Hugh Ross Williamson

There are two reasons to rejoice at the publication of this new edition of Hugh Ross Williamson's important work on the evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism. The first is its restoration of the author to his rightful place in the Catholic cultural conversation, a place he held for a full forty years from the 1930s to the 1970s; the second is the restoration of the present volume to its rightful place in the scholarly conversation on the nature and importance of Shakespeare's faith. -Joseph Pearce, from the Foreword

This is a new edition of Hugh Ross Williamson's classic work, The Flowering Hawthorn. This is a delightful, exquisitely decorated, essay-a blending of legend and history-on the famous Thorn of Glastonbury which has flowered each Christmas and from which, wrote Chesterton, grew the whole story of Britain. With consummate artistry Hugh Ross Williamson explores the legends which involve Joseph of Arimathea, including the possibility that Jesus Christ may have come to England with Joseph. The great event of Joseph's sojourn at Glastonbury was the building of the church...the first Christian church to be built in Britain. From the earliest days Glastonbury was to be pre-eminent as a Christian centre. To Glastonbury, as Avalon, came King Arthur; then King Alfred; and then Dunstan, perhaps the only other man in the pre-conquest period who approaches Arthur and Alfred in greatness. And the fame of the Abbey spread throughout the world. Pillage and desecration were to follow...and eventual restoration in this century.

This is a new edition of Hugh Ross Williamson's classic book, The Flowering Hawthorn. This is a delightful, exquisitely decorated, essay-a blending of legend and history-on the famous Thorn of Glastonbury which has flowered each Christmas and from which, wrote Chesterton, grew the whole story of Britain. With consummate artistry Hugh Ross Williamson explores the legends which involve Joseph of Arimathea, including the possibility that Jesus Christ may have come to England with Joseph. The great event of Joseph's sojourn at Glastonbury was the building of the church...the first Christian church to be built in Britain. From the earliest days Glastonbury was to be pre-eminent as a Christian centre. To Glastonbury, as Avalon, came King Arthur; then King Alfred; and then Dunstan, perhaps the only other man in the pre-conquest period who approaches Arthur and Alfred in greatness. And the fame of the Abbey spread throughout the world. Pillage and desecration were to follow...and eventual restoration in this century.

British writer Hugh Ross Williamson (1901-1978), an Anglo-Catholic priest who converted to Catholicism in 1955 and a prolific writer of drama and history, wrote two pamphlets, in 1969 and 1970, expressing his conviction that the Novus Ordo Missae represented not a reform of the Roman Rite of Mass but a devastating corruption of it. His background equipped him well to discern the signs of Protestantism and of Modernism as they appeared in the replacement liturgical books, and his conscience bid him speak up against what he called 'the great betrayal' (an ironic echo of his 1955 book on the Roman Canon, The Great Prayer). While many traditionalists would not concur with certain of his conclusions, his intelligent work, motivated by an obvious love for the Faith, helps us to remember today the anguish of spirit through which our forebears had to pass as they saw the heritage for which they converted being dismantled rite by rite.