Even the Duke of Wellington, as Chancellor of the University, and the last who was not himself an Oxonian, could not remain entirely remote from these quivering controversies. In the mid-thirties he had inclined to the High Church side, at least to the extent of being hostile to R. D. Hampden, another member of the Oriel constellation of circa 1820 and Melbourne’s nominee as Regius Professor of Divinity. But he soon thought the Tractarians went too far in trying to torment Hampden. Schism was the great evil, he admonished the Vice-Chancellor, worse even than heresy or impiety. And by 1844 Wellington was determined, to the brink of threatening to resign, that his nomination of the Evangelical Warden Symons of Wadham as the new Vice-Chancellor should be accepted. The Tractarians forced a vote but were overwhelmingly defeated in the Sheldonian, and Wellington responded to this victory with suitable lack of magnanimity by announcing that he would never allow such a vote again. The power of the Chancellor to nominate the Vice-Chancellor is now temporarily in abeyance, but I have found looking into these matters very instructive.
All this was well past and it was nearly nine years since Newman had last entered St Mary’s and six years since he had seen Oxford, except from the railway, when he went to Dublin in May 1852 and delivered on five successive Monday afternoons the lectures that became the first half of The Idea of a University. He records at the end - a sympathetic thought to me today - that they ‘have oppressed me more than anything else of the kind in my life’. However, he did not allow this to put him in a compromising mood towards his audience. Ladies, to his surprise it appears, were present. But he did not pay too much attention to them and wrote: ‘I fancied a slight sensation in the room when I said, not Ladies and Gentlemen, but Gentlemen.’ This may have owed less to a sense of affront at female presence, although Newman was certainly capable of feeling that, as to the fact that he constantly employed the word ‘gentlemen’ as a sort of alpenstock to lever him up the hill of an important stage in his argument. Perhaps it was to remind himself of the difference between delivering a lecture and preaching a sermon. Indeed he carried it to the almost ludicrous extent of spattering the texts of the last few Discourses, which were never publicly delivered but form to my mind the more interesting half of the whole, with this form of address.
The five delivered lectures themselves were a considerable on-the-spot success. They were listened to by high-quality attendances of about four hundred, and Newman was delighted with the quick perception of the Irish audience, just as they were with the distinction of the lecturer and the elevation of his thought. This was as well for the book for which they were written, which Newman called ‘one of my two most perfect works, artistically’ (a strong statement for any author), attracted much less critical notice and much smaller sales than his previous recent works. By contrast, its long-term resonance has been enormous, so much so that it has become impossible to dissociate from Newman the evocative phrase of The Idea of a University. John Sparrow made some attempt in his 1965 Cambridge Clark lectures to divert it on to Mark Pattison, who had a more solid influence in nineteenth-century university life than did Newman, but who lacked his capacity to arouse excitement. But Warden Sparrow, who allowed Newman, together with Matthew Arnold, a status equal to Pattison in the relevance to contemporary problems of his mid-Victorian pronouncements on universities, did not succeed in his diversionary attempt. Pattison stands with Jowett as one of the two dominating Heads of Houses of the second half of the nineteenth century, but ‘the idea of a university’ belongs to Newman, even though he never set foot in the only university that he understood between 1846 and 1877, between the ages of forty-five and seventy-six, which was by any standards a substantial and significant segment of his life. And when Professor Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale published The Idea of the University in 1992 the choice and slight variance of title was a deliberate obeisance to the persistent centrality of Newman’s thoughts on the subject.
The circumstances of Newman’s Dublin sojourn were unfavourable from a number of points of view. Just over a year earlier the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Britain, with its panoply of territorial bishops, had been established. Newman was unenthusiastic. He thought seminaries and education were more important than sees. But he was far too new a convert to be able to protest, even though he bore some of the brunt of the reaction against what was widely regarded as aggressive Catholic presumption. The Achilli case in which he was prosecuted for criminal libel against an unfrocked Dominican, who had subsequently been taken up by the Evangelical Alliance and had toured the country denouncing the corruption of Rome, is one of the most curious and ill-fitting episodes in Newman’s life. In a Birmingham lecture in the summer of 1850 Newman had drawn, without checking, on an anonymous pamphlet (in fact written by Bishop Wiseman, later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster) which denounced the personal immorality of which Achilli had been convicted by a papal court in Rome. Achilli, with his Low Church sponsors, got Newman indicted. The evidence that was essential for his defence was constantly on the point of arrival from Rome, but in spite of a special mission by two Birmingham Oratorians, it was never there when it was needed.