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Caroline, the lost love of the Cardinal
Henry Manning is remembered as a former Anglican who rose to prominence in the Roman Catholic Church. The wife of his early, brief marriage also deserves to be remembered, says Jonathan Luxmoore
 West Sussex connection: above: Henry Edward Manning by George Frederic Watts, 1882 |
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‘INTO THIS little book my dearest wife wrote her prayers and meditations. . . All the good I may have done, all the good I may have been, I owe to her.” The final words of an old man on his deathbed would hardly be remarkable had they not come from a Roman Catholic cardinal. That they were spoken by Henry Edward Manning, one of the principal church leaders of Victorian England, and were recounted for posterity by his successor, gives them a special poignancy. The life of Caroline Sargent, to whom Manning was briefly but happily married before becoming a Roman Catholic priest, has been veiled in silence for 170 years. But what is certain is that her early death left a wound from which he never recovered. “To accuse the Roman Catholic Church of marginalising her would be too much,” said Fr James Pereiro, Manning’s most recent biographer. “But remarkably little is known about her. What we do know is that she had a deep influence, and that her death was a tremendous shock which left him in floods of tears each time the tragic anniversary came around.” Caroline was the fourth of five daughters of the Revd John Sargent, Rector of Graffham with Woollavington, a benefice nestling under the South Downs and including the Sargent estate, Lavington Park, and the civil parish of East Lavington. For all its idyllic calm, the surrounding county of West Sussex was the setting for the 1829-30 Swing Riots, when farmworkers rebelled against wage cuts and new threshing machines. In a rare surviving letter, Caroline wrote how the rioters threatened to burn barns and “have the parson’s head”, they left her father wishing to “barricade us into the house for the winter”. Manning met Caroline, four years his junior, in January 1833. He had recently been ordained priest in the Church of England, and arrived, aged 25, as Mr Sargent’s curate. Although the Sargent household was run strictly, with no games or dancing allowed, it was also a warm and loving one. “I fear the ladies of the house will make you idle,” Manning’s former Oxford tutor, John Henry Newman, cautioned in a letter. “You will be lounging and idling with them all day.” A contemporary described the Sargent daughters as having “beauty of no ordinary kind”. By Easter 1833, Caroline and Manning were engaged. When Caroline’s father died suddenly that May, Manning was allowed to take over the parish. “I loved the little church under the green hillside, where the morning and evening prayers and the music of the English Bible for 17 years became a part of my soul,” he later recorded. “If there was no eternal world, I could have made it my home.”The couple were married at Woollavington Church on 7 November 1833 by Caroline’s brother-in-law, Samuel Wilberforce, a son of the great abolitionist, who went on to become Bishop of Oxford and later of Winchester. |
 Caroline's gravestone in the graveyard at Wollavington, a stone's throw from the Sargent family home |
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The honeymoon, at the house of Manning’s sister in Kent, was clearly blissful. “My dearest Mrs Sargent,” the young priest enthused a day after the wedding to his new mother-in-law — who was worried about her daughter’s fragilty — “I can send you an account of dearest Caroline, which you will hardly believe. She is at the moment dancing and singing, without a single evidence of fatigue or indisposition.”
LITTLE is known about the marriage, other than that it was consistently happy. “Nothing is more beautiful in the natural order,” Manning wrote glowingly of his life at Lavington. It was also tragically short. Caroline was indeed frail; and by early 1837 she was stricken with influenza, which soon developed into consumption, or pulmonary TB. “I try to leave all in God’s hands — but it is very, very difficult,” Manning wrote to Newman. His young wife wasted away, running high fevers and coughing blood. “No man knows what it is to watch the desire of his eyes fading away.”
Caroline was just 25 when she died in the early evening of 24 July 1837. Samuel Wilberforce described her burial a day later “in the beautiful shadow of the peaceful churchyard”, a stone’s throw from the Sargent family home, remarked that Manning appeared “calm and quiet”.
For the 29-year-old clergyman, however, it was a devastating blow. Manning threw himself into his pastoral work. But his longing for his dead wife was “like a furnace”, he confided to Wilberforce.
His mother-in-law, Mary Sargent, fulfilled Caroline’s dying wish by nursing him through his mourning. When he fell ill a year later, she slept on a sofa at his rectory bedside. “He was obliged to take from his neck the chain that has long hung there this last year, and I saw her locket and the two dear rings he himself took from her fingers and I fancied she was there herself,” Mrs Sargent told her daughter, Emily. “As I was watching him sleeping, I saw her lovely smile when she looked at me and said, ‘I am sure Mama you will do all you can to take care of Henry.’ I felt [I was] fulfilling her wishes and was comforted.” On Caroline’s second anniversary, his mother-in-law, found him “in quite an agony of tears”.
Death would haunt the Sargent family. Caroline’s oldest sister, Charlotte, had died in 1818, and her brothers, John and Henry, in 1829 and 1836, both aged just 20. Of her three surviving sisters, all of whom married clergymen, Emily, a gifted artist, would follow in 1841, aged 34, and Sophia in 1850. Of the seven Sargent children, only Sophia had children of her own. Only Mary, who married Henry Wilberforce, outlived her mother to reach 67.
Manning himself remained at Lavington for a further 14 years, becoming Archdeacon of Chichester in 1841, and coming close to the Oxford Movement, which was centred on his old university. He had made the first of many visits to Rome a year after Caroline’s death with a younger Oxford friend, William Gladstone, the future Prime Minister. In 1847, two years after Newman’s secession to Roman Catholicism, another Rome visit brought him two audiences with Pope Pius IX.
By now, Manning was at the heart of the Anglican establishment, and was even tipped as a future Archbishop of Canterbury. But the Church of England was deeply divided over issues of authority and independence. Declining a chaplaincy to Queen Victoria, he finally resigned his Lavington parish in 1850 in reaction to the Gorham judgment, in which the Privy Council ordered the installation of a controversial theologian as a parish rector.
Manning was received into the Roman Catholic Church in April 1851, and was re-ordained two months later, having concluded that the Church of his birth was under the thumb of secular powers. Fourteen years later, he succeeded Nicholas Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster, becoming an architect of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870, and a cardinal in 1875.
As head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, he bought the site for Westminster Cathedral, and was credited with turning what had been known derisively as the “Italian Mission” into a social and cultural force to rival the Established Church.
A FRIEND of Newman, who fell out with Manning over his Ultramontane sympathies, reputedly joked that Caroline’s death had been “the greatest calamity” to afflict the English Church, by opening up Manning’s path to Rome. Manning himself revealed little about his short-lived marriage.
In 1851, the year he became a Roman Catholic, he talked of spending time “looking over and destroying papers” at Lavington Rectory. He appears to have removed references to married life from his diaries and notebooks.
A first biography by Arthur Hutton, published in 1892, contained only the briefest of mentions of his “young and beautiful wife”, noting only that Caroline’s death brought “a new and lasting sadness”. A Catholic Truth Society biography in 1896 contained just three lines about Caroline. Another, on Manning’s secession, declined to give her name.
Such reticence fuelled rumours. It was said that Manning had largely forgotten Caroline, even seeing her death as a deliverance by freeing him to pursue his Roman Catholic career. The claim owed much to a spicy portrait by Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians (1918) used primitive psychological methods to “penetrate” Manning’s inner character, and claimed that Caroline’s memory “seemed to be blotted from his mind”.
Robert Grey, a more recent Manning biographer, dismisses Strachey’s “vicious and snide insinuation”. Manning may well have seen Caroline’s death as fulfilling some divine purpose, Grey concedes. “But there’s no doubt about her importance in his life,” the historian said. “Perhaps some church people would have preferred to write her out of history. But claims about his own indifference or neglect are typical of the kind of hostility Manning attracted from his opponents.”
In reality, his devotion to Caroline was well attested. Witnesses recorded how Manning had composed sermons sitting on a wall near his wife’s grave, and preserved the rectory living- room as she left it, with her workbox in place and a miniature of Caroline on his desk. Years after her death, he complained to Newman of how he faced “a hard life and an empty home”.
Along with her book of prayers and meditations, Manning also carefully preserved Caroline’s letters, until they were stolen with his bag at Avignon, in France, during his journey to Rome in 1851. The Roman Catholic poet Aubrey de Vere, who was with him, recalled how the grief-stricken Manning had put up the huge sum of £100 for the “lost treasure”, offering to let the thief keep the rest of the bag. To no avail — “the loss was probably necessary,” Manning ruefully reflected, “necessary to sever all bonds to earth.” |
 St Peter's, Woollavington |
| ALTHOUGH Manning made few references to Caroline’s influence, evidence suggests he was well aware of it. “What would she have thought of what I am doing, feeling, and believing?” he confided to Caroline’s sister, Mary Wilberforce, 12 years after her death. Manning’s biographer thinks the debt was extensive. Although the future cardinal was close to the High Church tradition during his Lavington years, the warm Evangelical faith of the Sargents, some of whom later followed him to Rome, helped deepen his spirituality. “Manning was never dogmatically Evangelical,” Fr Pereiro said. “But Caroline and her sisters added the warmth of a large, sweet, strongly united family, with its singing and devotion, to his spiritual make-up, something he hadn’t experienced before.” Manning’s keen interest in Christian education also owed something to Caroline, who taught in the parish school and handed out presents at Christmas to the Lavington children. Meanwhile, her influence could be detected in Manning’s notion of the Church’s social responsibility, which led him to speak out in defence of the rural poor. His mediation in the great London Dockers Strike of 1889, and his key contributions to Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on labour, a year before his death, could be traced back to preoccupations first nurtured at Lavington. Perhaps the personal loss also helped confirm his belief in clerical celibacy. Although marriage transformed Manning’s life, and proved deeply humanising, Fr Pereiro thinks Caroline’s early death had a “tremendous, seismic impact”, which he attempted to cope with by closing in on himself. “Manning remained a deeply emotional person throughout his life,” Fr Pereiro says. “But he didn’t let much out, fearing he could easily lose control of his feelings. Although he was very close to other women, particularly from his own family, finding great support in them, none of this ever came close to what he had experienced with Caroline.” There were hints of his own experience of intimate entanglements in one of his key works, The Eternal Priesthood (1883). “Our perfection of His friendship will vary in the measure in which we maintain our liberty from all unbalanced human attachment,” the Cardinal wrote. “If we be weak and wander to human friendships, we shall soon find that there is no rest anywhere else.” Manning visited Lavington for the last time in the late 1880s. He stood in silence at Caroline’s grave, explaining to Reginald Wilberforce, who now owned the Sargent estate, why, after originally ordering a cross, he left it unmarked. “I could not put on it the inscription I should have wished,” he told Wilberforce. And yet a rose from the graveside was brought to his Westminster residence each year by a great- niece, Dorothy Wilberforce, who recounted to another biographer, David Newsome, how the aged cardinal kissed the rose with tears in his eyes. G. K. Chesterton’s description of Manning in his last years as “a ghost clad in flames” was a long way from the dynamic young preacher who had so stirred the Sargent family back in the 1830s. When he died on 14 January 1892, hundreds of thousands came to view him lying in state at Brompton Oratory, and lined the roads of London for his funeral procession — a far cry from the quiet, rural solitude in which he had buried his young wife 55 years before. FEW TRACES of Caroline survive. When Lavington Park, now Seaford College, was finally sold in 1903, Reginald Wilberforce’s wife, Anna, described how she set up a simple gravestone among the beech trees behind the church, where Caroline lay “in her loveliness” alongside her sisters Emily, Sophia and Mary, after the family grew worried “that no one would know whose grave it was”. A small plaque in Chichester Cathedral recalls Manning’s gift of a window in his wife’s memory. The collection of Caroline’s prayers and meditations, however, which he handed on his deathbed to his successor, Herbert Vaughan, was buried with him. “Not a day has passed since her death on which I have not prayed and meditated from this book,” the Cardinal told Fr Vaughan, by his own account. “I know not to whom else to leave this.” The writer Hilaire Belloc, whose mother was became a Roman Catholic under Manning’s influence by Manning, admired the Cardinal for having “a great love affair and a great death”. What seems certain is that his passionate love for Caroline never faded, and that his four short years with her were his happiest. She deserves to be remembered as a profound influence on one of the Roman Catholic Church’s greatest leaders. |
 The former Sargent family home, now Seaford College |
