¹ Chaney describes himself as ‘a Catholic-supporting atheist’.

² John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902), historian and moralist, was a leader of the liberal Catholics from the 1860s, and conspicuous for his European rather than insular outlook. In 1869 he and Lord Edward Howard were the first Catholics to be promoted to the peerage since the 1680s. As a historian he had the fatal inhibition that he would not begin to write until he had read all the sources.

¹ James Ussher (1581–1656), Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland from 1625. He is the subject of an essay by T-R in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, in which T-R acknowledges that ‘the family’s Protestantism was not very firm and there had been relapses’.

² Richard Stanyhurst (1547–1618), Irish alchemist, historian, poet, and chaplain to Archduke Albert of Austria. Chaney had pointed out that he became a priest and that two of his sons became Jesuits.

³ Ussher’s staunchly Protestant Gravissimae quaestionis, de Christianarum Ecclesiarum … continua successione & statu appeared in 1613.

⁴ Myron Gilmore (1910–78), sometime Gurney Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard, was Director of Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti 1964–73. Chaney had been a Fellow at the Center 1984–5.

⁵ Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657), connoisseur, antiquarian, patron of Poussin, and an alchemist.

¹ Henri (1579–1638), Duc de Rohan, soldier, Huguenot leader and writer, was the friend, patient, and patron of Mayerne.

² Robert Torsten Petersson (1918–2011), whose books included Sir Kenelm Digby (1956).

³ Noel Malcolm (b. 1956), Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, 1981–8 and of All Souls since 2002; Hobbes scholar, political columnist, historian, and campaigner for justice in Bosnia. He gave Chaney’s later book The Evolution of the Grand Tour (1998) a favourable review in the Sunday Telegraph.

⁴ In fact the book mentions him a number of times, albeit in a hostile spirit.

⁵ Evgeniĭ Alekseevich Kosminsky (1886–1959) studied the Hundred Rolls of 1279–80 and was co-author of Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (1955).

⁶ As T-R explained in a later letter, he meant Andrew Rothstein (1898–1994), a Balliol graduate, who had been a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920 and remained a party member until his death. He was press officer to the Soviet mission in Britain 1920–45, and Lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies 1946–50 (when, as he claimed, he was ‘purged’); author of numerous propagandist works, including studies of Soviet foreign policy; critic of Communist revisionism in the 1980s.

¹ ‘Wobbly intellectual’.