Robert Hugh Benson AFSC KC*SG KGCHS (18 November 1871 – 19 October 1914) was an English Catholic priest and writer. First an Anglican priest, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1903 and ordained therein the next year. He was also a prolific writer of fiction, writing the notable dystopian novel Lord of the World, as well as Come Rack! Come Rope!.
Benson's output encompassed historical, horror and science fiction, contemporary fiction, children's stories, plays, apologetics, devotional works and articles. He continued his writing career at the same time as he progressed through the hierarchy to become a chamberlain to Pope Pius X in 1911 and gain the title of Monsignor before his death a few years later.
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Early life
Robert Hugh Benson was the youngest son of Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his wife, Mary; he was the younger brother of E. F. Benson, A. C. Benson and Margaret Benson.
He was educated at Eton College and then studied classics and theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1893.
In 1895, Benson was ordained a priest in the Church of England by his father the Archbishop.
Career
After his father died suddenly in 1896, Benson was sent on a trip to the Middle East to recover his own health. While there he began to question the status of the Church of England and to consider the claims of the Catholic Church, following a familiar religious path. His own piety began to tend toward the High Church tradition, and he started exploring religious life in various Anglican communities, eventually obtaining permission to join the Community of the Resurrection.
Benson made his profession as a member of the community in 1901, at which time he had no thoughts of leaving the Church of England. As he continued his studies and began writing, however, he became more and more uneasy with his own doctrinal position and, on 11 September 1903, he was received into the Catholic Church. Benson was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1904. As the son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, his conversion and subsequent ordination caused a sensation.
Benson's first assignment was as a college chaplain. He had a stutter and is said to have had a "reedy' voice," but was a popular preacher, attracting large audiences wherever he spoke. In 1911 he was appointed a supernumerary private chamberlain to Pope Pius X and consequently styled as Monsignor.
In 1914, he visited the University of Notre Dame and gave an address on the papacy. Both Confessions of a Convert (1913) and Lourdes (1914) were serialized in Notre Dame's Ave Maria magazine, before appearing as books.
He was awarded the Dignitary of Honour of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.
Novelist
Benson continued his writing career along with his ministry as a priest. Like both his brothers, Edward Frederic Benson ("Fred") and Arthur Christopher Benson, he wrote many ghost and horror stories, as well as children's stories and historical fiction. His horror and ghost fiction are collected in The Light Invisible (1903) and A Mirror of Shalott (1907). The Necromancers (1909) is a horror novel about the contemporary spiritualist movement.
His novel Lord of the World (1907) is generally regarded as one of the first modern dystopian novels. In the novel's speculative world of 2007, nations are armed with weapons which can destroy a whole city from the air within minutes. The Anglican Church and other Protestant denominations have crumbled and disappeared under a rising tide of secularism and atheism, and euthanasia is widely practised and considered a moral advance to reduce suffering. Only an embattled Catholic Church remains to champion the Christian faith. The Antichrist is depicted as a charismatic secular liberal politician who organizes an international body ostensibly devoted to world peace and universal love under his direction.
In a later novel, The Dawn of All (1911), Benson imagined an opposite future 1973 in which the Catholic Church has emerged victorious in England and worldwide after Germany and Austria won the "Emperor War" of 1914, and the Church's main remaining enemy is a Lenin-like international Communist leader. This book is also notable for its fairly accurate prediction of a global network of passenger air travel, aboard winged airships called volors.
His historical novels include the Reformation Trilogy: By What Authority (1905), The King’s Achievement (1905), and The Queen’s Tragedy (1907). Come Rack! Come Rope! (1912) describes the persecution of English Catholics during the Elizabethan era.
Private life
As a young man, Benson recalled, he had rejected the idea of marriage as "quite inconceivable". He had a close friendship with the novelist Frederick Rolfe, with whom he had hoped to write a book on St. Thomas Becket, until Benson decided that he should not be associated (according to writer Brian Masters) "with a Venetian pimp and procurer of boys". Nevertheless, he maintained his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the friend and lover of Oscar Wilde, and when an acquaintance protested that the connection with Douglas was inappropriate for him, he replied: "Lord Alfred Douglas is my friend, and he'll come down when he likes!"
Death and legacy
Benson died of pneumonia in 1914 in Salford, where he had been preaching a mission; he was 42. As he had requested, he was buried in the orchard of Hare Street House, his house in the Hertfordshire village of Hare Street. A chapel, dedicated to St Hugh, was built over the site. Benson bequeathed the house to the Catholic Church as a country retreat for the Archbishop of Westminster. The Catholic church in the nearby town of Buntingford, which he helped finance, is dedicated to St Richard of Chichester, but is also known as the Benson Memorial Church.
In 2019, the house was put up for sale. Benson's remains were exhumed and moved to the crypt of St Edmund's College in Old Hall Green.
The Benson Club is a Catholic reading group named in his honour at Fisher House, Cambridge.
Works
Science fiction
A Mirror of Shalott, Benziger Brothers, 1907.
Lord of the World, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1908 [1st Pub. 1907].
The Dawn of All, B. Herder, 1911.
Historical fiction
By What Authority?, Isbister, 1904. Republished in 2022 by The Cenacle Press with a foreword by Joseph Pearce and new illustrations by Jerzy Ozga.
Come Rack! Come Rope!, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1913 [1st Pub. 1912].
Oddsfish!, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1914.
The King's Achievement, Burns Oates & Washbourne, Lrd., 1905. Republished in 2022 by The Cenacle Press with a foreword by Joseph Pearce and new illustrations by Jerzy Ozga.
The Queen's Tragedy, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd., 1907.
The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd., 1912.
Initiation, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1914.
Contemporary fiction
The Light Invisible, Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd., 1906.
The Sentimentalists, Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd., 1906.
The Conventionalists, Hutchinson & Co., 1908.
The Necromancers, Hutchinson & Co., 1909. (This was adapted as Spellbound (1941 film)