His father, Sir William Hume, was Professor of Medicine at Durham University; his mother, Elizabeth Tisseyre, was from a military family. There was an irony in the image Hume was to gain as a quintessence of Englishness, for his father was a Scottish Protestant and his mother a French Catholic. But his education was archetypically upper-middle-class English – prep school in his native Newcastle and then at Gilling East, and then at Ampleforth College, the public school in North Yorkshire run by Benedictine monks.There he decided to become a monk and took his first vows – choosing Basil as his monastic name – before going on to Oxford to read History and, when he trained for the priesthood, opted for Fribourg, rather than Rome, for his theological studies (which is perhaps why his ecclesiology turned out orthodox rather than ultramontane).He then returned to life at Ampleforth as Fr Basil, teacher and housemaster, where – when his imperious French mother arrived in her chauffeur-driven car, wound down the window and shouted “Georges!” – the man who had recently been elected Magister Scholarum of the English Benedictine Congregation would jump up from his chair, run his hands over his hair, rub his toe- caps on the back of his trousers and run to greet his mother just like one of his fifth-formers.When, in 1963, his community bypassed two monastic generations and elected him abbot, at the age of just 40, it was that most English of qualities, the genius for compromise, which they perhaps perceived in him, along with his evident prayerfulness. With a community of 150 monks, a school and 20 parishes to supervise, the young abbot needed to be a master of reconciling clashing priorities. More than that, the Second Vatican Council had just begun, and with it a revolution which was to rock the Church, creating pressures which were to cause many religious communities to fall apart.Out went Latin. In came the vernacular, communion under both kinds, the practice of concelebration, a new lectionary and breviary – and a eucharistic rite which seemed ominously similar to its Anglican equivalent.

The task of orchestrating all this in a community with an inbuilt resistance to change was formidable. Some of Ampleforth’s most respected monks were out of sympathy with the whole thrust of “Vatican II”: one man’s renewal, said one monk, was another man’s betrayal. Yet over the next 12 years Dom Basil handled it with sensitivity and flexibility, creating loopholes for those who needed exceptions.”My head is progressive but my heart is conservative,” he told the monks, taking care never to ally himself too much with one set of opinions. He pursued the same technique as Archbishop, combining a conservative temperament with an intellectual openness and a vivid sense of moral and social justice.His appointment to Westminster was entirely unexpected, not least to Hume himself. He might, perhaps, have realised that he was a strong candidate to become world-wide superior of the Benedictine order when the job of Abbot Primate fell vacant in 1977. But the job of leader of the Catholics of England and Wales, as it was to become known in his time, he had not presumed even to consider. Indeed he was flattered even to be consulted by the papal nuncio about who might succeed to the post after the death of Cardinal John Heenan.

The front-runner was considered to be Derek Worlock, recently appointed Archbishop of Liverpool, and the Church’s leading strategist and intellectual (who turned out to have enemies in Rome).Hume took the telephone call of appointment in the middle of dinner with his fellow monks He was not happy. “I must confess I didn’t enjoy the rest of the meal,” he said afterwards. Indeed he was only reconciled to the commission after an interview with Pope Paul VI, into which he went glum-faced and emerged happy and with no doubts about himself or the job, one contemporary recalls.From the moment of his installation in 1976 it was clear that Basil Hume was in a different mould to his predecessors. Heenan, like those before him, had been steely and aloof – a “prince of the church” in the phrase of the time. Like the other seven Archbishops of Westminster since the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 he trod a careful line between London and Rome – but one which never disputed the primacy of the Vatican. “Am I Queen of England or am I not?” said Queen Victoria when faced with the triumphalism of the first of those figures, Cardinal Wiseman, whose old-fashioned carriage with its cardinal-pink gorgeous trappings was satirised by the poet Browning as a “lobster side-salad”. In his inaugural address Archbishop Hume set out a very different philosophy, and one which was to characterise his approach over the next 23 years.

A bishop, he said, quoting Augustine, was a man who knew the weakness, fears and anxieties of all people; who, as well as sensing the presence of God, experienced the darkness of his apparent absence; whose job was not to stifle but to release, not to impose but to draw out, not to dominate but to animate.Four years later in Rome he realised this was not the agenda of everyone in the hierarchy. At the 1980 Synod of Bishops, just before that defining moment on the plane home, Hume had issued a masterly warning which made his peers sit up. There was a view of the Church, he said, as a fortress with soldiers whose duty was unquestioning obedience, in which so much noise was made that they could not hear those outside. But there was also a vision of the Church as a pilgrim, searching for the road in a land where the signposts pointing the way had become weather-beaten and needed new paint and yet were being renovated with the wrong paint.