Background
Henry Wilberforce was born in 1807, the youngest son of William Wilberforce and his wife, Barbara Ann Spooner.
Henry Wilberforce was born in 1807, the youngest son of William Wilberforce and his wife, Barbara Ann Spooner.
He studied classics and mathematics at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was elected president of the Oxford Union.
He graduate Bachelor in 1830, Master of Arts in 1833, in the meantime enrolling as a student at Lincoln"s Inn. During his time in Oxford he had received tuition from John Henry Newman, through whose influence he not only became attached to the Tractarian movement, but abandoned his plan to study for the bar, and instead took orders as an Anglican clergyman. The Catholic Defence Association was founded in Ireland the same year, and in 1852 Wilberforce became Secretary, living in Ireland for two or three years.
In 1854 he became owner and editor of the Catholic Standard, changing the name to the Weekly Register the following year.
In 1864, finding the pace of weekly editorial responsibility too demanding, he sold the Weekly Register and embarked on a more leisurely production of articles and reviews for the Dublin Review. After his death a selection of these was published as The Church and the Empires (1874), with a biographical preface by Cardinal He died in Stroud, Gloucestershire, on 23 April 1873.