MANNING, HENRY EDWARD , English Roman Catholic cardinal, was born at Totteridge, Hertfordshire, on July 15, 1808', 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. 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, and at Balliol college, Oxford. He made his mark in the Union, where Gladstone succeeded him as president in 1830. He graduated with first-class honours in 1830, and obtained, in 1831, through Viscount Goderich, a post as supernumerary clerk in the colonial office. But he returned to Oxford in 1832, 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 Nov. 7, 1833. Manning's married life was of brief duration. His young and beautiful wife was of a consumptive family, and died child less (July 24, 1837). This bereavement 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 Manning took a leading part in the Church education movement, by which diocesan boards were established through out the country; and he wrote an open letter to his bishop in criticism of the recent appointment of the ecclesiastical com mission. In December of that year he paid his first visit to Rome, and called on Dr. Wiseman in company with W. E. Glad stone. In Jan. 1841 Shuttleworth, bishop of Chichester, ap pointed him archdeacon. In 1842 he published a treatise on The Unity of the Church, and in that year he was appointed select 'Purcell's assertion that the year of his birth was 1807 rests on no trustworthy evidence.
preacher by his university. Four volumes of his sermons appeared between the years 1842 and 185o, and these had reached the 7th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd editions respectively in 185o, but were not after wards reprinted.
Newman's secession from the Church of England in 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 (after wards Hope-Scott) that he was at this time most closely associ ated. In the spring of 1847 he was seriously ill, and that autumn and the following winter he spent abroad, chiefly in Rome, where he saw Newman "wearing the Oratorian habit and dead to the world." He had public and private audiences with the pope on April 9 and May 11, 1848, but recorded next to nothing in his diary concerning them, though numerous other entries show an eager interest in everything connected with the Roman Catholic Church, and private papers also indicate that he recog nized at this time grave defects in the Church of England and an attraction in Roman Catholicism. Returning to England, he
protested, but with moderation, against the appointment of Hampden as bishop of Hereford, and continued to take an active part in the religious education controversy. Through the influence of Samuel Wilberforce he was offered the post of sub-almoner to Queen Victoria, always recognized as a stepping-stone to the episcopal bench, and his refusal of it was honourably consonant with all else in his career as an Anglican dignitary, in which he united pastoral diligence with an asceticism that was then quite exceptional.
In 185o the decision of the privy council, that the bishop of Exeter was bound to institute the Rev. G. C. Gorham to the benefice of Brampford Speke in spite of the latter's acknowledged disbelief in the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, brought to a crisis the position within the Church of England of those who believed in that Church as a legitimate part of the infallible Ecclesia docens. Manning made it clear that he regarded the matter as vital, though he did not act on this conviction until no hope remained of the decision being set aside or practically an nulled by joint action of the bishops. In July he addressed to his bishop an open letter on "The Appellate Jurisdiction of the Crown in Matters Spiritual," and he also took part in a meeting in London which protested against the decision. In the autumn of this year (185o) was the great popular outcry against the "Papal aggression" (see WISEMAN), and Manning, feeling him self unable to take part in this protest, resigned, early in Decem ber his benefice and his archdeaconry; and writing to Hope-Scott, who a little later became a Roman Catholic with him, stated his conviction that the alternative was "either Rome or licence of thought and will." He was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Brownbill, S.J., at the church in Farm Street, on Passion Sunday, April 6, 1851. On the following Sunday he was confirmed and received to communion by Cardinal Wiseman, who also, within ten weeks of his reception, ordained him priest. Manning there upon proceeded to Rome to pursue his theological studies, resid ing at the college known as the "Academy for Noble Ecclesiastics," and attending lectures by Perrone and Passaglia among others. The pope frequently received him in private audience, and in 1854 conferred on him the degree of D.D. In 1857 the pope, proprio motif, appointed him provost (or head of the chapter) of Westminster, and the same year he took up his residence in Bayswater as superior of a community known as the "Oblates of St. Charles," an association of secular priests on the same lines as the institute of the Oratory, but with this difference, that they are by their constitution at the beck and call of the bishop in whose diocese they live.