THE
P RTAL
September 2015
Page 9
Thoughts on Newman
Newman & Scotland
Dr Stephen Morgan examines the evidence of Blessed
John Henry Newman’s relationship with Scotland
A
year ago – on a day ominously close to the seven hundredth anniversary of the Battle of
Bannockburn – the people of Scotland voted against independence from the United Kingdom. There
were those who were surprised by the size of the margin but, despite the quite remarkable feat of the Scottish
Nationalists in winning all bar three of the country’s parliamentary seats in this May’s General Election,
there remains a very strong attachment to the Union.
In Newman’s day, unionism was the order of the day
and, despite strong calls for Home Rule in Ireland, the
idea of an independent Scotland – it was then often
called simply “North Britain” by English and Scots
alike – would have seemed almost unthinkable. That
it has become thinkable is, in part, due to a man with
whom Newman had a surprising connection.
Hope’s London home in Curzon Street against rash
steps – protest by all means, seek “sound” episcopal
patrons, but nothing more (any similarity to the
modern-day reactions to Women bishops is, I’m sure,
entirely coincidental) and certainly not Rome.
After several months of vacillation, Hope saw his
way clear and, like Newman , leaving old and close
Whilst it may be too much to claim that Sir Walter friends behind with no little measure of sadness, he
Scott invented a certain romantic notion of Scotland, made his submission alongside Manning on Passion
without his contribution (and that of his contemporary Sunday 1851.
Robert Burns) the idea we have of the country and its
nationhood owes much to his work and especially his
The following January – in the midst of the Achili
novels.
trial – Newman went to stay with the Hope-Scott’s (as
they were shortly to style themselves when Charlotte
A lawyer and poet (he was offered and turned down inherited the house) at Abbotsford, the house in the
the laureateship in 1813), but best known as a novelist borders that Sir Walter Scott had built.
through his Waverley novels, Scott retold for both
Scotland and England the story of the Jacobite rising.
He stayed with them for six weeks describing his
When, in 1818, he found the Honours of Scotland, as sojourn as one of almost complete rest and wondering
the Scots Crown Jewels are known, though lost since whether he hadn’t “laughed too much or argued too
the last sitting of the Scots Parliament before the Act of much”. It was to be another twenty years before he
Union in 1707, Scott became something of a national was to visit again, shortly before Hope died. This was
hero.
to be a shorter visit but one in which Newman noted
how many of the local border families had become
In 1847, fifteen years after Scott had died, his grand- Catholics.
daughter, Charlotte, married a close friend of John
Henry Newman, the lawyer and Tractarian leader,
It wasn’t only the Stuart-descended recusant family
James Hope.
The Hopes were received into the in Scotland’s longest continuously occupied home,
Catholic Church, along with Archdeacon Manning Traquair House, but the Kerrs, the Monteiths and
and others in 1851, following the Gorham Judgement even the Duchess of Buccleugh were now Catholics
of the Privy Council the previous year.
and providing churches and chapels for a growing
Catholic population. As Newman put it, “this
Apart from the Erastian scandal of a secular court Presbyterian region has now several lights set upon
purporting to determine the doctrine of the Church, high candlesticks”.
Hope-Scott was more appalled by the Court’s finding
that denial of Baptismal Regeneration was not a
The legacy of Scott, Jacobitism, Tractarian Converts
necessary doctrine of the Church by law established.
and mass Irish immigration all play their part in a
modern understanding of Scotland and one no-one
There are those who counselled those who met at would dare call it any longer ‘North Britain’.
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