Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and CommentsGuiney, Louise Imogen
History
Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 1803-1836
‘… By the bye, I write [“Newman”] as if you knew he was returned. He
came back last Tuesday week.[147]… He has been delayed by what one can
now look back on without uneasiness, as he has not suffered
eventually; but the fact is, he has had a very narrow escape of his
life, owing to a severe epidemic fever which he caught in Sicily, and
in a place where he could get access to no kind of medical aid. At the
place where he was seized he was laid up for three days, unable to
move, and at the end of that time strangely took it into his head that
he was well. In consequence, he set out on his journey, and after
having gone about seven miles, was carried almost lifeless into a
cabin, just at a moment when, by a strange accident, a medical man was
passing. This person relieved him sufficiently to enable his
attendants to remove him to a town some way farther on, in which a
doctor resided: Enna, or Castro Giovanni. Here he was eleven days
before the crisis of his fever arrived, and it was long thought he had
no chance of recovering…. He was afterwards delayed at Palermo by the
stupid vessel, which did not sail for three weeks after it had
promised, and thus lost all the advantages of a good wind. However, he
is back safe at last, and really looks well, though his hair is all
coming off, and his strength is not yet thoroughly restored. Do
something for the [Magazine] and the _Lyra_. Wherefore stand ye all
the day idle? I am going to [Hadleigh] in an hour or two to concert
measures.’
Hadleigh Rectory, in Suffolk, was the scene of the little four-days’
congress called together on July 25, by the independent Cambridge
forerunner of the Movement, the Rev. Hugh James Rose; ‘the most
eminent person of his generation as a divine,’ Dean Church calls him.
It is interesting to recall that the young Richard Chevenix Trench was
Curate of Hadleigh at this time. Neither Keble nor Newman was able to
attend. It was the first rally of those willing to fight ‘for the
doctrine of Apostolical Succession, and for the integrity of the
Prayer-Book’; and means were about to be taken to found a powerful
Association of Friends of the Church. Froude, impatient of talk and of
preliminaries, distrustful of the need of organisations, cherishing a
preference such as Newman was to express long after, writing to Pusey,
for ‘generating an ἦθος rather than a system,’ went down from Oxford
somewhat grumblingly. The subjects brought forward at Hadleigh were
chiefly disciplinary. The complicated relationship of Church and
State, the call for Lay Synods, and the ever-burning topic of the
manner of the Appointment of Bishops in the Church of England, seem to
have engrossed the four men present, Froude then as always, in his
extreme abstract way, pushing on to conclusions the others were not
ripe for. He found Rose, disinterested as he knew him to be,
‘conservative’; he lamented that Rose and Palmer of Worcester clung to
what he calls the ‘gentleman heresy,’ to ‘the old prejudices about the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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