Herbert Hensley Henson (8 November 1863 – 27 September 1947) was an English Anglican cleric, scholar and polemicist. He was Bishop of Hereford from 1918 to 1920 and Bishop of Durham from 1920 to 1939.

Henson's father was a devout follower of the Christian sect the Plymouth Brethren and disapproved of schools. Henson was not allowed to go to school until he was fourteen, and was largely self-educated. He was admitted to the University of Oxford, and gained a first-class degree in 1884. In the same year he was elected as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and began to make a reputation as a speaker. He was ordained priest in 1888. Feeling a vocation to minister to the urban poor, Henson served in the East End of London and Barking before becoming the chaplain of Ilford Hospital Chapel, a 12th-century hospice in Ilford, in 1895. In 1900 he was appointed to the prominent post of rector of St Margaret's, Westminster, and canon of Westminster Abbey. While there, and subsequently as Dean of Durham (1913–1918), he wrote prolifically and sometimes controversially. He was tolerant of a wide range of theological views; because of this, some members of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England accused him of heresy and sought unsuccessfully to block his appointment as Bishop of Hereford in 1917.

In 1920, after two years in the largely rural diocese of Hereford, Henson returned to Durham in the industrial north-east of England as its bishop. The area was badly affected by an economic depression. Henson was opposed to strikes, trade unions and socialism, and for a time his outspoken denunciation of them made him unpopular in the diocese. Some of his opinions changed radically during his career: at first a strong advocate of the Church of England's continued establishment as the country's official church, he came to believe that politicians could not be trusted to legislate properly on ecclesiastical matters, and he espoused the cause of disestablishment. He campaigned against prohibition, the exploitation of foreign workers by British companies, and fascist and Nazi aggression. He supported reform of the divorce laws, the controversial 1928 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, and ecumenism.

Herbert Hensley Henson was born in London on 8 November 1863, the fourth son and sixth child of eight of Thomas Henson, a businessman, and his second wife, Martha, née Fear. Thomas, raised in a farming family in Devon, quarrelled with his father and left home as a young man to go into business in London. By 1865, when Hensley was two years old, Thomas, had prospered enough to buy a property in Broadstairs on the coast of Kent to retire there and devote himself to gardening and religion. In his three volumes of memoirs, written towards the end of his life, Henson was conspicuously reticent about his childhood, devoting three and a half pages out of the total of nearly 1,200 to his first eighteen years, but it is clear that Thomas Henson was a zealous evangelical Christian who had renounced the Church of England and later became a follower of the Plymouth Brethren.

My father's evangelicalism was deepened and darkened by his bereavement. He seemed to lose interest in everything except religion, and under the influence of some Plymouth Brethren ... his religion degenerated into bigotry. He never joined the sect, but he read their literature, shared many of their opinions and grew into their narrow intolerance.

Henson's biographer John Peart-Binns writes that Henson senior's "bleak outlook on the world" and "feeling of urgency to be prepared for the Second Coming" caused his family life to be one of all-pervading darkness. His wife shielded the children from the worst excesses of what the biographer Matthew Grimley describes as Thomas's "bigotry", but in 1870 she died, and, in Henson's words, "with her died our happiness". Grimley comments that Henson's unhappy childhood "could have come straight out of the pages of Charles Dickens".

As an adult Henson remembered Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin as the first book that moved him. Thomas Henson forbade his children to go to school, play with other children, or go on holiday. Chadwick writes that deprived of outlets except religion, the family, and his father's books, Hensley "escaped into the library. At an early age he became the voracious reader of the family." The family library lacked fiction for boys; the young Henson instead read such works as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Chadwick comments that by the age of fourteen "this prodigious boy had read as deeply in divinity as many young men when they take holy orders." The young Henson became a dedicated Christian and felt a vocation for the Anglican priesthood; his father's fundamentalist views were anathema, and left him with what Grimley calls "an enduring hatred of protestant fanaticism".

In 1873 Thomas Henson remarried; Emma Parker, widow of a Lutheran pastor, ensured that the children were properly educated. In Henson's phrase, "she recreated the home". She introduced him to the works of Walter Scott and translations of classical authors such as Thucydides and Plutarch, helping to form his literary style. He wrote later, "It was a curiously mixed bag, but I absorbed it with avidity". He remained devoted to her – he called her Carissima – and once he was an adult he cared for her until her death in 1924.