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Henry Nutcombe Oxenham

Harrow, England, 1829 - 1888, London

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/no90008681
Oxenham, Henry Nutcombe (1829–1888), Roman Catholic convert and ecumenist, was born at Harrow, Middlesex, on 15 November 1829, the eldest son of William Oxnam (1800/01–1863), who later took the name Oxenham, an Anglican clergyman and second master of Harrow School, and his wife, Mary Susannah, daughter of the Revd T. Carter, lower master of Eton College. He was educated at Harrow School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he won a classical scholarship. He graduated BA in 1850 (MA 1854) with second-class honours in classics, and was president of the Oxford Union in 1852. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1854 and served as a curate at Worminghall, Buckinghamshire, and then at St Bartholomew's, Cripplegate, London. As an Anglican curate, he began to write and publish religious works which testified to his Tractarian views and practice. His slim volume of poetry, The Sentence of Kaires and other Poems, first published in 1854, eventually ran to three editions. In the same year Simple Tracts on Great Truths by Clergymen of the Church of England and a Manual of Devotions for the Blessed Sacrament were published under his editorship.

Oxenham was at the inaugural meeting of the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom (APUC) in September 1857 with the Anglican, F. G. Lee and the Roman Catholic Ambrose Phillipps De Lisle. The APUC promoted a reunion of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox churches, which would allow each to retain its distinctive patterns of worship and customs. Less than two months after joining the APUC, however, Oxenham was received into the Roman Catholic church by his fellow convert H. E. Manning. As he explained in The Tractarian Party and the Catholic Revival (1858), he had lost confidence in Anglicanism which he saw as Erastian and ununified. He retained a strong attachment to the Church of England, however, and disliked what he considered to be the excesses of ultramontanism. He became a member of the Brompton Oratory and received minor orders but did not proceed to the priesthood. He could not be convinced that his Anglican orders were invalid and clashed with members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. In the 1860s he vigorously defended the liberal Catholic periodical Rambler to Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham, who regarded it as the mouthpiece of the restless unorthodox. Oxenham also publicly drew attention to the deficiencies of English Catholic seminaries. He took up a teaching position at St Edmund's College, Ware, and then briefly at the Oratory School, Birmingham, where he helped to trigger a staff mutiny at the end of his first term: Newman refused to take him back. He increasingly came under the influence of J. J. I. von Döllinger, the Bavarian church historian and liberal, later translating his major works as First Age of Christianity and the Church (1866) and Lectures on the Reunion of the Churches (1872). In 1865 Oxenham published his own The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement.

Oxenham remained a passionate supporter of reunion even after the APUC was criticized in a papal rescript in 1864 for encouraging the idea that churches other than the Roman Catholic were truly ‘catholic’, and after the English bishops had pressed for a condemnation of the society. Oxenham contributed essays to F. G. Lee's two series of Sermons on the Reunion of Christendom (1864, 1865) in which he advocated reunion as a response to rationalism, and argued for theological discussion between churches and for a distinction to be drawn between the essentials and non-essentials of faith. In terms that anticipated the twentieth-century ecumenical movement, he argued that Christians would naturally begin to understand one another as they worked side by side on social questions. In 1866 his Dr Pusey's Eirenicon Considered in Relation to Catholic Unity: a Letter to Revd Fr Lockhart included a plea for an official Roman Catholic investigation into the validity of Anglican orders. In response to rigorous criticisms by the ultramontane Dublin Review he returned to the subject in another collection edited by Lee, Essays on the Reunion of Christendom (1867), which dismissed ‘the bluster of a little coterie of amateur theologians [and] the idiosyncrasies of a crotchety journalist’ with disdain (Oxenham, 189). Like his mentor, Döllinger, Oxenham was appalled by the definition of papal infallibility pronounced at the First Vatican Council in 1870, although he came to disapprove of the Old Catholic church. He continued to write on reunion and to criticize ultramontanism in the pages of the Saturday Review. He edited and translated the second volume of Bishop Hefele's The History of the Christian Church (1876) in the same year that he brought out Catholic Eschatology and Universalism. In 1879 Oxenham published Eirenicon of the Eighteenth Century and an edition of Essay towards a Proposal for Catholic Communion which was first published anonymously in 1704 and is usually ascribed to Joshua Basset. In 1884–5 he published Short Studies in Ecclesiastical History and Biography and Short Studies, Ethical and Religious, and in 1886 a Memoir of Lieutenant Rudolf de Lisle RN. Oxenham's tall, thin, and dark appearance, as well as his manner, may have suggested a recluse, but he was passionate, and his theology and approach to reunion were to be officially adopted by the Roman Catholic church less than a hundred years after his death. He died in full communion with the Roman Catholic church at 42 Addison Road, Kensington, on 23 March 1888, and was buried in Chislehurst, Kent.

Elizabeth Stuart
Sources

W. G. Gorman, A biographical list of the more notable converts to the Catholic church in the UK during the last 60 years (1910) · The Tablet (3 March 1888), 534 · Church Times (29 March 1888) · H. R. T. Brandreth, Dr Lee of Lambeth (1951) · The letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain and others, [31 vols.] (1961–) · DNB · H. N. Oxenham, ‘Postscript on Catholic unity’, Essays on the reunion of Christendom, ed. F. G. Lee (1867) · IGI · Foster, Alum. Oxon. · P. A. Shrimpton, A Catholic Eton? Newman's Oratory School (2005)
Archives

BL, letters to W. E. Gladstone, Add. MSS 4433–4478 · CUL, letters to Lord Acton · Pusey Oxf., APUC MSS · Quenby Hall, Leicestershire, Ambrose Phillipps De Lisle MSS

Wealth at death

£11,778 1s. 5d.: probate, 29 May 1888, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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Elizabeth Stuart, ‘Oxenham, Henry Nutcombe (1829–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2014 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/21056, accessed 23 Oct 2017]

Henry Nutcombe Oxenham (1829–1888): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/21056

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Last Updated8/7/24

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