He was born at Totteridge, Hertfordshire, the third and youngest son of William Manning, a West India merchant, who served as a director and (1812 - 1813) as a governor of the Bank of England, and who sat in Parliament for some thirty years, representing in the Tory interest Plympton Earle, Lymington, Evesham, and Penryn consecutively. Henry's mother, Mary, daughter of Henry Leroy Hunter, of Beech Hill, Reading, came of a family said to be of French extraction. Manning spent his boyhood mainly at Coombe Bank, Sundridge, Kent, where he had for companions Charles and Christopher Wordsworth, later bishops of St Andrews and Lincoln respectively. He attended Harrow School (1822 - 1827) during the headmastership of Dr G Butler, but obtained no distinction beyond playing in the cricket eleven in 1825.
He matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1827, and soon made his mark as a debater at the Oxford Union, where Gladstone succeeded him as president in 1830. At this date he had ambitions of a political career, but his father had sustained severe losses in business, and in these circumstances Manning, having graduated with first-class honours in 1830, obtained the year following, through Viscount Goderich, a post as a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial Office. This, however, he resigned in 1832, his thoughts having turned towards a clerical career under Evangelical influences, which affected him deeply throughout life.
Returning to Oxford, he gained election as a fellow of Merton College, and received ordination; and in 1833 he became rector of Lavington-with-Graffham in Sussex due to the patronage of Mrs Sargent, whose granddaughter Caroline he married on November 7 1833, in a ceremony performed by the bride's brother-in-law, Samuel Wilberforce, later Bishop of Oxford and Winchester. Manning's marriage did not last long: his young and beautiful wife came of a consumptive family, and died childless (July 24, 1837). The lasting sadness that overshadowed him facilitated his acceptance of the austere teaching of the Oxford Movement; and though he never became an acknowledged disciple of John Henry Newman, the latter's influence meant that from this date Manning's theology assumed an increasingly High Church character, and his printed sermon on the "Rule of Faith" signalled publicly his alliance with the Tractarians. In 1838 he took a leading part in the Church education movement, by which diocesan boards were established throughout the country; and he wrote an open letter to his bishop in criticism of the recent appointment of the ecclesiastical commission. In December of that year he paid his first visit to Rome, and called on Dr Wiseman in company with Gladstone.
In January 1841 Shuttleworth, Bishop of Chichester, appointed him archdeacon, whereupon he began a personal visitation of each parish within his district, completing the task in 1843. In 1842 he published a treatise on The Unity of the Church, and his reputation as an eloquent and earnest preacher being by this time considerable, he was in the same year appointed select preacher by his university, thus being called upon to fill from time to time the pulpit which Newman, as vicar of St Mary's, was just ceasing to occupy.
Four volumes of Manning's sermons appeared between the years 1842 and 1850, and these had reached the 7th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd editions respectively in 1850, but were not afterwards reprinted. In 1844 his portrait was painted by Richmond, and the same year he published a volume of university sermons, omitting the one on the Gunpowder Plot. This sermon had annoyed Newman and his more advanced disciples, but it was a proof that at that date Manning was loyal to the Church of England as Protestant. Newman's secession in 1845 placed Manning in a position of greater responsibility, as one of the High Church leaders, along with Edward Bouverie Pusey, John Keble and Marriott; but it was with Gladstone and James Hope-Scott that he was at this time most closely associated.
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This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.