Soon after his return to England he met and married Charlotte Amyatt, and went to live at Escot, Ottery St. Mary. Here their family of twelve children was reared. Sir John, though his official life was over, yet busied himself in many local matters. He acted as deputy-lieutenant and as colonel-commandant of local militia and yeomanry. Then later, in advanced age, there fell upon him a great trouble: he lost his sight entirely. Curiously enough, his brother (who had served in the Civil Service of the East India Company) suffered the same deprivation.
Everyone who remembers her describes Maria Kennaway, Sir John's daughter, as possessing great beauty and attraction. She had hitherto spent her girlhood in the daily service of the poor around her home. She and her sisters started village schools in the neighbourhood, and taught the children constantly the religious duties in which they themselves had grown up.
Maria Kennaway—a Plymouth Sister as regards her religious profession—was a girl of deep and earnest faith. After her marriage to Francis Newman, it became a real grief to her to find that he was drifting further and further away towards agnosticism. Loving him devotedly as she did, her constant prayer was that he might return to his former faith: that the "cloud," as she called it, which was over him might be dispersed, and that he should believe as she did.
Like Moses, she never in this life saw her "Promised Land" (she never doubted that he would die in faith), for when she died in July, 1876 (devotedly nursed by her husband), she knew that he thought, as he bent over her at the end, that it was probably a last farewell for both.
I give here, as it seems an appropriate place, Newman's letter (to Dr.
Nicholson) on his wife's death:—
"15 Arundel Crescent, "Weston-super-Mare, "21st July, 1876.
"My dear Nicholson,
"For more than forty years I have been in possession of a heart that loved me ardently: that happiness is no more. But I kept my treasure ten years longer than I had any reason to expect. Yesterday we committed my beloved to the grave….
"I saw her declining in strength through failure of appetite, but ever hoped for finer weather and change of air to restore her. But the fine weather came too late to restore her. From want of blood her heart became fatally weak, and she died just as her brother did, the late Sir John Kennaway, through failure of the heart and consequent mortification of the feet. I now believe that local death began on the night of the 5th. Her sufferings in the feet were great, and we could do nothing to allay them. Her breathlessness (also from weakness of the heart) we could aid by fanning. She knew she could not recover, and only prayed for 'release.' Her prayer was granted early on Sunday morning, 16th July.
"Of course I feel very desolate, and to live quite alone in declining years [Footnote: Some few years later he married his first wife's devoted friend and companion who had lived with them for eleven years, and who took the greatest care of Newman till he died in 1897.] seems unnatural and unhealthful; but I cannot form any decisions at present. I am conscious of excellent health and unbroken strength, and after forty years of happy love should be very ungrateful to repine.