A balancing act

If anyone should wince at a hint of aggression in the title of this book — and some Catholics might — let him or her remember or read Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), in which every Spaniard is a sallow coward, every priest a slinking prevaricator and every Protestant Englishman an apple-cheeked exemplar of straightforwardness and truth. At least, that is how I remember it, with astonishment; a high point in 300 years of anti-Catholic propaganda.

Tit for tat is never a good idea, but balance is, and this collection of 16 portrait-biographies by different hands can be thought of as a contribution towards fairness. We meet some interesting men (a volume of Catholic Heroines is in preparation, we are rather urgently informed, lest there be murmurs), from the Venerable Bede to Leonard Cheshire and Cardinal Hume. Some are barely known, anyway to this reviewer; John Lingard, for example, and Lord Petre. Also, it is good to be reminded (brilliantly, by Lucy Beckett) of the remarkable story of Cardinal Pole — who was not even an ordained priest when the Pope gave him a cardinal’s hat.

The introduction, by John Jolliffe, pulls no punches. Henry VIII was ‘amoral, treacherous and ruthless, vainglorious and restless’, which seems a little politically parti pris, until we learn from Lucy Beckett that Henry had Pole’s mother, at nearly 70, an erstwhile friend of his (Pole had royal, Plantagenet blood) imprisoned and then executed on no evidence at all.

One of the editor’s non-selections stands out: we miss G. K. Chesterton. However, ‘his verbal somersaults and paradoxes did not equal the achievements of his great friend Hilaire Belloc’. Hmm. Instead, we have a lively and affectionate essay by A. N. Wilson, Belloc’s biographer, which begins, surely accurately, ‘Belloc’s reputation today survives as the author of comic verses for children’.