Hadrian the Seventh

by Frederick Rolfe

  In accordance with instructions, the Cardinal-Prefect of the Congregation of Sacred Rites presented to the Pontiff certain completed processes and petitions for the beatification of the Venerable Servants of God, Alfred the Great, King and Confessor,—Henry VI. of Lancaster, King and Confessor,—Mary Stewart of England, France, and Scotland, Queen and Martyr. Assent was deigned to these petitions; and pictures, each with a golden nimbus, were unveiled in the Vatican Basilica. The bull of beatification decreed the addition of the following words to the Roman Martyrology, the official roll of sanctity:—

  This day, in England, is kept the festival of the Blessed Alfred, King and Confessor, who by the acclamation of his own people is named Great: memorable as a father of his fatherland, a lover of his brother, a true servant of God.

  This day, in England, is kept the festival of the Blessed Henry VI. of Lancaster, King and Confessor: memorable for meekness, for suffering, for purity of heart, for the gift of prayer.

  This day, in Scotland, is kept the festival of the Blessed Mary Stewart, Queen and Martyr: memorable for womanly fragility, for nineteen years’ atonement in prison, for choosing death rather than infidelity.

  Semphill and Carvale had urged Hadrian to impose the Proper Office and Mass of the last upon England as well as Scotland. His Holiness would know why?

  “Because Her Majesty was the rightful Queen of England as well as of Scotland;” Semphill responded with the air of one who has invented a new sauce.

  “Display your premisses, Lord Cardinal;” said the Pope.

  “They are simply historical facts, known to everyone.”

  “But the conclusions which may be drawn from historical facts, mainly depend upon the sequence or method of arrangement of the said facts. Display yours, Lord Cardinal.”

  “The Blessed Mary Stewart was heiress of James V., who was heir of Margaret Tudor wife of James IV. of Scotland and daughter of Henry VII. of England. Henry VII.’s heir was his son Henry VIII., who married Katherine of Aragona and had issue Mary Tudor. Subsequently, failing to obtain annulment of this marriage from Your Holiness’s predecessor Clement VII., Henry VIII. lived in sin with Anne Bullen and Jane Seymour by whom he had issue Elizabeth and Edward. Canonically this prince and princess were illegitimate and incapable of succession. Therefore, on the death of Henry VIII. the crown of England demised to his sole legitimate issue, Mary Tudor——”

  “But Parliament had passed an Act, 28 Hen. VIII. c. 7, giving the English Sovereign power to limit the crown by letters-patent or by his last will to such person or persons as he should judge expedient.”

  “Surely, Holiness, that ought not to count. However, on the death of Mary Tudor without issue, I argue that the crown of England demised de jure though not de facto to the next legitimate Tudor who was Mary Stewart, heiress of Margaret Tudor.”

  Hadrian turned to Carvale.

  “Of course, Most Holy Lord, I feel with Cardinal Semphill. I think”—his beautiful blue eyes blazed with the fire of his dreams—“I think that the time has come for doing justice to the memory of ‘that predestined victim of uncounted treasons, of unnumbered wrongs, wrongs which warped and maddened and bewildered her noble nature, but never quenched her courage, never deadened her gratitude to a servant, never shook her loyalty to a friend, never made her false to her faith.’ O think, Holiness, of all that the Stewarts have suffered!”

  Hadrian Himself had a very tender and romantic feeling of attachment towards the Stewarts: but He responded, “Our office is not to stir up strife. We Englishmen happen to have made an ideal of Elizabeth. With that delightful capability for making our own ideals and maintaining them in the teeth of realities, we have chosen to forget the fact that no sovereign of ordinary intelligence could have helped being gilded by the really abnormal galaxy of talent which illumined the age of Elizabeth. It was those gigantic geniuses who made the glory of England then. England happened to be personified by Elizabeth. Therefore, in English eyes, Elizabeth was great and glorious and all the rest. No one” (he turned to Semphill) “can quarrel with your statement of blind and naked fact; and no one, who is right-minded, will. But, We desire to reconcile, not to exasperate, though We never will refuse to exasperate upon an apt occasion. Therefore We will not assert now that which need not be asserted. Be content that We raise your lovely martyred queen to the honours of the altars of your country. Ask Almighty God to look upon your land with favour for His Son’s sake, and for the sake of her who in the Strength of that Son was faithful unto death. Call upon Mary in Heaven to add her prayers to those which ye offer to God on earth. Precious in the sight of The Lord.—If it be His Will to confirm with signs and wonders these your invocations——”

  Their Eminencies gazed at the Pope with ecstasy. That He, whom they had known before, not always agreeably, that He—“Oh, really,” said Semphill to Carvale as they left the Presence, “I don’t know whether I’m sleeping or waking.” And Hadrian, alone, rolled a cigarette, saying to Another than Himself, “Is that what You wish me to do in this case?”

  Simultaneously with the beatificatory bull Laudemus insignes, was issued the Epistle to the English. The Pope affirmed that the English Race naturally was fitted to give an example to humanity. In particular, He categorically distinguished its solid worth, its dignified good sense, its deliberate tenacity, its imperturbable habit, its superb impassiveness in reverses, its stoical firmness under the most cruel deceptions, its unshaken determination to conquer under any circumstances. In general, He noted its faculties of self-restraint, of construction, of administration, and (among the upper and middle classes) of altruism. He indulged no vain regrets: but dealt entirely with the present and the future. He addressed the Race, as the Race would wish to be addressed, with perfect sincerity. In spite, He said, of the scum which floats, and is called “Smart”: in spite of the dregs which goes a-mafficking, and is called “Hooligan” the English people at heart were as sound as ever. Millions, rich and not rich, gentle and simple, in town and country, led clean and wholesome lives. No newspaper paragraphs proclaimed that these good souls were bringing-up their children to be ladies and gentlemen, were solicitous for the welfare of their inferiors, had respect unto themselves. No flaming headlines screeched, announcing that they were paying their way, marrying and giving in marriage, rejoicing and sorrowing, like the brave honest commonplace people that they were. No Society Gossip told of Robert and William and Nicholas and James and Frederick and Herbert and Percy and Alfred, day-labourers for a too scanty wage, who never drank nor fought nor swindled nor yelled for their rights, but who led decent noble lives under circumstances often cruelly unjust and always rigorously hard. Of such as these, said Hadrian, was the English Race composed. He reminded England that she had received more from the Latin Church than any other nation: that her gains had been direct before 1534: indirect after that date, when her natural enemies were dragged down by the corruptions of Rome. (He thought they would enjoy that point.) He assumed nothing, not even a prejudice. He advised without commanding: He directed without trespassing. The latter half of the Epistle concerned those who owed Him spiritual allegiance: to these He spoke with all authority. He blamed their phrenetic anxiety to enter into worldly competition. He pointed out that the Penal Laws, which from 1534 to 1829 had deprived them of “that culture which contact with a wider world alone can give,” had rendered the Catholic aborigines corporeally effete and intellectually inferior to the rest of the nation. He did not blame noluntary defects: but facts were facts, and only fools would refuse to face them. These defects would find their remedy in the influx of new and vigorous blood and unexhausted brains. He quoted the words of a great critic who said that the religious movement of our day would be almost droll if it were not, from the tempers and actions which it excited, so extremely irreligious. It had taken four centuries to produce the present position of Catholics in England; and, as no man has a right to expect miracles, it might take four centuries more to restore them to a corporeal and i
ntellectual equality with the average of their fellow-countrymen. To this end, He bade them to welcome and to comfort accessions to their number, not (as was the present custom) with slavering sentimentality giving place to slights, snubs, slanders, and sneers: but with brotherly love, putting in practice the Faith which they professed; and letting their light shine, instead of advertising comparatively paltry efforts at illumination. He reminded them that “God made man right, but he had sought out many abstruse reasonings;” and, for a society of Christians to pretend to be “the world” or “of the world” was an incongruous monstrosity. He warned them that the kind of conscience which they cultivated, the conscience which descends from its high personal plane, which consents to haggle and discuss how far resistance to temptation must be carried, which deigns to consider consequences, to weigh possibilities, and to guard against disaster, was the proximate occasion for the well-founded charges of hypocrisy and humbug brought against all religion by lewd fellows of the baser sort. As for those of the clergy, whose comportment elicited from outsiders testimonials to the effect that they were “thorough men of the world having nothing clerical about them except their collars” or “thoroughly good chaps who take their glass and enjoy a smutty story like ordinary beings,”—His Holiness assured Their Right Reverencies, Their Very Reverencies, and Their Reverencies, that they completely misconceived their sacred character. “Our citizenship is in heaven (ή πολιτεια ήμων έν ούρανωι.) If then in very truth, ye look for a city which is an heavenly, ye must esteem yourselves as being ‘in the world’ as strangers (ξενοι), or resident aliens (μετοικοι); and so ye ought not to be ‘curiosi in aliena republica.’ ” He ordained that married Anglican clergy (whose wives were alive and who possessed the grace of a Divine Vocation) on resuming allegiance to the See of Peter, should be admitted to the priesthood and serve secular churches: but faculties for hearing confessions were not to be disposed to married priests; and each such priest, having charge of a mission, must nominate and maintain at least one Regular as curate whose sole duty should be the administration of the sacrament of penance. Finally, the Supreme Pontiff commanded the sacrifice of that phantom uniformity which had been the curse of Catholicism for four centuries, and the retention and cultivation of national and local rites and uses. And He commended England to St. George, Protector of the Kingdom.

  The Archsocialists were bitterly chagrined by the pontifical denunciation of their Open Letter; but the Epistle to the English made them gnash their teeth. In print, they gibbered at first, and vomited after their manner. In congress, each one suspected his neighbour of being a “traitor to the Cause” whose treachery had taken the form of urging his comrades corporately to attract the pontifical fulmination. There was a dreadful scene at West Ham and a free fight at Battersea. Comrade Pete Quillet threatened to ’ave Comrade Bill Meggin’s blighted ear; and had as much of the left one as twenty-seven unclean gorgonzola-coloured fangs could tear off, before he succumbed to six boots, a bottle, and a harness-buckle. At head quarters, the demagogues did behave with outward decency: not disguising their disappointment, but casting about for a new lead. The curious thing was that not one of them now but was more than ever anxious for alliance with the Power which disdained and damned them. It was the Power which they coveted—and admired, in the first intention of the word. Their attitude to the Pope was that of those who lick the hand that lashes them. The Pope was not a Penrhyn, against whose liberty they could invoke the laws at which otherwise they girded: He was to them something immense, intangible, potent, detestable—and most desirable.

  While they were debating as to the precise posture in which they next should cringe, Comrade Jerry Sant communicated startling news. He was a delegate from the north: by profession, first a haberdasher’s bagman, secondly a socialist; Socialism appearing to him an easy way of self-aggrandisement. As a rule, he did not push forward, working in the background, anonymously writing for the papers, watching for a chance to snatch. He whispered a word to his neighbour at the table.

  “Rot!” said the latter.

  “Rot yersel’!” Jerry retorted.

  The other Fellowshipper guffawed. “Here, I say, Mr. Chairman, this Comrade says he used to know that old Pope!”

  Jerry Sant became observed. He had the haggard florid aspect, the red-lidded prominent eyes, the pendulous lip of a sorry sort of man. He stood up and began to speak, sometimes dragging a sandy rag of moustache or fingering shiny conical temples, but generally holding on by the lapels of a short-skirted broad-cloth frock-coat, protruding black-nailed thumbs through the button-holes in a manner acquired during a week in Paris. His style was geological, so to speak, consisting of various strata deposited at various periods. The surface stratum, representing the Kainozoic Time, consisted of the platitudinous bombast characteristic of the common or oratorical demagogue. Below that, corresponding to the Mesozoic Time, came the ridiculous obsequious slang of the bagman of commerce. Below that again, corresponding to the Paleozoic Time, appeared the gelded English which muscleless feckless unfit-for-handicraft little sciolists acquire in school-board spawning-beds. And these rested on stratum of the Azoic Time, to wit the native Pictish Presbyterian jargon of Mr. Sant’s sententious pettifogging spiteful self. These different strata occurred as irregularly as natural strata. They ran one into the other like veins in a fissure, causing displacements resembling those which technically are called Faults; and the tracing and stripping of the same is a task for the ingenious geophilologist. “It’s a gospel-truth, comrades. I had used to fhat ye might call know the Pope a few years ago fhen he was just George Arthur Rose and not a pound-note in his purse. I was running the Social Standard oot o’ my own pocket, and many’s the bit o’ work I’ve let him have. He was trying his hand at journalism then, and gey glad to get it. I may take this opportunity of saying that he owes his footing to me; and most ungrateful he has treated me, comrades, as is the nature of him, proud aristocrat as he is. Not that I look for gratitude in such: but I’ve often thought when I’ve heard of him getting on—I mean before as he was fhat he is now-—as perhaps he might like to remember him as gave him his first leg up. But no, not a bit of it though. I advised him of as much, once; and he rounds on me and cheeks me cruel. And I’m not the only one neither: I can tell you something else about him. There’s a lady-friend of mine——”