meta
On October 31, 1904, Robert Hugh Benson wrote his mother that he had just finished his novel on Henry VIII. He was in a jubilant mood. He was thirty-four years old, at the height of his powers. He had found himself, his vocation, and a vocation within a vocation—writing. In June he had been ordained a priest by Archbishop Seton in the tiny chapel opening out of the library of San Silvestro’s Church in Rome. Immediately thereafter he had rushed home to find his mother, the widow of E. W. Benson, late Archbishop of Canterbury, his brothers Arthur, Christopher and Edward, his sister Margaret and many good friends uncommonly generous in their congratulations.
Despite their loyal Anglicanism, the Bensons, particularly Mrs. Benson, rejoiced at his happiness. They did not regard Hugh’s conversion to the Catholic Church and his recent ordination as a surprise or a tragedy. All his life—from his days at the Cleveden School and Eton and Cambridge, during his career as an Anglican clergyman at the Eton Mission in the slums and Kenesing and as a monk in the Anglican Community at Mirfield—Hugh had hunted, often with tortured anxiety, for the truth that his swift, honest mind had failed to find in the Anglican persuasion. Knowing that Hugh’s conversion followed the most agonizing scrutiny of conscience, his family approved, if they did not applaud, his decision.
Robert Hugh Benson’s first clerical assignment too was a cause for rejoicing. He was sent to Llandaff House at Cambridge where he shared the congenial society of Monsignor Barnes, the Catholic chaplain at the University. There he read theology in the mornings and in the afternoons completed The King’s Achievement, his second novel and certainly one of his best.
Like its predecessor, By What Authority?, The King’s Achievement dramatizes a crucial point in English history. In the earlier book Elizabeth, the incarnation of English national pride, challenges the authority of the Church. The King’s Achievement poses the same conflict between Caesar and God, this time, however, with Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, in the role of Caesar. Henry’s “achievement” is the destruction of the monasteries whereby at one blow he enriched himself, persecuted his fellow men and obliterated the symbol of England’s ancient Catholic life.
The King’s Achievement does what good historical fiction should do: it renders a complex historical situation justly and it brings characters to life in a story that is interesting for its own sake. That it succeeds on the first score only a few have disputed. Robert Hugh Benson’s knowledge of Church history was intensely personal. As a boy he lived in the very houses where some of the greatest scenes of sixteenth-century history occurred. Gifted with a keen, indeed at times a morbidly vivid, imagination, he lived himself into the pageants, the persecutions, the rackings of martyrs and confessors. He was widely read in the narrow field of English Reformation history and benefited too from consulting notable historians like Dom Bede Camm and Cardinal Gasquet. Consequently The King’s Achievement betrays an expert knowledge of details as well as the estimate of underlying political realities. Few historical novelists can match Benson’s descriptions of the furnishings, customs and the spiritual life of a representative pre-reformation monastery like Lewes or a convent like Rusper. He is equally at home in the manor house of Overbury Court or the middle-class London home of Beatrice Atherton. He is just as good in explaining the forces at work behind the suppression of the monasteries—Henry’s greed, Cromwell’s Machiavellian lust for power, the spiritual envy of the renegade priest Layton, the candid compromising of Cranmer.
Indeed Benson’s sense of historical complexity is so acute that, despite the enormous popular success of the novel, he fell afoul of two extremes. Some Catholics felt that he stressed too much the human weaknesses of the priests and monks who quailed before the King’s official Visitors. In this story there are no real heroes save St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher and Beatrice Atherton. Most of the other Catholics are timorous, confused, or half in sympathy with Henry’s defiance of a foreign Pope. On the other hand Protestant extremists resented Benson’s picture of Henry’s brutality and above all of the implicit charge that the heroes of Protestant history connived in the King’s atrocities. These objections, however, argue more to Benson’s evident struggle to present a balanced view than to his failure to be just.
Indeed balance is an outstanding feature of The King’s Achievement. Both character and action are presented in vivid contrast. Sir James Torridon’s piety is opposed to his wife’s agnosticism; Christopher and Margaret Torridon’s religious loyalty to their brother Ralph’s opportunism; Cromwell’s ruthlessness to St. Thomas More’s honesty; the tranquil life at Lewes and Rusper to the turbulent life of the city and the Court; the heroic martyrdoms of More and Fisher to the equivocal deaths of Anne Boleyn and Ralph Torridon. The monstrous cruelty of Ralph who dismisses his brother and sister from their Religious Houses is countered by the charity of Beatrice Atherton, a true spiritual daughter of St. Thomas More, and the flaccidity of the comfort-loving prior of Lewes contrasted to the reckless gallantry of Sir Nicholas Maxwell.
The style, too, is as varied as the action and the characters. Benson can be tersely dramatic, as in the death scenes and in the pathetic description of the ruin of Lewes, or calmly expository, as in his explanation of Tudor policy, or lyrically romantic, as in his descriptions of the royal progress down the Thames or of a conventual Mass. In short his book reflects his own spirit—ardently romantic, unashamedly mystical, yet withal scholarly and composed. In an inspired phrase of his father, Benson rouses his readers into tranquillity.
This essay is taken from the Foreword to Robert Hugh Benson from The King’s Achievement.
Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.
Imaginative Conservative readers may use the code IMCON15 to receive 15% off any order of not-already discounted books from Cluny Media.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is “Old Castle” by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.