Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman | Page 5

February, 1730. He married Jemima White, and died in 1799. Apparently now for the first time the interest in the town of Wandsworth ceased, for the records show that both Henry and his wife were buried in St. Mary Woolnoth. And now we come to the direct ancestors of Francis Newman, for Henry Fourdrinier and Jemima White, his wife, were the parents of Jemima, who married at St. Mary's, Lambeth, in 1799, John Newman of the firm of Ramsbottom, Newman & Co., and gave birth in 1801 to John Henry, the future Cardinal, and in 1805 to the subject of this memoir, Francis William.
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In _Civil Architecture_, by Chambers, it is mentioned that the plates were engraved by "old Rooker, old Fourdrinier, and others," thus seeming to imply that there was more than one Fourdrinier then in England.
Perhaps the most interesting of all the Fourdrinier family was the Henry Fourdrinier, the eldest brother to the mother of Francis Newman. He was born in 1766 at Burston Hall, Staffordshire, and lived until 1854. His father was a paper-maker, and both he and his brother Sealey (born 1747, and married Harriett, daughter of James Pownall, of Wilmslow) gave up their time almost entirely to the invention of paper machinery. This invention was finished in 18O7, [Footnote: _Dict. Nat. Biog._ Vol. XX.] and then misfortune fell upon them: the misfortune that so often descends like the "black bat night" upon those who have spent all their money, thought, and labour on the effort to launch their self-designed ship upon the uncertain sea of trade.
The Fourdrinier brothers had spent ￡60,000 upon this venture, and the immediate result of the finished invention was bankruptcy to the unfortunate inventors. Then, in 1814, the Emperor Alexander of Russia promised to pay them ￡700 per annum during the space of ten years if he could use two of their paper-making machines. Of this sum they saw not a penny.
In 1840, Parliament voted the sum of ￡7000 to the Fourdriniers as a tardy recognition of the great service they had rendered their adopted country by their invention. The descendant of these gifted men showed no special taste for invention along the lines taken by his ancestors, it is true; but his brilliant intellect, no doubt, owed many of its qualities to their inventive force and power. Where they made paper and spent their whole energies in inventing machines for making it quicker, Francis Newman wrote on it--used it as a medium for spreading far and wide his own splendid aims and purposes for the betterment of existing social conditions. Before all things, Newman was a Social Reformer. There was no possible doubt that, as far as that question went, he left his country further forward on the road to real progress as regarded conditions of life for her citizens, and higher, broader ideas of her duty to other nations. As far as all these questions went he did not live in vain, for to-day we are learning the wisdom of his views for justice for the oppressed and for "the cause that needs assistance."
He was essentially one of those rare men who prefer to be on the weaker side, and whose sword is ever ready for its defence and championship.

CHAPTER II
THE TWO BROTHERS--SCHOOL AND COLLEGE DAYS
Francis William Newman was born at 17 Southampton Street, Bloomsbury Square, on 27th June, 1805. His father was a London banker. Rev. T. Mozley, in his _Reminiscences of Oriel_, says he was partner in the firm of "Ramsbottom, Newman, Ramsbottom & Co., 72 Lombard Street, which appears in the lists of London bankers from 1807 to 1816 inclusive." He tells us that the family of "Newman" (or, as it was originally spelt, "Newmann") was of Dutch extraction. The father of Francis Newman had great schemes for making England "independent of foreign timber by planking all our waste lands."
In 1800 John Newman married Jemima Fourdrinier, and in the year 1801 John Henry, the future Cardinal, was born. The latter and the subject of our memoir were in effect the two sheaves before whom all the rest bowed down. There were four other children: Charles Robert, Harriette Elizabeth, Jemima Charlotte, and Mary Sophia.
[Illustration: SEALE'S COFFEE HOUSE, OXFORD (NOW DEMOLISHED) Done from an old drawing in the year when Francis Newman and John Henry Newman stayed there with Blanco White.]
John Henry and Francis went to a school at Ealing (of which Dr. Nicholas was head-master), then, as Mr. Mozley says, considered the best preparatory school in the country. There were three hundred boys there at that time, but none were so brilliant or showed so much talent as the two Newmans. One after the other they rose to the top of the school. Frank was captain in 1821. There was some talk of removing