In 1848 he was appointed head of the Birmingham Oratory, and there he resided--with one short break as rector of the Roman Catholic University at Dublin--for nearly forty years. In 1879 he was created a cardinal, and his visit to Rome and installation as a Prince of the Sacred College excited much attention in England. Although by temperament and inclination one of the least combative and most retiring of men, Cardinal Newman found himself again and again in the thick of the argumentative fray. At one time he was involved in a libel action by an ex-priest and ultra-Protestant lecturer named Father Achilli, and this cost Newman and his friends twelve thousand pounds; at another time he was arguing with the foremost English statesman, Mr Gladstone, as to the probable loyalty of English Roman Catholics if the Papacy and the English Government were brought into collision. In one great controversy of his life he was generally admitted to have achieved a success, and this success is associated with an enduring literary work, the autobiography which he calls his "Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ." Reviewing Froude's "History of England" in _Macmillan's Magazine_ (January 1864), Charles Kingsley charged Newman with being careless about truth, and with teaching that cunning and not truth-seeking was the acceptable method of the Roman Catholic clergy. Brought to bay by Newman, Kingsley contradicted himself in an amazing fashion, and even the most enthusiastic Protestants were compelled to admit that the clever novelist was no match for the trained dialectician. Mrs Kingsley, in her charming life of her husband, practically admits that he was worsted in the conflict, and J. A. Froude, his brother-in-law, wrote: "Kingsley entirely misunderstood Newman's character. Newman's whole life had been a struggle for truth. He had neglected his own interests; he had never thought of them at all. He had brought to bear a most powerful and subtle intellect to support the convictions of a conscience which was superstitiously sensitive. His single object had been to discover what were the real relations between man and his Maker, and to shape his own conduct by the conclusions at which he arrived. To represent such a person as careless of truth was neither generous nor even reasonable."