Mediterranean travels

In December 1832, Newman accompanied Archdeacon Robert Froude and his son Hurrell on a
tour in southern Europe on account of the latter's health. On board the mail steamship Hermes
they visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands and, subsequently, Sicily, Naples and Rome,
where Newman made the acquaintance of Nicholas Wiseman. In a letter home he described
Rome as "the most wonderful place on Earth", but the Roman Catholic Church as "polytheistic,
degrading and idolatrous".[42]

During the course of this tour, Newman wrote most of the short poems which a year later were
printed in the Lyra Apostolica. From Rome, instead of accompanying the Froudes home in April,
Newman returned to Sicily alone. He fell dangerously ill with gastric or typhoid fever at
Leonforte, but recovered, with the conviction that God still had work for him to do in England.
Newman saw this as his third providential illness. In June 1833 he left Palermo for Marseille in
an orange boat, which was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio. Here, Newman wrote the verses
"Lead, Kindly Light" which later became popular as a hymn.[42]

Tracts for the Times

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Portrait miniature of John Henry Newman, by William Charles Ross

Newman was at home again in Oxford on 9 July 1833 and, on 14 July, Keble preached at St
Mary's an assize sermon on "National Apostasy", which Newman afterwards regarded as the
inauguration of the Oxford Movement. In the words of Richard William Church, it was "Keble
who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus, and Newman who took up the work"; but the first
organisation of it was due to Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been
styled "the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement". Rose met Oxford Movement figures
on a visit to Oxford looking for magazine contributors, and it was in his rectory house at
Hadleigh, Suffolk, that a meeting of High Church clergy was held over 25–26 July (Newman
was not present, but Hurrell Froude, Arthur Philip Perceval, and William Palmer had gone to
visit Rose),[43] at which it was resolved to fight for "the apostolical succession and the integrity
of the Prayer Book."[citation needed]

A few weeks later Newman started, apparently on his own initiative, the Tracts for the Times,
from which the movement was subsequently named "Tractarian". Its aim was to secure for the
Church of England a definite basis of doctrine and discipline. At the time the state's financial
stance towards the Church of Ireland had raised the spectres of disestablishment, or an exit of
high churchmen. The teaching of the tracts was supplemented by Newman's Sunday afternoon
sermons at St Mary's, the influence of which, especially over the junior members of the
university, was increasingly marked during a period of eight years. In 1835 Pusey joined the
movement, which, so far as concerned ritual observances, was later called "Puseyite". Through
Francis Rivington, the tracts were published by the Rivington house in London.[44]

In 1836 the Tractarians appeared as an activist group, in united opposition to the appointment of
Renn Dickson Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity. Hampden's 1832 Bampton Lectures, in
the preparation of which Joseph Blanco White had assisted him, were suspected of heresy; and
this suspicion was accentuated by a pamphlet put forth by Newman, Elucidations of Dr
Hampden's Theological Statements.

At this date Newman became editor of the British Critic. He also gave courses of lectures in a
side chapel of St Mary's in defence of the via media ("middle way") of Anglicanism between
Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism.

Doubts and opposition

Newman's influence in Oxford was supreme about the year 1839. Just then, however, his study
of monophysitism caused him to doubt whether Anglican theology was consistent with the
principles of ecclesiastical authority which he had come to accept. He read Nicholas Wiseman's
article in the Dublin Review on "The Anglican Claim", which quoted Augustine of Hippo against
the Donatists, "securus judicat orbis terrarum" ("the verdict of the world is conclusive").
Newman later wrote of his reaction:

For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine struck me with a power which I never had felt
from any words before. ...They were like the 'Tolle, lege,—Tolle, lege,' of the child, which
converted St Augustine himself. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum!' By those great words of the
ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history,
the theology of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised. (Apologia, part 5)
After a furore in which the eccentric John Brande Morris preached for him in St Mary's in
September 1839, Newman began to think of moving away from Oxford. One plan that surfaced
was to set up a religious community in Littlemore, outside the city of Oxford.[45] Since accepting
his post at St. Mary's, Newman had a chapel (dedicated to Sts. Nicholas and Mary) and school
built in the parish's neglected area. Newman's mother had laid the foundation stone in 1835,
based on a half-acre plot and £100 given by Oriel College.[46] Newman planned to appoint
Charles Pourtales Golightly, an Oriel man, as curate at Littlemore in 1836. However, Golightly
had taken offence at one of Newman's sermons, and joined a group of aggressive anti-
Catholics.[47] Thus, Isaac Williams became Littlemore's curate instead, succeeded by John Rouse
Bloxam from 1837 to 1840, during which the school opened.[48][39] William John Copeland acted
as curate from 1840.[49]

Newman continued as a High Anglican controversialist until 1841, when he published Tract 90,
which proved the last of the series. This detailed examination of the Thirty-Nine Articles
suggested that their framers directed their negations not against Catholicism's authorised creed,
but only against popular errors and exaggerations. Though this was not altogether new,
Archibald Campbell Tait, with three other senior tutors, denounced it as "suggesting and opening
a way by which men might violate their solemn engagements to the university." Other heads of
houses and others in authority joined in the alarm. At the request of Richard Bagot, the Bishop of
Oxford, the publication of the Tracts came to an end.

Retreat to Littlemore

Newman also resigned the editorship of the British Critic and was thenceforth, as he later
described it, "on his deathbed as regards membership with the Anglican Church". He now
considered the position of Anglicans to be similar to that of the semi-Arians in the Arian
controversy. The joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric set up in Jerusalem was to him further
evidence that the Church of England was not apostolic.[50]

Newman College, College Lane, Littlemore

In 1842 Newman withdrew to Littlemore with a small band of followers, and lived in semi-
monastic conditions. The first to join him there was John Dobree Dalgairns.[51] Others were
William Lockhart on the advice of Henry Manning,[52] Ambrose St John in 1843,[53] Frederick
Oakeley and Albany James Christie in 1845.[54][55] The group adapted buildings in what is now
College Lane, Littlemore, opposite the inn, including stables and a granary for stage coaches.
Newman called it "the house of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Littlemore" (now Newman
College).[56] This "Anglican monastery" attracted publicity, and much curiosity in Oxford, which
Newman tried to downplay, but some nicknamed it Newmanooth (from Maynooth College).[57]
Some Newman disciples wrote about English saints, while Newman himself worked to complete
an Essay on the development of doctrine.

In February 1843, Newman published, as an advertisement in the Oxford Conservative Journal,

an anonymous but otherwise formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against Roman
Catholicism. Lockhart became the first in the group to convert formally to Catholicism. Newman
preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore, the valedictory "The parting of friends" on 25
September, and resigned the living of St Mary's, although he did not leave Littlemore for two
more years, until his own formal reception into the Catholic Church.[39]

Conversion to Roman Catholicism

An interval of two years then elapsed before Newman was received into the Roman Catholic
Church on 9 October 1845 by Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist, at the college in Littlemore.
The personal consequences for Newman of his conversion were great: he suffered broken
relationships with family and friends, attitudes to him within his Oxford circle becoming
polarised.[58] The effect on the wider Tractarian movement is still debated, since Newman's
leading role is regarded by some scholars as overstated, as is Oxford's domination of the
movement as a whole. Tractarian writings had a wide and continuing circulation after 1845, well
beyond the range of personal contacts with the main Oxford figures, and Tractarian clergy
continued to be recruited into the Church of England in numbers.[59]

Oratorian

In February 1846, Newman left Oxford for Oscott, where Nicholas Wiseman, then vicar-
apostolic of the Midland district, resided; and in October he went to Rome, where he was
ordained priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and awarded the degree of Doctor of
Divinity by Pope Pius IX. At the close of 1847, Newman returned to England as an Oratorian
and resided first at Maryvale (near Old Oscott, now the site of Maryvale Institute, a college of
Theology, Philosophy and Religious Education); then at St Wilfrid's College, Cheadle; and then
at St Anne's, Alcester Street, Birmingham. Finally he settled at Edgbaston, where spacious
premises were built for the community, and where (except for four years in Ireland) he lived a
secluded life for nearly forty years.
Statue outside the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, popularly known as Brompton
Oratory, in London

Before the house at Edgbaston was occupied, Newman established the London Oratory, with
Father Frederick William Faber as its superior.

Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England

Anti-Catholicism had been central to British culture since the sixteenth-century Protestant
Reformation. According to D. G. Paz, anti-Catholicism was "an integral part of what it meant to
be a Victorian".[60] Popular Protestant feeling ran high at this time, partly in consequence of the
papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae by which Pope Pius IX re-established the Catholic diocesan
hierarchy in England on 29 September 1850. New Episcopal sees were created and Cardinal
Nicholas Wiseman was to be the first Archbishop of Westminster.

On 7 October, Wiseman announced the Pope's restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in
a pastoral letter From out of the Flaminian Gate.

Led by The Times and Punch, the British press saw this as being an attempt by the Papacy to
reclaim jurisdiction over England. This was dubbed the "Papal Aggression". The Prime Minister,
Lord John Russell, wrote a public letter to the Bishop of Durham and denounced this "attempt to
impose a foreign yoke upon our minds and consciences".[61] Russell's stirring up of anti-
Catholicism led to a national outcry. This "No Popery" uproar led to violence with Catholic
priests being pelted in the streets and Catholic churches being attacked.

Newman was keen for lay people to be at the forefront of any public apologetics, writing that
Catholics should "make the excuse of this persecution for getting up a great organization, going
round the towns giving lectures, or making speeches."[62] He supported John Capes in the
committee he was organising for public lectures in February 1851. Due to ill-health, Capes had
to stop them halfway through.
Newman took the initiative and booked the Birmingham Corn Exchange for a series of public
lectures. He decided to make their tone popular and provide cheap off-prints to those who
attended. These lectures were his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England and
they were delivered weekly, beginning on 30 June and finishing on 1 September 1851.

In total there were nine lectures:

1. Protestant view of the Catholic Church

2. Tradition the sustaining power of the Protestant view
3. Fable the basis of the Protestant view
4. True testimony insufficient for the Protestant view
5. Logical inconsistency of the Protestant view
6. Prejudice the life of the Protestant view
7. Assumed principles of the intellectual ground of the Protestant view
8. Ignorance concerning Catholics the protection of the Protestant view
9. Duties of Catholics towards the Protestant view

which form the nine chapters of the published book. Following the first edition, a number of
paragraphs were removed following the Achilli trial as "they were decided by a jury to constitute
a libel, June 24, 1852."[63]

Andrew Nash describes the Lectures as: "an analysis of this [anti-Catholic] ideology, satirising it,
demonstrating the false traditions on which it was based and advising Catholics how they should
respond to it. They were the first of their kind in English literature."[64]

John Wolffe assesses the Lectures as:

an interesting treatment of the problem of anti-Catholicism from an observer whose partisan

commitment did not cause him to slide into mere polemic and who had the advantage of viewing
the religious battlefield from both sides of the tortured no man's land of Littlemore.[65]

The response to the Lectures was split between Catholics and Protestants. Generally, Catholics
greeted them with enthusiasm. A review in The Rambler, a Catholic periodical, saw them as
"furnishing a key to the whole mystery of anti-Catholic hostility and as shewing the special point
of attack upon which our controversial energies should be concentrated."[66] However, some
Catholic theologians, principally Dr John Gillow, President of Ushaw College, perceived
Newman's language as ascribing too much to the role of the laity. Gillow accused Newman of
giving the impression that the Church's infallibility resides in a partnership between the hierarchy
and the faithful, rather than falling exclusively in the teaching office of the Church, a concept
described by Pope Pius IX as the 'ordinary magisterium' of the Church. [67] The Protestant
response was less positive. Archdeacon Julius Hare said that Newman "is determined to say
whatever he chooses, in despite of facts and reason".[68]

Wilfrid Ward, Newman's first biographer, describes the Lectures as follows:

We have the very curious spectacle of a grave religious apologist giving rein for the first time at
the age of fifty to a sense of rollicking fun and gifts of humorous writing, which if expended on
other subjects would naturally have adorned the pages of Thackeray's Punch.[69]

Ian Ker has raised the profile of Newman's satire.[70] Ker notes that Newman's imagery has a
"savage, Swiftian flavour" and can be "grotesque in the Dickens manner".[71]

Newman himself described the Lectures as his "best written book."[72]

Achilli trial

Caricature of Newman by "Spy", published in Vanity Fair in 1877

One of the features of English anti-Catholicism was the holding of public meetings at which ex-
Catholics, including former priests, denounced their prior beliefs and gave detailed accounts of
the horrors of Catholic life. Giacinto Achilli (1803–1860), an ex-Dominican friar, was one such
speaker.

In 1833 Achilli, author of Dealings with the inquisition: or, Papal Rome, her priests, and her
Jesuits... (1851), had been made Master of Sacred Theology at the College of St. Thomas, the
future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.[73]

Nash describes Achilli's journey to England thus:

[Achilli] had been imprisoned (in a monastery) by the Inquisition for heresy, he claimed, but
actually for a series of sexual offences against under-age young women. He had been "rescued"
from the Inquisition by a group of English ultra-Protestants as a hero six months before the Papal
Aggression crisis broke. He was received by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, greeted a
public meeting at Exeter Hall with a specially written hymn, "Hail Roman prisoner, Hail" and
given a chapel in London. His Dealings with the Inquisition was a best seller. In his public
lectures, sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance, he professed to the errors of Catholicism and to
be a sincere Protestant, and his exciting account of the cruelties of the Inquisition made him a
credible and popular anti-Catholic speaker.[74]

In July 1850, Wiseman wrote a detailed exposé of him in The Dublin Review which listed all of
his offences. Newman therefore assumed, after seeking legal advice, that he would be able to
repeat the facts in his fifth lecture in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in
England.

In these lectures, Newman denounced various anti-Catholic utterances. These included those of
the Maria Monk, the allegation of cells under his own Oratory on Hagley Road, Birmingham and
those of Giacinto Achilli. Newman emphasises the importance of responding to Achilli:

For how, Brothers of the Oratory, can we possibly believe a man like this [Achilli], in what he
says about persons and facts, and conversations, and events, when he is of the stamp of Maria
Monk, of Jeffreys, and of Teodore, and of others who have had their hour, and then been
dropped by the indignation or the shame of mankind.[75]

The section of the lecture that was decided by jury to constitute a libel was:

I have been a Catholic and an infidel; I have been a Roman priest and a hypocrite; I have been a
profligate under a cowl. I am that Father Achilli, who as early as 1826, was deprived of my
faculty to lecture, for an offence which my superiors did their best to conceal; and who in 1827
had already earned the reputation of a scandalous friar. 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.[76] I am he, who
afterwards was found guilty of sins, similar or worse, in other towns of the neighbourhood. I am
that son of St. Dominic who is known to have repeated the offence at Capua, in 1834 or 1835;
and at Naples again, in 1840, in the case of a child of fi[f]teen. I am he who chose the sacristy of
the church for one of these crimes, and Good Friday for another. Look on me, ye mothers of
England, a confessor against Popery, for ye 'ne'er may look upon my like again.' I am that
veritable priest, who, after all this, began to speak against, not only the Catholic faith, but the
moral law, and perverted others by my teaching. I am the Cavaliere Achilli, who then went to
Corfu, made the wife of a tailor faithless to her husband, and lived publicly and travelled about
with the wife of a chorus-singer. I am that Professor of the Protestant College at Malta, who with
two others was dismissed from my post for offences which the authorities cannot get themselves
to describe. And now attend to me, such as I am, and you shall see what you shall see about the
barbarity and profligacy of the Inquisitors of Rome.

You speak truly, O Achilli, and we cannot answer you a word. You are a Priest; you have been a
Friar; you are, it is undeniable, the scandal of Catholicism, and the palmary argument of
Protestants, by your extraordinary depravity. You have been, it is true, a profligate, an
unbeliever, and a hypocrite. Not many years passed of your conventual life, and you were never
in the choir, always in private houses, so that the laity observed you. You were deprived of your
professorship, we own it; you were prohibited from preaching and hearing confessions; you were
obliged to give hush-money to the father of one of your victims, as we learned from an official
document of the Neapolitan Police to be 'known for habitual incontinency;' your name came
before the civil tribunal at Corfu for your crime of adultery. You have put the crown on your
offences, by as long as you could, denying them all; you have professed to seek after truth, when
you were ravening after sin.[77]

The libel charge was officially laid against Newman in November. Under English law, Newman
needed to prove every single charge he had made against Achilli. Newman requested the
documents that Wiseman had used for his article in the Dublin Review but he had mislaid them.
He eventually found them but it was too late to prevent the trial.

Newman and his defence committee needed to locate the victims and return them to England. A
number of the victims were found and Maria Giberne, a friend of Newman, went to Italy to
return with them to England. Achilli, on hearing that witnesses were being brought, arranged for
the trial to be delayed. This put Newman under great strain as he had been invited to be the
founding rector of the proposed Catholic University in Dublin and was composing and delivering
the lectures that would become The Idea of a University.

On 21 June 1852, the libel trial started and lasted three days.[78] Despite the evidence of the
victims and witnesses, Achilli denied that any of it had happened; the jury believed him and
found Newman guilty of libel. The injustice of the verdict was widely recognised:

a great blow has been given to the administration of justice in this country, and Roman Catholics
will have henceforth only too good reason for asserting that there is no justice for them in
matters tending to rouse the Protestant feelings of judges and juries.[79]

A second trial was not granted and sentencing was postponed. When sentencing occurred,
Newman did not get the prison sentence expected but got a fine of £100 and a long lecture from
Judge John Taylor Coleridge about his moral deterioration since he had become a Catholic.
Coleridge later wrote to Keble:

It is a very painful matter for us who must hail this libel as false, believing it is in great part
true—or at least that it may be.[80]

The fine was paid on the spot and while his expenses as defendant amounted to about £14,000,
they were paid out of a fund organised by this defence committee to which Catholics at home
and abroad had contributed; there was £2,000 left over which was spent on the purchase of a
small property in Rednal, on the Lickey Hills, with a chapel and cemetery, where Newman was
eventually buried.

Achilli, despite his victory, was discredited. Newman removed the libellous section of the fifth
lecture and replaced them by the inscription:
De illis quae sequebantur / posterorum judicium sit – About those things which had followed /
let posterity be the judge.[81]