THE death of Pius IX brought to Manning a last flattering testimony of
the confidence with which he was regarded at the Court of Rome. In one
of the private consultations preceding the Conclave, a Cardinal
suggested that Manning should succeed to the Papacy. He replied that he
was unfit for the position, because it was essential for the interests
of the Holy See that the next Pope should be an Italian. The suggestion
was pressed, but Manning held firm. Thus it happened that the Triple
Tiara seemed to come, for a moment, within the grasp of the late
Archdeacon of Chichester; and the cautious hand refrained.
Leo XIII was elected, and there was a great change in the policy of the
Vatican. Liberalism became the order of the day. And now at last the
opportunity seemed ripe for an act which, in the opinion of the majority
of English Catholics, had long been due--the bestowal of some mark of
recognition from the Holy See upon the labours and the sanctity of
Father Newman. It was felt that a Cardinal's hat was the one fitting
reward for such a life, and accordingly the Duke of Norfolk,
representing the Catholic laity of England, visited Manning, and
suggested that he should forward the proposal to the Vatican. Manning
agreed, and then there followed a curious series of incidents--the last
encounter in the jarring lives of those two men. A letter was drawn up
by Manning for the eye of the Pope, embodying the Duke of Norfolk's
proposal; but there was an unaccountable delay in the transmission of
this letter; months passed, and it had not reached the Holy Father. The
whole matter would, perhaps, have dropped out of sight and been
forgotten, in a way which had become customary when honours for Newman
were concerned, had not the Duke of Norfolk himself, when he was next in
Rome, ventured to recommend to Leo XIII that Dr. Newman should be made a
Cardinal. His Holiness welcomed the proposal; but, he said, he could do
nothing until he knew the views of Cardinal Manning. Thereupon, the Duke
of Norfolk wrote to Manning, explaining what had occurred; shortly
afterwards, Manning's letter of recommendation, after a delay of six
months, reached the Pope, and the offer of a Cardinalate was immediately
dispatched to Newman.
But the affair was not yet over. The offer had been made; would it be
accepted? There was one difficulty in the way. Newman was now an infirm
old man of seventy-eight; and it is a rule that all Cardinals who are
not also diocesan Bishops or Archbishops reside, as a matter of course,
at Rome. The change would have been impossible for one of his years--for
one, too, whose whole life was now bound up with the Oratory at
Birmingham. But, of course, there was nothing to prevent His Holiness
from making an exception in Newman's case, and allowing him to end his
days in England. Yet how was Newman himself to suggest this? The offer
of the Hat had come to him as an almost miraculous token of renewed
confidence, of ultimate reconciliation. The old, long, bitter
estrangement was ended at last. 'The cloud is lifted from me for ever!'
he exclaimed when the news reached him. It would be melancholy indeed if
the cup were now to be once more dashed from his lips and he was obliged
to refuse the signal honour. In his perplexity he went to the Bishop of
Birmingham and explained the whole situation. The Bishop assured him
that all would be well; that he himself would communicate with the
authorities, and put the facts of the case before them. Accordingly,
while Newman wrote formally refusing the Hat, on the ground of his
unwillingness to leave the Oratory, the Bishop wrote two letters to
Manning, one official and one private, in which the following passages
occurred:
'Dr. Newman has far too humble and delicate a mind to dream of thinking
or saying anything which would look like hinting at any kind of terms
with the Sovereign Pontiff.... I think, however, that I ought to express
my own sense of what Dr. Newman's dispositions are, and that it will be
expected of me ... I am thoroughly confident that nothing stands in the
way of his most grateful acceptance, except what he tells me greatly
distresses him--namely, the having to leave the Oratory at a critical
period of its existence, and the impossibility of his beginning a new
life at his advanced age.'
And in his private letter the Bishop said:
'Dr. Newman is very much aged, and softened with age and the trials he
has had, especially the loss of his two brethren, St. John and Caswall;
he can never refer to these losses without weeping and becoming
speechless for a time. He is very much affected by the Pope's kindness
and would, I know, like to receive the great honour offered him, but
feels the whole difficulty at his age of changing his life or having to
leave the Oratory--which I am sure he could not do. If the Holy Father
thinks well to confer on him the dignity, leaving him where he is, I
know how immensely he would be gratified, and you will know how
generally the conferring on him the Cardinalate will be applauded.'
These two letters, together with Newman's refusal, reached Manning as he
was on the point of starting for Rome. After he had left England, the
following statement appeared in "The Times":
'Pope Leo XIII has intimated his desire to raise Dr. Newman to the rank
of Cardinal, but with expressions of deep respect for the Holy See, Dr.
Newman has excused himself from accepting the Purple.'
When Newman's eyes fell upon the announcement, he realised at once that
a secret and powerful force was working against him. He trembled, as he
had so often trembled before; and certainly the danger was not
imaginary. In the ordinary course of things, how could such a paragraph
have been inserted without his authority? And consequently, did it not
convey to the world, not only an absolute refusal which he had never
intended, but a wish on his part to emphasise publicly his rejection of
the proffered honour? Did it not imply that he had lightly declined a
proposal for which in reality he was deeply thankful? And when the fatal
paragraph was read in Rome, might it not actually lead to the offer of
the Cardinalate being finally withheld?
In great agitation, Newman appealed to the Duke of Norfolk.
'As to the statement,' he wrote, 'of my refusing a Cardinal's Hat, which
is in the papers, you must not believe it, for this reason:
'Of course, it implies that an offer has been made me, and I have sent
an answer to it. Now I have ever understood that it is a point of
propriety and honour to consider such communications sacred. This
statement, therefore, cannot come from me. Nor could it come from Rome,
for it was made public before my answer got to Rome.
'It could only come, then, from someone who not only read my letter,
but, instead of leaving to the Pope to interpret it, took upon himself
to put an interpretation upon it, and published that interpretation to
the world.
'A private letter, addressed to Roman Authorities, is interpreted on its
way and published in the English papers. How is it possible that anyone
can have done this?'
The crushing indictment pointed straight at Manning. And it was true.
Manning had done the impossible deed. Knowing what he did, with the
Bishop of Birmingham's two letters in his pocket, he had put it about
that Newman had refused the Hat. But a change had come over the spirit
of the Holy See. Things were not as they had once been: Monsignor Talbot
was at Passy, and Pio Nono was--where? The Duke of Norfolk intervened
once again; Manning was profuse in his apologies for having
misunderstood Newman's intentions, and hurried to the Pope to rectify
the error. Without hesitation, the Sovereign Pontiff relaxed the rule of
Roman residence, and Newman became a Cardinal.
He lived to enjoy his glory for more than ten years. Since he rarely
left the Oratory, and since Manning never visited Birmingham, the two
Cardinals met only once or twice. After one of these occasions, on
returning to the Oratory, Cardinal Newman said, 'What do you think
Cardinal Manning did to me? He kissed me!'
On Newman's death, Manning delivered a funeral oration, which opened
thus:
'We have lost our greatest witness for the Faith, and we are all poorer
and lower by the loss.
'When these tidings came to me, my first thought was this, in what way
can I, once more, show my love and veneration for my brother and friend
of more than sixty years?'
In private, however, the surviving Cardinal's tone was apt to be more
... direct. 'Poor Newman!' he once exclaimed in a moment of genial
expansion. 'Poor Newman! He was a great hater!'
X
IN that gaunt and gloomy building--more like a barracks than an
Episcopal palace--Archbishop's House, Westminster, Manning's existence
stretched itself out into an extreme old age. As his years increased,
his activities, if that were possible, increased too. Meetings,
missions, lectures, sermons, articles, interviews, letters--such things
came upon him in redoubled multitudes, and were dispatched with an
unrelenting zeal. But this was not all; with age, he seemed to acquire
what was almost a new fervour, an unaccustomed, unexpected, freeing of
the spirit, filling him with preoccupations which he had hardly felt
before. 'They say I am ambitious,' he noted in his Diary, 'but do I rest
in my ambition?'
No, assuredly he did not rest; but he worked now with no arriere pensee
for the greater glory of God. A kind of frenzy fell upon him. Poverty,
drunkenness, vice, all the horrors and terrors of our civilisation
seized upon his mind, and urged him forward to new fields of action and
new fields of thought. The temper of his soul assumed almost a
revolutionary cast. 'I am a Mosaic Radical,' he exclaimed; and, indeed,
in the exaltation of his energies, the incoherence of his conceptions,
the democratic urgency of his desires, combined with his awe-inspiring
aspect and his venerable age, it was easy enough to trace the mingled
qualities of the patriarch, the prophet, and the demagogue. As, in his
soiled and shabby garments, the old man harangued the crowds of
Bermondsey or Peckham upon the virtues of Temperance, assuring them,
with all the passion of conviction, as a final argument, that the
majority of the Apostles were total abstainers, this Prince of the
Church might have passed as a leader of the Salvation Army. His
popularity was immense, reaching its height during the great Dock
Strikes of 1889, when, after the victory of the men was assured, Manning
was able, by his persuasive eloquence and the weight of his character,
to prevent its being carried to excess. After other conciliators--among
whom was the Bishop of London--had given up the task in disgust, the
octogenarian Cardinal worked on with indefatigable resolution. At last,
late at night, in the schools in Kirby Street, Bermondsey, he rose to
address the strikers. An enthusiastic eye-witness has described the
scene:
'Unaccustomed tears glistened in the eyes of his rough and work-stained
hearers as the Cardinal raised his hand and solemnly urged them not to
prolong one moment more than they could help the perilous uncertainty
and the sufferings of their wives and children. Just above his uplifted
hand was a figure of the Madonna and Child; and some among the men tell
how a sudden light seemed to swim around it as the speaker pleaded for
the women and children. When he sat down all in the room knew that he
had won the day, and that, so far as the Strike Committee was concerned,
the matter was at an end.'
In those days, there were strange visitors at the Archbishop's House.
Careful priests and conscientious secretaries wondered what the world
was coming to when they saw labour leaders like Mr. John Burns and Mr.
Ben Tillett, and land-reformers like Mr. Henry George, being ushered
into the presence of his Eminence. Even the notorious Mr. Stead
appeared, and his scandalous paper with its unspeakable revelations lay
upon the Cardinal's table. This proved too much for one of the faithful
tonsured dependents of the place, and he ventured to expostulate with
his master. But he never did so again.
When the guests were gone, and the great room was empty, the old man
would draw himself nearer to the enormous fire, and review once more,
for the thousandth time, the long adventure of his life. He would bring
out his diaries and his memoranda, he would rearrange his notes, he
would turn over again the yellow leaves of faded correspondences;
seizing his pen, he would pour out his comments and reflections, and
fill, with an extraordinary solicitude, page after page with
elucidations, explanations, justifications, of the vanished incidents of
a remote past. He would snip with scissors the pages of ancient
journals, and with delicate ecclesiastical fingers, drop unknown
mysteries into the flames.
Sometimes he would turn to the four red folio scrapbooks with their
collection of newspaper cuttings, concerning himself, over a period of
thirty years. Then the pale cheeks would flush and the close-drawn lips
would grow even more menacing than before. 'Stupid, mulish malice,' he
would note. 'Pure lying--conscious, deliberate and designed.'
'Suggestive lying. Personal animosity is at the bottom of this.'
And then he would suddenly begin to doubt. After all, where was he? What
had he accomplished? Had any of it been worthwhile? Had he not been out
of the world all his life! Out of the world!
'Croker's "Life and Letters", and Hayward's "Letters",' he notes, 'are
so full of politics, literature, action, events, collision of mind with
mind, and that with such a multitude of men in every state of life, that
when I look back, it seems as if I had been simply useless.'
And again, 'The complete isolation and exclusion from the official life
of England in which I have lived, makes me feel as if I had done
nothing'. He struggled to console himself with the reflexion that all
this was only 'the natural order'. 'If the natural order is moved by the
supernatural order, then I may not have done nothing. Fifty years of
witness for God and His Truth, I hope, has not been in vain.' But the
same thoughts recurred. 'In reading Macaulay's life I had a haunting
feeling that his had been a life of public utility and mine a vita
umbratilis, a life in the shade.' Ah! it was God's will. 'Mine has been
a life of fifty years out of the world as Gladstone's has been in it.
The work of his life in this world is manifest. I hope mine may be in
the next. I suppose our Lord called me out of the world because He saw
that I should lose my soul in it.' Clearly, that was the explanation.
And yet he remained sufficiently in the world to discharge with absolute
efficiency the complex government of his diocese almost up to the last
moment of his existence. Though his bodily strength gradually ebbed, the
vigour of his mind was undismayed. At last, supported by cushions, he
continued, by means of a dictated correspondence, to exert his
accustomed rule. Only occasionally would he lay aside his work to plunge
into the yet more necessary duties of devotion. Never again would he
preach; never again would he put into practice those three salutary
rules of his in choosing a subject for a sermon: '(1) asking God to
guide the choice; (2) applying the matter to myself; (3) making the sign
of the cross on my head and heart and lips in honour of the Sacred
Mouth;' but he could still pray; he could turn especially to the Holy
Ghost.
'A very simple but devout person,' he wrote in one of his latest
memoranda, 'asked me why in my first volume of sermons I said so little
about the Holy Ghost. I was not aware of it; but I found it to be true.
I at once resolved that I would make a reparation every day of my life
to the Holy Ghost. This I have never failed to do to this day. To this I
owe the light and faith which brought me into the truefold. I bought all
the books I could about the Holy Ghost. I worked out the truths about
His personality, His presence, and His office. This made me understand
the last paragraph in the Apostles' Creed, and made me a Catholic
Christian.'
So, though Death came slowly, struggling step by step with that bold and
tenacious spirit, when he did come at last the Cardinal was ready. Robed
in his archiepiscopal vestments, his rochet, his girdle, and his
mozzetta, with the scarlet biretta on his head, and the pectoral cross
upon his breast, he made his solemn Profession of Faith in the Holy
Roman Church. A crowd of lesser dignitaries, each in the garments of his
office, attended the ceremonial. The Bishop of Salford held up the
Pontificale and the Bishop of Amycla bore the wax taper. The provost of
Westminster, on his knees, read aloud the Profession of Faith,
surrounded by the Canons of the Diocese. Towards those who gathered
about him, the dying man was still able to show some signs of
recognition, and even, perhaps, of affection; yet it seemed that his
chief preoccupation, up to the very end, was with his obedience to the
rules prescribed by the Divine Authority. 'I am glad to have been able
to do everything in due order', were among his last words. 'Si fort
qu'on soit,' says one of the profoundest of the observers of the human
heart, 'on peut eprouver le besoin de s'incliner devant quelqu'un ou
quelque chose. S'incliner devant Dieu, c'est toujours le moins
humiliant.'
Manning died on January 14th, 1892, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.
A few days later Mr. Gladstone took occasion, in a letter to a friend,
to refer to his relations with the late Cardinal. Manning's conversion
was, he said,
'altogether the severest blow that ever befell me. In a late letter the
Cardinal termed it a quarrel, but in my reply I told him it was not a
quarrel, but a death; and that was the truth. Since then there have been
vicissitudes. But I am quite certain that to the last his personal
feelings never changed; and I believe also that he kept a promise made
in 1851, to remember me before God at the most solemn moments; a promise
which I greatly valued. The whole subject is to me at once of extreme
interest and of considerable restraint.'
'His reluctance to die,' concluded Mr. Gladstone, 'may be explained by
an intense anxiety to complete unfulfilled service.'
The funeral was the occasion of a popular demonstration such as has
rarely been witnessed in the streets of London. The route of the
procession was lined by vast crowds of working people, whose
imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been touched. Many who had
hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their
best friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man's spirit that
moved them? Or was it his valiant disregard of common custom and those
conventional reserves and poor punctilios which are wont to hem about
the great? Or was it something untameable in his glances and in his
gestures? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about
him, of the antique organisation of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind
of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was
more acute than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing today. And
he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never
lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral
monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the
almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent
tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten
trophy--the Hat.