I saw and heard all that was going on, the hopes deferred, the secret visits to Littlemore, the rumours and more than rumours of Newman’s defection. Such was the devotion of some of these disciples that they expected day by day a great catastrophe or a great victory, for after the publication of so many letters written at the time by Wiseman, Manning, De Lisle, and others, there can be little doubt that a great conversion or perversion of England to the Romish Church was fully expected. De Lisle writes: “England is now in full career of a great Religious Revolution, this time back to Catholicism and to the Roman See as its true centre ... the best friends of Rome in the Anglican Church are obliged still to be guarded.” Such words admit of one meaning only, and if Newman had been followed by a large number of his Oxford friends, the results for England might really have been most terrible. But here, no doubt, the English national feeling came in. What England had suffered under Roman ecclesiastical rule had not yet been entirely forgotten, and the idea that a foreign potentate and a foreign priesthood should interfere with the highest interests of the nation, was fortunately as distasteful as ever, not only to a large party of the clergy, but to a still larger party of the laity also. It seemed to me very curious that so many of Newman’s followers did not see the unpatriotic character of their agitation. Either subjection to Rome or civil war at home was the inevitable outcome of what they discussed very innocently at the Observatory, and little as I understood their schemes for the future, I often felt surprised at what sounded to me like very unpatriotic utterances.