Right but wrong

In 1850, Nicholas Wiseman is excited.  He's a new Cardinal! The Vatican has reinstated the hierarchy in England! Why not celebrate?

So he pens a pastoral letter, "From without the Flaminian Gate" (sometimes rendered "From out the Flaminian Gate," "From out of the Flaminian Gate of Rome," or just "From the Flaminian Gate"), which mentions, in the midst of his enthusiasm, that as part of the new arrangement, "we govern and shall continue to govern, the counties of Middlesex, Hertford and Essex, as Ordinary thereof, and those of Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Berkshire and Hampshire, with the islands annexed, as Administrator with Ordinary jurisdiction."  Now, this is perfectly correct in a technical sense: as the Cardinal of Westminster, he had ultimate conntrol over the new dioceses.  The statement is right.  Unfortunately, between this and the aforementioned enthusiasm, Protestants everywhere believed that he was claiming dominion over the country itself.  Even though Wiseman raced to correct this interpretation, in a statement that might conveniently be abridged thusly--

WISEMAN: WTH?!

--he didn't succeed, and some years of extreme anti-Catholic nastiness followed.

I recently wrote a short article about this event, which at the time was dubbed "the papal aggression," and one of the things I realized is that nobody thinks Wiseman was in the right rhetorically, no matter how accurate he was technically.  A lot of his Catholic contemporaries were not exactly thrilled either--it sounds like Newman wanted to crawl under a convenient pew, for example--but there hasn't been what you'd call a revisionist effort in Wiseman's favor.   In effect, he's accused of reading the room rather incompetently.  But, with some exceptions, it's interesting that the blame tends to fall primarily on Wiseman instead of the room; looking at the current version of my article, I too hand him some of the blame (although I bring in some Catholic support on his side).  Nor is the blame denominational--Catholic biographers and historians tend to whack their figurative heads against the desk just as hard as the Protestants (or otherwise affiliated).  The underlying assumption is that Wiseman should have taken the temperature (to borrow from Newman) of his Protestant contemporaries with a better-calibrated intellectual thermometer before engaging in any sort of rhetorical flourish, let alone a literal description of the charge he had been given.  I wonder, though, to what extent the temperature could, as it were, have been taken, especially given what we know about the Vatican's prior negotiations with the British government on the subject--and not least because Wiseman presumably thought he was speaking to a Catholic instead of a Protestant room.  Contemporary social media is not the only place where messaging goes awry...