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Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo The extraordinary fantasy novel of the Englishman who becomes Pope, and what he does with his power. ‘Hadrian the Seventh’ is the extraordinary and colourful fantasy of an Englishman, a failed Roman Catholic priest, who all at once finds himself elected to the Papacy. The detailed look behind the drawn curtains of the Vatican is vivid, well-researched and credible, and has fascinated readers since it was first published a century ago. The new Pope is suddenly called in by a peace conference. The tensions he has to deal with, and resolve, provide a remarkable ‘alternative history’, all the more interesting to the modern reader because we know what really happened. Over the novel hangs the looming cloud of the First World War. Could it have been avoided if ‘Hadrian the Seventh’ had been fact, not fiction? Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled ‘Baron Corvo’, was himself a failed applicant for the priesthood: a difficult man who quarrelled with friends as soon as he made them and lived mostly in poverty. He is the subject of a classic biography, A J A Symons’s ‘The Quest for Corvo’.
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