Rolfe was indeed an extraordinary man. A self-styled baronet and priest, he was also, variously, a confidence trickster, pauper, schoolmaster, painter, pioneering photographer, blackmailer, and paedophile; and author of seven novels and various short stories. Rolfe’s vindictiveness and paranoia have become legendary, mainly through AJA Symon’s biography, The Quest for Corvo, and as the eponymous protagonist of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s roman a clef, The Unspeakable Skipton.
The son of a piano maker, Rolfe was born in 1860 into a Dissenting family. An early convert to Roman Catholicism, such was his religious ardour that at fourteen he had his breast tattooed with a cross.
His life became an obsessively fruitless quest to enter the priesthood. He was expelled from seminaries in England and Rome. Although the ostensible reason given for his expulsions were that he was spending too much time on poetry and painting, Rolfe had actually irritated the authorities by arguing violently with anyone who questioned his actions, and for his habit of running up numerous debts he had no hope of paying.
Although his hopes of entering the priesthood were at an end, he vowed to remain celibate for twenty years so he could be ready for the “call” if it ever came. It never did. He became convinced that all his hardships were the result of a Papist conspiracy against him. However, he did take to signing himself Fr. Rolfe - the abbreviation of Frederick being his way of suggesting he had a right to the traditional Catholic honorific, Father.
After the Rome debacle Rolfe settled in Hampshire, where he presented himself as Baron Corvo. According to him it was an honorary title bestowed upon him by the Duchess Sforza-Cesarini, a wealthy patron who had taken him in when he was homeless in Rome. He left Hampshire under a cloud of debt and fraud, and started afresh in Aberdeen. Within two months of securing a job as a photographer's assistant he was sacked, although he refused to accept his dismissal and had to be physically prevented from attending work by the police. After running up a huge bill at his lodgings he was eventually thrown out into the street in his pyjamas – when threatened with eviction Rolfe’s habit was to retire to bed and pretend it wasn’t happening.
Despite all this, Rolfe continued writing. He had adopted an arcane and idiosyncratic writing style, using archaic spelling designed to present an aesthetic “feel” to his work, and strewing his writing with foreign words. He wrote in green and heliotrope inks on sheets of paper and tacked them to his walls and then edited from there.
His most famous work is Hadrian VII, in which George Arthur Rose, an impoverished and oppressed writer, manages to be elected Pope – Rolfe’s greatest fantasy.
Rolfe spent the last five years of his troubled life in Venice. He applied for a job as a gondolier, but usually he relied on other people's generosity for his survival. In his last year, he somehow borrowed enough money to buy a dazzling gondola, draped in leopard and lynx skins, which he ostentatiously poled through the canals. Nevertheless, after a period of sleeping under tarpaulins on the canals, he died of "heart paralysis" on 25 October 1913 in a flat belonging to a friend.
His legacy is not only the myth of the man and his works, but also a medical condition known as Corvo's Syndrome - a quasi-delusional state in which an individual sees himself, not the incumbent, as the Pope of Rome.
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