These hundred letters, a selection from the many thousands that Hugh Trevor-Roper composed, were written over fifty-eight years, from September 1943, when he was 29 years old, to December 2001, when he was 87 and had thirteen months to live.1 The first letter was written in his period as an intelligence officer, who found in correspondence, and in the solitary meditations that were published in 2011 as The Wartime Journals, forms of self-expression that were excluded by the secrecy and mechanical preoccupations of his work. When he wrote the last of his letters he was living alone, widowed, almost blind, and mortally ill, in a Victorian rectory in the town of Didcot in south Oxfordshire. This volume traverses a career in academic life which roamed far beyond it. A Tutor in History at Oxford from 1946, he became Regius Professor of Modern History in 1957; was ennobled in 1979 as Lord Dacre of Glanton; and moved to Cambridge in 1980 as Master of Peterhouse, an office he held for seven years until his retirement. Seventeen of the letters are written from his Oxford college, home, or office; eleven from the Master’s Lodge at Peterhouse; seventeen others during his many travels. The letters describe visits to Greece, to Spain, to Portugal, to Iceland, to Israel, to the United States, to the West Indies, to Australia, to Pakistan, to Soviet Russia, to Czechoslovakia.
Trevor-Roper wrote to enliven. As he declared in a BBC radio programme (described in his letter to Noël Annan of 20 October 1988), he believed that history should be not ‘a boring private subject for the specialists’ but a vital force that animated general readers: ‘I would like people to feel that they’re part of history … to feel … the movement of it and themselves in it, and not to see the past as a dead deposit but as a living continuity.’1 His vitality, which was indomitable in both his historical work and his extra-curricular diversions, is evident throughout these hundred letters selected for publication at the time of the centenary of his birth. Our selection illustrates the range of his life and preoccupations: as a historian, a controversialist, a public intellectual, a legislator, a lover of literature, a traveller, a countryman. It depicts a life of rich diversity in public activities and private avocations; a mind of intellectual sparkle and eager curiosity; a character that relished the comedies of his time, and revelled in the absurdities, crotchets, and vanities of his contemporaries. It reveals the complexities of an exceptional personality. And it will gladden readers who value wit, erudition, and intellectual vigour. The playful irony of his correspondence places him in a literary tradition which stretches back to the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné in the seventeenth century and Horace Walpole in the eighteenth. Like them he takes pleasure in enlightening and amusing his correspondents. Like them he has a vivid power of pictorial imagery. Yet in a letter of 7 March 1959 we find Trevor-Roper wearying of the superficiality of de Sévigné’s correspondence. His power of analysis brings something more searching. He, no less than they, is an aesthete, but his aestheticism is combined with fierceness of intellect, with an inexhaustible curiosity of enquiry, and with a passion for lucid analysis.
Trevor-Roper’s correspondence amounted to millions of words. A book needs reasonable bounds, but a volume containing many hundred more letters could easily have been compiled without a diminution of quality. Had the editors had an eye to the stature or fame of the recipients rather than to the intrinsic interest of the letters, we might have included letters to such men as George Orwell, Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly, Malcolm Muggeridge, Lord Cherwell, Solly Zuckerman, and Harold Macmillan. Yet Trevor-Roper, who was no respecter of celebrity, wrote the great majority of his most memorable letters to less prominent people.
Hugh Trevor-Roper was born in January 1914 in the small village of Glanton in the Cheviot Hills, close to Northumberland’s border with Scotland. As he recounted to his future wife in his letters of August 1953, a chill loneliness numbed his childhood. His visual alertness and pictorial imagination, which through his life would feed his unquenchable appetite for metaphor, were present in his boyhood, as was the myopia which perhaps intensified those qualities. ‘I can’t understand anything’, he explained in 1942, ‘that I can’t present to my imagination in a pictorial form; and when I comprehend anything vividly, it is always in the terms of some visual image.’
A physically strenuous child, he had little physical contact with his parents, and his adult relationships would sometimes be hampered by bodily tension or awkwardness. He discovered for himself during his solitary childhood those consolatory resources that would also sustain him in adulthood: reading, and observation of the natural world. The first letter in this collection, to Logan Pearsall Smith in 1943, is written from his parents’ house in Alnwick, the Northumberland town to which his parents moved when he was a small boy. It mentions, inter alia, the trout-streams, woodlands, stubble-fields, and partridges of the neighbouring landscape. In another letter, written to his future wife on 8 August 1953, he recalls his boyhood love of the wild flowers, crustaceans, tadpoles, caterpillars and butterflies that he found on forays in Northumberland or near his boarding-schools. Nearly four decades later, in a letter written on 14 July 1991, he describes his struggle to save the lives of an array of orphaned hedgehogs. The emotional isolation of his childhood leaves its mark on his letters. They are a reaching out for contact. The craving is so strong in the sequence of letters to James Howard-Johnston, his stepson, that the recipient often felt unequal to replying. It is more discreetly present in letters to Peter Ramsbotham (19 March 1947), Dawyck Haig (28 January 1951), and others. It is implicit, too, even if less transparently so, in his exchanges with Valerie Pearl, Felix Raab, Blair Worden, Alasdair Palmer, and Edward Chaney. He longed for his correspondents to reply. ‘Do write again: I love your letters, and I long to hear of you, and from you,’ he urged Gerald Brenan, on 11 March 1968. Many of the letters published here are expressions of tenderness or affection from an inhibited man who—even by the standards of his emotionally well-drilled generation—had difficulty in expressing his feelings. The high spirits of the letters can have a serious purpose, which has care and thought behind it. We see it in the humour of his letter to Alan Yorke-Long (21 September 1952), which was written to amuse a dying friend, or in his letter to James Howard-Johnston (21 May 1960), which was intended to revive the spirits of a depressed teenager.
‘The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach,’ wrote Trevor-Roper’s preceptor Edward Gibbon in his autobiography, ‘but … knowledge of our own family from a remote period, will be always esteemed.’ Where our ancestors are concerned, Gibbon continued, ‘we wish to discover them possessed of ample fortunes, adorned with honourable titles, and holding an eminent rank in the class of hereditary nobles.’ Trevor-Roper enjoyed (but not too seriously) the facts that he was a collateral descendant of William Roper, the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Thomas More, and a direct descendant of a younger brother of the tenth Baron Teynham. As a boy he was aware that only a dozen lives (several of them those of elderly bachelors) separated him from inheriting the Teynham peerage, which had been created in the reign of King James I. His ironical pleasure in imagining his remote relations bedecked in their coronets is detectable in the references in his letters to Lady Dacre, Lord Carlisle, Lord Hampden, Lord St Oswald, and others, and in his hopes of buying family portraits from his distant connection Lady Ford. He had early acquaintance with an aristocratic society, for soon after his birth his father, a country doctor at Glanton, bought an additional practice at nearby Alnwick, a town dominated by the Duke of Northumberland and his towering castle. The Trevor-Ropers’ house in a picturesquely named street, Bondgate Without, was a short walk from the ducal ramparts. The social position of medical families in King George V’s England was precarious: the status of physicians depended on that of their patients; doctors’ wives were notorious for their anxiety to exact due respect in their communities; the class-consciousness in a little ducal town was intense; and Kathleen Trevor-Roper surpassed most of her kind in fretful snobbery.
Trevor-Roper was sent at the age of 9 to a barbarous preparatory school in Derbyshire, and a year later to a more tolerable but still Spartan establishment, Belhaven Hill near Dunbar. As a boy from Northumberland, imbued with romantic visions of Borders history, in which the English were valiant patriots repulsing the raids of barbarous Scottish marauders, he was captivated by Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, with its account of Jacobite rebels and such Reiver families as the ‘Dacres of the North’, who from their garrisons contended against the lawlessness of the Borders. At Belhaven Hill the minority of English children were subjected to xenophobic Scottish bullying by their fellow pupils. Trevor-Roper’s hostility to Scottish nationalism, manifest in his letters to Nan Dunbar (17 April 1980), James Stourton (5 October 1986), and others, may owe something to rebuffs of his early years.1
Trevor-Roper thrived in examinations. At the age of 13 he won a scholarship to Charterhouse, a major public school on the outskirts of Godalming in Surrey, where he excelled as a classicist. He made the first of his appearances as a contributor to weekly magazines while a schoolboy. On 27 May 1931 ‘H. R. Trevor-Roper (Charterhouse)’, aged 17, featured in The Listener as co-winner of its Greek crossword (in which all the answers were from the Iliad or Odyssey). A month later, on 24 June, he was one of the prizewinners for the Horace crossword. These modest triumphs testify to the exacting and unashamed standards of culture that still prevailed in the 1930s, and to the spirit of playfulness that accompanied Trevor-Roper’s academic training. Classical literature was always his first love, even after he had changed, as an undergraduate at Christ Church where he was a classical scholar, from a degree in that subject to one in history. He had great tracts of Greek and Latin poetry—and of English and European poetry too—by heart. His adult correspondence is suffused with classical quotations and allusions, which came so readily to him, which indeed he could scarcely keep out of his head. The beauty and purity that language can achieve, its power of allusiveness, the limitless range of its resources—those were his constant sustenance. He cared for language for another reason too, as an instrument of lucidity and mental discipline. He felt ‘moral hatred’, he told his former pupil Blair Worden in April 1977, ‘for rhetoric, slovenly language, ambiguity, emotive obscurity’. Once, he added, he had supposed that his obsession with clarity of prose had originated in his reading A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic after its publication in 1936; but four decades later, ‘when I look back I think perhaps my classical education was the original cause of this attitude. At the back of my mind, I still see every sentence as demanding to be put into Latin. If it cannot be put into Latin, I know that it is, at best, obscure, at worst nonsense.’
Probably as compensation for being bookish in habits and appearance, Trevor-Roper was a rowdy, hard-drinking undergraduate and graduate student, who ran with the beagles and hunted with the hounds. Exultant with drink one night, he hurled an empty champagne bottle from a firstfloor window of the Gridiron club which narrowly missed his fellow pupil and future ally Robert Blake, who was walking on the pavement below. Always he guarded against solemnity, which he never confused with seriousness. In his wartime journals he wrote, in a characteristic strain of self-mockery: ‘In moments of silent meditation, sitting in the sun on hay-stacks or by river-banks, or roistering over pots of ale, or waiting by covert-sides, I am often astonished by the depth and extent of my learning. “Hugh Trevor-Roper”, I say to myself, when this bewildering revelation breaks upon me, “you must be careful or you will be buried, obliterated, beneath the burden of this stupendous erudition. Go slow! Be canny! In the interests of learning, you should devote more time to beagling, foxhunting, drinking, fishing, shooting, talking; or, if you must read, read Homer, Milton, Gibbon, who cannot harm the brain.”’ Even in his thirties he had dissolute bouts. After George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Christ Church for its 400th anniversary celebrations in 1946, he told his wartime colleague Solly Zuckerman: ‘I signalised Their Majesties’ visit by extreme intoxication. My hand still trembles, my mind is cloudy, and I am crippled by mysterious bruises.’ Trevor-Roper’s pleasure in boisterous nights underlies several letters before his marriage in 1954. His pleasure in physical exertion and rough journeys is voiced in his letters to Nim Church (28 August 1946), Dawyck Haig (2 April 1951), and his wife Xandra (21 September 1960).
The letters in this volume show Trevor-Roper as a writer first, a historian second. Yet they have much to tell us about his historical work and outlook. They illuminate lines of historical investigation, developments in his interests, and the premises of his historical philosophy. They are witnesses, too, to the unassailable independence of his historical judgement. That characteristic marked his work from the start. Having secured a first in history in 1936, he began work as a graduate student on Charles I’s Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. Under the nominal supervision of the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Claude Jenkins, he was left to go his own way. He never saw himself as a member of a historical school or tried to create one. His historical thinking was formed largely in reaction against prevailing orthodoxies. Though in his earlier career—‘my marxisant phase’ as he would later call it—he accepted the premise of R. H. Tawney that the political changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries originated in economic and social conflicts, he would become repelled by the determinist spirit of Marxist and other progressive historical thinking, which denied or belittled both the freedom of the human will and the role of contingency in history. Economic history in any case lost its appeal to him, and gave way to his studies in the history of ideas. ‘I used to think’, he admitted in 1951, ‘that historical events always had deep economic causes: I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx.’
Of all the things for which he revered Gibbon, none influenced him more than the eighteenth-century historian’s gift for historical comparison. His mind, like Gibbon’s, searched restlessly for analogies and contrasts that would illuminate one age by the light of another. With Gibbon he saw the past in the present and the present in the past. It was partly for the same capacity that he admired Gerald Brenan (with whom he maintained a correspondence throughout the 1950s and 1960s). Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth was a study of the Spanish civil war; and yet, as Trevor-Roper told Bernard Berenson in February 1954, ‘I make my best pupils studying 16th and 17th century Spain read it, for I think there is more profound analysis of 16th and 17th century Spain between the lines of Brenan’s book than in the explicit statements of any work written directly on the subject.’ ‘The richness of the historical knowledge, the heroic intellectual integrity, the rejection of all ready-made formulae, the monumental learning behind it, the burning lucidity of the style—it made everything else written on Spain seem pitifully shoddy.’ To Trevor-Roper’s mind the breadth of Brenan’s perspective achieved what specialization, which has nothing to compare its findings with, cannot. The present book includes a letter of 13 December 1956 to J. C. Masterman, the Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, which decries narrow and unadventurous specialization in terms that anticipate Trevor-Roper’s inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford the following year. He was dismayed by the introversion of the proliferating sub-disciplines of historical study, as he was by the decline in the knowledge of foreign or classical languages among historians.
Trevor-Roper’s interest in international politics is a recurrent presence in the volume. A letter of 8 November 1956 to his former pupil Edward Boyle, who had just resigned as a minister in protest at the mishandling of the Suez crisis, voices Trevor-Roper’s dismay at the ineptitude of the Eden government. By now Trevor-Roper had excoriating language both for Marx—‘historically, he remains a huge fossil lodged in a living stream, discolouring indeed a thin trickle of it, but without influence upon its future course’—and for his adherents: ‘Modern Marxists, with a million mass-produced needles, busily stitch and mend the system, which perpetually splits and shrivels at the touch of events.’1 His statements provoked responses from Communist Party members including Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and Andrew Rothstein (the last a figure of contempt to Trevor-Roper, as shown in a letter of 6 August 1986). The ensuing controversy ran in the correspondence columns of the New Statesman for nine issues, from 20 August to 29 October 1955, with Isaiah Berlin joining Trevor-Roper against Hobsbawm. Trevor-Roper’s combative letters to the press over the decades include tussles with Evelyn Waugh in the correspondence columns of the New Statesman in the winter of 1953–4 over the character and history of English Catholic recusancy, and a protest in The Spectator in 1955 against newspaper distortions in the coverage of the Burgess–Maclean spy story.2 The present volume confines itself to private letters, but his public ones are not a negligible part of his output. Among them are those penned under the name Mercurius Oxoniensis and published first in The Spectator and then, in 1970, as The Letters of Mercurius. In this book letters to Wallace Notestein and James Howard-Johnston in the summer of 1968 supply privately circulated addenda to that collection. Trevor-Roper wrote spoof letters, private and public, under other names, though those documents too, again having separate qualities, are not represented here.
Trevor-Roper relished controversy and was a master of controlled invective. He felt vivified when waging war on Lawrence Stone, Tawney, Arnold Toynbee, and other scholars whose use of evidence, or whose premises or interpretations or priorities, he found defective. Yet although he and A. J. P. Taylor battled in print and on television over the latter’s The Origins of the Second World War, the two men remained on reasonably cordial terms. After his opponent’s death Trevor-Roper retained an interest in the personality and conduct of his erstwhile foe, as is attested by letters to Adam Sisman of 21 June 1991 and Geoffrey Wheatcroft of 12 January 1994.
Other controversies arose from Trevor-Roper’s interest in wartime intelligence. In the first months of the Second World War he was recruited to a newly formed section of the War Office’s communications department called the Radio Security Service. There he became expert in interpreting the decrypted radio transmissions of the German secret service, the Abwehr. When peace returned he retained his intelligence contacts, and in the 1950s he answered their enquiries about younger Oxford men who were considered suspect—the future cabinet minister Edmund Dell among them. From the 1960s he published reviews and essays about intelligence matters in terms that vexed some officials of MI5 and MI6 by their criticisms, mockery, and indiscretions. This aspect of his life is covered in letters to Kim Philby of 21 September 1968, to Michael Howard of 5 November 1981, and to Noël Annan of 17 November 1981 and 28 September 1994. Although he resisted the more implacable postures of the Cold War, as is indicated by his letter to Isaiah Berlin of 18 February 1955, he loathed the brutal stupidity of Communist regimes, and was shocked by their incarceration or mental subjugation of scholars (see his mention of Mikhail Bakhtin in his letter to Frances Yates, 28 December 1969). In the post-war era he saw both Communism and the Roman Catholic Church, which he likewise assailed in print, as enemies to the freedoms of thought and action which they denied to their members. His excitement at the collapse of Soviet domination of Russia and central Europe in 1989–90 is evident in his letters of the period.
Dick White, who was head of MI5 in 1953–6 and of MI6 in 1956–68, was Trevor-Roper’s lifelong friend. It was while the two men were downing bottles of hock with H. L. A. Hart in occupied Germany during the summer of 1945 that White decided that Trevor-Roper should deploy his formidable powers as an assembler and analyst of evidence to prove beyond doubt that Hitler had died in the Berlin bunker in April 1945 rather than (as rumour-mongers insinuated) being spirited away by submarine to South America, secreted on a Baltic island, or kept as Stalin’s captive in an oubliette. This was an ideal task for a young man who had already proved his investigative and analytical skills. He drew on his findings to write The Last Days of Hitler, which became an instant bestseller after its publication in 1947. It secured his reputation among commissioning editors in the 1950s as England’s pre-eminent expert on Nazi documents. He provided a long essay, ‘The Mind of Hitler’, to introduce a volume of Hitler’s table-talk which George Weidenfeld published in London in 1953; he wrote an introduction to the letters of Martin Bormann; and enjoyed meetings with François Genoud, who controlled the literary estates of Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, and with Himmler’s Estonian masseur Felix Kersten. His interest in the complex psychology of such rogues as Genoud was comparable to his attraction to those malicious old men Logan Pearsall Smith and Bernard Berenson, and to his curiosity about the mainsprings of character of such confidence tricksters as Kenneth de Courcy, Robert Peters, and Edmund Backhouse—all of whom are mentioned in these letters.
Trevor-Roper’s refusal to be confined to a single historical period or to monolingual sources, still less to any specialist topic, set him apart from those of his contemporaries who wrote big books on the subjects on which they had concentrated at length. Bernard Berenson, Wallace Notestein, and other friends urged him to write a long masterpiece on the period of the English Civil Wars. They complained of his readiness to be diverted by intrigues within his college or faculty, or on behalf of candidates for academic posts, or against the rival machinations of his antagonists. They noted that his former Christ Church ally Robert Blake, although no less busy in academic politics, had managed to write two big biographies of Conservative prime ministers as well as heading an Oxford college and completing other important books. When Trevor-Roper was elected as Master of Peterhouse, a journalist (prompted by informants who had spoken non-attributably) wondered if he ‘may now find the time to write the magnum opus on the English Civil War which has been promised for many a year. Even his greatest admirers would agree that his published output in his own specialist academic field of the seventeenth century has been disappointingly slight after the considerable promise of his first book on Archbishop Laud.’1 That was a partial view, not merely in the light of Trevor-Roper’s revulsion against the idea of having ‘his own specialist academic field’, but because there was nothing ‘slight’ about his output. The bulk of his publications is formidable. There are, it is true, far more essays than books, a pattern for which he would not have apologized. Historians, he maintained, should write essays on subjects on which they are not qualified to write books, and so bring a comparative perspective to them. Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them, such as his ‘Religion, Reformation and Social Change’, ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, and ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, have lastingly transformed their fields.2
Trevor-Roper was a great figure of twentieth-century Oxford, and a luminary in the generation of public intellectuals that also included Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, H. L. A. Hart, and A. J. P. Taylor. Only a small selection of his letters about the affairs of the university where he spent most of his working life is included here, for inevitably they have their parochial aspects; but there is more than ephemeral interest in the three letters on academic matters to J. C. Masterman (13 December 1956), Valerie Pearl (4 April 1969), and Robert Blake (17 August 1970). Another of Trevor-Roper’s academic correspondents, with whom he exchanged letters over several decades, was Hugh Lloyd-Jones, who had been elected Regius Professor of Greek in the university and a Student (Fellow) of Christ Church in 1960, but who moved to the United States after his retirement in 1989. Lloyd-Jones was ‘a striking example of the kind of brilliant, vivid and anarchic figure whom it is hard to imagine holding a major chair in the modern, managed and managerial university’, wrote Robert Parker, Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, of Lloyd-Jones after his death in 2009. Readers of One Hundred Letters, which contains three letters to Lloyd-Jones written during a sequence of exchanges that followed Trevor-Roper’s move to Peterhouse in 1980, will feel Parker’s words are applicable to him too. Likewise Parker’s picture of Lloyd-Jones in reluctant attendance at committees—‘it was always a pleasure at subfaculty meetings to watch him ostentatiously working his way through the week’s crop of off-prints while the routine business droned on’—recalls other observers’ memories of Trevor-Roper writing letters in his immaculate handwriting (or producing deft drawings of animals or cartoons of his colleagues) during the drudgery of board meetings of the Oxford History Faculty. Like Trevor-Roper, Lloyd-Jones was a formidable polemicist who strove to enlist his extensive foreign contacts (in Parker’s words) ‘to combat the provincialism of Oxford’.1 The two men resembled each other in their scholarly zeal, in their thirst for intellectual enquiry, and in the intensity of their diction and gaze. Both men brought colour to an increasingly monochrome academic environment.
Trevor-Roper’s activities were never restricted to the university. He lectured abroad, reviewed in the weekly magazines and Sunday newspapers, plunged deep into public debates, inspirited an easily demoralized wife, went abroad for weeks at a time as a special correspondent, travelled back and forth between Oxford and his Scottish home (a journey made more arduous by the Beeching cuts, which closed the Carlisle to Edinburgh railway, and with it Melrose station, in 1969). After 1979 some of his letters describe his attendance, as Lord Dacre of Glanton, in the House of Lords. He took the Conservative whip but was not inhibited by it. He seldom spoke in the chamber, where he may not have felt at ease as a performer. His rare interventions—as in the debate on oversight of the Security Services held in December 1986—are striking for their concision, elegance, and authority. It is, however, his relish for the individual tempers, the quiddities, and group loyalties of his fellow peers that he savours in his letters to Edward Chaney of May 1988, to Noël Annan of 20 October 1988 and 28 September 1994, to Alasdair Palmer of 24 December 1989, and in others. Three letters in this volume were written in the Lords.
It was a few months after his elevation to the peerage as Lord Dacre of Glanton in 1979 that he was elected Master of Peterhouse. Some fellows of the college, content to regard him as a Tory, hoped for a reign of peaceable immobility. Instead, he did battle against what seemed to him to be reactionary, obscurantist, and introverted tendencies within the fellowship. He had admirers and allies among the fellows, but others were dismayed by his implacable insistence on his interpretations of the college’s rules, as well as by the freedom with which he regaled the high tables of other colleges with his colourful accounts of life in Peterhouse. Even among detached onlookers, some questioned his characterizations of his adversaries and his interpretations of their beliefs, and felt that the stormy disputes in the governing body, which were broadcast in the press, had become too dominant an obsession with him. His use of the word ‘mafia’ to describe some of the fellows not only indulged his satirical instincts. It exaggerated the cohesion—intellectual and political—of the figures concerned.
Yet his battles at Peterhouse were not mere personal fixations. In his mind fundamental issues of intellectual and educational principle were at stake. His commitment to liberal values and secular premises was incompatible with ‘the Peterhouse school of history’, and especially inimical to the outlook of Maurice Cowling, the historian who had been his kingmaker at Peterhouse but became his chief opponent. His historical credo, as he stated years after his retirement from the mastership of Peterhouse in 1987, was: ‘stand firm on our own Western Tradition—the tradition of the Enlightenment, the open society, pluralism’. He strove to expose the college to outside influences, and supported rationally argued reforms. He particularly confounded expectation first by accepting the arguments for the admission of women to the college, and later by proposing the successful motion in governing body which achieved that result. His mind, although ineradicably the product of a male intellectual world, was not confined by it: he enjoyed communicating with intelligent, strong-minded female colleagues, as his letters to Valerie Pearl, Nan Dunbar, and Frances Yates attest.
There was another convulsion in Trevor-Roper’s sixties. Much of his public impact had been achieved by his exposure of the errors, elisions, misquotations, slipshod deductions, or outright frauds of other scholars. Yet at the age of 69 he made an egregious mistake which humiliated him across the educated world. The fiasco of his authentication of the forged Hitler diaries is recounted in his letter to Frank Giles dated 10 July 1983, and in later comments to Edward Chaney of 20 April 1991. Here it is enough to note that his failure was caused less by arrogance than by his remoteness, heightened by the encroachments of age, from the world of journalism with which he was contending. In the estimate of Neal Ascherson, who was a journalist on The Observer from 1960 until 1990, the danger for Dacre in 1983 was that ‘he had no idea of the frantic haste, secrecy, and pressure of a big exclusive, in which there is no room for second thoughts. His first glance at the diaries suggested to him that they could be real, but a first glance was all he got. His instinct was not to authenticate them until he had taken more time to reflect, to examine, to wait for the ink and paper tests to be confirmed. But that was not on offer. His mistake was to allow himself to be hurried into stating that the diaries were genuine … A sort of innocence, rather than the famous arrogance, brought the catastrophe about.’1
Trevor-Roper’s letters, written between 1947 and 1959, to Bernard Berenson, who was his mentor in the history of art and an early guide in his reading about the history of ideas, were published as Letters from Oxford in 2006. That was a substantial book, but there were others to whom he wrote a still greater number of words. There were also innumerable brief exchanges of letters with other correspondents, usually prompted by particular events or publications: the letters in this volume to Peter Medawar, Tibor Szamuely, and Zeev Sternhell are examples. It might be supposed that a man who wrote so much must have written hurriedly. The supposition is confounded, even in letters written when the pressures of his work were strongest. Writing letters was an essential pleasure of his life, and in them, no less than in his other writings, his careful ordering of his ideas, his marshalling of his vocabulary, and his precision and concision of expression brought satisfaction even when time was short—and even as he protested his ineptitude at setting a calm pace for his paper-work. ‘I am congenitally incapable of preparing lectures, articles, anything, ahead of time,’ he told Robert Blake in 1977. ‘I always work best under the lash; and so I leave everything until it simply has to be done. Then my scholarly perfectionism comes into play: I hate doing anything badly; so I go through agonies of tumultuous industry at the last minute.’1
Some correspondents told him that they were keeping his letters for posterity (though not all of them did); but while his correspondence is part of his literary legacy, he might not have savoured its publication. He was always more interested in writing than in publishing. The letters were private documents, in which he trusted to their privacy. He was aghast when he heard that an irreverent letter he had sent Berenson in 1952 about the death of King George VI had been handed around among visitors to Berenson’s Italian villa, I Tatti—one of whom was a journalist. He was irritated when told that a private letter of 1963 about the candidates for the Regius Chair of Modern History at Cambridge had been copied by its recipient to the incumbent Regius Professor, Herbert Butterfield, in whose papers in Cambridge University Library it could be read by anyone with a reader’s ticket; indignant when warned that private letters which he had written from Peterhouse in the 1980s were being circulated; shaken, too, to learn that his correspondence with Wallace Notestein was available in Princeton, and being photocopied. One of the editors of this volume can recall Trevor-Roper letters being read aloud, with hilarity, to him by one of the recipients in the 1970s. Tibor Szamuely’s children remember their father reading aloud newly received letters from Trevor-Roper at the breakfast table. Indeed, a samizdat of the letters developed. Trevor-Roper’s wartime subordinate and Christ Church colleague Charles Stuart loaned to Robert Blake a twelve-page letter, which has since gone missing.
Why, in so crowded a life, in which he had to fight for time for his historical writing, did Trevor-Roper write so very many letters? The tempting answer is that this was easier than writing works of sustained historical scholarship. Yet his problem was not to write books. It was to persuade himself to publish them. He drafted much which was never published, including the huge book on the Civil Wars. It was dissatisfaction with the outcomes, not laziness or indifference, that kept so many of his writings from print. Truancy for Trevor-Roper was not an evasion of labour, but a principle of conduct, essential to mental equilibrium and to adventure of thought. To allow the mind to run idle was to escape from the pressures of conformity, social and professional, which his whole cast of mind resisted. In a letter to Wallace Notestein on 21 July 1968 he rejoices in the ‘pleasure of total vacancy’. Nine years earlier, at the close of his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor in 1957, he praised one of his predecessors in the chair, Frederick York Powell, ‘the friend of Mallarmé and Rodin and J. B. Yeats and Verlaine’, whose life had likewise escaped the confines of academic employment: Powell ‘contributed impartially to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Sporting Times’, and conned the boxing reports in the Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette as conscientiously as he did Beowulf.
If letter-writing was a form of truancy, it also gave scope for another necessary antidote to the earnest daily round: frivolity, an indulgence which ran deep in his nature. ‘Who of us’, he asks in a letter of 21 June 1991 to his future biographer, ‘would wish to be judged by our private letters, in which one is licensed to be frivolous and irresponsible?’ Frivolity is not a uniform feature in these letters: there are passions and earnest convictions; but the tone of mischievous comedy is seldom absent for more than a few pages. He wrote his letters off duty. They did not demand the research or the dogged accuracy necessary to his historical writing. The more exuberant of them allowed unfettered scope to caricature, distortion, even fantasy. Yet if there are those essential differences from his professional work, there are no less essential similarities. Behind the two forms of writing there lie the same powers of mind and observation; the same range and exactitude of learning; the same impulse for historical comparison; the same assured movement of thought between the concerns of the past and those of the present. The letters are distillations of a historian’s wisdom.
Readers of the letters assembled in this book, where they are arrayed with elucidatory footnotes, will experience them differently from their recipients. Many of his correspondents might have spurned our provision of translations and glosses as fussy or condescending. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Trevor-Roper’s fellow classicist, annotated a draft of Letters from Oxford with pungent marginalia expressing his distaste for explications which, he felt, should be unnecessary to anyone of culture. But for other recipients, particularly younger ones who had been educated amid the decline of classical studies, Trevor-Roper’s allusions and quotations must have been a test, as they might be to unaided readers now. He liked to stretch the minds of his younger correspondents. There are deliberate challenges as well as beguiling tutelage and confiding scholarship in his affectionate, generous letters to them. As he told his future wife in August 1953, he admired youthful spontaneity, curiosity, receptivity, flexibility, and unspoilt imagination. It was to these qualities that he appealed in letters written to guide and widen and brighten their recipients’ minds, to steer his young friends towards fresh intellectual pursuits or literary pleasures. A letter from him also posed the challenge of reply, itself an instructive exercise. He once urged his young friend the historian Jeremy Catto, an eager recipient of his letters, to reply more often, not merely to give Trevor-Roper himself pleasure but because of the benefit one can derive from the necessary trouble. It is a measure of his yearning for contact that he so much relished letters from people who could not begin to match his epistolary gifts.
He strove to instil a concern for freshness and exactness and clarity of language into the young, and to deter them from the slipshod conformism of cliché and jargon. Those purposes are clear in letters to James Howard-Johnston during his education at Eton and Oxford and his later training at the Dumbarton Oaks Centre for Byzantine studies; to the graduate students Felix Raab in September 1962 and Alan Macfarlane on 22 January 1967; and in the literary precepts entitled ‘The Ten Commandments’ which he sent to Edward Chaney on 11 May 1988. For Trevor-Roper, as for Gibbon, style was the image of character. It could not be attained without discipline. In a letter of 1 May 1993 to his former pupil Richard Rhodes, he drew a parallel between the anarchic tendencies of modern English usage and the practices of the ‘anti-monastery’ of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose votaries lived as they wished and as their instincts demanded, free of laws and regulations: ‘I think it began in the ’60s, with the general doctrine of permissiveness, as at the Abbey of Thelema: Fais ce que voudras: it doesn’t matter about rules, technique, clarity, meaning, so long as you express yourself; as also in the other arts: splosh the paint about and the result is art because it is you. Horrible egotism!’
Most of these hundred letters exude a sense of self-possession. Cool, clear thoughts have been ordered and polished. Possible lines of resistance to Trevor-Roper’s arguments have been anticipated, and potential obstacles demolished by uncompromising, sometimes merciless logic. Yet rationality was only one dimension of his mind. There is an intense literary sensibility at work in these letters, which is caught in evocations of poetry and landscape and the natural world. And while the rationality proclaims confidence, there are inner uncertainties. Occasionally in these letters the reader can divine, behind the habitual élan, the shyness that could inhibit him in conversation. In familiar company, it is true, he could be a brilliant talker, but his exuberance had a way of turning conversation into monologue. Letters, being written monologues, permitted the shaping of thoughts and words which impromptu discussion forestalls. Moreover, though he generally shunned emotional self-exposure in letters as in company, his correspondence does not always mask the loneliness, the self-doubt, and the depression that often accompany the comic temperament. In two letters of 1953 taken from his huge correspondence with his future wife Xandra, an exchange whose emotional intensity surprised all who had known him on its discovery after his death, he exposes raw feeling.
The letters reveal another feature of his temperament that the world did not often see: the tug of self-reproach. Despite his many worldly successes there is in some of the letters an undertone of inner censure. He blames himself for frittering time, for misdirecting effort, for a failure to bring his life under organizational control. When he was in Oxford, in his college rooms or his office in the History Faculty Building, even in his house in St Aldates, he felt bombarded by the administrative documents which demanded his attention, and mislaid or forgot the personal correspondence that he cherished. As he put it to J. H. Plumb in 1970, ‘I am a hopeless writer of letters—or at least, a hopeless organiser of the paper which falls like a gentle but continuous blizzard of snow on my various desks. Some of them congeal into solid, lasting ice; others somehow get pushed off into great drifts at the table-side; others simply melt away and no trace is left of them. Yours has suddenly emerged from beneath a drift, and fills me with shame for my long silence.’1
Twenty-nine of the letters in this volume, including some of the gladdest ones, were written at Chiefswood, the house in the Scottish border country which the Trevor-Ropers owned from 1959 until 1987. On solitary visits to the house, or on days alone there while his wife visited her titled friends in Scottish country houses where he might be bored or (in the case of Catholic families) ill at ease or unwelcome, he studied and thought and wrote in assuaging peace. He read big or difficult books that required intensity of attention: ‘seven stout quarto volumes’ of the correspondence of Hugo Grotius in July 1968, for example, or the works of Ssu-ma Ch’ien in April 1979. In his quiet interludes at Chiefswood he would sit in his study and write long, conversational letters which ranged over university business, personal news, intellectual preoccupations, world affairs, travel plans, and gossip. Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’, where ‘Society is all but rude | To this delicious solitude’, would come into his mind. The letters to friends and younger scholars from Chiefswood savour solitude—and are simultaneously retreats from its burdens. On 16 July 1966 he wrote to the graduate student Alan Macfarlane, with whom he shared an interest in seventeenth-century witch-hunts: ‘I am enjoying being alone, with no more exacting conversation than that of the gardener: and do not understand why Xandra makes such a fuss about cooking (to the extent, now, of fetching a Chinese cook from Hong Kong): I live on ham, tongue, pork pie, spring onions and strawberries & cream, & cheese, white wine and brandy, and I find that the preparation of meals takes no time or trouble at all, & I am working like mad on witches. If you feel in need of a change & can live on such fare, come & visit me. I should not entertain you: you would work on your witches next door.’ The invitation, at once to company and to separation, signals the ambivalence towards solitude of a man in whom it could be so creative but also so despondent a condition.
In these letters, readers can visit Trevor-Roper in his study at Chiefswood, hear his monologues, savour his ideas, weigh his judgements. If the wit sometimes has the sharpness of spring onions, at other moments—with its irony, its inventive and elaborate metaphors, and its unquenchable delight in human absurdity—it is pure strawberries and cream.