A Forgotten Defender of Tradition
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 wou
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