Valerie Pearl (b. 1926) was one of Trevor-Roper’s closest confidants, to whom he wrote long letters, spiced with academic gossip. A historian of the English Civil Wars, she was a Lecturer at Somerville College, Oxford, between 1965 and 1968. She then moved to University College London, as Reader and later Professor in London History. She was co-editor (with Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Blair Worden) of the Festschrift in Trevor-Roper’s honour, History and Imagination (1981). That same year she was appointed as the second President of New Hall, and thus served as head of a Cambridge college in the same decade as Trevor-Roper.
Chiefswood, Melrose
Dear Valerie
I returned from Vienna two days ago and found your letter. The Photostat from the BM1 came next day. Your influence in that citadel of learning is clearly immense and I fear I may well exploit it in future. Thank you so much for exerting it for me.
Now about the Hartlib MSS.2 I’m afraid I don’t know where they are at present but I can and will find out. They have an odd history. Having been lost for many years they were re-discovered in a solicitor’s office in (I think) Chester during the war, and it was decided, by the solicitor I think, that they had been deposited there by the Delamere family—i.e. the Booths of Booth’s Rising—in the last century.1 The present Lord Delamere lives in Rhodesia but he is agreed to be the owner. He allowed Turnbull to use them, and Turnbull kept them in his house.2 There are about six crates of them. I last saw them in the house in Prestatyn, N. Wales, to which Turnbull had retired. I have transcripts of some of them, but only such as interested me at the time. Turnbull is now dead, but G. R. Armytage, his successor as Professor of Education at Sheffield,3 got hold of the papers and said that he was going to publish the Ephemerides, which are a mine of information about Hartlib’s contacts. I urged the Clarendon Press to undertake this but between the dilatory bureaucracy of the Press and the uncertainties of Armytage, the project seems to have lapsed. But my excellent Kenya-Indian friend Pyranali Rattansi4 (do you know him?) wrote to me recently that a colleague of his at Leeds5 was now editing the Ephemerides. Rattansi is at the moment in Kenya and his letter is at Oxford; but when I am back in Oxford—to which I may be returning via China (I have just been invited there for next Saturday: I am not sure if I can possibly make such a detour at such notice. But it is tempting!)6—I will look into the matter and let you know. Turnbull had made an index to the Ephemerides; so if there is any reference to Dillingham, it should be easy to trace it.1
Nothing in Christopher’s book now surprises me.2 I am totally disillusioned by it and ask myself seriously what has happened to him. I believe he has simply galloped through a mass of often worthless secondary sources picking out whatever snippets—unverified and often misquoted—seem to the eye of faith to support his predetermined conclusions. Does this seem too strong? It is not. I can document it again and again. I have just read through the whole of Ralegh’s History of the World and Camden’s Annals, and I find Christopher’s generalisations totally irresponsible. Also he misquotes wildly. Look, for instance, at the reference given in note 17 on p. 211 and see how it compares to Christopher’s quotation. I have now reached, in respect of him, the same position I long ago reached in respect of Stone:3 I can believe nothing that he says on trust. And yet what a good book Economic Problems of the Church is!4
I get more and more sceptical, I’m afraid, about the academic world in general and about the possibility of intellectual honesty. I have just—thanks to the first photostat which you procured for me—completed a brief study of a historiographical problem involving George Buchanan.5 My conclusion is that Buchanan knew that his views about the ancient Scottish constitution were all rubbish by 1572, and that, thereafter, he drew in his horns and attenuated his references to it; and yet, since he was determined to keep to his conclusions, he could not jettison their basis and so he regurgitated the whole sea of rubbish again in 1582. Just when I had finished this, I received a letter from Gertrude Himmelfarb1 who has written a fascinating article—part of a forthcoming biography—on Bentham’s Panopticon. Do read it: it is in Ideas in History: Essays in Honour of Louis Gottschalk (Duke Univ Press 1963). The article convinces me that the doctrinaires of the bourgeois ‘liberal’ revolution were no less inhuman than those of the proletarian revolution. In her letter she described the reaction of her Benthamite friends to her article. It is exactly the same as I presume Buchanan’s to have been: they have altered their texts to meet the shock of the facts, but have left the conclusions untouched. Perhaps we all do this. As Miss Himmelfarb says ‘it’s a familiar enough experience—I know you have encountered it again and again—and yet it never ceases to surprise and shock’. It surprises and shocks me in Christopher’s book.
I didn’t greatly enjoy Vienna. The congress was much too large to be of any value, though of course one meets friends; but to reach every friend one runs the gauntlet of a dozen bores. I enjoyed meeting Fritz Fischer of Hamburg, who has convulsed the German Establishment by blowing up the official orthodoxy about 1914.2 His stories of German academic life leave anything we can describe nowhere. Apparently there are about five old men—Gerhard Ritter,3 Percy Schramm,4 etc—who have absolute control over all historical teaching and can, in effect, block any appointment anywhere. No one can be appointed to the humblest position in any university except by a 2/3 majority of the whole Faculty—i.e. of all established teachers in all subjects—so of course the non-experts simply bow to the authority of the established oracles. I suppose Powicke nearly attained that position with us: nearly but not quite. There are times when I thank God for the Oxford and Cambridge college system.
There was one enjoyable episode at the congress. Do you know about Robert Peters?1 He is a roving imposter—a twice-defrocked parson who has been in gaol in England for bigamy, in Canada for gross moral turpitude, and who awards himself bogus degrees in order to obtain academic appointments. He evidently has a psychological craving for academic and clerical status and functions. He even (on the strength of the usual forged documents and plausible tales) got into Oxford, to Magdalen, a few years ago; but he was unwise enough to enlist my aid against the bishop of Oxford who, he said, was persecuting him; and so I started investigations which led to his precipitate flight via Dublin to Canada. Well, at Vienna I was dozing through a series of grave statements about heresy in the 17th century, when I suddenly heard the French president of the session call on ‘M. le professeur Peters de l’Université de Manchester’, and there, sure enough, I saw my old friend, seeking to attract the notice of possible patrons by making a learned ‘intervention’. I’m afraid he was put out by finding me there and fled the next day. But he contrived to get to all the functions, and although he was pretty cautious at the British ambassador’s reception—especially when he discovered that the girl to whom he was making doubtless improper advances was my stepdaughter—he was uninhibited at the reception given by the Cardinal Archbishop and offered his services to several obscure Catholic universities in America. I enjoyed writing a grave letter to Ernest Jacob asking how Peters got through the careful mesh which is intended to confine participation to bona fide historians. I surprised Jacob in the act of reading my letter. His hands were trembling so hard that he couldn’t get it back into its envelope. ‘It shall be investigated!’ he cried. ‘It shall be investigated!’
I must stop and sleep on the delicate question: shall I, or shall I not, make this sudden wild dash to China?
yours ever
Hugh