Hugh Trevorroper

Trevor-Roper was as intrigued by Kenneth de Courcy (1909–99), the self-styled Duc de Grantmesnil, as he was by Edmund Backhouse. De Courcy had launched himself as a roving foreign policy consultant to uninfluential Conservative politicians during the 1930s. From 1938 until 1976 he compiled and circulated a fierce anti-Communist newsletter with many subscribers in the American Midwest. After his sentence in 1963 to seven years’ imprisonment for fraud, forgery, and perjury, he shared a cell in Wormwood Scrubs with the spy George Blake. Always susceptible to titled company, his genealogical self-aggrandizement intensified after his release from prison. Trevor-Roper’s pleasure in de Courcy’s absurdities, and patience with his pretensions, were however not without limits.

To Jeremy Catto, 21 August 1982

Where are you spending August? At home, I hope. It is folly to go abroad (see below). If you are at Eydon, please keep a very close watch on Squire Ford (and more especially Lady Ford).¹ Has anyone bought the house? But my interest is not in the new owners.

I think I told you that Sir E.F. tackled me at a dinner party in London and said that they were selling the Dacre portraits: would I be interested?1 I said ‘yes’ in a somewhat non-committal way. Lady F also told me this, at the same party, in a somewhat more distant way. Well, I have now had a letter from Sir E.F., written on behalf of Lady F (who is the owner of the house and the pictures)—why, I asked myself, couldn’t she write herself?—and enclosing a list of the Dacre portraits, some to be sold, some to be kept: in other words, allegedly, a complete list. However, I note that the Trevor-Roper portraits (the only ones in which I might be interested) have been omitted from the list. And yet I have seen them myself in the house. What is the meaning of this? We can only assume that Lady Ford, being unable (so far) to kill me, as she told you that she would gladly do, is seeking to re-write history by eliminating the Trevor-Ropers from the history of the Dacre title—rather as Stalin eliminated Trotzky from the history of the Russian Revolution. Ominous precedent! Perhaps, like Stalin, she is determined to destroy her enemy too, and is only biding her time till she has found a hatchet-man prepared to insert himself into my household …

We have been back at Chiefswood for a week; but it will take far more than a week for me to recover from the psychological shock of the previous fortnight. I will tell you all.

At this point, perhaps I should name our host in order to clarify my reservations. He was none other than the father of your former pupil Joseph (I think) de Courcy: now I suppose Lord Joseph, since his father, mero motu,1 has created himself a duke in order to exorcise a psychological trauma due to his lack of a title of nobility; and if one is going to ennoble one’s self, I suppose one might as well go the whole hog. At any rate he is now duc de Grantmesnil, and takes his ducal status very seriously. He has ducal emblems embroidered on his shirts and slippers; his title is printed in his cheque-books and on his labels and engraved on his writing-paper; and his road-atlas (for he motored us out), and no doubt his other books (if he has any), are inscribed, in his own hand, with the words ‘Property of His Grace the Duke of Grantmesnil’. I noticed that in France, when referring to himself, he would contrive to use the third person, so as to drop the phrase, which seemed very musical to his ears, ‘Monsieur le duc’—just as Walter Annenberg, when ambassador to the court of St James, contrived, by the same device, to make repeated use of the phrase ‘his Excellency’.² However, I also noted that when we were staying, en route, with a real French marquis, he became Mr de Courcy. The marquis, I observed, was a keen and learned genealogist, whom perhaps it would have been difficult to deceive.

But I am running ahead too fast. We are still only in March, when I rashly allowed Xandra to accept the invitation. Then came the war for the Falkland Islands. I saw a ray of hope. Mrs T (it seems) wanted me to conduct the enquiry into the preliminaries to that war, and that task, I thought, though otherwise unenviable, would at least get me out of the Italian holiday. But alas, I was vetoed (as I understand) by Mr Foot,1 and there was no escape. Indeed, the Falklands war had the very opposite result: for while we were doomed to go, the rest of the house-party made it an excuse to run out—one couple because their sons were due back from the Falklands in August, another because they had a furious row with our and their prospective host on the subject of the Falkland Islands: indeed, it seems, the war in the South Atlantic was child’s play compared with the battle which raged over the dinner-table, with verbal bombardments shattering the calm of the dining-room and exocets² sinking the port decanters with all contents. So my hope that the conversation of our host would be diluted and dispersed by the company was confounded, and we were doomed to be with him for a fortnight, alone.

When we arrived at the ducal villa, we found that this too was very different from our expectation. Instead of a luxurious Renaissance chateau, with terraced gardens, elegant statuary, quiet ilex-groves, a swimming-pool fed with crystallised water from the mouth of a baroque animal holding the ducal coat-of-arms, and polite Italian servants periodically wheeling in the drink-trolley, we found a dark and poky farm-house in a field, with no conveniences of any kind, and a perpetual lack of water. The swimming-pool was a communal pool a mile away, in a field of nettles, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. There were no servants, and the nearest shops were in a hideous borgo about five miles away over execrable roads. In this squalid bothie we were doomed (since we had a fixed-day return air-ticket) to spend a fortnight, listening to endless monologues by the soi-disant duke on his imaginary pedigree, his own social grandeur, his importance in the councils of the great and the Secret Service, his butlers, footmen, valets, stewards, secretaries, etc. Xandra said it was like a Chekhov play. I thought it was a cross between Nightmare Abbey and Cold Comfort Farm.

We made various plans of escape. We tried to take refuge with Harold Acton;1 but he had just had Princess Margaret to stay, after which all his servants, exhausted by the strain, had claimed an immediate holiday. We tried the Hotel Universo in Lucca; but it was full. So we had to sit it out and find some relief by seeking to lead our host on to the subjects which he seemed most anxious to avoid and so to reconstruct, behind the tedious fantasies of his phony autobiography, some few solid facts of his real history. For he is, I soon realised, a Backhouse; and indeed I have now enough matter for another book on another hidden life; but I am determined not to write it.

We flew back from Pisa a week ago, our suitcases groaning with clothes for all social occasions, never used. Xandra says that she has a callus on her bottom from the hardness of the kitchen chairs (the kitchen was the only living room). We only once escaped from the (pseudo-) ducal monologues: that was when we found the British Ambassador to Prague in a house nearby.² He was a Cambridge man, and was much exercised by the problem of the authorship of the letters of Mercurius Oxoniensis, which he seemed to know by heart. He asked me if the problem had ever been solved, so I told him the truth: that it had aroused a great deal of speculation, and many wild suggestions, but that it remained one of the insoluble mysteries of literature.