed by Cardinal Wiseman and dedicated to St. Mary of the Angels, a title reflecting Manning’s enduring devotion to St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Third Order. Subsequent building, extensions and additions were to be the work of John Francis Bentley. The founding group of Oblates was small, all its members being admitted as novices of the community on the day of the first general chapter. When the first biennial elections were held, Manning was confirmed by Wiseman as Superior and henceforth known to the community simply as ‘the Father’. Before the year was over the group was to be joined by three new novices and two postulants, all of whom eventually persevered in their vocation. By the time Manning died in 1892, the Oblates had been able to number a total of forty-six priests in their ranks in the space of only thirty-five years, thus easily outstripping the recruitment pattern of Brompton Oratory, the closest to the concept of the Oblates in both spiritual formation and organisation. Over the eighty years immediately following Manning’s demise, a further thirty-three priests were to be counted among the Oblates.

On his arrival at Lavington in January 1833 H. E. Manning’s theological baggage fitted neatly into a few short sentences. He summed it up in a letter written to Samuel Wilberforce (October 20, 1850): ‘When I came to Lavington in 1833 I believed, as I always did, in Baptismal Regeneration: I had no view on the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ: and no idea of the Church’. In the recollections of his later ‘Journal’ (1878–82) he described his position at that time in greater detail: ‘The state of my religious belief in 1833 was profound faith in the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, in the Redemption by the Passion of our Lord, and in the work of the Holy Spirit, and the conversion of the soul. I believed in baptismal regeneration, and in a spiritual, but real, receiving of our Lord in Holy Communion. As to the Church, I had no definite conception’. His evangelical background and piety seems still to have filled most of his religious horizon.

It is not surprising that Henry Edward Manning had strong opinions about the Kulturkampf, Otto von Bismarcks effort in the early 1870’s to bring the Roman Catholic Church in Germany under the control of the State. As head of the Catholic Church in England, it appropriately fell to Manning to condemn what most British Catholics would have seen as the persecution of their Church in the new German Empire. Moreover, Manning knew personally the bishops involved in the conflict with Bismarck from their time together at the Vatican Council. Indeed, he was well acquainted with some of them who had played important rôles, either for or against, in the great controversies of the Council that led to the definition of Papal Infallibility. MiecisIaus Ledochowski, Archbishop of Gnesen and Posen, imprisoned and expelled from his see by the German government in 1874, had, together with Manning, been a prominent infallibilist. Paulus Melchers, Archbishop of Cologne, and leader of the German inopportunists, suffered the same penalty. The bishops of Breslau, Trier and Paderborn, all of whom had played significant rôles at the Council, the first two against, the latter for the definition, were either imprisoned, expelled, or both. Manning considered these men to have suffered for the cause of religious liberty, and could not understand the indifference of British politicians, especially of liberals like Gladstone, to their fate.

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.

Henry Manning first settled in Sussex when he became John Sargent’s curate at the tiny village of Upwaltham in 1832. A year later Sargent made him his curate at Graffham and Lavington. When John Sargent died in May 1833, his widow presented Manning to the two livings. On December 24 1840, he was appointed Archdeacon of Chichester. He was to remain in Sussex for eighteen years until his resignation from all these preferments in December 1850, and shortly afterwards, in his own words, Manning became a Catholic ‘off his own bat’.