Seeing the works of the early decades of the twentieth century by Robert Hugh Benson and Hilaire Belloc as part of a living tradition of historical scholarship, we might hope that the revival of interest in their historical perspectives might prove inspirational to new generations of pioneering cultural figures in the twenty-first century.
The reception of Robert Hugh Benson into the Catholic Church in 1903 was probably the most controversial conversion in England since that of John Henry Newman almost sixty years earlier. What made Benson’s conversion so controversial was that he was the son of E. W. Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1882 until 1896, the leader of the worldwide Anglican communion. The crossing of the Tiber by the Archbishop’s son was a clear and unmistakable indication that the Catholic Revival, which Newman’s conversion could be said to have instigated, was continuing to gain momentum at the dawn of the new century. Even more shocking was that Benson began to write popular novels that exposed the false narrative of England’s official history, highlighting the tyranny and terror of the so-called English “Reformation”. Within four years of his reception into the Church, he had written a trilogy of historical novels in which the real ugliness of the Machiavellian realpolitik of the Tudor dynasty is made manifest. These were By What Authority? (1904), The King’s Achievement (1905) and The Queen’s Tragedy (1907).
The Catholic writer, Hilaire Belloc, was so impressed with Benson’s “Reformation Trilogy” that he wrote of Benson, in August 1907, that it was “quite on the cards that he will be the man to write some day a book to give us some sort of idea what happened in England between 1520 and 1560”. In the event, Benson’s early death in 1914 prevented him from fulfilling Belloc’s prophecy, prompting Belloc to take on the task himself of correcting what he derided as “tom-fool Protestant history”. Lamenting that “most people are still steeped in that false official history which warps all English life”, he embarked upon the “weary work [of] fighting this enormous mountain of ignorant wickedness”. Whereas Benson had fought such ignorance through the writing of well-researched historical novels, Belloc chose to write non-fictional works of history to enlighten his contemporaries about the darkness of England’s past.
Apart from his two masterful panoramic overviews, How the Reformation Happened (1928) and Characters of the Reformation (1936), Belloc wrote full-length biographies of many of the key figures of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. These included books on Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cranmer, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Charles II and James II. Today, thanks to the vision of several new and adventurous publishers, the historical fiction of Robert Hugh Benson and the non-fictional English historical works of Hilaire Belloc are once again available in handsome new editions.
Benson’s By What Authority and The King’s Achievement have been published by the Cenacle Press at Silverstream Priory in Ireland, whereas Belloc’s Wolsey, Cranmer, Charles I and Cromwell have been published in splendidly vintage-style hardcover editions by Mysterium Press in England. The Belloc editions are being sold in the United States by Os Justi Press, another exciting press which has emerged in recent years.
In addition to these new editions of the historical works of Benson and Belloc, other pioneering small publishers have had the vision to publish works of fiction and non-fiction which reflect the same revisionist approach to Tudor and Stuart England. Full Quiver Press has published a new edition of Dena Hunt’s Treason, a novel set during the Elizabethan Terror, and Gondolin Press has published the English translation of Elisabetta Sala’s Italian novel, The Execution of Justice, which takes the notorious Gunpowder Plot as its historical backdrop. Meanwhile, another exciting and adventurous new publisher, Arouca Press, has brought back into print Hugh Ross Williams’ neglected historical tour de force, The Day Shakespeare Died.
The present author has contributed to the new literature on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history with his two works on Shakespeare, The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome and Through Shakespeare’s Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays, both published by Ignatius Press, and with his own panoramic overview of English history, Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, also published by Ignatius Press. He is honoured to be continuing a tradition of historical revisionism aimed at correcting the Protestant propagandizing of English history by the Whig historians of the eighteenth century. This revisionist correction of the historical narrative began in earnest in 1819 with the publication of the first three volumes of Fr. John Lingard’s, multivolume History of England, a monumental work which built upon the foundations laid by the groundbreaking scholarship of Bishop Challoner.
Having read the first four volumes of Lingard’s History, the popular writer, William Cobbett, began work on his bestselling and highly rhetorical History of the Protestant Reformation. The success of Cobbett’s populist approach to Lingard’s solid scholarship led to the latter’s work being much more widely known and read. There is little doubt that the popularity of Cobbett’s History helped to pave the way for Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and was influential on the neo-medievalist movements of the following decades, including the Gothic Revival, led by Augustus Pugin; the Young England movement, led by Benjamin Disreali; the “back to the land” wing of the Chartists, led by Feargus O’Connor; the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by John Ruskin and William Morris; and the Distributist movement, led by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. According to Christopher Hollis, these pioneering cultural figures derived their inspiration, “whether they were conscious of it or not, from Cobbett and, through Cobbett, from Lingard”. Benson and Belloc built their own works on these Lingard-Cobbett foundations, and Chesterton wrote a book on Cobbett and his influence.
Seeing the works of the early decades of the twentieth century by Benson and Belloc as part of a living tradition of historical scholarship, we might hope that the revival of interest in their historical perspectives might prove inspirational to new generations of pioneering cultural figures in the twenty-first century. If this comes to pass, the future will owe a great debt of gratitude, not merely to Lingard, Cobbett, Benson and Belloc, but to the pioneering and adventurous publishers who are publishing new editions of their important works today.
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The featured image is “John Muir” (1917), by Orlando Rouland, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.