As Good as God, As Clever as the Devil
Rodney Bolt

Minnie Sidgwick was just twelve years old when her cousin, twenty-three-year-old Edward Benson, proposed to her in 1853.Edward went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and little Minnie – as Mary Benson – to preside over Lambeth Palace. When the Archbishop died, Mary set up home in a Jacobean manor house with her friend Lucy Tait. She remained at the heart of her family of fiercely eccentric children. But none of them was ‘the marrying sort’ and the family seemed destined for disruption.