Dying Hurrell Froude's face lights up as St. John Henry Newman says goodbye

DARTINGTON, Devon, October 11, 1835 AD — Saint John Henry Newman said goodbye to his closest friend, Hurrell Froude, on Sunday evening, October 11, 1835 AD, at the rectory in Dartington, in south Devon. Froude was dying of consumption. St. John Henry Newman slept that night at Exeter on his way back to Oxford, and the two men never saw each other again.

St. John Henry Newman was 34, a Fellow of Oriel College and vicar of St. Mary’s, the University Church at Oxford. Froude, two years younger, had been ill for four years. That summer St. John Henry Newman was deep in reading the Fathers of the Church and did not want to leave Oxford. In August he told his sister Jemima that he was “very unwilling” to go, “but it is so uncertain whether he will be able to come to Oxford at all, that I think I ought to secure seeing him before he goes abroad.”

Dartington is a parish of some six hundred people two miles north of Totnes. Froude was born in its rectory. His father, Robert Hurrell Froude, Archdeacon of Totnes, was the rector. St. John Henry Newman told his sister that the country was “overpoweringly beautiful and enchanting, except to those who are resolved not to be enchanted.”

The two men met at Oriel in 1826, the year Froude was elected a Fellow. Froude brought St. John Henry Newman together with John Keble, who had been Froude’s tutor. Froude counted it the one good deed of his life: “I had brought Keble and Newman to understand each other.”

On St. John Henry Newman’s first visit to Dartington, in July 1831, Froude caught influenza after sleeping on deck on the way down the Channel to Torbay. St. John Henry Newman wrote later that it “led him by slow steps to the grave.” In December 1832 the two men sailed with Froude’s father on a voyage round the Mediterranean for Froude’s health.

In July 1833, after the Government suppressed ten Irish bishoprics, Froude and three other churchmen met at a rectory at Hadleigh, in Suffolk. They resolved to defend the Church of England’s bishops as successors of the Apostles and to keep its Prayer Book unaltered. That September St. John Henry Newman began the Tracts for the Times, short papers to the clergy, most of them written by him at first. R. W. Church, who later wrote the movement’s history, put it this way: “Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse; then Newman took up the work.”

Froude later went out to Barbados, in the West Indies, and by June 1835 he was home at Dartington. On September 12 Froude wrote to Oxford, “We shall be ready for you whenever you come.” Two doctors had examined Froude’s chest, one of them a young man who had studied the use of the stethoscope. Both told his father they had never examined a chest with less sign of disease. “Yet they say the disorder in my throat is dangerous unless stopped,” Froude wrote. A doctor had also ruled that he must not go abroad that winter.

St. John Henry Newman arrived on September 15 and stayed almost a month. He had written ahead that he would bring a pile of sermons, so that Froude could help him put together a third published volume.

St. John Henry Newman found Froude “pretty well,” but “languishing” without his friends from Oxford. He trusted he had “been of use in this way in stimulating his spirits.” Froude had been allowed to read again. St. John Henry Newman called that “a great comfort,” and was going to send him a lot of books.

On the Sunday evening, in the dark, St. John Henry Newman went to Froude to say goodbye before setting out for Exeter. St. John Henry Newman wrote afterwards: “When I took leave of him, his face lighted up and almost shone in the darkness, as if to say that in this world we were parting for ever.”

On the road home he wrote of Froude to Frederic Rogers, a Fellow of Oriel: “It is wonderful, almost mysterious, that he should remain so long just afloat; and as far as it is mysterious, it is hopeful — really it would seem as if he were kept alive by the uplifted hands of Moses.”

Froude died at Dartington on February 28, 1836 AD. On the morning of March 1 St. John Henry Newman opened the archdeacon’s letter in a friend’s room at Oriel and could only hand it to him without a word. The next day St. John Henry Newman wrote to another friend: “I can never have a greater loss.”

The archdeacon asked his son’s friends to choose books from Froude’s small collection to keep. St. John Henry Newman stood looking along the shelves until a friend beside him said, “Take that.” It was the Breviary, the book of the Church’s daily prayer, that Froude had carried with him in Barbados. Nearly thirty years later St. John Henry Newman wrote of it: “Accordingly I took it, studied it, wrote my Tract from it, and have it on my table in constant use till this day.”