James Hope-Scott - Early Life and Conversion

Early Life and Conversion

Born at Great Marlow, in the county of Buckinghamshire, and christened James Robert Hope, he was the third son of Sir Alexander Hope, and grandson of John Hope, 2nd Earl of Hopetoun. After a childhood spent at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, of which his father was governor (now called "commandant"), he was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a contemporary and friend of William Ewart Gladstone and John Henry Newman. In 1838 he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. Between 1840 and 1843 he helped to found Trinity College, Glenalmond. In 1840-41 he spent some eight months in Italy, Rome included, in company with his close friend Edward Louth Badeley.

On his return he became, with Newman, one of the foremost promoters of the Tractarian movement at Oxford and entirely in Newman's confidence. In 1841, he published an attack on the Anglican-German Bishopric in Jerusalem, and further defended the "value of the science of canon law, in a pamphlet. Edward Bouverie Pusey also valued Hope's advice and canvassed him in 1842 before publishing the Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on some Circumstances connected with the Present Crisis in the Church. Hope supported publication.

Along with other Anglo-Catholics, Hope was disturbed by the Gorham judgment and, on 12 March 1850, a meeting was held at his house in Curzon Street, London which was attended by fourteen leading Tractarians including: Badeley, Henry Edward Manning and Archdeacon Robert Isaac Wilberforce. They eventually published a series of resolutions which started the process of distancing Hope, Badeley, Manning and Wilberforce from the Anglican Church.

In 1851 Hope was received with Manning into the Roman Catholic Church.