The life and times of Cardinal Wiseman

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Preface

The Life of Cardinal Wiseman had been twice in preparation before the present work was written. Cardinal Manning collected materials for it in 1865, immediately after Wiseman's death. The Biography, however, was never actually begun until the late Father Morris, SJ., undertook it in 1893.

After Father Morris's death, Cardinal Vaughan asked me to write the Life, placing at my disposal the correspondence and other documents collected by Cardinal Manning and Father Morris. Cardinal Vaughan has, however, left me quite free in regard to the views incidentally expressed in the Biography, and has given me equal freedom in selecting from the documents for the purpose of publication.^

Father Morris's sketch of the first chapter has

^ Many of the documents belong to Ushaw College, to which they were left by Monsignor Thompson, one of Cardinal Wiseman's literary legatees. I have to thank the President of Ushaw for his courtesy in allowing me to use them.

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been used in the present work, only for some of the facts it contains. The chapter itself has been rewritten. His graphic account of the ' Errington case/ however, based as it is on his own personal recollections, has been given almost entire. These were the only portions of his book which he left

behind him.

Only a comparatively brief selection has been made from Cardinal Wiseman's large foreign correspondence— the letters selected being chiefly from Dollinger and from members of the French Episcopate, on matters of international interest.

In touching on the history of the movement for Italian unity, with which Wiseman's long residence in Rome brought him in close contact, I have relied mainly on Mazzini's ' Life and Works,' Chevalier O'Clery's two books, ' The Italian Revolution ' and ' The Making of Italy,' and on the documents collected by M. de St. Albin in his ' History of Pius IX.' The long and important political Meniorandinn drawn up and presented by Wiseman himself to Lord Palmerston in the crisis of 1847, i^i the capacity of informal diplomatic envoy of Pius IX., is here published for the first time. Its presentation was immediately responded to by the mission of Lord Minto to Rome.

That part of Cardinal Wiseman's career which

PREFACE VI i

concerns his work for the Catholic body in England, is too important not to be dealt with fully in his Life. But I trust that its close bearing on the history of the Oxford Movement,^ and its historical importance as viewed in the light of the dramatic story of the English Catholics since the Reformation, will give even to this aspect of his career an interest for readers who are not his coreligionists.

His influence on the course of the Oxford Movement, and his connexion with its leaders ; his association, during the twenty years of his residence in Rome, with many whose names are familiar to Englishmen ; his connexion, as Curator of the Arabian MSS. in the Vatican Library, with the great Orientalists of the day, and his own early researches in that department ; his correspondence and intercourse with Newman, Manning, Lord Houghton, Dollinger, Lamennais and others, as well as his combat with the * Times ' and the whole English nation in the almost unprecedented (though evanescent) agitation against the ' Papal Aggression, have, of course, a more general interest.

^ The revival of English Catholic zeal by Wiseman began exactly two years after the Oxford Movement had been inaugurated. * The reanimation of the Church of Rome in England,' writes Dr. Liddon [Life of Pusey, ii. 4), * was quickened in no small degree by the arrival [in 1835] of a divine whose accomplishments and ability would have secured him influence and prominence in any age of the Roman Church. ' This was Dr. Wiseman.

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writer can only hope that he may succeed in imparting to his readers some at least of the great interest (to him largely unexpected) which he has derived from the study both of the Cardinal's personality and of his career. Some of the events recorded, though long past, seem to supply the key to more recent developments of religious thought, which occupy the attention of many of us. And the Cardinal himself, highly gifted though he was intellectually and morally, was also abundantly endowed with those specially human qualities, which command the interest of students of life and character in every age.

Eastbourne : November^ 1897.

Contents

OF

THE FIRST VOLUME

CHAPTER PAGE

CHAPTER I BOYHOOD 1802-18 i8

Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman claimed descent

from Capel Wiseman.. Protestant Bishop of Dromore, the third son of Sir William Wiseman, Bart, and great-grandson of Sir John Wiseman, one of the Auditors of the Exchequer in the reign of Henry VHI. This family, now represented by Sir William Wiseman, of Caulfield, Essex, acknowledged the kinship at the time of Cardinal Wiseman's death — the then head of the family. Admiral Sir William Wiseman, attending the funeral service at the Catholic Cathedral at Sydney (where he chanced to be staying), as a mark of respect to a deceased kinsman. The pedigree has, however, never been exactly ascertained.

James Wiseman, the grandfather of the Cardinal was a merchant resident in Waterford, and a Catholic. VOL. I B

He appears to have migrated to Seville towards the end of the last century. His youngest son, James, the Cardinal's father, was a Spanish merchant in Seville. He was twice married, first to the daughter of a Spanish general, and next to Miss Xaviera Strange, a member of the family of Strange of Aylwardstown Castle, Co. Kilkenny. One of his daughters by the first wife married Mr. John Tucker; and her only child, Xaviera, became the wife of Mr. William Burke of Knocknagur, and the mother of the present Sir Theobald Burke of Glinsk and of Thomas Henry Burke who was murdered in the Phoenix Park, in company with Lord Frederick Cavendish, in 1882. Nicholas Wiseman was the son of James Wiseman by his second wife, and was born in Seville on August 2, 1802.^ Seville recognised her distinguished son at the time of his death, and a resolution was passed by the Municipal Council to call the street in which he was born Calli del Cardendl Wiseman?

His mother laid him, as an infant, upon the altar of the Cathedral of Seville, and consecrated him to the service of the Church. His intimate friend Cardinal Manning was wont to trace in some of his religious tastes and ideals the influence of the early associations of Catholic Spain. ' The first stratum of his mind,' he wrote, ' was deeply tinged by the soil in which he was born. There was about him to the end of life a certain grandeur of conception in all that

» Cardinal Wiseman had one brother, James (older than himself), and one sister, Frasquita, who became Countess Gabrielli of Fano in Italy. ^ The street is now called Calli Fabiola^, related to the works, the creations and the worship of the Church, which is evidently from Catholic Spain. . . . He had been born in an atmosphere of Catholic splendour, and all his conceptions and visions of the sanctuary were as he had seen them in childhood, and as it ought to be, rather than as it is in the chill and utilitarianism of Modern England.'

One little trait of character in his earliest childhood may be mentioned. A relation of Cardinal Wiseman who visited Seville in the later forties met one who remembered * little Nicholas ' as a tiny boy, always profusely generous with his sweetmeats, which he used to distribute among his playfellows.

An acquaintance of his early days at Seville was the celebrated Blanco White, so well known later on in English literary and Academic circles. Mr. White, who earned in after years a pension from the English Government for literary services, was in Wiseman's boyhood a priest.^ His subsequent abandonment of priest's orders, and ultimately of Christianity, left a very painful impression on Wiseman, the more so from early recollections of the charm of his personality. That these recollections were well founded is evident to any reader of Blanco White's memoirs, and it is interesting to gather from them

^ Cardinal Wiseman writing in 1830 to a friend thus alludes to Mr. Blanco White : ' Our fathers were both English commercial settlers at Seville and our families very intimate. . . . Blanco was spiritual director to my nearest and dearest relatives. An old friend of mine, and of Blanco's father, who comes to Rome every winter, never mentions him without tears in his eyes. He was, he says, without exception, the most pious, the most amiable and the most clever young man he ever knew, when he took orders.'

B 3 and from the * Apologia ' the mutual influence and affection which existed twenty years later between him and another future Cardinal, John Henry Newman.^ Though only three years old when he left Spain, Nicholas Wiseman used to recall in later life seeing the prize crews brought ashore at Cadiz after the battle of Trafalgar ; and he criticised Mr. Stanfield's great picture * The Victory ' as inaccurate, because his sailor at the port-hole had no pigtail. Wiseman's memory proved quite accurate, and Mr. Stanfield painted in the pigtail.

Mr. James Wiseman died in 1805, and a little later Nicholas Wiseman and his brother James were taken by their mother to her native country, sailing in the Melpomene frigate to Portsmouth. They spent two years at a boarding school at Waterford, of which we only know that it was at this time that Nicholas first acquired the English language, having as a tiny boy talked Spanish.

He passed to Ushaw College, near Durham, on March 23, 1810. Ushaw numbered at that time about ninety students, and was presided over by Dr. Thomas Eyre, a member of the well-known old Catholic family of that name. Ushaw shares with St. Edmund's College, Old Hall, the distinction of descent from the English college founded by Cardinal Allen in 1568 in the University of Douay. The college was broken up during the reign of terror, in 1793, and a remnant of its students and professors founded the two English Catholic colleges just mentioned, one in the North and the other in the South.

* See Apologiay p. 47,

The unbroken traditions which Ushaw has preserved make it in some sense the truest representative of the spirit of that great home of education, which trained, for more than two hundred years, generations of Englishmen who refused to break with the Roman See, and — during the first century of its existence — of priests who came over to England with every prospect of suffering death for their allegiance. The natural result of a long course of proscription on strong English characters is traceable in that spirit. As all hope of the return of England to the Roman communion by a change of dynasty became gradually abandoned, English Catholics assumed definitively the character of men resigned to inevitable persecution. Those who suffered for the faith looked for their reward

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in the next life, but ceased to be sanguine of the triumph of their cause in this. It was for a life of proscription for conscience sake that Douay had to prepare her sons. Great piety and strength of character, coupled with reserve in speech, avoidance of the eye of a hostile public, and a spirit of endurance rather than of enterprise, have naturally been leading features of the character which the later Douay and its successors tended to foster.

The marked spirit of Ushaw had an evident effect on Nicholas Wiseman. The habits of reserve, the deep piety and concentration of purpose, characteristic of the place, on the one hand, and on the other its tendency to keep in check flights of imagination or original speculation, appear at once to have strengthened his character and to have curbed the early development of his peculiar genius. 'Not words but deeds; the Cardinal wrote in later life, as the suitable motto for Ushaw ; and while the immediately apparent result was that many of his special gifts found little or no scope or sympathy, and failed to develop, those who knew him best recognised in the trailing he received a valuable antidote to his intense impressionableness and craving for sympathy — due perhaps in part to his share of Celtic blood — which might otherwise have proved a source of weakness, and impaired his powers of concentration. As it was, he appears to have been regarded, by those who came across him casually, as a stupid boy, and to have made few friends. At the same time others who watched his career more closely were taking note (as he learnt a little later) of his powers of application, and his masculine grasp of the subjects to which he directed his attention. He appears, in the course of a school life which gave little evidence of his subsequent brilliancy^ to have developed a taste for reading and habits of self-reliance and independent study which never deserted him. And, indeed, for fostering such habits the genius loci was well suited. Douay and Ushaw, if they were truly represented by such martyrs as Campion and Arrowsmith, were also typified by the patient and thorough research of a Challoner and a Lingard.

' The education of St. Cuthbert's College, Durham,' writes Cardinal Manning, * made him the solid manly Englishman of whom Englishmen have learnt to be proud. He described himself in a little unpublished poem ... as a *' lone unmurmuring boy,'' who studied while others played, who could find no pastime

BOYHOOD J

SO sweet as a book.' Cardinal Wiseman has left a fuller account of his characteristics as a boy in a letter written during his later years to a nephew to whom he was much attached. ' I was always considered/ he writes, • stupid and dull by my companions {when out of class\ and made hardly any friends, and never got any notice or favour from superiors. But I knew that I was reading a great deal more than others without saying a word about it, both in study time and out of it, and I made myself happy enough. I am sure I never said a witty or clever thing all the time I was at college, but I used to think a good deal. . . . The great lesson which I learnt during the desolate years of college life is . . . self-reliance, not vanity or presumption, but the determination to work for [my] self.' 1

The chief exception to the lack of notice on the part of the College authorities was in the case of the well-known historian. Dr. Lingard, who was Vice- President of Ushaw, and governed it during the interregnum from Dr. Eyre's death in May 1810 until the installation of his successor (Dr. Gillow) in June 181 1. Cardinal Wiseman writes of him :

An acquaintance begun with him under the disadvantage of ill-proportioned ages — when the one was a man and the other a child — led me to love and respect him ; early enough to leave many years after in which to test the first impressions of simpler emotions, and find them correctly directed and most soundly based. Mr. Lingard was Vice-President of the College which I entered at eight years of age, and I have retained upon my memory the vivid recollection of specific acts of thoughtful

^ In his last year at Ushaw, Nicholas Wiseman's name appears at the top of his class.

and delicate kindness, which showed a tender heart, mindful of its duties, amidst the many harassing occupations just devolved on him, through the death of the President and his own literary engagements ; for he was reconducting his first great work through the press. But though he went from college soon after, and I later left the country and saw him not again for fifteen years, yet there grew up an understanding first, and by degrees a correspondence and an intimacy between us, which continued to the close of his life.

Another of the Professors to whom Wiseman owed much was Dr. Newsham, afterwards for many years President of the College. He was a man whose remarkable gifts impressed the Oxford converts in later years ; and from the time when he was Wiseman's Professor in Syntax (in 1815), and again in Rhetoric,^ a friendship grew up between them which proved lifelong.

The traditional picture of young Wiseman's external appearance which remains at Ushaw is that of a somewhat gawky youth, with limbs ill knit together, betokening the absence of all aptitude for athletics, sauntering about with a book under his arm, oftener alone than in company. Few details of his school life are preserved. It is interesting to know that he once saw Bishop Milner, the author of 'The End of Controversy' — 'the English Athanasius,' as Cardinal Newman has styled him — a prelate whom many have concurred with Dollinger and Wiseman himself in regarding as a truly great man intellectually, as he unquestionably was a man of remarkable energy and ability. The occasion

^ * Syntax ' and ' Rhetoric ' correspond to the fourth and sixth forms of a public school.

was that of a visit, in August 1 812, of the four English Vicars Apostolic and Bishop Moylan, of Cork, to Ushaw. It was at Ushaw that Wiseman finally resolved to take Holy Orders ; and the cottage is still shown in the neighbourhood where, according to a college tradition, the future Cardinal, in the course of half an hour spent there to avoid a passing storm, made up his mind to become a priest. The first thought of devoting himself to the Biblical studies which issued in his well-known ' Horae Syriacae ' came in 1 8 16, during one of the long vacations of his schooldays, spent in the company of his friend George Errington, afterwards Archbishop of Trebizond, and closely associated with Wiseman's later career.

Nicholas Wiseman's devotion to his mother, which was so prominent in him through life, was marked in boyhood ; and for a time she came to live in Durham in order to be near her two sons at Ushaw. In the course of an afternoon spent in her house, the future hero of the * Papal Aggression ' was hooted as a * Papist ' in a contested election at Durham, being at the time a boy of ten or eleven.^

^ * Near to the place where the church now stands [in Durham] was the house of a Catholic mother, who had fixed her home in Durham that she might more carefully watch over her son, then a boy in St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw. It was more than fifty years ago, when the spirit of the English people had not yet been liberated from the possession of hatred to the Catholic faith and Church. The present generation can hardly remember what was the violence of those days. The next generation will hardly beheve it when they read it in history.

* It chanced that this Catholic boy, it may be often or twelve years old, was detained from college, under his mother's roof. It was the moment of a parliamentary election. The house opposite to their home was the principal inn in Durham. It is now the convent of the

Another recorded incident in his Ushaw life should be mentioned. He and a schoolfellow — probably James Sharpies, afterwards a Bishop and coadjutor to Dr. Brown, of the Lancashire district — formed a society for the study of Roman antiquities. They procured a plan of Rome for this purpose, and investigated, among other things, the history of the English College at Rome, of which we must speak directly. They wrote at the same time a story of Roman life entitled *Fabius.' That the joint-author of ' Fabius ' and the boy-student of Roman topography was to pass more than a third of his life in the Eternal City, and to interest tens of thousands in the fortunes of Fabius's daughter Fabiola,^ is a coincidence worth remarking.

Sisters of Mercy. An election committee was there sitting, and an election mob was gathered about the door. The spirit of party was running high, and men's blood, as is usual, was heated, and there was uproar in the street. The boy was standing at the window to see the fray. The mob caught sight of him, and assailed him with hootings of contempt, and with names which, as they are now falling into forgetfulness, I will not repeat. The Catholic mother, terrified at the increasing uproar, and fearing for the safety of her son, drew him back into the room, and out of sight.

' Again there came a day, some fifty years afterwards, when that boy, grown to manhood, stood in the midst of a still greater tumult, which upheaved the whole of England, from its highest to its lowest, with storm and tempest against the Catholic and Roman Church. Once more he stood, but now surrounded by his brethren in the Episcopate, higher than all, fearless, and appealing in calm articulate voice to the common sense of the people of England, as the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.' — Sertnons on Ecclesiastical Subjects^ by Henry Edward (Manning), Archbishop of Westminster. London: Burns & Gates, 1872, vol. ii, p. 259.

^ Some particulars as to the enormous sale of Fabiola are given in a subsequent chapter.

In 1 8 14 he chanced to be in London, and witnessed the ceremonial display in honour of the visit of the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Russia. This was also the occasion on which Cardinal Consalvi came to London as the Pope's representative at the meeting of the allied Powers — a circumstance which Wiseman's subsequent connection with that great statesman led him especially to remember. Consalvi was at that time an object of interest to all the world, from the prominent part he had taken in the long warfare between Pius VII. and Napoleon Bonaparte, the more so, perhaps, from the Emperor's known anger at his policy. His relations with the English Court were of the most cordial description, and his portrait still hangs in Windsor Castle.

Cardinal Consalvi was much impressed by the kindness of his reception in England — an impression which led to an event of great importance to Wiseman's future career, as we shall shortly see. He and his secretary, Capaccini (afterwards Cardinal, and the intimate friend of Chevalier Bunsen), used to give a humorous account of their visit to London, and of their constant anxiety lest they might offend English Protestant susceptibilities. They appeared at their first public dinners in the black coat and white tie of an English clergyman. Capaccini's health was proposed on one occasion, and he gave in reply the health of the Pope, which was accordingly drunk, for the first time probably, in such an assembly, since the reign of Queen Mary. ' But in the triumphant good humour and high spirits of the present moment,' adds Capaccini in telling the story, * anything can be done la CARDINAL WISEMAN

without offence.' Consalvi afterwards made his appearance on some state occasion, with due official sanction, in the red ferrajuolo worn by cardinals in the Vatican itself^

The unexpected cordiality of his English hosts gave Consalvi a special interest in our country, and it was at his suggestion that the Pope resolved, four years later, to open once again the English College in Rome, which had been closed since the depredations of the French in 1798. Consalvi was named * Cardinal Protector ' of the College, which was opened in 1818 ; and young Wiseman was chosen as one of the candidates for the priesthood who were to form the nucleus of the revived establishment. Five more went from Ushaw,'-^ and a few from other colleges.

The English College was the successor to an old house for the entertainment of English pilgrims in Rome, first founded by Ina, the Saxon king. This developed, about the year 1362, into a hospitiuniy placed under the care of one John Shepherd and his wife. The King of England became its patron, and named its rector. In the archives of the College is preserved a list of the pilgrims who visited Rome from year to year — many of them youths of noble family, students at the University of Bologna.

After Henry VIII.'s rupture with the Holy See the number of pilgrims diminished, and ceased altogether under Elizabeth. A bishop and several other refugees for the Catholic faith lived there until 1578,

^ Bunsen^s Life^ i. 248, and Last Four Popes^ p. 72. 2 The names of the five are James Sharpies, William Cavanagh, Henry Gillow, George Heptonstall, and J. Fleetwick.

when Gregory XIII. converted it into a College — one of those founded for the benefit of Englishmen who retained communion with the Apostolic See after the Reformation. It was, however, stipulated that should England once more become Catholic, the building should be restored to its original purpose.

Many relics of the Catholic Church of England survive there — monuments to pre-Reformation English prelates, and in later years to such champions in times of persecution, as Father Parsons and Cardinal Allen.

For upwards of two hundred years the College sent forth priests for the English mission, and the roll of martyrdoms under Elizabeth and her successors is a long one. The spot is shown where St. Philip Neri, Newman's patron, and the original founder of the Oratory, stood daily as the English students wended their way to lecture at the university, and greeted them with the salutation, ' All hail, Flowers of the Martyrs,' * Salvete, flores martyrum.'

Since the College had been pillaged during the horrors of the Revolution and French invasion of 1798, it had been uninhabited, save by the old Italian porter. The decision to restore it was taken early in 1818 ; and Dr. Gradwell, the future Rector, was already installed in the College before young Wiseman and his companions arrived.

The years from sixteen to twenty-two are for anyone critical years in the formation of tastes and character. With Nicholas Wiseman they were especially so. The expansion of his nature after the somewhat repres^ve discipline of Ushaw appears to have been complete. Intensely impressionable all through life by external objects, the very journey to Rome seems to have awakened his imagination and given elasticity to his mind. His own account of his taciturn, ' desolate' boyhood, studious, thoughtful, monotonous, contrasts quite strangely with the eager imaginativeness and love of adventure, visible in his account of his subsequent life, beginning with this change in its surroundings.

The young Englishmen embarked at Liverpool on October 2, and arrived at Leghorn late in December, after an adventurous voyage, very unlike the comfortable and brief journey to Rome of our own day. ' A fortnight was spent,' writes the Cardinal in his retrospect,^ * in beating up from Savona to Genoa, and another week in running from Genoa to Livorno ; . . . a man fell overboard and was drowned off Cape St. Vincent ; . . . a dog went raving mad from want of fresh water, and luckily, after clearing the deck, jumped or slipped into the sea ; . . .' the vessel was once at least on fire. . . . All the passengers were nearly lost in a sudden squall in Ramsey Bay, into which they had been driven by stress of weather, and where they of course landed.'

The land journey from Leghorn was nearly as uncomfortable and as full of alarm. Brigands and robbers were a constant fear to the travellers. At Pontedero the vetturino warned them to lock their doors at night, drawing his hand * significantly across his thyroid gland ; ' on the road near Bolsena trees

* In the Recollections of the last Four Popes and of Rome in their Times (London, 1858).

were being cut down with the avowed purpose of destroying the cover whence the brigands were constantly sallying ; and wayside posts were adorned by the bodies of bandits recently caught and hanged on the spot.

Those *who may now make the whole journey in four days/ writes the Cardinal, ' will indulgently understand how pleasing must have been to those early travellers' ears the usual indication by voice and outstretched whip embodied in the well-known exclamation of every vetturino, " Ecco Roma ! " '

Through the Flaminian Gate, by Monte Pincio — - at that date only a green hill without its present sculptured terraces — down the Corso, with its palaces on either side, then turning to the right by the column of Antoninus, again to the left, and then a halt at the Custom House : the whole route is detailed by the Cardinal with the vividness of the first impressions of Rome. Then onward through many streets, the Pantheon at one moment and the Farnese a little later arresting attention, till the travellers alighted at last in the Via di Monserrato at the Collegio Inglese.

The effect of the historical associations of the College on young Wiseman was immediate. Recording his sensations on first arrival, he writes : ' One felt at once at home ... it was English ground, a part of the fatherland, a restored inheritance.' The old church of Holy Trinity, adjoining the College, was still standing, though its roof was gone ; and the painting by Durante Alberti, representing the Holy Trinity and the English patron saints, St. Edmund and St. Thomas of Canterbury, formed its altar-piece. The College chapel was * illuminated from floor to roof with the saints of England/ ' It was something to see, that first day, the spot revisited by English youths, where many an English pilgrim, gentle or simple, had knelt leaning on his trusty staff cut in Need wood or the New Forest ; where many a noble student from Bologna or Padua had prayed as he had been lodged and fed in forma pauperis^ when before returning home he came to visit the tomb of the Apostles. . . . Around lay scattered memorials of the past. One splendid monument, erected to Sir Thomas Dereham at the bottom of the church, was entirely walled up and so invisible.' There were traces, too, of the havoc wrought by the French invaders of '98. ' Shattered and defaced lay the richly efifigied tombs of an Archbishop of York and a Prior of Worcester, and of many other English worthies ; while sadder wreckage of the recent storm was piled on one side — the skull and bones of perhaps Cardinal Allen, Father Parsons and others, whose coffins had been dragged up from below and converted into munitions of war. And if there needed a living link between the young generation at the door and the old one that had passed into the crypt of that venerable church, there it was in the person of the more than octogenarian porter Vincenzo, who stood, all salutation, from the wagging appendage to his grey head to the large silver buckles on his shoes, mumbling toothless welcomes in an as yet almost unknown tongue, but full of humble joy and almost patriarchal affection, on seeing the haunts of his own youth repeopled/