2026 marks 175 years since Henry Edward Manning’s reception into the Catholic Church on 6 April 1851 (Easter Sunday) and, within ten weeks, his ordination on 14 June at Farm Street on the Feast of St Basil the Great. He was to become the second Archbishop of Westminster and later a Cardinal. Hilaire Belloc described him as “the greatest Englishman of his time”, and yet has anyone of such greatness suffered so grievously at the hands of his biographers?
But first, the antecedents of this remarkable Englishman. Henry Manning was born at Totteridge, Hertfordshire, on 15 July 1808, the third and youngest son of William Manning, a West India sugar merchant, MP and Governor of the Bank of England, and Mary (née Hunter), of French extraction. One of his godfathers was Henry Addington, Prime Minister from 1801 to 1804 and by then Viscount Sidmouth, ironically a staunch opponent of Catholic Emancipation.
