‘Neither in nor out of the Oxford Movement’

Long time no posting, because of: Ash Wednesday, retreat days in Pluscarden with Canmore students, a cold caught in Pluscarden, a meeting in Mount Argus (Dublin). The quotation shown above gave rise to some interesting guesses from Liam, Zadok and Benedict Ambrose. However, here is the title page of my 123 Meme book, with a photograph of the he referred to in the quotation.

Ignatius Spencer became a Catholic in 1830, having resigned his living as a priest in the Church of England. Like his friend, Blessed Dominic Barberi, Ignatius had great hopes for the Oxford Movement. In 1840 he visited Newman at Oxford to ask him to pray for unity in the truth. In his Apologia pro vita sua, Newman writes of their meeting:
This feeling [against the politics of ‘the Court of Rome’] led me into the excess of being very rude to that zealous and most charitable man, Mr. Spencer, when he came to Oxford in January, 1840, to get Anglicans to set about praying for Unity. I myself then, or soon after, drew up such prayers; it was one of the first thoughts which came upon me after my shock, but I was too much annoyed with the political action of the members of the Roman Church in England to wish to have any thing to do with them personally. So glad in my heart was I to see him when he came to my rooms, whither Mr. Palmer of Magdalen [brought him], that I could have laughed for joy; I think I did ; but I was very rude to him, I would not meet him at dinner, and that, (though I did not say so,) because I considered him “in loco apostatæ” from the Anglican Church, and I hereby beg his pardon for it. I wrote afterwards with a view to apologize, but I dare say he must have thought that I made the matter worse….