Of course it is the contributions by ‘professionals’ that catch the eye: Lucy Beckett on Pole, Clare Asquith on Robert Southwell, Roderick O’Donnell on Pugin, A. N. Wilson on Belloc. Best of all — sly, witty, compendious — is Robert Gray on Cardinal Manning.

Gray has written a biography of Manning, and here he describes him as ‘armed with a killing seriousness of purpose, supreme administrative skill, and a total absence of humour’. (This of a man he admires.) Manning began as a Church of England clergyman, well-connected and immediately promoted. When John Henry Newman converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, this gave Manning pause. He was a great admirer of central authority. ‘Something tells me,’ he noted, ‘something keeps rising and saying, “You will end in the Roman Catholic Church”.’ In 1851 that is what happened and, remarks Gray, ‘for the first time in 300 years the Catholic Church was obliged to witness within its ranks the formidable spectacle of a Balliol man on the make.’

Everyone hated Manning, including his colleagues, whom he called the ‘upper ten thousand’ of Catholics and whom Gray describes as ‘more John Bullish than John Bull, involved with agriculture, dedicated to sport (Catholics played an important part in the development of cricket), scornful of any intellectual pretension.’ All loathed him — except the Irish and the poor. He was the first to spot the importance of Irish immigration to the growth of English Catholicism. Others had only noticed how much they smelled. ‘Father Faber bemoaned “the immovable belts of stink” they brought into the London Oratory, which risked driving away worshippers of the washing classes.’ Even the gentle Newman said they reminded him of ‘the “For Gentlemen” on railway platforms’. Manning provided them with schools, refuges (and places in which to wash). He was co-opted into the Committee on Distress in London, and an official who worked with him reckoned that ‘if there had been a dozen Mannings England would have been in some danger of being converted to Christianity’. In 1892 hundreds of thousands of Londoners turned out to pay repect to his funeral procession.

David Knowles, OSB, excommunicated, disgraced, possibly the greatest historian of English monasticism; Leonard Cheshire, winner of the Victoria Cross and tireless, eccentric philanthropist: this book is a serious, complex rebalancing of the scales. Even Charles Kingsley played his part. He is not included here, obviously, but it was his remark, ‘Truth for its own sake has never been a virtue of the Roman clergy’, that drove Newman sighing to his desk, in order to write his great Apologia Pro Vita Sua.

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