THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CARDINAL WISEMAN BY WILFRID WARD AUTHOR OF WILLIAM GEORGE WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT WILLIAM GEORGE WARD AND THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 'WITNESSES TO THE UNSEEN' ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. WITH PORTRAIT LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 1897 All rights reserved 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, S.J., 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.1 Father Morris's sketch of the first chapter has 1 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. 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 Döllinger 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 Memorandum drawn up and presented by Wiseman himself to Lord Palmerston in the crisis of 1847, in 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 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, Döllinger, 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 reani mation 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. |