¹ T-R was in the process of reviewing the first volume of Cowling’s Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England for The Listener. ‘The subject is the intellectual crisis of our time,’ he told Frances Yates: ‘a crisis which (it appears) has been enacted, observed and faced entirely and exclusively within the walls of Peterhouse. There is a chapter on Butterfield; but Butterfield interpreted by his disciples is even less clear than Butterfield himself, and after reading it I find myself no wiser.’ He later described the book as ‘a series of potted intellectual biographies of a miscellany of English worthies’. It was, he judged, ‘a very rum work’. ‘The outer world is occasionally mentioned en passant,’ he told Lloyd-Jones.

² Canon Charles Smyth (1903–87) published Cranmer and the Reformation under Edward VI at the age of 23. Appointed Dean of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1937, he was passed over in 1944 for the vacant Dixie Chair of Ecclesiastical History having by his prickliness made too many enemies in his college and university. The Crown rescued him by appointing him rector of St Margaret’s, Westminster, and Canon of Westminster Abbey, but he had such an unedifying squabble with Westminster School about noisy pupils disturbing his studies, and estranged so many colleagues in the abbey community, that his preferment to a deanery was impossible. He resigned early in 1956.

¹ ‘Fanatical heretics’. ‘Schwärmerei’ was an insult hurled by 16th-century Lutherans at sectaries whose extremism discredited their movement.

² Jack Jones (1913–2009), General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union 1969–78.

³ Princess Anne (b. 1950), a noted horsewoman who represented Great Britain at the 1976 Olympic Games, was elected Chancellor of London University in 1980.

⁴ Ian [Ian R.] Christie (1919–98), a Namierite historian of 18th-century England, had been one of those who joined Plumb in threatening resignation from the British Academy if Blunt did not relinquish his fellowship. He held history chairs at University College London, between 1966 and 1984. Christie held the minority view that the man sentenced at Nuremberg and imprisoned at Spandau was not Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess but an impostor. T-R contributed an essay, ‘Huth: The Incorrigible Intruder’, to David Stafford (ed.), Flight from Reality: Rudolf Hess and his Mission to Scotland (2002).

¹ Sir Cyril Philips (1912–2005), Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies 1956–77 and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London 1971–6, had obtained important correspondence by and about ‘Ossian’ Macpherson, which he treated as his personal property and to which he denied access to scholars. Jeremy Cater, in a footnote to his edition of Trevor-Roper’s The Invention of Scotland, writes that in 1981 Philips ‘was finally forced by mounting family, academic, and ultimately legal pressure, to disgorge what was left of the collection of Macpherson papers, which he had guarded illegitimately, jealously and incompetently for thirty-five years’ (p. 251).