Monsignor Hugh Benson’s birthday on 18 November 1871 prompts a reflection on his life. This year, that reflection is shaped especially by the June publication of the extraordinary diary of his eldest surviving and closest brother, Arthur Christopher (AC), released to mark the centenary of Arthur’s death.
First and briefly, the diary: The Benson Diary: Volume I: 1885–1906; Volume II: 1907–1925 (edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam, Pallas Athene, 2025). Arthur, an eminent housemaster at Eton and, for a decade, Master of Magdalen, Cambridge, was celebrated as a prolific writer of poetry and belles-lettres and is better known as the author of the lyrics to “Land of Hope and Glory”. Selections from his diary (kept between 1885 and 1925) — 180 manuscript volumes (running to close to five million words) — had been edited by his friend Percy Lubbock in 1927, and by David Newsome in 1979. But this year venerable Professors Duffy and Hyam’s generously introduced and meticulously edited two volumes, “somewhat less than a twelfth of the whole, about 350,000 words”, have been almost universally hailed. The TLS proclaimed, “In the Pepys Class”; the Literary Review’s Piers Brendon considered “Benson's diary is one of the best of the kind”; and The Critic’s headline read: “A fascinating record of a vanished world.”
The Spectator’s Philip Hensher thought, “Silly as he was, and remote from commanding anything like agreement at any point, he enters the diarists’ pantheon for readers to shake their heads over in perpetuity,” while The Times’s Peter Parker wrote, “There is rarely a page without some entertaining or piquant aperçu. As a portrait of an age, seen from a particular ivory tower, the diary is invaluable; as a study of someone in flight from his own nature, it is both moving and compelling.” The one captious note has come from The Guardian’s Sir Vernon Bogdanor: “In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship... What the diaries offer, as was once said – perhaps unfairly – of Trollope, is the sedative of gossip. They provide the illusion that one is in communion with great writers and powerful people, but it’s one we shouldn’t fall for.”
The Bensons were, even by Victorian standards, an astonishing family. With some justification, Simon Goldhill wrote a group biography with the title A Very Queer Family Indeed (2016). Hugh was the fourth son and youngest of the six children of Edward White Benson (EW), the 94th Archbishop of Canterbury, and his wife (and second cousin) Minnie Sidgwick, to whom he had proposed when she was twelve (he waited six more years to wed her).
Minnie produced Martin in August 1860, Arthur in April 1862, Nellie (Mary Eleanor) in October 1863, Maggie (Margaret) in June 1865, Fred (Edward Frederic) in July 1867 and, finally, Hugh in November 1871. As the youngest, Hugh was, as his biographer, the celebrated C. C. Martindale SJ, put it, “hopelessly spoiled and indulged as a child.”
When Hugh was born, EW was headmaster of Wellington College — its first. The following year he was appointed chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral and, five years later, became bishop of the new diocese of Truro. The following year, Martin, the eldest child and the light of their father’s life, died of meningitis aged 17. As the editors of AC’s diary put it in their introduction:
“The surviving children were brought up in the shadow of this grief… They knew that Martin had set an impossible standard, especially now that he was safe from further scrutiny… For Edward even bliss in the afterlife no longer seemed a sure bet. Pacing the room, he explained to his wife: ‘I am, so to speak, at ease with Him here on earth. I feel as if I might wake up there and not be satisfied with it.’”
Hugh remembered, “My father’s influence upon me was always so great that I despair of describing it. I do not think that he understood me very well; but his personality was so dominant and insistent that the lack of this understanding made very little difference.” As Duffy and Hyam put it, “He had felt like ‘a small china mug being filled at a waterfall’.”
In 1882, EW was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. In the same year Hugh was sent to a preparatory school at Clevedon, Somerset, and three years later won a scholarship to Eton, where he stayed until 1889. As his entry in the Oxford DNB states, although not then overly religious, he won the Hervey Prize for a poem on Father Damien of Molokai, the heroic nineteenth-century Belgian priest who gave his life ministering to a Hawaiian leper colony.
After cramming unsuccessfully for the Indian Civil Service, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890, graduating BA in 1893. He began theology, having decided to take holy orders. “Wagner, Swedenborgianism, mesmerism, and climbing in the Alps were among his interests.”
He was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1895, and until the autumn of 1896 he worked in the Eton Mission at Hackney Wick among poor people who, according to his Oxford DNB entry, “loved him more than he liked them”. After his father's death in October 1896 he suffered a breakdown (a common curse within the family) and went to Egypt, whence Anglicanism “seemed provincial”.
From May 1897 until June 1898 he was curate at Kemsing, near Sevenoaks, and then spent five years at the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, Yorkshire, where the lectures of its superior Charles Gore (later Bishop of Oxford and once described as “the most fascinating and influential bishop of the Church of England in the twentieth century”) unsettled him.
In 1903 he returned home, and in September of that year he was received into the Catholic Church at Woodchester, Gloucestershire. According to Fred’s biographer, Brian Masters (1993), Hugh was regarded as “the supreme catch of a convert from the very arms of Canterbury” — the most celebrated since John Henry Newman. Members of the family felt the conversion made him “smug and insufferably pontifical”, but given his boyish enthusiasm and his place in the family, they continued to love him.
Arthur’s faith was distinctly different. He privately described Christianity as “a very mixed affair”. The Apostles were “very inferior people”. Christianity as understood in his own day would surely be superseded by a new “much simpler, much larger” religion, which would teach people to “live finely in themselves” instead of “propping up and comforting the weak”. The Bible was not “a relation of the dealings of God with men”, but “only a relation of the imaginations of men about God, interspersed with many romantic fables”.
He wrote of his brother Hugh, “He would like to see everyone a R.C. If he found God were not a sound R.C. he would try to convert him.” Arthur records Hugh visiting the family at home — Tremans, near Horsted Keynes in West Sussex — five days after his ordination in Rome. The widowed Minnie was by then sharing her life there with Lucy Tait, daughter of the 93rd Archbishop of Canterbury. Arthur’s entry is worth reproducing at length as it gives an insight into the man who was Hugh, the Church of Rome at the time, and the flavour of the diary.
Friday 17 June 1904
I went off and wrote a little. Presently in came Hugh. He looks very well indeed — never better — dressed just like an Anglican — frock-coat etc, only for a bit of silk under the band. Just as natural and cheerful as ever — indeed more so. He sat and talked a long time — of the odd time-wasting life at San Silvestro — 15 men in a vast convent — no layman allowed — endless vacant rooms — no rules, no hours; mostly broken-down priests...
The Bensons were prolific writers, forever scribbling; in all, they wrote some 200 books. Hugh’s first work, The Light Invisible (1903), proved to be a very popular semi-mystical novel. A vivid Elizabethan story, By What Authority?, followed in 1904. Hugh wrote “in furious haste” and with “terrifying fecundity”: three books in 1906, three in 1907, and three in 1912.
After his ordination he lived at Llandaff House, Cambridge, and then, in 1905, the rectory in Cambridge, where he wrote novels of contemporary life, in addition to An Alphabet of Saints (1905). In 1907 he produced the sensational Lord of the World, an account of the coming of Antichrist, set in 2008, when the only faith with any systematic world presence is the Catholic Church, while the West has been thoroughly secularised and ruled by a new technical and bureaucratic elite. It was said to be Pope Francis’s favourite book.
The following year he bought and adorned an old house in Hare Street, Buntingford, Hertfordshire, where he lived until his death. Another nine books appeared, including Come Rack! Come Rope! (1912), a bloodcurdling account of Catholic martyrdom in post-Reformation England. He also printed four volumes of his sermons.
The Oxford DNB records that he “was immensely popular as a preacher, although his manner was violent owing to his stammer, and his voice shrill”. His brother Fred wrote of his “tumultuous eloquence” and the “flawless, flame-like delivery of his sermons”.
He had a great capacity for friendship and defiantly received Oscar Wilde’s nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas, when warned against him. But he ended a collaboration with the clever but strange and flawed Frederick Rolfe (the self-styled Baron Corvo) with whom he was to write a life of St Thomas Becket. Rolfe proved impossible to work with, and Hugh decided he could not be associated with “a Venetian pimp and procurer of boys”. The biography (1910) was published under Hugh’s name alone. No harm appeared to have been done, as he was appointed private chamberlain to Pius X the following year and henceforth was Monsignor Benson.
Arthur was with him when he was dying at the Bishop’s House in Salford in October 1914, where he had been preaching. Arthur’s entry in his diary for Sunday 18 October was both moving and odd — as only a Benson could be. Hugh’s last words were “I commend my soul to God, to Mary, to Joseph.”
But before that he had said, “‘Don’t look at me, Arthur’, and to the nurse, ‘Stand between me and him.’ The nurse moved round and I saw his face no longer.”
And then: “Make sure I am dead” — as he had a fear of being buried alive. He had left elaborate instructions for burial in a loose-lidded coffin in a vault with steps leading to a trapdoor, the key to which should be left at his side. He was only 42.
Father Martindale summed up his life thus: “Athirst for experience, he used fully every lesson he had learned, yet his piety remained childlike and his faith fierce.”
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