Richelieu

One of the true lords of the English language, Belloc was not an Englishman by birth. His father was French, his mother was Irish; and when he married, his bride was an American. But he looked more like the traditional figure of John Bull than any Englishman could. He was born at La Celle, near Paris, on July 20, 1870. His father, Louis Swanton Belloc, was a well-known barrister in France. Bessie Rayner, his mother, was of Irish extraction.

Belloc studied at the Oratory School at Edgebaston, England, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1893. In his third year he was the Blackenbury History Scholar and an honor student in the history schools. Between the Oratory School and Oxford, Belloc served in the French Army, where as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of Artillery he was stationed at Toul. It was from this spot that, years later, he was to set forth on the pilgrimage to St. Peter’s that furnished material for The Path to Rome, the book that many critics consider his best.

At Oxford Belloc became President of the debating society, the Oxford Union, and was known for his brilliance and high energy. His literary career followed his Oxford period immediately. He rapidly achieved success as a newspaper and magazine writer and as a light versifier. From then on a torrent of books, pamphlets, letters, etc., poured from his pen. It astonishes, not only in its bulk but in its diversity: French and British history, military strategy, satire, comic and serious verse, literary criticism, topography and travel, translations, religious, social, and political commentary, long-running controversies with such opponents as H. G. Wells and Dr. G. G. Coulton. His published books number one hundred and fifty-three. It is little wonder that A. P. Herbert described him as “the man who wrote a library.”

In 1903 Belloc became a British subject, and in 1906 was sent to Parliament by the South Salford constituency. His maiden speech in the House early in 1906 won him an immediate reputation as a brilliant orator. The same year he was the nominee of the British Bishops to the Catholic Education Council. Belloc remained in the House of Commons until 1910, but refused to serve a second term because, in his own words, he was “weary of the party system,” and thought he could attack politics better from without than from within. From that time on he devoted his entire efforts to writing and lecturing.

In 1911 Belloc founded the Eye Witness, which he edited with Cecil Chesterton (1879–1918), who with Belloc wrote their rousing condemnation of Parliamentary politics, The Party System. Together they scooped the notorious Marconi scandal in England in 1912. In the same year Chesterton took over the editorship of the Eye Witness, transforming it into the New Witness and editing it until his enlistment in 1916. At that point his brother G. K. assumed the editorial role for the paper, which he renamed G.K.’s Weekly in 1925. A year after G.K. died, in 1936, Belloc was persuaded by Hilary Pepler (1878–1951) to edit what was the successor to G. K.’s Weekly, called simply the Weekly Review. As was typical, Belloc soon found the editorship tedious, and passed it on to his son-in-law, Reginald Jebb (1884–1977).

Belloc was largely responsible for the conversion to the Faith of G. K. Chesterton. They went on to become numbered among England’s greatest writers and considered to be two of the most brilliant lay expounders of Catholic doctrine. The two were close friends and frequent collaborators, especially on G. K’s. Weekly, in which they waged many a valiant crusade together. Their journalistic collaboration also produced corresponding political movements, small but intense. The New Witness inspired and guided the Clean Government League, founded to unmask, combat, and eliminate government corruption. That League was also the inspiration for the later effort in 1926 to establish a New Witness League of sorts, which would take its inspiration from G. K.’s Weekly; it was this vision that flowered into the Distributist League that endured for some 13 years.

During World War I Belloc wrote detailed and authoritative war commentaries, each week filling much of the journal Land and Water, which was dedicated to covering the war. The Times paid high tribute to Belloc’s amazing powers in the field, drawing attention to his article that had appeared in London Magazine over two and a half years before the start of the war, “in which he predicted, with the most extraordinary accuracy, the proceedings of the Germans at Liege as they have happened at the opening of the present war.” The Times described his prediction as “one of the most astonishingly accurate prophecies of a great war in the history of journalism.”

Mr. Belloc visited the United States on many occasions. In 1937 he served as a visiting Professor of History at the Graduate School of Fordham University in New York; from these lectures came his book The Crisis of Civilization. He was decorated by Pope Pius XI with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1934 for his services to Catholicism as a writer. In the same year Oxford conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. Later he shared with the then British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, the distinction of being the only persons to have their portraits hung in the National Portrait Gallery while they were alive.

Just four days before his eighty-third birthday, while dozing before the fireplace in his daughter’s home, he fell into the flames and was so badly burned that he died soon afterward in a hospital at Guildford, Surrey, on July 16, 1953.

Because of his antagonism to many British sacred cows and his free and caustic criticism of them, he was not a wholly popular man in England. Nor did his espousal of the Nationalist cause against the Communists during the Spanish civil war add to his popularity there. His refusal to tone down his views, and his contempt for the political, literary, and social establishments of the day, militated against recognition of him as a major writer and thinker. Neither was he helped by the range of his work; critics like to pigeon-hole a writer as poet, historian, playwright, or novelist, and they could not cope with his diversity, huge output, and overwhelming ebullience. They resented him. Even today, that fear and resentment is to be seen in the dismissive little articles and reviews, and the obsession with his alleged “fascism” which stems from his willingness to speak the truth as he saw it on topics which today are “untouchable.” But slowly the truth is emerging that Hilaire Belloc is among the great writers of English prose and that the best of his verse is of equally high quality. More importantly, he was a thinker of power, significance and – how rare these days – integrity. Where are the people today who would sacrifice the material rewards of public life and office as did Belloc when he demanded, in Parliament in 1908 and repeatedly thereafter, that the funds of political parties should be subject to audit?

Contrary to the lack of recognition which he received in some quarters during his lifetime, and despite his own prediction to the contrary, his place in English letters is secure.

Fr. Crowdy was born in Pyrford, Surrey; his father was a Solicitor and both his parents were Anglicans. At Baliol College, Oxford, Crowdy met Dr. Buchman and his flourishing “moral re-armament” movement. Buchman confronted the young undergraduate with what was called “radical questioning” and, as a result, Crowdy underwent a process of re-thinking which ultimately resulted in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in India, where he was stationed as a gunnery officer during the Second World War. Ordained a priest after the war, Fr. Crowdy became a member of the London Oratory where he lived for 22 years. Although Crowdy maintained an attachment to the Oratory, he never settled there, not having really found his vocation. In the late 1960’s he became firstly alarmed and then exasperated by the upheavals in the Church following the Second Vatican Council. Of this period, he wrote, “I felt a definite drift towards protestant ideas and decided that the old Mass was the best anchor to put out to prevent further drift” In these words he recalls Dr. Buchman’s appeal to “absolute honesty” in religious matters. In 1973 Crowdy moved to Italy in order to help out in a little parish in Florence. Six years later he moved to the diocese of Northampton, and it was there that he finally decided to break with what he called “the modernist Church” and return to the Tridentine Mass which he loved.

In 1977 he translated into English a tract by the Florentine economist Neri Capponi, which condemned the new Mass as being full of “baseless assumptions, contradictions, and evasions.” He also at about this time translated into English from the French An Open Letter to Confused Catholics by Archbishop Lefebvre.

Like many people of his generation who boasted a classical education built on solid reading, Fr. Crowdy had enormously wide interests outside his priestly work. He was a talented painter and possessed an enormous knowledge of art and literature. He was a competent gardener and could even turn his arm over in a game of garden cricket.