Imagine if Jane Williams, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, were to run off with one of the daughters of George Carey.What a dreadfully messy scandal that would be!
And how frightful for George’s son Andrew Carey, who has devoted his life to campaigning against same-sex relationships.
But go back a century or so, and something very similar actually happened.
Mrs Mary Sidgwick Benson, by that stage the widow of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury 1882-96, ran off with Lucy Tait, daughter of Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury 1868-1882.
How horrified their Graces would have been if they had known what fate had in store!
(Unless, that is, they took Queen Victoria’s view that there was no such thing as lesbianism.)
One wonders what Mrs Benson’s sons thought. Presumably Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the Catholic convert author of “Come Rack! Come Rope!”, would have been horrified.
(No sniggering – it’s a historical novel about Elizabethan persecution.)
E F Benson, on the other hand, might have been less censorious: he was the author of the “Lucia” novels and also represented England at figure skating (a distinction he shares, bizarrely, with Bishop Arthur Roche of Leeds).
Apart from a reference on Wikipedia, I can find disappointingly little on the internet about this tale of Sapphic love between the ladies of Lambeth, though there is a sour comment from Peter Conrad in a Guardian book review: “The Church of England’s hypocrisy is even more loathsome than its bigotry, and Minnie’s is surely one of the skeletons in Rowan Williams’s closet.”
That seems a bit harsh. But, then again, look at Rowan’s distinctly Victorian treatment of Jeffrey John…
In case you were wondering, I stumbled across this story because of mention of the Bensons on another thread.
Alas, I can find no equivalent scandals in the history of Catholic Archbishops of Westminster, only one of whom was married.
It’s always surprised me, however, that no one has ever bothered to investigate the strange story of Cormac’s elevation to Westminster.
You see, he was originally one of three priest brothers, and through a bureaucratic mix-up the wrong Fr Murphy-O’Connor ended up being made cardinal.
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