Henson was in a minority of senior clergy in speaking out against the dictators of the Axis powers. He condemned Nazi anti-Semitism, Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, appeasement and the Munich agreement. On 1 February 1939, at the age of seventy-five, he retired from Durham to Hintlesham in Suffolk. Seven months later the Second World War began. Henson supported the Allies' fight in what he saw as a just war to defeat godless barbarism; he wrote of "The deepening infamies of Nazi warfare – infamies so horrible as almost to shake one's faith in the essential Divineness of Humanity." He urged, "there can be no compromise or patched up peace".