Henry Edward Manning

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Edward Manning died on the 14th of January 1892, and when his estate was settled, it came to just £3,527. For a man who had spent decades as the most powerful Catholic clergyman in England, the sum was remarkably modest. But it was what the undertakers found around his neck that startled those present: a locket on a chain, and inside it, a portrait of Caroline, the wife he had buried more than half a century earlier, when he was still a Church of England rector in West Sussex. A celibate Catholic cardinal, and yet that small token had never left him.

  Manning's life raises questions that don't resolve easily. How does a man born to a slave-owning merchant banker, educated at Harrow and Oxford alongside future prime ministers, end up settling a dock strike on behalf of London's poorest labourers? How does a loyal Anglican archdeacon who published sermon after sermon defending the Church of England walk away from it in a single year? And how does a Victorian churchman whose name is largely forgotten today leave a mark on Catholic social teaching that endures more than a century after his death?

• 2. A Merchant's Son

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  Manning was born on the 15th of July 1808 at Copped Hall in Totteridge, Hertfordshire, the home of his grandfather. His father, William Manning, was a figure of considerable weight in early nineteenth-century England. William sat in Parliament for thirty years, representing four constituencies in the Tory interest: Plympton Earle, Lymington, Evesham, and Penryn, in succession. He also served as a director of the Bank of England and held the governorship in 1812-1813. He was, by the standards of the age, a prominent merchant. He was also a slave owner.

  Henry's mother, Mary, came from a French Huguenot family through her father, Henry Lannoy Hunter of Beech Hill. Her brother was Sir Claudius Stephen Hunter, 1st Baronet. The household the young Manning grew up in was one of commerce, politics, and Protestant respectability.

  His boyhood was spent mainly at Coombe Bank in Sundridge, Kent, where his companions included Charles Wordsworth and Christopher Wordsworth. Both would later become bishops, of St Andrews and Lincoln respectively. Manning attended Harrow from 1822 to 1827, during George Butler's headmastership. He played cricket for two years in the school eleven but won no particular academic distinction there.

  At Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1827 to study Classics, things were different. He rose at the Oxford Union and demonstrated a gift for argument. William Ewart Gladstone succeeded him as Union president in 1830, the same year Manning graduated with first-class honours. The two men's lives would remain entangled for decades.

• 3. The Anglican Years

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  A clerkship at the Colonial Office, obtained through the 1st Viscount Goderich in 1831, was supposed to be Manning's path into public life. His father had suffered severe financial losses, and a political career was no longer a realistic ambition. Manning resigned from the Colonial Office in 1832, drawn toward the Church under Evangelical influences, including a friendship with Favell Lee Mortimer that, by the source's account, affected him deeply throughout his life.

  Back at Oxford in 1832, he was elected a fellow of Merton College and ordained a Church of England deacon. In January 1833 he became curate to John Sargent, Rector of Lavington-with-Graffham in West Sussex. Sargent died in May of that year, and Manning succeeded him as rector through the patronage of Sargent's mother.

  On the 7th of November 1833, Manning married Caroline, John Sargent's daughter, in a ceremony conducted by the Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, her brother-in-law, who would later become Bishop of Oxford and then Winchester. The marriage ended in grief. Caroline came from a consumptive family and died childless on the 24th of July 1837.

  Manning was by then moving theologically. He never became a formal disciple of John Henry Newman, but Newman's influence pushed his thinking toward a High Church position. A printed sermon on the "Rule of Faith" publicly marked his alignment with the Tractarian movement. He took a lead in the church education movement in 1838, helped establish diocesan boards across the country, and that December paid his first visit to Rome, calling on Nicholas Wiseman at the English College, with Gladstone at his side.

  In January 1841, Philip Shuttleworth, Bishop of Chichester, appointed Manning Archdeacon of Chichester. He personally visited every parish in his district between 1841 and 1843. His 1842 treatise on The Unity of the Church added to a growing body of published work. Four volumes of sermons appeared between 1842 and 1850, reaching multiple editions by the end of that period. George Richmond painted his portrait in 1844. In that same year Manning published a volume of university sermons, deliberately omitting the one he had preached on the Gunpowder Plot, a sermon that had irritated Newman and his circle, but which Manning retained as evidence of his loyalty to the established church.

• 4. The Break

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  Newman's departure for Rome in 1845 left Manning in a position of greater Anglican responsibility, alongside figures like Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Keble. The event that finally broke Manning's allegiance was not Newman's conversion but a legal ruling five years later.

  In 1850, in what became known as the Gorham judgement, the Privy Council ruled that the Church of England was obliged to ordain a clergyman who explicitly denied that baptism had an objective regenerating effect. For Manning, this was not a procedural matter. The denial of the objective power of the sacraments was, in his view, a flat heresy, at odds with Christian tradition stretching back to the Church Fathers. What made it worse was the mechanism: a civil court, secular and governmental, was dictating doctrine to a church that claimed divine foundation. To Manning, this proved that the Church of England was not a divinely created institution but a human one, and one still under the thumb of the Crown.

  On the 6th of April 1851, Manning was received into the Catholic Church. He travelled to Rome, where he took a doctorate at the academy. On the 14th of June 1851, he was ordained a Catholic priest at the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception on Farm Street. The speed of his rise within his new church reflected both his abilities and his prior reputation. He became provost of the cathedral chapter under Cardinal Wiseman, the same man he had called on in Rome thirteen years earlier.

  In 1856, Manning visited the Oblates at Milan to study whether their rule could be adapted to Westminster's needs. The following year, at Wiseman's direction, he established the mission of St Mary of the Angels in Bayswater, created to serve the labourers then building Paddington Station. He also founded, at Wiseman's request, the Congregation of the Oblates of St Charles, a community of secular priests that both men had independently conceived of. Manning became its superior.

• 5. Cardinal and Controversialist

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  Manning became Archbishop of Westminster in 1865, the second person to hold that office. In 1875 he was created Cardinal-Priest of Ss Andrea e Gregorio al Monte Celio. Three years later he took part in the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIII.

  His close relations with Pope Pius IX and his strongly ultramontane convictions gave him considerable standing at the Holy See. At the First Vatican Council in 1870, Manning was among the most forceful advocates for defining the doctrine of papal infallibility. Cardinal Newman believed the doctrine but judged it unwise to define it formally at that moment. Manning had no such reservations.

  As Archbishop, he oversaw the acquisition of the site for Westminster Cathedral. His sustained focus, however, was on Catholic education. He worked to build an expanded system of Catholic schooling, including the Catholic University College in Kensington, which did not survive long. His published output continued: works such as The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost in 1865, Petri Privilegium in 1871, The Glories of the Sacred Heart in 1876, and The True Story of the Vatican Council in 1877 ranged across theology, church governance, and Roman affairs. In 1883 he published The Eternal Priesthood, which became his most influential book. Manning argued there that the priesthood was, in and of itself, an outstanding path to perfection, even a state of perfection. He pressed for a rigorous conception of the priest's moral duties and insisted the priest must serve his community as more than a dispenser of the sacraments. Reviewers described the tone as austere and glacial compared with his polemical writings.

• 6. Labour, Justice, and Dissent

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  In 1888, the journalist and social activist Virginia Crawford, herself an English Catholic, interviewed Manning for The Pall Mall Gazette. The conversation touched on the direction of the Church's engagement with the poor. Manning's thinking on these questions had practical consequences: in 1889 he played a significant role in settling the London dock strike, acting at the behest of Margaret Harkness.

  Several scholars credit Manning as a key contributor to Rerum novarum, the papal encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII that established the foundations of modern Catholic social justice teaching. His warm relationship with the Holy See, built during the Pius IX years, gave him a channel through which his social views reached Rome directly.

  His influence extended to individual conversions as well. Elizabeth Belloc, mother of the writer Hilaire Belloc, was among those Manning helped bring into the Catholic Church. His thinking had a lasting effect on Hilaire Belloc himself.

  Manning's social concern did not extend in all directions equally. In 1871, at St Mary Moorfield, he stated publicly that he hoped English women would resist, by what he called a stern moral refusal, the pressure to enter the public conflicts of men. He was explicitly opposed to women's suffrage. His record on animal welfare stood on different ground: he was a founding member of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection and served as its vice-president. At the society's annual meeting in June 1881, he condemned vivisection as inhumane and of doubtful scientific benefit. In 1887 he stated that vivisection was not "the way that the all-wise and all-good maker of us all has ordained for the discovery of the healing arts."

• 7. After Death

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  Manning died on the 14th of January 1892. He was buried at St Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green. In 1907, his remains were moved to Westminster Cathedral, the site he had secured for the Church during his years as Archbishop.

  The encyclical Rerum novarum, to which scholars trace his influence, continues to be cited as the document that launched the tradition of modern Catholic social teaching. Manning's translation of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis from the Italian, published in 1863, represents a quieter corner of his legacy, distinct from the polemics and the doctrinal battles. The locket found around his neck in 1892 contained the portrait of Caroline Sargent, the wife he had outlived by fifty-five years.