He wins Oxford's top prize and keeps playing his violin

OXFORD, April 12, 1822 AD — On Friday, April 12, 1822 AD, a butler set out through Oxford with news. It was for the winner of a prize that half the young graduates in the city wanted.

The winner was Saint John Henry Newman, who was twenty-one. The prize was a Fellowship at Oriel College, the most respected college in Oxford. A Fellow was one of the men who ran a college. Less than a year and a half earlier, St. John Henry Newman had broken down in his final exams. Nobody at his own college, Trinity, thought he could win.

Twelve hours a day

St. John Henry Newman sat those exams in November 1820 AD, at nineteen, when most students were twenty-two. He was aiming for the highest honours. For twenty of the last twenty-four weeks, he got up at five or six. On average he studied more than twelve hours a day. “If one day I read only nine, I read the next fifteen,” he told a friend afterwards.

It wore him out. His turn came a day sooner than he expected, and he panicked. He struggled on for several days and then had to give up. He still got his degree. But in classics his name was in the lowest group on the honours list. That group had a mocking nickname: “Under-the-line”. “It is all over, and I have not succeeded,” he wrote to his father.

At the end of 1821 AD he decided to try for a Fellowship at Oriel. An older friend at Trinity, Mr. Kinsey, warned St. John Henry Newman’s father not to hope for too much. At Oriel, Mr. Kinsey wrote, “the struggles of the best have failed”. The head of Oriel was Provost Edward Copleston. On February 5, 1822 AD, St. John Henry Newman asked him for permission to sit the exam anyway.

Lamb cutlets and fried parsley

By the third day of the exam, the Provost and some of the other judges liked St. John Henry Newman’s papers very much. Three of them went to Trinity to find out what kind of person he was. The visit was secret. St. John Henry Newman’s tutor at Trinity, Mr. Short, did not give it away. But Mr. Short was so excited that he sent for St. John Henry Newman. He said he only wanted to ask how the exam was going.

Mr. Short was eating an early dinner before leaving Oxford. He made the young man sit down and share his lamb cutlets and fried parsley. Mr. Short found out that St. John Henry Newman meant to drop out of the exam. Mr. Short talked him into staying.

A violin in Broad Street

On Friday morning the Fellows elected St. John Henry Newman. The Provost’s butler carried the news. He found the new Fellow in his lodgings in Broad Street, playing the violin. The butler said he was afraid he had “disagreeable news to announce”. St. John Henry Newman had been elected a Fellow of Oriel and was wanted at the college at once.

St. John Henry Newman thought a servant had no business joking with him like that. He answered, “Very well,” and went on playing. The butler asked whether he had come to the wrong rooms. St. John Henry Newman told him it was all right.

As soon as the butler had gone, St. John Henry Newman threw down the violin. He ran all the way to Oriel, and shopkeepers who had heard the news bowed to him.

At Oriel he was called into the college tower to shake hands with the Provost and the Fellows. One of them was John Keble, whom St. John Henry Newman had heard called “the first man in Oxford”. “I bore it till Keble took my hand,” St. John Henry Newman wrote to his friend John William Bowden, “and then felt so abashed and unworthy of the honour done me, that I seemed desirous of quite sinking into the ground.” To his father he wrote: “I am just made Fellow of Oriel. Thank God!”

Bells rang from three towers for his election, and he had to pay for the ringing.

What St. John Henry Newman wanted most was to stay a Fellow of Oriel for the rest of his life. He gave up his Fellowship twenty-three years later. On October 3, 1845 AD, he wrote to the head of Oriel to say he was leaving.