Hugh Trevorroper

Another of Trevor-Roper’s younger friends was Edward Chaney (b. 1951), who lived in Florence from 1978 until 1985 and had a doctorate from the Warburg Institute in London. He was the Shuffrey Research Fellow in Architectural History at Lincoln College, Oxford, 1985–90, and later historian to the London region of English Heritage and Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts, and Chair of the History of Collecting Research Centre, at Southampton Solent University. Just as Trevor-Roper was supplanted at a late stage as Pearsall Smith’s testamentary heir, so Chaney was Harold Acton’s literary executor until Acton made late changes in his will. At the suggestion of the publisher and naval historian Richard Ollard, Chaney sent a copy of his first book The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion (1985) to Trevor-Roper, whose biography of Laud he had used. In the covering letter he declared that Trevor-Roper was one of the book’s ideal readers. Trevor-Roper invited Chaney to meet him at Peterhouse. After Trevor-Roper’s return to Oxfordshire, the two men often went walking together.

To Edward Chaney, 6 August 1986

I was delighted by your letter: delighted, charmed, flattered (perhaps all these represent the same response), but also touched. Especially since I suspect there is a little intellectual gulf between us. I do not put myself into any category, but I see myself periodically described (among other less flattering adjectives) as a whig; and I suppose that may be as accurate as any such labels are. You, I deduce, with the same general reservation, are a papist:¹ so that in the 17^th century, at least, and indeed at any time up to that of Lord Acton,² we would be irreconcilable—although now, perhaps, drawn closer together by the emergence of more radical believers such as Christopher Hill. In any case, I am delighted to find myself on the same side as the writer of so learned and fascinating a book and such a charming letter.

I write now from my home in Scotland. Always when I come here—the journey a recurrent trauma—I leave something important behind. This time we had to turn back from Peterborough because we suddenly realised that we had left all the silver on the dining-room table. Only on unpacking here did I discover that I had left some vital papers behind, which include your letter (though not, happily, your book); so I write without having it in front of me and may not take up all the points you raised. However, I remember some of them.

First, Ussher.1 I would still (unless corrected) describe him as of a Protestant family. I think I am right in saying that his uncle Richard Stanyhurst² was originally a Protestant, but converted to Catholicism by Edmund Campion. Ussher’s mother followed later; but I think the whole family started as Protestants. There was not much love lost between Ussher and Uncle Richard, at least after Ussher published his book de Christianarum Ecclesiarum … perpetua successione.³ Ussher had civil relations with Catholic scholars, but he was, I think, pretty paranoid about popery. You mention someone—was it Richelieu?—expressing interest in Ussher’s works. I am interested in that. May I ask for a repeat?

You asked me about Berenson. I knew him very well and used to stay regularly at I Tatti. It was a wonderful house to stay in: a marvellous library, interesting company and good conversation. He had a house in Vallombrosa, to which he went in the summer when his servants went on holiday, and I used to go there too. I look back with the greatest pleasure to my time at I Tatti—with such pleasure that I am reluctant to visit the place now (although I did stay there once after his death, with Myron Gilmore, who, as Director, preserved some of the douceur de vivre of the house).⁴

Thank you for the information about the correspondence of Cassiano dal Pozzo.⁵ I will pursue that. I do not believe that Mayerne ever went to Italy, after his return from the Grand Tour with the Duc de Rohan in 1600,1 or had any Italian friends; so Petersson’s² remark surprised me. I suspect that you are right and that he is merely mentioned in the correspondence of others.

I spoke to Noel Malcolm.³ He said that he had not received a copy of your book, but that he would try to get a review copy. I hope he will review it. I hope that I will too; but I am frightened of promising more than I can do at present.

Poor old Christopher Hill—I understand that, after a lifetime of trying to keep ahead of the latest radical undergraduate fashion, he has now sunk exhausted by the wayside and is regarded by undergraduate historians as vieux jeu. In the 1930s he was (in a discreet, semi-sophisticated way) a Stalinist—not all that discreet and only very superficially sophisticated: he published a book, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, in which Trotsky is not mentioned.⁴ In about 1951–2 I remember the visit to Oxford of Academician E. A. Kosminsky, who, by a scholarly dissection of the Pipe Roll of 1292 (I think) established the entire class structure of medieval England as a Marxist paradigm.⁵ When there was a reception for the History Faculty to meet the great man (at Balliol of course), he was flanked by Christopher and Max Rothmann (do I recall the name aright?⁶ A bone-headed Stalinist bigot) to protect him from any profane contacts. In 1956, in the Khrushchev era, Christopher moved to keep up with the anti-Stalinist young and quarrelled with Rothmann, who denounced him as a wankender Intellektueller1 (I only saw the record of the C.P. meeting in German). Then, in 1962, he jumped on the sociology bandwagon (see Intellectual Origins of the Puritan Revolution 175–6). In 1968, when Marcuse overtook Marx, he made a further great leap forward: he dyed his hair black, advertised that he was still young by feats of physical agility, and found historical progress the property no longer of austere, disciplined puritans but of antinomian Ranters. The climax of this phase seems to me to be his Milton: a monument of perverse industry, in which the Muggletonian Milton (like a radical Balliol undergraduate in the King’s Arms) haunts taverns, swapping radical thoughts with plebeian revolutionaries who take tobacco ‘as a means of heightening consciousness, akin to drug-taking in our own society’.

Beyond this point it is difficult to see where one can go, and the poor old thing now seems to have given up. I met him a few weeks ago at a posh luncheon at the Dorchester to celebrate the 75^th birthday of Veronica Wedgwood (whom he had tried to blackball for the British Academy; but this inter nos, as Aubrey would say). He has ceased to dye his hair. No doubt he lives very comfortably on the royalties of his Marxist books, still required reading in the Open University.

However, I have always found him very genial, and he has a sense of humour, and I can’t help liking the old wretch. Recently we found ourselves in unexpected alliance across a wider gulf than separates you from me: against the Cambridge neo-tories. So you can see how useful a central whig position can be! Not that I am entirely against the new toryism. My whiggism is very relative. I regard crude whiggism as being the logical forerunner of crude Marxism: the idea that ‘progress’ is the possession of a particular political party.

I hope you will call on me if you come to Cambridge. I shall return there at the beginning of next term, 5^th October—perhaps before.