A Forgotten Defender of Tradition

[Editor’s Note: This is the thirty-third in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom.]

What do T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Hugh Ross Williamson have in common? The answer is that they were all commissioned to write plays for the annual Canterbury Festival. T.S. Eliot had written Murder in the Cathedral about the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket; Charles Williams wrote Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, about the 16th-century Protestant “reformer”; Dorothy L. Sayers wrote The Zeal of Thy House, about the architect who oversaw the medieval rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral; and Hugh Ross Williamson wrote His Eminence of England, about Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. 

What these four writers don’t have in common is that Eliot, Williams, and Sayers all remained Anglicans whereas Williamson would be received into the Catholic Church in 1955, two years after his highly controversial play had been performed and boycotted at the Canterbury Festival.

The controversy surrounding the play was caused by Williamson’s choice as his subject of Cardinal Pole, who had opposed Henry VIII’s establishment of the Anglican Church and who had remained staunchly and defiantly Catholic in the midst of England’s rupture from Rome. Even the famous actor and convert to the Faith, Robert Speaight, who played Cardinal Pole in the Canterbury Festival production, conceded that Williamson’s choice was “a curious one for an Anglican festival.” Audiences were low, indicative of a boycotting of the play by angry Anglicans, and it was noted that the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury was conspicuous by his absence.

Hugh Ross Williamson would be no stranger to controversy. It might even be said that he positively courted it, somewhat like Hilaire Belloc in whose footsteps he walked. Like Belloc, he would become an indefatigable defender of the Catholic Church against what Belloc had called the “enormous mountain of ignorant wickedness” that constituted “tom-fool Protestant history.” Two years prior to the production of the controversial play on Cardinal Pole, Williams had written The Gunpowder Plot, in which he argued convincingly that the notorious plot to blow up Parliament had been facilitated by government agents intent on the entrapment of angry Catholics. His book was dismissed at the time but has since gained credence following the publication of a book by Antonia Fraser which made a similar argument from the historical records. 

Similarly, in The Day Shakespeare Died, published in 1962, he presented the evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism at a time when it was much less mainstream than it is today to argue that the Bard of Avon owed his allegiance to the Church of Rome.

Williamson’s conversion to Catholicism had been influenced by the Anglo-Catholicism of T.S. Eliot, whom he had long admired, and also by the works of G.K. Chesterton. “He was always talking about Chesterton,” his daughter recalled, “and he thought his Orthodoxy was one of the best books he’d read. I would think Orthodoxy probably had an important influence on his intellectual and spiritual development.” The importance of Chesterton’s classic work would appear to be confirmed by the title that Williamson chose for his autobiography, The Walled Garden, which was inspired by a metaphor in Chesterton’s book. Williamson’s conversion to Catholicism had been influenced by the Anglo-Catholicism of T.S. Eliot, whom he had long admired, and also by the works of G.K. Chesterton.Tweet This

At the time of his reception into the Church, he was an Anglican clergyman, which meant that his conversion would cost him and his family very dearly financially. They lost the vicarage in which they were living and the income he had been earning. His wife, who had accompanied him into the Church, was working to support the family, and Williamson earned money as chairman of the BBC’s The Brains Trust, a very popular TV show in which he and other members of a panel of “experts” would answer questions sent in by viewers. 

Shortly after his reception into the Church, he was informed by Hugh Carleton Greene, a senior BBC executive, that he was no longer needed as a member of the panel. He was informed by Greene’s wife, off the record, that he had been removed from The Brains Trust because “you present the wrong image now you are a Catholic.” He protested that it was 1955, not 1555, but Mrs. Greene reiterated that “a trendy Anglican clergyman was fine but a Catholic convert was not.” Ironically, Hugh Carleton Greene’s own brother, the novelist Graham Greene, was a famous convert to the Faith.

As a Catholic, Hugh Ross Williamson became a great defender of the Faith. Continuing his works of history, The Beginning of the English Reformation, published in 1957, invited comparisons with Belloc’s How the Reformation Happened. The following year, on the centenary of the Marian apparitions at Lourdes, he wrote a book, The Challenge of Bernadette, as well as a television play on St. Bernadette, Test of Truth, and a stage play, The Mime of Bernadette, which was produced at the Albert Hall. In 1961, his play on St. Teresa of Avila, with Dame Sybil Thorndike cast in the title role, was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival. A man of many parts (literally!), he was also an actor on both stage and screen, performing under the stage name Ian Rossiter.

The final years of Hugh Ross Williamson’s life were dominated in defending the Traditional Latin Mass from the efforts being made by iconoclastic modernists to eliminate it. He had always loved the beauty of the Canon of the Mass which was the subject of his book The Great Prayer, published in the year of his conversion, and he had no time for those who argued that the new rite was closer to the Mass of the early Church, a claim which scholars as estimable as Cardinal Ratzinger have shown conclusively to be false. For Williamson, such liturgical “primitivism” was absurd:

[T]he return to the “primitive” is based on the curious theory of history, sometimes referred to as “Hunt the Acorn”. That is to say, when you see a mighty oak you do not joy in its strength and luxuriant development. You start to search for an acorn compatible with that from which it grew and say: “This is what it ought to be like.”

A similar metaphor had been used by J.R.R. Tolkien, who shared Williamson’s dismay at the liturgical modernism of the 1960s. Commenting that he couldn’t understand why a sapling should be considered superior to a full-grown tree, Tolkien added that, in any case, the sapling can’t be found by chopping down the tree. If you chop down the tree, you do not find the sapling; you kill the tree.

Hugh Ross Williamson died in 1978, a few months before the accession of Pope St. John Paul II. He could not have known but must have hoped and prayed that a future pope would turn the tide of modernism. John Paul II would choose Cardinal Ratzinger as his closest ally, and Ratzinger would succeed him as pope. Benedict XVI would then restore the true spirit of the liturgy and the extraordinary beauty of Tradition. None of this could have been known to Hugh Ross Wiliamson, living in the shadow of what he called the Great Betrayal, but he would surely be rejoicing, as indeed he might be rejoicing in the heaven-haven of the reward, that the Tree of Tradition is alive and well and resplendent with the fruits of faith.