He was educated at Westminster School, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated MA, forming a lifelong friendship with Newman.

[3] Newman, who with others had been privately opposed to a dogmatic declaration of the doctrine, which Gladstone had vigorously attacked, reproached himself that he had caused his friend's death by overworking him.

"[5] He was a man of marked individuality and Newman paid tribute to him in his Apologia, and directed that he himself be buried in the same grave as St John: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John's grave — and I give this as my last, my imperative will.

[7] The two share a memorial stone inscribed with the words he had chosen: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

Campaigners for gay rights within the Church speculated the Vatican was embarrassed by the relationship between the two, though historians and scholars of the period suggest this is a misunderstanding of the concept of friendship that existed at the time.

[8] Newman's remains in the shared grave were exhumed as part of a plan to move them to the Oratory in Birmingham city centre.