St. John Henry Newman resigns the Oxford place he wanted for life

LITTLEMORE, near Oxford, October 3, 1845 AD — Saint John Henry Newman resigned his Fellowship of Oriel College, Oxford, today, twenty-three years after he won it. He wrote from Littlemore to Edward Hawkins, the Provost, who is the head of the college. He asked Hawkins to take his name off the books of the college and of the University, the lists of their members. He gave no reason.

St. John Henry Newman is forty-four and a clergyman of the Church of England. A movement in defence of that church is now twelve years old, and he was its leader. He gave up his place at the head of the movement in the spring of 1841 AD. Since then he has come to believe that the Church of England is in the wrong and the Catholic Church in the right. His friends still hope he will stay in the Church of England, and Oxford is waiting to learn whether he will leave it. He has warned his friends privately and has said nothing in public.

A Fellow of Oriel is one of the men who run the college: the Fellows elect new Fellows and choose the Provost, and a Fellowship brings an income. With his name off the college’s books he also loses his place in Convocation, the body of graduates that governs the University.

St. John Henry Newman was elected on April 12, 1822 AD, at twenty-one, to a place that half the young graduates of Oxford wanted. The Provost’s butler came to his lodgings with the news and found him playing the violin. St. John Henry Newman answered “Very well” and went on playing until the man had gone, then threw the violin down and ran to the college. The bells of three towers were rung for his election, and he had to pay for the ringing. Until then he had been unknown and short of money. The election gave him an income and a reputation, and he never wished for anything higher than to live and die a Fellow of Oriel.

Hawkins was a Fellow of Oriel then, and in those first years he did much to form the younger man’s mind. He taught him to weigh his words, read his first sermons and criticised them severely. In 1828 AD the Fellows chose a new Provost. St. John Henry Newman backed Hawkins, and his support did much to win Hawkins the election. The next year the two men fell out. St. John Henry Newman, by then a tutor, held that a tutor was a pastor to his pupils and not only their lecturer. Hawkins disagreed, and as Provost he stopped sending pupils to St. John Henry Newman. In the summer of 1832 AD St. John Henry Newman handed the last two or three over to the Provost.

St. John Henry Newman kept the Fellowship. In 1842 AD he left Oxford for Littlemore, a village in his parish, and lived there with several younger men in prayer, fasting and seclusion. In September 1843 AD he resigned as vicar of St. Mary’s, the University church. St. John Henry Newman told his eldest sister that month: “I am so drawn to the church of Rome, that I think it safer, as a matter of honesty, not to keep my living.”

“By November I expect to have resigned my Fellowship,” St. John Henry Newman wrote this April to a friend, James Mozley. In the same letter he told Mozley, “All that is dear to me is being taken from me.”

In the past few days two of the men who lived with him at Littlemore wrote to tell him they had been received into the Catholic Church.

Today St. John Henry Newman sent the Provost his letter and wrote a second, to Edward Bouverie Pusey. Pusey became his friend when both were Fellows of Oriel, and later one of the leaders of the movement alongside him.

“I have written to the Provost to-day to resign my Fellowship,” St. John Henry Newman told Pusey. “Anything may happen to me now any day.”