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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 endured a lifetime of indignities and disappointments. However, in the hilarious and touching pages of this, his finest novel, he triumphs.

Taking as its point of departure the alleged inaccuracy of the chronicles of Matthew Paris, Hubert's Arthurpresents 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 facing perhaps his greatest challenge when his reign is threatened by the crucifixions of young Christian boys.

Penned by the brilliant but eccentric Frederick Rolfe (who styled himself Baron Corvo) whilst he was starving and homeless in a self-imposed exile in Venice, Hubert's Arthur, first published posthumously in 1935, is one of the strangest and most remarkable novels of the twentieth century. Filled with action and suffused throughout with Rolfe's characteristic humor, the novel is notable for its blatant homoeroticism, its savage anti-Semitism, and its shockingly graphic violence. This edition features a new scholarly introduction by Kristin Mahoney, who also provides detailed annotations to help guide readers through Rolfe's labyrinth of historical and literary references and his unique vocabulary of archaic words, some of which have not been used since the sixteenth century.