The reformation in England has been
the subject of any number of excellent novels and plays and for many of us our
first acquaintance with it came through works of the imagination. Robert Bolt’s
A Man for All Seasons, first as a play and then as a movie with the
incomparable Paul Scofield in the role of Thomas More made martyrdom
intelligible in a secular age despite the justified reservations expressed by
Marvin O’Connell in this issue. Robert Hugh Benson, whose father was Archbishop
of Canterbury, became a Catholic and, among other remarkable writings, published
a series of historical novels about the reformation in England. I know of one
teenager who was enthralled by Come Rack! Come Rope!. Grown considerably
older now, he was convinced anew of Benson’s genius by a rereading of The
King’s Achievement. This novel turns around the condemnation of More and
presents a divided family, one brother a priest, a sister a nun and another
brother, with the sinister name Ralph, an aide to Cromwell. All turns out well
in the end, with Ralph dying an edifying death in the final chapter.
A novel that conveys the way the change was foisted on ordinary Englishman is H.
F. M. Prescott’s Man on a Donkey, told in the form of a medieval
chronicle. In these days of lukewarm allegiance and indifferentism we may be
touched first in our imaginations. But for the real stuff, there is The
Autobiography of a Hunted Priest by John Gerard S.J. Nowadays when so many
Jesuits make those Pascal disdained seem stalwarts, it is good to be reminded of
the heroic martyrs of the Society who returned to England from the continent to
minister to faithful Catholics. Many of these Jesuits ended as martyrs. Such
heroines and heroes there were. May our paltry pulses beat more rapidly as we
read.
