George Errington, bishop of Plymouth, his friend since boyhood, was appointed, with the title of archbishop of Trebizond. Two years later Manning was appointed provost of Westminster and he established in Bayswater his community of the “Oblates of St Charles.” All Wiseman’s later years were darkened by Errington’s conscientious but implacable hostility to Manning, and to himself in so far as he was supposed to be acting under Manning’s influence. The story of the estrangement, which was largely a matter of temperament, is fully told in Ward’s biography. Ultimately, in July 1860, Errington was deprived by the pope of his coadjutorship with right of succession, and he retired to Prior Park, near Bath, where he died in 1886. In the summer of 1858 Wiseman paid a visit to Ireland, where, as a cardinal of Irish race, he was received with enthusiasm. His speeches, sermons and lectures, delivered during his tour, were printed in a volume of 400 pages, and show an extraordinary power of rising to the occasion and of speaking with sympathy and tact. Wiseman was able to use considerable influence with English politicians, partly because in his day English Catholics were wavering in their historical allegiance to the Liberal party. As the director of votes thus doubtful, he was in a position to secure concessions that bettered the position of Catholics in regard to poor schools, reformatories and workhouses, and in the status of their army chaplains. In 1863, addressing the Catholic Congress at Malines, he stated that since 1830 the number of priests in England had increased from 434 to 1242, and of convents of women from 16 to 162, while there were 55 religious houses of men in 1863 and none in 1830. The last two years of his life were troubled by illness and by controversies in which he found himself, under Manning’s influence, compelled to adopt a policy less liberal than that which had been his in earlier years. Thus he had to condemn the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, with which he had shown some sympathy in its inception in 1857; and to forbid Catholic parents to send their sons to Oxford or Cambridge, though at an earlier date he had hoped (with Newman) that at Oxford at least a college or hall might be assigned to them. But in other respects his last years were cheered by marks of general regard and admiration, in which non-Catholics joined; and after his death (16th February 1865) there was an extraordinary demonstration of popular respect as his body was taken from St Mary’s, Moorfields, to the cemetery at Kensal Green, where it was intended that it should rest only until a more fitting place could be found in a Roman Catholic cathedral church of Westminster. On the 30th of January 1907 the body was removed with great ceremony from Kensal Green and reburied in the crypt of the new cathedral, where it lies beneath a Gothic altar tomb, with a recumbent effigy of the archbishop in full pontificals.
Wiseman was undoubtedly an eminent Englishman, and one of the most learned men of his time. He was the friend and correspondent of many foreigners of distinction, among whom may be named Döllinger, Lamennais, Montalembert and Napoleon III. As a writer he was apt to be turgid and prolix, and there was a somewhat un-English element of ostentation in his manner. But his accomplishments and ability were such as would have secured for him influence and prominence in any age of the Church; and besides being highly gifted intellectually and morally, he was marked by those specially human qualities which command the interest of all students of life and character. He combined with the principles known as Ultramontane no little liberality of view in matters ecclesiastical. He insisted on a poetical interpretation of the Church’s liturgy; and while strenuously maintaining her Divine commission to teach faith and morals, he regarded the Church as in other respects a learner; and he advocated a policy of conciliation with the world, and an alliance with the best tendencies of contemporary thought. It was, in his judgment, quite in accordance with the genius of the Catholic Church that she should continuously assimilate all that is worthy in the civilization around.
See the biography by Wilfrid Ward, The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman (2 vols., 1897; fifth and cheaper edition, 1900). (A. W. Hu.)
WISHART, GEORGE (c. 1513–1346), Scottish reformer, born about 1513, belonged to a younger branch of the Wisharts of Pitarrow. His early life has been the subject of many conjectures; but apparently he graduated M.A., probably at King’s College, Aberdeen, and taught as a schoolmaster at Montrose. Accused of heresy in 1538, he fled to England, where a similar charge was brought against him at Bristol in the following year. In 1539 or 1540 he started for Germany and Switzerland, and returning to England became a member of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1543 he went to Scotland in the train of a Scottish embassy which had come to London to consider the treaty of marriage between Prince Edward and the infant queen of Scots. There has been much controversy whether he was the Wishart who in April 1544 approached the English government with a proposal for getting rid of Cardinal Beaton. Roman Catholic historians such as Bellesheim, and Anglicans like Canon Dixon, have accepted the identification, while Froude does not dispute it and Dr Gairdner avoids committing himself (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. vol. xix. pt. i., Introd. pp. xxvii-xxviii). There was another George Wishart, bailie of Dundee, who allied himself with Beaton’s murderers; and Sir John Wishart (d. 1576), afterwards a Scottish judge, has also claims to the doubtful distinction. Sir John was certainly a friend of Creighton, laird of Branston, who was deeply implicated in the plot, but Creighton also befriended the reformer during his evangelical labours in Midlothian. The case against the reformer is not proven and is not probable.
His career as a preacher began in 1544, and the story has been told in glowing colours by his disciple John Knox. He went from place to place in peril of his life denouncing the errors of Rome and the abuses in the church at Montrose, Dundee, Ayr, in Kyle, at Perth, Edinburgh, Leith, Haddington and elsewhere. At Ormiston, in December 1545, he was seized by the earl of Bothwell, and transferred by order of the privy council to Edinburgh castle on January 19, 1546. Thence he was handed over to Cardinal Beaton, who had him burnt at St Andrews on March 1. Foxe and Knox attribute to him a prophecy of the death of the Cardinal, who was assassinated on May 29 following, partly at any rate in revenge for Wishart’s death.
Knox’s Hist.; Reg. P.C. Scotland; Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; Hay Fleming’s Martyrs and Confessors of St Andrews; Cramond’s Truth about Wishart (1898); and Dict. of Nat. Biogr. vol. lxii. (248-251, 253-254). (A. F. P.)
WISHAW, a municipal and police burgh of Lanarkshire, Scotland. Pop. (1901) 20,873. It occupies the face of a hill a short distance south of the South Calder and about 2 m. N. of the Clyde, 15 m. E.S.E. of Glasgow by the Caledonian railway. It owes its importance to the development of the coal and iron industry, and was created a police burgh in 1855. It was extended to include the villages of Cambusnethan and Craigneuk in 1874. The chief public buildings are the town-hall, Victoria hall, the public library and the parish hall, and there is also a public park.
WISLICENUS, JOHANNES (1835–1902), German chemist, was born on the 24th of June 1835 at Klein-Eichstedt, in Thuringia. In 1853 he entered Halle University, but in a few months emigrated to America with his father. For a time he acted as assistant to Professor E. N. Horsford at Harvard, and in 1855 was appointed lecturer at the Mechanics' Institute in New York. Returning to Europe in 1856, he continued his studies at Zürich University, where nine years later he became professor of chemistry. This post he held till 1872. He then succeeded A. F. L. Strecker in the chair of chemistry at Würzburg, and in 1885, on the death of A. W. H. Kolbe, was appointed to the same professorship at Leipzig, where he died on the 6th of December 1902. As an original investigator he devoted himself almost exclusively to organic chemistry, and especially to stereochemistry. His work on the lactic acids cleared up many difficulties concerning the combination of acid and alcoholic properties in oxy-acids in general, and resulted in the discovery of two substances differing in physical properties though possessing a structure of proved chemical identity. To this phenomenon, then noticed for the first time, he gave the name of “geometrical isomerism.” So far back as 1869, before the publication of the doctrine of J. H. van’t Hoff and J. A. Le Bel, he expressed the opinion that the ordinary constitutional formulae did not afford an adequate explanation of certain carbon compounds, and
