Meanwhile the government had been trying to lighten the burden of Church rates and taxes upon the Irish peasantry. How could this, in part, be financed? The Established Church of Ireland was sustained by four archbishops and eighteen bishops, somewhat excessive for the number of Irish Protestants. Why not therefore suppress ten bishoprics? It was Whately who had taught Newman to deplore Erastianism – the acceptance that the Church was a dependency of the State, a ministry of morals, whose bishops were appointed under Crown patronage by the Prime Minister. Even more questionable was the Prime Minister’s practice of choosing clergymen who would vote for his party in the House of Lords. By singular irony Whately had become Archbishop of Dublin and the opportunity was too good to miss. Newman wrote a devastating snub to his old teacher.
At this time Newman’s stock was high among the Oxford dons. Like the vast majority of the bishops he opposed the introduction of the Reform Bill, which was finally passed in 1832. The Whig reforms generated a new wave of opposition. The reforms in Ireland beggared the Protestant parish clergymen, and did not do all that much for the Roman Catholic peasantry. Nor, in the opinion of Oxford, were the reforms to lighten the burden of Church rates and other disabilities on the Dissenters any better. Yet it was at this moment that another attempt was made to enable Dissenters – Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and the like – to enter Oxford and Cambridge. If Roman Catholics and Dissenters could now sit in Parliament, why should they not be permitted to become students at Oxford and Cambridge? This was the view which Provost Hawkins and other fellows of Oriel held. Among them was Renn Dickson Hampden. He had been appointed professor of moral philosophy when Newman himself had hopes of being elected, and had written a pamphlet supporting the proposal to relax the rule requiring undergraduates to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Pamphlets flew about. Once again Newman triumphed when the proposal was voted down.
Worse was to follow. In 1836 the Regius professor of divinity died and the Whigs were still in power in London. Melbourne naturally consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury but he sent the Archbishop’s list of eight names to Whately and Copleston for comment. They advised him to reject all eight names and appoint the new professor of moral philosophy, Hampden. Newman and the young professor of Hebrew, Edward Pusey, petitioned the Hebdomadal Council (composed of the heads of the colleges) to appoint a committee to examine Hampden’s writings – in particular the Bampton Lectures he had delivered a few years previously. Were they or were they not heretical? The committee found Hampden guilty of rationalism. Amid growing excitement, with one set of proctors vetoing a vote, and their successors permitting it, various indignities and prohibitions were heaped on Hampden. The virulence of the language used infected the undergraduates, who at one point stormed the Sheldonian Theatre denouncing Hampden.
Newman had now become a different kind of don. He had become a university politician. But he remained a puzzle, because he was not playing politics along the recognised party lines. Not for him the reform of the curriculum or the structure of university committees. His concern was the orientation of the Church of England; and since nearly all dons were clergymen in holy orders, what he said concerned them. By now he had turned against science and political economy as subjects fit for Oxford. He deplored the decision to hold the British Association meeting in the university. The aim of Oxford should be to guide and purify the Church. Using all his gifts of charisma and rhetoric Newman provoked an era of controversy, bitterness and intolerance which hung like a cloud over Oxford for the next thirty years. Religion – doctrine, theology, the interpretation of the Bible, the liturgy, fasting, celibacy, the sacraments – became topics of unbridled dispute. Newman had come to regard Evangelicalism as a faith that fostered spiritual pride, a faith that was vulgar and hostile to the intellect, too liable to foster sects that broke away from the Anglican Church, too sympathetic towards those enemies of the Church, the Dissenters, and above all too self-confident that all that a soul needed to be saved was to experience conversion. Evangelicals regarded the Church of England as less important than the Invisible Church to which the elect of all sects belonged. But Newman argued that a good Christian should not consider that one single experience – his conversion – absolved him. Newman preached holiness, not conversion. Holiness was a state of mind in which day by day you sought to live a better life, a more disciplined life, under the Church’s guidance. Evangelicals were content to convert individuals but Newman wanted to convert the nation.
To Newman the independence of the Church was more important than anything else in the world. The Church – did not the Apostles’ Creed say so? – was a Catholic church, a reformed, not a Protestant church: Roman abuses had been reformed, but not the Church itself. No government, no sovereign, no Parliament, could reform God’s Church, and Erastianism – the Prime Minister exercising ecclesiastical patronage – was as evil as Protestantism. To disestablish bishoprics in Ireland was sacrilege: whether the Irish were or were not Anglicans was irrelevant. The word of God required authoritative interpretation and priests alone could interpret it because they were directly descended from the Apostles by the laying-on of hands at ordination. The Church interprets the Bible and the rubrics of the Prayer Book and looks to the Early Fathers for guidance. The old High and Dry party, centred on Christ Church, supported the Established Church. But for Newman the Church was not established by the State. It was sanctified because the Church was a holy body descended from the twelve Apostles.
These were the tenets of the Oxford Movement and Newman was its leader. Among his allies was his senior, John Keble, who preached a sermon on National Apostasy denouncing the proposal to suppress the Irish bishoprics. More influential was the young Edward Bouverie Pusey, appointed in his twenties to the Regius professorship of Hebrew by Wellington on the advice of the Dean of Christ Church. (The Duke’s supporters were mightily offended: the Bouverie family had made bitter speeches against the government; but the Duke replied against the grain of the times: ‘How could I help it when they told me he was the best man?’) Pusey’s prestige as a scholar, an Eton and Christ Church man, his aristocratic connections, gave weight to the cause. Young disciples, such as Robert Wilberforce (son of the great Evangelical opponent of the slave trade), Frederick Faber, Henry Manning, joined Newman; but one man in particular captivated Newman. That was Hurrell Froude.
Froude was a handsome, dashing young man of a well-born Devon family and Newman fell in love with him. There are always some dons who like to shock and Froude was one of them. He was a fanatic. Coming from a High Church family, he hated Protestantism, detested the Reformation and ridiculed the Thirty-Nine Articles. So did Newman’s brother-in-law Tom Mozley, who declared that the Catechism was like a millstone round the neck of the Church. The Puseyites, as they began to be called, spread their teaching through pamphlets they called ‘Tracts for the Times’ – tracts which later became learned treatises. Many of the tracts were designed to show how many medieval practices, long since abandoned, should be revived. The first tract Pusey wrote was on the spiritual benefits of fasting.
In 1836 Froude died of tuberculosis and Newman wrote a preface to his Remains, in great part a transcription of his diaries. No young man who is earnest and has a mission in life should allow his diaries to be published. Froude’s descriptions of his ascetic practices, and his self-examination of his deeds, his thoughts, his motives, revealed him to be a prig; but far more damaging were his praise of clerical celibacy, his devotion to the Virgin Mary, his contempt for the heroes of the English Reformation – Froude once said that the best thing about Cranmer was that he burned well. Before the year (1838) was out, the irrepressible champion of Protestantism, Charles ‘Golly’ Golightly, got up a subscription to raise a memorial in Oxford to the Protestant Martyrs, and impaled Newman and Pusey upon a dilemma: to contribute or not to contribute? They havered; and then withdrew. From then