One day George Arthur Rose, hack writer and minor priest, discovers that he has been picked to be Pope. He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted. "The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth," he declares. "The present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our own impulse, We command."Hadrian is conceived in the image of his creator, Fr. Rolfe, whose aristocratic pretensions (he called himself Baron Corvo), religious obsession, and anarchic and self-aggrandizing sensibility have made him known as one of the great English eccentrics. Fr. Rolfe...

Frederick Rolfe, who early in his career also published under the name "Baron Corvo," became famous for his "Hadrian the Seventh" (1904), in which an Englishman is unexpectedly elected Pope, and later became infamous for his writings on his love for Venetian boys. But it was with the "Toto" stories, first published in John Lane's fin de siecle literary journal "The Yellow Book," that Corvo achieved his first and most widespread authorial success. In these tales, an Italian peasant youth ingenuously recounts to his English master six poignant and often funny stories dealing with Heaven,...

Taking as its point of departure the alleged inaccuracy of the chronicles of Matthew Paris, Hubert's Arthur presents an alternative retelling of English history from the point of view of Hubert de Burgh. In Hubert's narrative, which begins with an account of the struggle for succession in the wake of King Richard Lionheart's death, young Duke Arthur of Brittany does not die at the hands of King John, but instead ascends to the throne. Hubert relates Arthur's adventures as he combats the wily John, fights in the Crusades, and wages battle against the treacherous Simon de Montfort, before...