In February 1841 a series of letters entitled “The Tamworth Reading-Room” appeared in The Times, attributed to “Catholicus”. This nom-de-guerre was the pseudonym of John Henry Newman, at that time one of the heads of the “Tractarian” movement of the Church of England.
For eight years Newman had been publishing and editing the Tracts for the Times, in which he and his collaborators sought to recover and revitalise the Catholic character of the Anglican Church. Hostile both to the errors of Protestantism and to what they believed to be the “corruptions” of the Roman system, the Tractarians asserted that Anglican theology held to a “via media” which successfully preserved the doctrines of the primitive church. Yet it was precisely Newman’s study of the primitive church during the summer of 1839 which undermined his confidence, as his analysis of the Monophysite controversy during the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century demonstrated that the primitive church had never appealed to any “via media” but had always defended orthodoxy. This revelation shattered Newman, and by 1841 he was “on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church”.
