Hadrian VII

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.