Henry Edward Manning

Henry Edward Manning (July 15, 1808 - 1892), an English Roman Catholic cardinal, was born at Totteridge, Hertfordshire, being the third and youngest son of William Manning, a West India merchant, who was a director of the Bank of England and governor, 1812-1813, and who sat in Parliament for some thirty years, representing in the Tory interest Plympton Earle, Lymington, Evesham, and Penryn consecutively.

His mother, Mary, daughter of Henry Leroy Hunter, of Beech Hill, Reading, was of a family said to be of French extraction. Manning's boyhood was mainly spent at Coombe Bank, Sundridge, Kent, where he had for companions Charles and Christopher Wordsworth, afterwards bishops of St Andrews and of Lincoln. He was educated at Harrow, 1822-1827, Dr G Butler being then the head master, but obtained no distinction beyond being in the cricket eleven in 1825.

He matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1827, and soon made his mark as a debater at the Union, where Gladstone succeeded him as president in 1830. At this date he was ambitious of a political career, but his father had sustained severe losses in business, and in these circumstances Manning, having graduated with first-class honours in 1830, obtained the year following, through Viscount Goderich, a post as supernumerary clerk in the colonial office. This, however, he resigned in 1832, his thoughts having been turned towards a clerical career under Evangelical influences, which affected him deeply throughout life.

Returning to Oxford, he was elected a fellow of Merton College, and was ordained; and in 1833 he was presented to the rectory of Lavington-with-Graffham in Sussex by Mrs Sargent, whose granddaughter Caroline he married on November 7, 1833, the ceremony being performed by the bride's brother-in-law, Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards bishop of Oxford and of Winchester. Manning's married life was of brief duration. His young and beautiful wife was of a consumptive family, and died childless (July 24, 1837).

The lasting sadness that thus early overshadowed him tended to facilitate his acceptance of the austere teaching of the Oxford Tracts[?]; and though he was never an acknowledged disciple of Newman, it was due to the latter's influence that from this date his theology assumed an increasingly High Church[?] character, and his printed sermon on the "Rule of Faith" was taken as a public profession of his alliance with the Tractarians[?]. In 1838 he took a leading part in the Church education movement, by which diocesan boards were established throughout the country; and he wrote an open letter to his bishop in criticism of the recent appointment of the ecclesiastical commission. In December of that year he paid his first visit to Rome, and called on Dr Wiseman in company with WE Gladstone.

In January 1841 Shuttleworth, bishop of Chichester, appointed him archdeacon, whereupon he began a personal visitation of each parish within his district, completing the task in 1843. In 1842 he published a treatise on The Unity of the Church, and his reputation as an eloquent and earnest preacher being by this time considerable, he was in the same year appointed select preacher by his university, thus being called upon to fill from time to time the pulpit which Newman, as vicar of St Mary's, was just ceasing to occupy.

Four volumes of his sermons appeared between the years 1842 and 1850, and these had reached the 7th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd editions respectively in 1850, but were not afterwards reprinted. In 1844 his portrait was painted by Richmond, and the same year he published a volume of university sermons, in which, however, was not included the one on the Gunpowder Plot This sermon had much annoyed Newman and his more advanced disciples, but it was a proof that at that date Manning was loyal to the Church of England as Protestant. Newman's secession in 1845 placed Manning in a position of greater responsibility, as one of the High Church leaders, along with Pusey and Keble and Marriott; but it was with Gladstone and James Hope (afterwards Hope-Scott) that he was at this time most closely associated.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.