Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (28 page)

As it happened, the tensions between Rome and England took a turn for the worse in 1850 when Wiseman was summoned to the Vatican to receive a Cardinal’s hat and to plan the establishment of an English hierarchy that rivalled that of the Church of England. For those of a Protestant cast of mind it looked like an aggressive bid to infiltrate the country with Romanism. Ill-advisedly, perhaps, Wiseman issued in advance of his return a pastoral letter ‘From out the Flaminian Gate’, vaunting the restoration of the Catholic Church to its proper ‘orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament’. On 14 October
The Times
poured ridicule on Wiseman as the ‘newfangled Archbishop of Westminster’.
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The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, publicly condemned Rome’s ‘pretension of supremacy over the realm of England’. There were anti-Popery demonstrations, and effigies of the Pope were burnt in the streets. Priests were attacked, including Father Faber’s Oratorians. The popular magazine
Punch
depicted Wiseman (‘Wiseboy’) bringing papal bulls into the country in full cardinal’s fig, with Newman ‘Newboy’ holding his train.

To combat the surge of hatred against Catholics, Newman embarked on a series of talks (later published as
Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England
). He would one day consider it his ‘best written book’.

LIBEL

Newman was overseeing the building of the Oratory in Edgbaston, at the same time contending with rumours prompted by a speech in parliament that Catholic religious houses were designing basement ‘cells’ for nefarious purposes. Richard Spooner, MP for North Warwickshire, had delivered a speech on the Religious Houses Bill, suggesting that a large religious convent in Edgbaston had ‘fitted up the whole of the underground’ with ‘cells, and what were those cells for?’ To which the House resounded with ‘hear, hear’. The Mayor of Birmingham was accordingly called upon to inspect Newman’s basement area, and confirmed that the site was quite innocent.
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In a bid to dampen anti-Roman prejudice, Newman again invoked wayward imagination as the reason for Protestant animus. Focusing on the cliché of Catholic institutions, such as convents and monasteries, as places of torture and

sexual perversion, he turned the image against the Church’s antagonists. It is the Protestant imagination that is a grim convent or workhouse where the ‘thick atmosphere refracts and distorts such straggling rays as enter in’.
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On the difficulty of entering into dialogue or reasoned debate, he writes:

If, for instance, a person cannot open a door, or get a key into a lock, which he has done a hundred times before, you know how apt he is to shake, and to rattle, and to force it, as if some great insult was offered him by its resistance: you know how surprised a wasp, or other large insect is, that he cannot get through a window pane; such is the feeling of the Prejudiced Man when we urge our objections – not softened by them at all, but exasperated the more …
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Turning to the irrational Protestant classification of Catholics as a type, New-man conjures up a series of brilliant conceits, including

[In an] inquisitive age, when the Alps are crested, and seas fathomed, and mines ran-sacked, and sands sifted, and rocks cracked into specimens, and beasts caught and catalogued, as little is known by Englishmen of the religious sentiments, the religious usages, the religious notions, the religious ideas of two hundred millions of Christians poured to and fro, among them and around them, as if, I will not say, they were Tartars or Patagonians, but as if they inhabited the moon.
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In his fifth lecture, Newman ill-advisedly took the liberty of naming a name. His target was one Giacinto Achilli, a former member of the Dominican order who had left the Church after being indicted by the Roman Inquisition for sexual misconduct. While professor of philosophy at the seminary in Viterbo he had seduced two women. Three times he was moved on by the church authorities, but he continued his unpriestly behaviour in each new appointment, including the rape of a woman in the sacristy of St Peter’s Church in Naples for which he was arrested by the local police. The Roman Inquisition (a milder institution than the notorious Spanish Inquisition) sent him to a remote retreat house to do penance, but he absconded to Corfu where he opened a Protestant chapel and had an affair with the wife of a tailor. In his new life, financed by the ultra-Protestant Evangelical Alliance, he preached and lectured against the Catholic Church, while conducting serial affairs. By 1850 he was in England delivering fiery anti-Popery lectures, arriving eventually in Birmingham where he came to Newman’s notice.

Newman spoke against Achilli on 28 July 1851, unwisely, perhaps, referring to him as an ‘infidel’, and more to the point mentioning the allegations of his sexual misdemeanours, basing his facts on an article published by Cardinal Wiseman in a recent edition of the
Dublin Review
. His precise words were these, speaking, as it were, on Achilli’s behalf – condemning himself from his own mouth:

I am that Achilli, who in the diocese of Viterbo in February, 1831, robbed of her honour a young woman of eighteen; who in September, 1833, was found guilty of a second such crime, in the case of a person of twenty-eight; and who perpetrated a third in July, 1834, in the case of another aged twenty-four …
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Wiseman had claimed that he possessed documentary evidence to back up these claims, as did Monsignor Talbot, who was in possession of Achilli’s confession at the tribunal of the Roman Inquisition.

By September Achilli instituted criminal libel proceedings against Newman, which, should he lose, could result in an unlimited fine, or imprisonment. It was now crucial for Wiseman and others to produce the documentation that underpinned the Cardinal’s original allegation. But Newman found himself in a nightmare of obstructional indifference. He wrote to his friend Capes at the end of November 1851: ‘If the devil raised a physical whirlwind, rolled me up in sand, whirled me round, and then transported me some thousands of miles, it would not be more strange, though it would be more imposing a visitation. I have been kept in ignorance and suspense, incomprehensibly, every now and then a burst of malignant light showing some new and unexpected prospect.’
²⁸
He went on: ‘For three months I have been soliciting information from abroad

– but I can’t get people even to write to me.’

Wiseman said that he had mislaid the documentation, but Newman discovered that ‘he never had looked for them’ until it was too late to reverse the decision to go to trial. In the meantime Newman had sent two of his confreres, Father Nicholas Darnell and an ailing Joseph Gordon, to Italy to secure evidence, while his friend Maria Giberne travelled out to find and bring back witnesses. In the event, the trial took place before a jury between 21 and 24 June 1852 and Newman lost.
The Times
attacked the verdict, judging it an unwarranted display of anti-Catholicism, confirming a belief that Catholics would now have good reasons for believing there was no justice for them in cases involving the

‘Protestant feelings of judges and juries’.

The main casualty of the Achilli affair, however, was Father Joseph Gordon who fell seriously ill on his return from Italy and eventually died. Newman’s sense of loss reveals the depth of his feeling for each of the small circle of companions who had served him loyally and selflessly. Referring to himself in the third person Newman wrote:

On S. Cecilia’s day, November 22nd, the Father [Newman] was called up to London for judgement. It was too much for Father Gordon; faithful to his own loyal heart, on that very day he was seized with a pleurisy, and when the Father returned from London on the morrow with his process still delayed, he found him in bed. It was the beginning of the end. He languished and sank, got worse and worse, and at the end of nearly three months, on the 13th of February, 1853, he died at Bath. He is in the hands of his God. We all loved him with a deep affection; we lamented him with all our hearts, we keenly

feel his loss to this day. But the Father’s bereavement is of a special kind, and his sorrow is ever new.
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Newman himself was on the brink of collapse. Writing to his nun friend, Sister Mary Imelda Poole, he reported that the doctor had told him ‘distinctly I shall have a premature old age, and an early death … He says my brain and nerves cannot bear it.’
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The doctor prescribed a holiday, which Newman took in Scotland at Abbotsford for six weeks as a guest of John Gibson Lockhart, Walter Scott’s son-in-law.

Troubles at the Oratory followed him on his convalescence, symptomatic of an overworked, highly-strung religious community with a lack of firm and experienced leadership. A lay brother called Bernard Hennin (lay brothers did the skivvying in religious houses, cleaning lavatories and so forth) had fallen for a Mrs Frances Wootten, a doctor’s wife, who had come to live in Edgbaston and was making herself serviceable to the Oratorians. Mrs Wootten told the Oratorian Father Nicholas Darnell in confession that Bernard had attempted to kiss her four times on the face. Whereupon the shocked priest persuaded Mrs Wootten to make the same allegation outside of the seal of the confessional; which she did. The allegation was now shared with two other Oratorians, including Ambrose St John. On grilling Brother Bernard it was discovered that he had, in fact, just about kissed Mrs Wootten’s hand and that he had got nowhere near her face. St John had decided, in Newman’s absence, that Bernard should be sent to a Redemptorist retreat house near Liverpool. On learning of all this Newman became enraged, accusing Ambrose and his confreres of acting without proper authority. The first letter he sent to Ambrose on the matter demonstrates that much as he loved his younger friend, he could treat him harshly:

Charissime

I know that this letter will pain you …
Without
me you recommend a Brother of the Congregation to become a Trappist …
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Father Nicholas also received a broadside from Newman, lambasting him for virtually breaking the seal of confession: ‘… were I an Italian’, he wrote, ‘and a man of unsubdued mind, I should be sorely tempted, under circumstances, to use the stiletto against [such a] confessor’.
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The hapless Brother Bernard, who was evidently mentally challenged and unsuited to an all-male community, eventually went to the Oratory in London whence he left the congregation and got married.

Newman received his sentence in the Achilli affair on 31 January 1853. The fine was £100, clearly a derisory figure; but Newman’s costs amounted to more than £14,000 – at least a million pounds at today’s value. Judge Coleridge left a remarkable diary note of the scene that day:

The immense crowd, the anxious and critical audience, his slender figure, and strange mysterious cloudy face. After all the speeches of Counsel he desired to say a few words. Oh! What a sweet musical, almost unearthly voice it was, so unlike any other we had heard.… I have a feeling that there was something almost out of place in my not merely pronouncing sentence on him, but in a way lecturing him. And yet as I could not avoid the one, so it seemed to me quite in course for me to do the other, when by breach of the law he had fairly been brought under me. Besides, in truth Newman is an
over-praised
man, he is made an idol of.
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In a manuscript note, Newman remembered that the judge was said to be ‘very nervous’, and that the contrast between them was ‘great’ – ‘I looking so wooden’. Small wonder. Judge Coleridge, according to Newman, had rebuked him, saying, that ‘I had been everything good when I was a Protestant – but I had fallen since I was a Catholic’. Coleridge ended by saying: ‘I fear I make no impression on you.’
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An Achilli fund was instituted in England, Ireland, Canada and the United States to cover the phenomenal costs; the sum raised far exceeded the amount required. Three months later Newman was in a position to solicit funds from as far afield as Baltimore to help Bishop Ullathorne and Dr Moore, Rector of Oscott College who had been gaoled in Warwick prison as debtors. The pair had shares in a Welsh Bank which failed two years earlier. According to Newman, ‘the Assignes [
sic
], witnessing the liberality of Catholics to me, determined, as they expressed it, to “put the skrew [
sic
] on Catholics”, for the benefit of the creditors’.
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The redoubtable bishop was relaxed since he had once worked as a missionary on Norfolk Island the penal colony. The debtors were let out after ten days.