The conditions of life enjoyed by a junior officer at Robinswood Barracks, while not elegant—we lived in army-style huts—were not at all bad. I had a batman who made the bed, saw to it that my room was clean, and kept my uniform pressed, brasses polished, and boots well shone. The officer’s mess itself was a reasonably comfortable place, our regular fare was quite decent, and on ceremonial occasions the fare was really pretty good. Two such occasions stick in my mind. The first was a New Year’s dance. Claire-Ann, newly returned from spending Christmas with her Italian “family” in Cuneo and wearing a very fetching red dress was, I proudly thought, the belle of the ball and certainly boosted my reputation among my fellow officers. The second was a particularly elaborate regimental dinner, graced by a small military band which, among other things, played a few bars of the national anthem immediately after the proposing of each toast. The routine on such occasions was firmly fixed by tradition. Full-dress uniform was the order of the evening; the regimental silver was displayed on the table, though it was nothing in comparison with that of the Loyal Regiment in Preston (which I had glimpsed as a private soldier when I had to wash dishes on a similar occasion); and we were seated down the long dining table in order of rank, with the colonel of the regiment presiding at the head in his capacity as president of the dinner and the most junior subaltern (Mr. Vice) seated at the foot, serving by tradition as vice president. The rest of us subalterns were clustered around him along the lower reaches of the table. After the dishes were cleared, port glasses put out, and decanters placed before president and vice president and moved around in clockwise direction so that all could fill their glasses, the colonel rose to his feet and said “Mr. Vice, the Queen.” Whereupon Mr. Vice in turn rose to his feet, raised his glass, and said “Gentlemen, the Queen.” To which, having risen to their feet and raised their glasses, all said “The Queen” and drank. After a few (deafening) bars from the band, all sat down again, only to be raised to their feet by the second toast. “Mr. Vice,” the president said, “our colonel in chief.” Whereupon Mr. Vice, having risen to his feet, proposed the toast: “Gentlemen, the Princess Royal.” To which, on our feet and before taking a sip, we would all respond by saying “The Princess Royal.” After another few deafening bars, we were again reseated. But at the National Service subalterns’ end of the table, and as at all such dinners, an informal ritual invariably unfolded. In accordance with a tradition handed down from time immemorial by our predecessors in rank and status, our glasses were raised no more than an inch from the table and we murmured sotto voce the National Serviceman’s toast: “FTA” (“Fuck the Army!”).
Such expressions of contempt for the military were, of course, de rigueur for those of us who were not professional soldiers and who were obsessively counting the days remaining before our demobilization, release from compulsory servitude, and recovery of the lost freedoms of civilian life. But if pressed later on, I suspect that we would all, though with differing degrees of reluctance, have been forced to confess that we had learned a great deal from our period of required service. And not just about the intricacies of global signaling and the like. The more important lessons lay elsewhere: in the responsibilities we had had to discharge; in what we had learned about our fellow countrymen in all their variety; about our own behavior and the behavior of men in general when thrown together with others under unpromising circumstances; about duty, the danger of irresponsibility, human decency and compassion, and the value of comradeship; and above all about ourselves, our good and bad qualities, our strengths and our weaknesses, our hopes and our fears. As a sixth-former at school, I had not been one of those whom the headmaster had chosen as a prefect and I had concluded, accordingly, that I must be altogether lacking in any sort of leadership potential. At officer cadet school, however, and later on when discharging my responsibilities at Gloucester, I learned that I was not quite as hopeless in those respects as I had gloomily concluded in the past. I was not deficient, I discovered, in powers of command. I was not uncomfortable with taking on responsibility. Taking charge carried with it no great terrors; it was clearly preferable to following somebody else’s trumpet, especially so if that trumpet was an uncertain one. I was perfectly capable of being decisive, even crisply so, should the circumstances call for it. Perhaps more important, I had also learned that I took satisfaction in what, for better or worse, I would call the pastoral care and feeding of a group of men, some of them much older than I was. I tried to listen carefully and to think clearly in offering counsel when they brought to me their personal problems (a not-infrequent occurrence), often quite intricate in nature and calling really for the services of the solicitor whom they couldn’t afford, and occasionally, given the chaos that seemed to have overtaken some of their personal lives, really quite poignant. It was all, for me, powerfully educative—about others, of course, but also about myself. Certainly, in the absence of that maturing experience, I very much doubt now that I would have been inclined later on to take on the sort of responsibilities involved in academic administration.
But such thoughts, of course, came along much later—the fruit, if you wish, of a species of emotion recollected in quasi-tranquility. At the time, as the winter of 1956–57 wore on, my thoughts and those of Claire-Ann were fixed on things more proximate, on our immediate futures, both individual and collective. For me, the default position was to follow the path I had mapped out before going to Canada: to return to Oxford and take up the Senior Scholarship that would see me through to the completion of a DPhil under the supervision of E. F. Jacob, something I thought I could do in two years. And that would have been fine by Claire-Ann, who had settled in to England and adjusted to English mores really quite happily. The problem, however, was “What then?” At the time, there seemed to be hardly any academic job openings in Britain and neither at Oxford nor later on at Yale did anyone seem conscious of the fact that the arrival of the baby boom generation at college age would almost certainly trigger a very significant expansion in the number of university places and, concomitantly, in the number of academic job openings. We wanted to get married and I was not enamored of the prospect of having to piece together a series of part-time tutorial jobs as I had seen others at Oxford having to do in order to make some sort of a hand-to-mouth living. Claire-Ann, moreover, had her own challenges. She wanted to teach school but, as she lacked British teaching certification, the public sector there would be closed to her and she would have to limit her job search to private schools. The latter might, conceivably, have worked out. Certainly, having submitted an application, she had initial success with a very good interview at Cheltenham Ladies College and was on the cusp of accepting a job there when we finally decided to pursue our futures in the United States.
That option we had been careful to keep open. Knowing that it was a long and convoluted process, I had begun, quite early, the application process for permanent resident status in the United States, which carried with it the “green card” that permitted one to work there. I had also done my best to investigate the current academic job status across the Atlantic. It wasn’t particularly encouraging, but I concluded that I would probably be able to get a full-time job if I had a PhD, if only at some small and undistinguished college. I also concluded that, if I wished to pursue an academic career in the States, I would do well to finish my PhD work at an American graduate school and benefit from the job placement service it would provide. Being becalmed in an out-of-the-way military camp, it was difficult for me to find out much about a broad range of American graduate schools, so, wanting to graduate from a first-rate, high-profile institution, I had applied, with a singular lack of imagination, for graduate fellowships at Harvard and Yale. To my surprise and delight, both universities came through with decently funded fellowships. Meanwhile, Claire-Ann had learned that, because of the swelling of enrollments at American schools induced by the baby boom and the concomitant shortage of teachers, a fast-track certification route had been opened up for those who had graduated from a university or college with a degree in the liberal arts (that is, arts and sciences). All it involved was the completion of a summer certification program specifically tailored to their needs at a state university or state teacher’s college. With that certification in hand, one could then apply for teaching jobs in the hard-pressed public sector.
Within the period of three weeks that we were given to respond to the Harvard and Yale offers, we had to make some fundamental and life-changing decisions. And that we did. The big one was for both of us to pursue our careers in America rather than England. The lesser one was for me to go to Yale rather than Harvard, even though I was familiar with the latter. I wish I could claim that I did so because the Yale motto (Lux et veritas) promised light as well as the truth signaled by its Harvard equivalent (Veritas). But the fact was that I could not afford to do otherwise. The Yale fellowship was worth $200 more than the Harvard one, at that time a not-inconsiderable sum of money. With our immediate futures now beginning to crystallize, the time seemed ripe for us to become formally engaged. Not that there was any need for earnest talk about “commitment” or formal proposals on either of our parts. We had long since slipped insensibly into the conclusion that we would be spending our lives together, as, indeed, we have for almost sixty years now. But because Claire-Ann’s parents didn’t know me, and because her mother had earlier needled her about “chasing off” to Europe after a boyfriend, we felt that I should write to her father asking formally, in good Victorian fashion, for the hand of his eldest daughter in marriage. And that I did. His (or, rather, their) response was warmly welcoming and reassuring. The reaction of my own parents, however, when I told them that I was getting engaged and going to Yale was less accommodating. The issue with them, I think, was less my choice of bride than the fact that I would be leaving again for the New World, this time for good. When I brought Claire-Ann up to Liverpool to meet them, it was not a happy occasion. While my father was fine and Noel was very welcoming, my mother and my sister Molly were, both of them, rather cool in the reception they gave her. Claire-Ann handled the situation with her characteristic aplomb, but I could not help feeling extremely upset and furious. My mother, after all, had left home at the tender age of fifteen, and she had married and moved away to England when she was just about my age. Why, I thought, and not without resentment, could she not accept the fact that her youngest son was about to do much the same thing? Why couldn’t she let go gracefully? Why the need to indulge the temptation of unloading on him what in later parlance would be called a “guilt trip?”
Whatever the case, the last few months of my army service seemed to go by very quickly. I have a jumble of memories, some of them, doubtless, going back a bit earlier and most relating to duties on rotation as orderly officer. Thus I can remember having to go to the Gloucester Magistrate’s Court on a Monday morning to testify to the conduct record and pay scale of soldiers who had been arrested for drunk and disorderly behavior in town on the previous Saturday night. Or going to the bank, accompanied by a guard armed only with a pickaxe handle, to sign for (rather nervously) and pick up the large amount of cash needed to pay the entire unit (the case containing it was handcuffed to one’s wrist). Or going to check up on prisoners in the camp’s cells to ensure they were not being mistreated or cheated out of their assigned cigarette ration, only to find our medical officer trying to look after one of them, a new eighteen-year-old recruit from some small Gloucestershire village who, my colleague told me, had been so shaken by his first encounter with military life that he lapsed into a (clinically defined) catatonic state. Or doing a routine check on the camp’s rather disreputable cooks (a demeaning ritual that required them to line up and spread their fingers wide so that one could make sure that they were not handling food while suffering from scabies) only to find that they had casually left the door to the meat safe swinging open so that the sides of beef hanging there were covered by bluebottles. Or having to deal with a young mom, probably no more than eighteen years old, who had appeared at the camp gate having trudged right across Gloucester carrying her six-month-old baby. She and her husband, who was on duty overnight at the camp, had had some sort of domestic tiff and, frightened and consumed with anxiety, she needed to see him. We sat her down in the guardroom with a cup of tea (the universal English remedy for people in distress) until we found her (very embarrassed) husband and were able to give them some private time together to sort things out. But I still found my heart going out to her in the loneliness of her misery and thought that the least I could do was to pay for a taxi to get her and the baby safely home.
Finally, in June, Claire-Ann left for America to begin the accelerated teacher certification program at Central Connecticut State Teachers College, and within a month or so she had interviewed successfully for a teaching position in Vernon, Connecticut. In the meantime, looking ahead now to graduate school language requirements, I myself devoted much of the little spare time I had to trying to improve my German. The rest I devoted to combing over Gloucester Cathedral, a truly magnificent building that I got to know quite intimately. Despite the observable roughness of the juncture between the massive eleventh-twelfth century Romanesque Norman nave and the spectacular Perpendicular transepts and apse, what had been achieved, perhaps because the same Cotswold limestone had been employed to build both sections, was a splendidly harmonious whole. The Perpendicular section is of fourteenth-century provenance, a piece of bold remodeling undertaken after the tomb of Edward II was located in the building. While contemplating its glories I could not help thinking that had our modern type of historical preservation society existed at that time, the whole glorious enterprise would doubtless have been denounced as an intrusive example of outright philistinism. The only big event of note that summer was Tony Hobbs’s wedding to Truda at a church in Wimbledon, a joyous occasion at which I had the privilege of serving as his best man. It was a military-style wedding which called for us both to appear in full-dress uniform equipped with (borrowed) swords, a touch that gave an agreeably Ruritanian feel to the whole affair. Not long after that, and as my term of service drew to a close, I handed over my troop to a rather grumpy major who seemed to find it hard to cope with night shifts without lapsing into crankiness at breakfast time. And my last official act was to turn up for a pre-demobilization interview with the colonel of the regiment who seemed stunned by the fact that a former subaltern of his might well envisage becoming a US citizen.
Demobilization formalities completed, I headed home to get my things together before embarking on the old Queen Elizabeth for the voyage from Southampton to New York. My few days at home, the last time I could use that designation for the house in which I had grown up, were not particularly happy ones. My mother was still finding it hard to come to terms with her youngest son’s decision to relocate abroad and the atmosphere was gloomy and tense. My father accompanied me into town to see me off from Lime Street Station on the train for Southampton and I realized later, from something that he had said, that he had had some sort of a premonition that we would never see each other again. He was right. Two years later, just three months before Claire-Ann and I were due back for a visit to Liverpool, he died at the age of seventy-one of a massive stroke. My mother, ten years his junior, was destined to live on as a widow for another twenty-two years, living alone but surrounded by seven grandchildren and, Molly having become the busy headmistress of a secondary modern school, deeply involved in helping look after Molly’s three young children.
Anxious as I was to get back to America, to reunite with Claire-Ann, and to pick up and mend the broken threads of my postgraduate education, I can recall only a couple of things about my return voyage on the Queen Elizabeth. The first is the fact that a fair number of French Fulbright students were among my fellow passengers, which made for lively conversation and much conviviality. The second is the fact that we encountered the tail end of a tropical storm or hurricane in the mid-Atlantic. It was the worst patch of weather I have ever encountered at sea, even though I was to crisscross the Atlantic a total of nine times by ship before capitulating to the convenience of flying. Stabilizers notwithstanding, that great vessel wallowed drunkenly as it made its painful way through the huge waves generated by the storm. Furniture had to be lashed down, crockery was smashed, and everyone, crew members no less than passengers, seemed to be in some measure seasick. Like all the older Cunard vessels, the Queen Elizabeth was a three-class ship with locked gates on deck dividing the separate areas and crew members policing the divisions. Under such stormy conditions, however, nobody was monitoring those symbols of English class structure and some of us, climbing over the barriers, were able to make our way forward until we were in an enclosed, windowed area right below the bridge. The sight that greeted our eyes as we peered forward towards the ship’s prow was a stunning one. When viewed from pier-side in port, that huge ship loomed up above the quay almost like a high-rise building. But now, lurching, wallowing, and corkscrewing as it made its painful way ahead, it was actually burying its great prow beneath the oncoming waves and then, though not without a convulsive shuddering, raising that prow once more above the waves while shedding through the scuppers countless tons of water back into the ocean. It was a sight I shall never forget.
In that way, and at painfully reduced speed, we made our way through the tail of that storm until we broke free at last into the sunlit seas, fresh breezes, and calmer waters that lay on the other side to the west. As we did so, and succumbing without resistance to a sharp onset of the Pathetic Fallacy, I found myself imagining that Nature herself had chosen to echo the turbulence of my own emotions and to draw a firm line beneath the preoccupations of the Old World I was leaving—the nostalgic memories of a childhood long since gone, the loves, tensions, and resentments of the familial past, the poignant sense of place that had bound me to the insular landscape into which I had been born. From all of that I now felt sundered by the violent caesura of that storm and I began instead, future-oriented fellow that I was, to fix my eyes on the tests and challenges that lay ahead.
That, certainly, was the way I was thinking as the Queen Elizabeth felt its weary way into the shipping lanes that lay to the east and south of Long Island as they began to converge on the (still bridgeless) Verrazano Narrows, proceeding thence head-on to the towers and minarets of Manhattan Island which (in the absence of the Pan Am/MetLife building) presented at that time a sharper profile than it does today, then to be nudged by attendant tugs to its berth alongside its welcoming pier somewhere in the vicinity of West 40th Street, New York.
No sooner had we disembarked in New York than that city grasped us in its great maw and gave us a welcoming shake. Along with two of the French Fulbrights who, like me, had trains to catch, I took a taxi to Grand Central Station. We simply grabbed the cab that pulled up at the front of the line, but our choice proved not to be a felicitous one. The driver took off across town at a recklessly high speed, managing to sideswipe another cab on the way. We didn’t stop, however, but simply slowed down for a while to see if the other driver wanted to make anything of it. He didn’t seem to want to, so we rocketed on. That left my French companions a bit shaken, and they were even more shaken when, instead of pulling into the normal drop-off zone on Vanderbilt, our driver drove around to the side entrance of the station on Lexington and then, blandly ignoring the reading plainly visible on his meter, tried to double charge us. An immigrant himself (from eastern Europe, I would judge), and having heard French spoken among his newly disembarked passengers, he had clearly decided that we were a bunch of confused foreign innocents, ripe for the plucking. We were not, and the matter was quickly settled once we suggested getting hold of a cop. After fifty years and more in the United States and countless taxi rides in a host of other American cities as well as in New York, I have never had a similar experience. But it left my French companions clearly wondering if that particular taxi ride represented some sort of Wild West American norm. So I saw them to their respective platforms in Grand Central Station before going myself to pick up my own train on the old New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad, which followed along the coastline of Long Island Sound up to New Haven before turning inland to make its way to Hartford.
There at the station I was met by Claire-Ann, who was looking wonderful and who drove me to her home in Manchester where, over a celebratory welcoming dinner, I was to meet for the first time her mother, father, and five curious siblings. Years later, when reminiscences were being exchanged at a meal after their mother’s funeral, Claire-Ann’s younger siblings shared with me the fact that they had been enthralled at the welcoming dinner to see me eating English-style, keeping my knife in my right hand and wielding the fork with my left. This was something that their mother, a stickler for good table manners, had taught them was poor form. One was permitted to cut one’s meat using the knife in the right hand, but it had then to be put down on the plate and swapped for the fork with which one was properly to do one’s eating. If that first dinner was perhaps a bit more formal than usual, the occasion was also a warmly welcoming one. The younger kids were unable quite to conceal their curiosity about their big sister’s exotic fiancé, but in general I was not made to feel that I was being subjected to close scrutiny or critical assessment. Of course, with the experience under my belt of being a parent myself, I am pretty sure that that, however discreetly, was precisely what was happening. Fortunately, I seem to have passed muster. Tired clichés about mothers-in-law notwithstanding, Alice (my own future mother-in-law) and I were destined to get along very well, and she became in time almost as proud of me as my own mother (who could, I have reason to believe, be quite tiresome on that subject). And I certainly came to admire her very much. A strong, commanding figure with a firm will (I now see some of her more admirable traits in Claire-Ann), she for some years headed up the Nursery Teachers’ Association in Connecticut and was active in Democratic Party politics in that state. She was possessed of a deep, though not ostentatious, Catholic piety that was grounded in (or had seen her through) a very tough time when she was a young mother with two small children. She had contracted tuberculosis and, in the absence of any other treatment, had to suffer the heartache of leaving her little tots behind in order to go into a sanatorium, there either to conquer the dread disease or to succumb to it. She conquered it and was to survive to the age of ninety, living alone in her last years as a confident and proudly independent person. One May when she was, I think, in her early eighties and when I, as president of Williams, had meetings to attend in Oxford, we brought her with us so that she could see the college gardens in their full seasonal glory. On that occasion, she proved to be an indefatigable tourist and a calmly poised guest of honor, seated at the right hand of the rector of Exeter at high table in that college’s handsome Hall. She comported herself for all the world as if she had spent her life sipping wine and hobnobbing with Oxford dons. “What nice young men,” she said afterwards, as we were making our way along the Broad heading back to the Randolph Hotel.
After a couple of wonderfully relaxing days in Manchester, I had to get down to New Haven to move into the room I had reserved in the Hall of Graduate Studies on York Street, to see the director of graduate studies in history in order to line up my course of studies for the year, and to take the required tests of reading ability in German and French. I hadn’t quite finished my demobilization leave from the army when I found myself sitting down to take those tests, and it was something of a load off my mind later to find that I had passed both of them. One thing, at least, was out of the way. I quickly settled into my room, which turned out to be on the ground floor, its window separated by no more than three or four feet from the kitchen window of Mory’s Temple Bar, the old club fronting onto York Street at which the Whiffenpoofs, the oldest college a cappella group in the United States, have been singing on Monday evenings for more than a century. So I associate that room, not only with the enticing aroma of food that was clearly of a quality beyond my means, but also with the celebrated Whiffenpoof song with which the group would always round out its evening performance. Its chorus is derived from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, “Gentlemen-rankers”:
We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,
Baa-aa-aa!
Gentlemen [songsters] rankers out on a spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!
In my memory, the mournful sentimentality of those words is linked incongruously with the authors whose books I was sitting at my desk delving into on those Monday evenings—with Ernst Troeltsch, for example, the great historical sociologist of religion, or with Karl Popper and what he had to say about the logic of scientific discovery, or with Wilhelm Dilthey and R. G. Collingwood, with whose philosophies of history I was much concerned that year.
Shortly after arriving at Yale, I had a session with Franklin Le Van Baumer, the modern European intellectual historian who was at that time serving as director of graduate studies in the History Department. A grave, solemn, decent, and deeply conscientious man, he made it clear at the outset that only after the department had had the opportunity to arrive at their own judgment about my capabilities would it decide whether or not to take into account my previous graduate work and to permit me to proceed to take the comprehensive examinations after a single year of course work consisting of four graduate seminars. He also reacted with a twinge of impatience when I described my interests, which, while anchored in the Middle Ages, reached forward in some respects to straddle the traditional divide between medieval and what we now call early modern. Where did I see myself falling? he wanted to know. Into medieval or Renaissance-Reformation, two areas of scholarly specialization which, though chronologically cheek by jowl, were clearly deemed in accord with the academic norms then prevailing to inhabit two very distinct microworlds of intellectual endeavor. For the dominance of those norms, of course, something of an interpretative price was paid. Because of the nature of their training, medievalists tended to be ignorant about the early modern period, and “Ren-Ref” types reciprocated by being ignorant about the Middle Ages. Until the Dutch scholar Heiko Oberman began—at the Harvard Divinity School in the 1960s—to train his Reformation-oriented students in late medieval theology, American specialists in Reformation history, while familiar with Renaissance history and the humanism of that era, characteristically knew very little about the late medieval scholasticism in terms of which Martin Luther himself had received his intellectual formation.
Confronted, however, with the necessity of making a stark choice between medieval and Renaissance-Reformation, I opted for the former only to discover that of the two medievalists in the department (the other, William Huse Dunham, specialized in English constitutional history), the one who dealt with continental Europe was on leave for the year. He was the Italian scholar, Robert Lopez, a distinguished and provocative specialist in medieval economic history, with some of whose work I was already familiar. For that absence I was later, or so I am now inclined to think, to pay a bit of a price. Although I got to know Bill Dunham quite well (he was very interested in the editing work I had done and was always very encouraging and supportive), I chose not to take his seminar because I judged that I was already pretty well prepared in English medieval history and needed now to focus on modern European intellectual history. For that was the required subfield outside my main area of specialization that I proposed to choose. So I signed up for Baumer’s own (very well-constructed) seminar in modern European intellectual history, for the seminar in the philosophy of history offered by the German émigré historian, Hajo Holborn, and for a seminar in early modern English constitutional history and political thinking offered by Hartley Simpson, then dean of the graduate school and one of the several former students of Wallace Notestein who, ending up in the Yale department, left it with a marked oversupply of specialists in modern English history. For my fourth seminar, I opted for one taught at the Yale Divinity School by Roland Bainton, the prominent Reformation historian. It focused on the long history of Christian social teaching and would, I thought, help flesh out aspects of medieval religious history with which I was not well acquainted. And it did precisely that.
Later on, having for the first time read Perry Miller’s The New England Mind and discovered the scholastic nature of Puritan theology and the degree to which (at least in natural theology) it was in direct continuity with late medieval scholastic modes of thought, I wished I had taken Edmund Morgan’s seminar on colonial America. But, that notwithstanding, the choice of seminars I had made turned out to be more than satisfactory and, with the reading I had to undertake for them, helped make that year of graduate course work at Yale a very stimulating and valuable one. Indeed, in the work in the primary sources that I undertook for two of those seminars lay the seeds of lines of investigation that I was to pursue in my scholarly work for long years into the future, and two of the first scholarly articles I was to publish had their beginnings in research papers I wrote for those seminars. Baumer’s seminar, which covered new territory for me, proved to be particularly helpful, bringing home to me just how important and fascinating the history of scientific thinking could be. During the course of the year we were all called upon to write two short papers for circulation to everyone else in the seminar. I chose to write mine on Thomas Henry Huxley and on Darwin, and I devoted my final research paper to the great Newton himself, whose understanding of the laws of nature I contrasted with that evident in the works of Hugo Grotius. It was not only, however, in my formal seminars that I found myself encountering new intellectual horizons. Living for a year in the Hall of Graduate Studies brought me into contact with a broad array of graduate students of varying intellectual backgrounds and who were pursuing PhD’s in a wide range of disciplines. Talking and arguing with them on a day-to-day basis proved to be highly educative. One in particular, a rather eccentric English student, Benno Wasserman by name, a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science who was working on a topic in international relations, did me a great service by introducing me to the thinking of Karl Popper, who had been his teacher. I wasn’t taken with Popper’s treatment of the nature of historical understanding or with his popular The Open Society and its Enemies which, in its treatment of Plato, struck me as mired in anachronism. But I was impressed by his argument about the demarcation of scientific reasoning from other modes of thought, and I found his falsification theory far more compelling than the type of verificationism I had picked up at Oxford. It served to liberate me, I think, from thinking about the historical enterprise in terms of some sort of primitive, Baconian empiricism.
That year, then, was a good one. After the intellectual deprivation of army life I found the atmosphere at Yale enormously stimulating. And, in practical terms, the year came to a very satisfactory ending. One’s grades in the graduate seminars were clearly very important. Only three positive possibilities were available—pass, honors, and highest honors—and it was clear that mere passes would not suffice if one wanted to proceed with graduate work. So I was enormously relieved to receive highest honors in all four seminars, to have my graduate fellowship renewed, to be excused from any further course work, to be cleared to take my comprehensive examinations in the fall, and to get on with my thesis. I cannot claim to have had anyone at Yale whom I could call my mentor. I already knew what I wanted to work on and the issue instead was to find someone willing to take me on as a thesis student writing on that topic. Fortunately, Roland Bainton was kind enough to assume the role of dissertation supervisor. I wasn’t quite working in his field, but he knew enough about the later Middle Ages to save me from egregious error and proved to be prompt, efficient, and conscientious in his supervisory role, reading carefully my draft chapters as I submitted them to him and getting them back to me quickly. So far as my dealings with him went, things went very smoothly and I was able to complete my thesis in the course of the 1958–59 academic year. I was particularly touched, then, over forty years later, when the Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference awarded me its Roland Bainton Book Prize for my The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870.
I devoted the summer of 1958 to three things: picking up the threads of the work on Pierre d’Ailly I had needed to put to one side three years earlier, revising for the comprehensive examination which at Yale took the form of a two-hour oral, and cleaning up and painting the little third-floor apartment we had rented on Prospect Place, just off Prospect Street, opposite the old Berkeley (Episcopal) Divinity School, and close in to the central Yale campus. Claire-Ann had secured a good teaching position at a school in neighboring Hamden, we were planning to get married in August, and we needed to get the place shipshape before we moved in. So, while she made curtains, I spackled the damaged places in the walls and began the process of repainting almost the entire interior. It was the beginning of my house-decorating phase (which eventually extended to the more tricky and aggravating business of hanging wallpaper) as we moved from one residence to another over the course of five years—two in New Haven, then two in Williamstown, before we built our own house in 1965. The house decorating culminated in an orgy of painting at the house we built when the two of us, strapped for cash, took on the task of painting almost the entire interior wall space ourselves. We purchased a few pieces of furniture, were given a handsome settee that had belonged to Claire-Ann’s deceased aunt, Loretta (it still graces our living room), along with an antiquated, heavy refrigerator of pre–World War II vintage that would start up with an enormous rattle and roar and dim the lights in the entire flat in the process. We needed to purchase a stove, and did so at a rather seedy New Haven establishment called Johnny’s Swap Shop. It was a small, secondhand gas stove. When we first lit it, it proved to be home to a crowd of cockroaches. At that moment they were clearly as startled as we were, and we were able to dispose of them as they scurried around before they were able to set up home in our new abode. One of them, trapped in an unlit burner and unable to get out, waved its antennae through the small openings in a way that brought irresistibly to mind a striking scene from Carol Reed’s film The Third Man, which I had just seen. There a wounded and exhausted Harry Lime (Orson Welles), trying to escape through the sewers of Vienna, was unable to budge a manhole cover in order to get out into the street. All that could be seen from the road were his wriggling fingers extending through the grating before slipping back down and out of sight. In my mind, then, Harry Lime and Johnny of Johnny’s Swap Shop vie for possession of the memory of that first, prenuptial stove.
We were married on August 9, 1958, in Manchester, Connecticut, and after a brief honeymoon on Nantucket, off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts (the first of many visits to that island), we settled in to happy married life on Prospect Place. Shortly thereafter, I took my comprehensive orals in the faculty lounge of the Hall of Graduate Studies, a room where, years later, I had to give a little speech of thanks on behalf of my fellow honorees at a lunch given for those of us who had just been awarded Wilbur Lucius Cross Medals by the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association. As graduate students we were required to stand for examination in one major and three minor fields. My major field was medieval religious and intellectual history. My minors were English history from the Anglo-Saxon invasion to 1215, English constitutional history and political thinking in the seventeenth century, and modern intellectual history. My examiners were Roland Bainton, Basil Duke Henning (standing in for Bill Dunham, who was away), Hartley Simpson, and Frank Baumer. Though I thought I was a bit shaky in response to one of Baumer’s questions, things in general went well and I even found myself involved in a stimulating disagreement with Bainton for a while on issues pertaining to Descartes’ natural theology.
The gratifying upshot was that I passed with distinction, and not long thereafter I was told by George Pierson, chairman of the department, that if I were planning to go on the job market that year I should know that Yale itself would like to appoint me to a junior position in the department should they get clearance from the provost to make such an appointment. Whether or not that would be the case, they would not know until after the end of the calendar year, but he wanted me to be aware of that possibility, which he seemed to think was quite likely. This was, of course, wonderful news and, when it was finally confirmed, I found myself in line to become a full-time instructor in history at Yale College (the instructorship still being the starting rank) as of July 1, 1959.
What that meant was that by the spring of 1959 the only hurdle left to surmount, apart from the completion of my thesis, was the submission of a progress report to my PhD committee. That body consisted of Bainton himself, Robert Lopez, and, because I was writing on the history of political thought, Charles Blitzer of the Yale Department of Political Science. I was to encounter Blitzer again later on in life when he was serving as director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, and I, having just stepped down in 1994 from the Williams presidency, was a fellow there and working hard to hit my scholarly stride again. By April 1959 when I submitted that progress report, I was well underway with the thesis and had encountered no criticism from Bainton about the several chapters I had already submitted to him. So I assumed that the submission of the report would be no more than a formality. For Bainton and Blitzer, indeed, it seemed to be precisely that. But not for Lopez. From him, instead, I received, not a piece of advice suggesting that I might do well to pay more attention to social and legal history (which could arguably have been a reasonable course correction) but, rather, a brief, formal note coldly informing me that the whole thesis appeared to be so involved with matters philosophical that he could not himself approve it for a doctoral degree in history.
Naturally, this left me quite shaken. Being literate enough, philosophically speaking, to be able to recognize the dividing line between philosophical and historical modes of reasoning, I was baffled by his stance. But if for me the philosophical as opposed to the historical denoted a different mode of reasoning, for him it seemed to refer, rather, to subject matter that was abstractly intellectual as opposed to the “factual” data of what he himself called “history proper”—presumably mainstream political, social, and economic history. And that was a position that struck me then, and now, as an unreflectively primitive one. But that notwithstanding, instead of seeing a green light opening up the way to a speedy conclusion to my student years, I was now confronted by something of an obstacle. Thinking (foolishly, it turned out) that a fuller explanation from me about the sort of work I was doing might remove the obstacle, I made an appointment with Lopez and went to see him in his office in Calhoun College. The session didn’t go well or last long. I had hardly begun with my explanations when he interrupted me, reminding me that his judgment, not mine, was the important thing; he was the professor, I was just the graduate student. That was that! What had been a worrying amber light had now modulated, it seemed, into a more alarming red one prohibiting further progress towards the degree.
By this time, I was in a state of bewildered desperation. Everything seemed to be falling apart. The only way out, so far as I could see, was to avail myself of the avenue afforded by the rules and regulations for the resolution of such disagreements via the holding of a colloquium at which I could make my case to all of the professors on my dissertation committee. So I went to see Frank Baumer in his capacity as director of graduate studies to explain my dilemma and to request the convening of such a colloquium. His reaction was immediate. The last thing I needed, he told me, was to be involved in such a colloquium. I was to leave the matter in his hands and those of Bill Dunham; he would get back to me. Though he was both proper and discreet in what he said on that occasion, I learned much later that he must have known his man all too well. Lopez, a somewhat volatile fellow, possessed, it turned out, a somewhat unenviable reputation for giving graduate students (and especially so women students) a difficult time, and the department seemed to have learned the wisdom of dealing with the concomitant fallout via less formal means than the convening of potentially fractious colloquia. I don’t know if the deliberations among my seniors were in any way contentious, but a sensible, face-saving solution was hit upon. I was to submit to Lopez three of the draft chapters I had already written so that he could make a more nuanced judgment about the nature of my scholarship. That I did and the approach worked. Having read the chapters and grumblingly conceded that they were scholarly, interesting, and even original, he gave me a bit of useful bibliographical advice about legal histories and permitted me to proceed on my chosen route towards the PhD. About all of this he wrote to Bainton who, with his permission, passed on the letter to me (I still have it). In that letter, and inter alia, he acknowledged that he might originally have come on a bit too strong. He was struggling at the time, he said, with a pileup of things calling for his attention after being in the hospital with a kidney stone attack (not, admittedly, the most propitious of moments to approach anyone)! But, while letting me proceed, he still insisted that my problematic was that of a philosopher rather than a historian and that my world was “a windowless thinker’s world” to which “facts” beyond those dealt with by political philosophers were irrelevant. If I had “the ambition of becoming an historian,” I would have “to open . . . [my] windows occasionally and look around.” Noting that he had recommended me for an appointment in the department on the strength of what others had said about me and “of what I had heard him say at a lecture of Barraclough,” he took pains to insist that he was “utterly unbiased” towards me. In fairness, that may well have been the case, though, in light of his deportment towards me over the next two years when I was a junior colleague of his, I began to have my doubts on that score. Though I was one of only two colleagues of his who were working on things medieval, he simply refused to acknowledge my presence or to speak to me or, even, to return my greetings when I spoke to him. For a young fellow just starting out, it wasn’t much fun, and I began to wonder about what might lie behind the whole episode. Was there some previous history in the department about students of his whom he had tried to get appointed? That I didn’t know. Or was he irritated by the fact that the department had opted to appoint a junior medievalist from Yale who had never been a student of his? That, too, I didn’t know. It is true that he did write to me twice over the course of the next two years. First, to tell me he had nominated me for a position at Long Beach State College in California. If I recall correctly, history was not then (or not yet) a separate department at Long Beach; instead it was just a section within the humanities division. I wasn’t interested in the job and let Lopez know that I wasn’t going to pursue it. Whereupon I received another, oddly chatty and handwritten, letter from him in which he told me that I should bear in mind that I would still “have to find the permanent home that our department is not in a position to offer you.” He was also already aware of the fact that, by that time (March 1961), George Pierson and Bill Dunham had recommended me for an opening at Williams, but he himself made a point of saying that “it does not look like a tailor-made opening for your measurements.” I was left wondering what exactly he thought my measurements were. His attitude and the nature of his dealings with me have remained something of a singularly unpleasant mystery. Talk about the nasty micropolitics of academic life has long been fashionable. But it does not match my own experience which has been relatively benign. Across the course of a career that spanned over forty years, this was the only truly disturbing episode I was to encounter. Some years later when I was president of the New England Medieval Conference, at that time a very lively group, and when, accordingly, we hosted the annual meeting at Williams, my wife and I threw a dinner party at our place for the conference’s steering committee. It was a very lively, convivial, and enjoyable occasion. And one of the most convivially engaged participants was none other than Robert Lopez himself. Though I caught him once or twice glancing speculatively at me, he appeared to have forgotten that we had ever encountered each other or had some previous history. After our guests had departed and we were embarking on the cleanup process, my wife, who had clearly enjoyed his company, asked who that “charming little Italian” was. I told her.
During those spring months of 1959 I also had another untoward, though less alarming, moment. This time it involved George Pierson, the chairman of the History Department. A distinguished Tocqueville scholar, he had moved on to immerse himself in the writing of a history of Yale College. He called me in to discuss my teaching responsibilities in the upcoming academic year and wanted to know to what subject I wanted to devote the senior honors seminar I had been fortunate enough to be invited to teach. History of medieval political thought, I hopefully suggested. No, he responded, because that pertained (though they didn’t offer the subject) to the Political Science Department. Why not, then, the history of Anglo-Saxon England? Too specialized, he (probably correctly) responded. Medieval church and society, then? When I came up with that suggestion, he paused, looked at me searchingly, and then inquired if I thought I could be objective on such a topic. I was puzzled and taken aback by the question and didn’t know quite how to respond. Then, as he himself began to betray signs of incipient embarrassment, it dawned on me what was going on. I had somehow been fingered as a Catholic who, as such, might not be possessed of the capacity for objectivity that clearly came naturally to people like him, members of a sort of WASP establishment who were, presumably, not caught up in the snares of any ideological entanglements. It was an awkward moment, for him, I suspect, almost as much as for me, and we had somehow to fumble our way through to an amicable resolution. At the time, I thought that his question was a spin-off from the sort of person he was and the class to which he clearly belonged. He was, after all, a rather patrician figure with deep ancestral roots at Yale College (he was a descendant of Yale’s first rector and a relative of Yale’s first student). I was not altogether surprised later on to read in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream (1988) of a report that Pierson had written in 1957 to Whitney Griswold, then president of Yale, complaining about the inadequate social backgrounds of the graduate students with which the History Department (unlike the English) was having to cope. Not, he fretted, “young men and women from the cultivated, professional and well-to-do classes,” people, in effect, “from able backgrounds” (italics mine). Instead, the History Department was having to make do with the sons and daughters of janitors, mechanics, watchmen, pharmacists, railroad clerks, and the like. People, in effect, like me. But in time I came to realize that my embarrassing moment with him was not stimulated by considerations of class. Instead it was what it seemed on the face of it to be, one concerning religious commitments. It reflected, I believe, the profound doubts prevalent among the members of the American intellectual establishment at that time about the compatibility with American democratic individualism of the “authoritarian” Catholic mentality, as well as about the very commitment of the “Catholic mind” to critical rationality. Just as, a few years earlier, I had failed in my ignorance of things American to understand why my distant Irish American cousins might well be keen pro-McCarthyites, so too, now, my ignorance of the climate of opinion prevailing among American intellectuals (mainstream Protestants and Jews as well as unbelievers) was such that I failed to realize how deeply suspicious they were of Roman Catholicism. I had read Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949, 1958) but had brushed it to one side as a piece of residual bigotry, a holdover from old-time Know-Nothingism. It hadn’t quite sunk in that it was a national bestseller, a book of the month selection, lauded enthusiastically at the time by a stellar constellation of American academics and intellectuals from John Dewey to McGeorge Bundy, and generated sympathetic reverberations among such people as Albert Einstein and Lewis Mumford. I myself was instinctively interpreting the American academic and intellectual scene, I now realize, in terms of the British world where, established church notwithstanding, in the absence of any denominationally sponsored universities, members of the Catholic minority were more or less comfortably integrated into the student bodies and faculty ranks of places like Oxford and Cambridge and where public funds helped support denominationally sponsored school systems of Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Jewish provenance alike. And I had simply taken the apparent lack of a Catholic presence on the Yale faculty to reflect the fact that in the United States, unlike Britain, Catholics had chosen to segregate themselves in their own array of (at that time) not very intellectually impressive universities and colleges. In much of this, of course, as I was later to discover, I was wrong. It was none other than Perry Miller, whose work I so admired, who had written in the New York Herald Tribune just eight years earlier that Catholicism was antagonistic to both “the democratic way of life” and to “a free and critical education.” As I was to discover in 1994 when reviewing George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University, my own thesis supervisor, Roland Bainton of gentle Quaker disposition, had written in 1958 expressing his doubts about whether Catholics, Protestant fundamentalists, or Orthodox Jews could really “participate in the intellectual life of the university,” and had wondered whether Catholicism could be “genuinely at home in any university other than a Catholic university.”
Of all of this I was blissfully ignorant when I had my odd encounter with George Pierson, who was, in any case, basically kindly in his engagement with junior faculty. Nor was I really conscious in 1965 that I might have been the first publicly observant, that is, “practicing” Catholic (an odd locution that—we are always “practicing” but don’t seem to get very good at it) to be promoted to tenure at Williams. But, by that time, the old WASP ascendancy was disintegrating. In 1985, when I was elected president of Williams, while the local newspaper noted, somewhat awkwardly, that I was to be the first Catholic to hold that position, the student-run Williams Record showed no interest in the matter and, so far as I know, it wasn’t a matter of comment on campus.
I missed the thesis submission deadline that would have enabled me to graduate at the Yale commencement of 1959 and had to wait until the next June formally to receive the degree. But all the work had been done and approved and, with my student years now over, I had been able to submit the bound copies of the thesis before sailing from Montreal for a stay of several weeks in England and France. My father having died suddenly in March, we wanted to spend a decent amount of time with my mother, the more so because Claire-Ann was now pregnant with our first child and we didn’t know when we would be able to get back across the Atlantic again. And it was to be, in fact, our last holiday without children for almost a quarter of a century. We had a good time that summer, both in London visiting the O’Keeffe’s and in Liverpool where we purchased a handsome Silver Cross perambulator, equipped with a nicely fringed surrey-type canopy for use during the summer months, and which later was recycled for inhabitation by our grandchildren. This we had shipped to Southampton, where it was picked up by the small Italian student ship on which we were sailing, and on which we would be embarking later on at Le Havre after our time in Paris and its environs. When we did so and enquired anxiously of a Genoese deckhand if the pram had indeed been picked up, his face broke out into a broad smile. “Carozella da bimba!” he exclaimed, and insisted on bringing us down a long ladder into the hold in order to show us that the pram, carefully stowed on its side and ensconced in protective wrapping, was indeed on board. By that time, Claire-Ann was clearly showing her condition and, on that return trip, entering into her Madonna phase, she was treated by the crew with marked solicitude and great kindness.
My two years as a member of the Yale History Department proved to be extremely busy and productive in more ways than one. Apart from getting my pedagogic feet on and my scholarly research off the ground, we were embarking on the great adventure of starting a family. Our daughter, Deirdre, was born at Grace New Haven Hospital in December 1959; our first son, Christopher, came along in April 1961. My teaching responsibilities involved, in addition to my honors seminar on “Church and Society in the Middle Ages,” two discussion sections in the basic European history course which, over two semesters, covered the period from 800 to 1914. The latter was a carefully thought-out and well-framed course, combining a high-quality lecture series given by two of the more senior assistant professors in the department with a series of discussion sections taught by the rest of us (all full-time instructors, no graduate assistants). These sections were focused on sets of topically organized “problems” involving collections of primary historical documents—in some ways not altogether unlike the case studies favored by so many business schools. Though it was a leading research university, Yale was by no means prone to slighting its undergraduate teaching mission. Figured into our teaching load as instructors was a required weekly session led by the lecturer and devoted to the sharing of ideas about how to approach the teaching of the next week’s topic. For one just starting out on his academic career, involvement in that course was highly educative and powerfully formative. So too was the seriousness of the teaching ethos that was conveyed. So much so, indeed, that even though I had been up all night with Claire-Ann in the hospital’s labor room until, just before dawn, Deirdre finally consented to be born, it never occurred to me to think of cancelling that morning’s weekly meeting of my seminar.
None of this left any time for research during that academic year, though, mindful of the publication expectations of places like Yale, I did manage to complete the translation of an exemplary conciliar tract by Pierre d’Ailly. In 1960, that appeared in print as my first article and was promptly anthologized. While I knew that my thesis on d’Ailly was fresh material and substantial enough to warrant turning into a book, I decided to put it to one side for a year in order to devote the summer of 1960 to the completion of two substantial articles. At the end of the day during that summer, Claire-Ann would often push Deirdre in her comfortable perambulator down to meet me outside Sterling Memorial Library when I emerged from my daylong labors in the stacks on those very articles. They were to be published over the course of the following year. So, too, was an article on William of Ockham’s ethical thinking, begun originally at Toronto but read as a paper at a graduate seminar on natural law thinking that the distinguished Italian scholar Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves (University of Turin) gave at Yale in the spring semester of 1960 in his capacity as Visiting Professor in Law, Philosophy, and Political Science. He had been Serena Professor of Italian Studies at Oxford when I was an undergraduate there, but I had not come into contact with him. Having since read and admired his books on medieval political thought and natural law theory, I decided to sit in on his seminar, and when at an organizing session he asked if somebody could get the proceedings started next time at the late medieval end of things, I volunteered to read the paper. Later on, he told me, rather disarmingly, that he was eternally grateful to me for doing so because he was always very nervous about getting his seminars off the ground. He really liked the paper and wrote me a lovely note telling me that it was “truly admirable” and represented the way in which “Ideengeschichte must be written” in order to be plausible. That was wonderful to hear, and he followed up his note by sending a cleaned up and annotated version of the piece to the journal Natural Law Forum (later American Journal of Jurisprudence), on whose editorial board he served, and they published it the following year.
Over the course of the next two years I got to know d’Entrèves quite well. Hailing from minor Italian aristocracy (he was the Count of Entrèves up in the Valle d’Aosta near Courmayeur), he had an English mother and was something of an anglophile. He had clearly loved his time at Oxford and he had happy memories of having been drawn into some of the meetings of the Inklings with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others at Magdalen College. He was kind enough to give my thesis on d’Ailly a close reading and to pronounce it fit for publication. This was both helpful and reassuring, the more so in that, after it was accepted, I had not heard much by way of comment from either Bainton or Blitzer, and what I had heard from Lopez had obviously been a good deal less than encouraging. He also tried to interest me in taking on the editing of the Consilia of the fifteenth-century Italian canonist and conciliarist thinker, Francesco Zabarella, for a series of which he was the general editor. At that time, however, I already had too much on my plate with my line of research on Pierre d’Ailly, his great student Jean Gerson, and their early-sixteenth-century successors on the Parisian theology faculty, John Mair and Jacques Almain, to be able to take on that additional assignment even to please him. D’Entrèves was a warm, accessible, charming, and kindly man with whom I was to keep up a correspondence for a decade and more. On one occasion he came to tea at our little apartment (he missed the English ritual of afternoon tea) and made a characteristic and gratifying fuss over our little baby. From that occasion I carry in my mind a picture of him talking animatedly, teacup in hand, and sitting at one end of the couch while five-months-old Deirdre lay sleeping in a baby seat at the other.
D’Entrèves was not the only person at that time to invite me to commit to more editing work. I had got to know some of the people involved at that time on the big Yale project to edit the complete works of Sir Thomas More (among them Joe Trapp, the New Zealander who was later to become director of the Warburg Library in London) and had put together for them a little guide to the structure of the Corpus Juris Canonici and to the rather complex way in which texts from that great compilation were cited. It was that, I suspect, that led Dick Sylvester of the Yale English Department, then serving as the executive editor for the whole project, to ask me to take on the editing of More’s Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer. Though the text itself is not very ingratiating, the proposition itself was not unattractive as the project disposed of enough funding to “buy back” one’s time—that is, to fund a leave of absence so that one could get on with the job. But again, rightly or wrongly, I decided that I would do well to forego that plum and to stick with the line of research to which I was already committed.
While such were the sorts of things that preoccupied me during my two years as a member of the Yale History Department, I also had my eye on the academic job market. Observation had taught me that those appointed to a junior position at a place like Yale should not succumb to the temptation of imagining that they might have a long-term future there. In the old days, as the makeup of the department itself suggested, that might well have been the case. But no more. Infrequent exceptions to the general rule of “out rather than up” there might well be. But with Lopez in the equation as one of the crucial senior people in my general field, the likelihood of my being such an exception hovered at or below the zero level. Not that my situation was an unenviable one. Yale was a good jumping-off ground for positions elsewhere. I could expect to be able to stay there for six or seven years and then, with my scholarly reputation firmly established, to move to a more senior position at another reputable institution. So I was not yet, at least in career terms, under any real pressure. In the end, however, I chose to move, and to do so earlier rather than later. In 1961, the medieval position at Williams College in Massachusetts opened up and George Pierson and Bill Dunham were kind enough to draw my name to the attention of Bob Scott, an American intellectual historian and himself a Yale product who was then chairman of the Williams History Department. I had met him two years earlier at a Yale “smoker” (reception) at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association and had found him to be a warm, approachable man. Bob contacted me to see if I might conceivably be interested. After driving up to Vermont the previous summer to attend the wedding of a graduate school friend, we had stopped over in Williamstown to visit with Bob and Diana Collins who had been our contemporaries as students at Yale. We were taken with the sheer beauty of the place and intrigued by what we picked up at a nice outdoor party about the atmosphere at the college. There was, we sensed, a real and appealing sense of collegial community there which seemed to be lacking in the Yale that we, at least, had encountered in our short time there. When Bob Scott contacted me, then, I told him that I might well be interested and I was invited up for an interview. Because Christopher was on the brink of being born (and, unlike Deirdre, he was to come very quickly), I could spend only a day in Williamstown. It was a day filled with meetings and interviews both at the college and departmental level. People were nice and it was all very pleasant. But I couldn’t help being struck by the fact that nobody expressed much interest in what I was doing in my research. All the talk was about teaching and of that fact I took note.
After me, they had two other candidates to interview. Bob, I suspect, being himself a Yale product, didn’t think I could be enticed to leave Yale. But he was not only a very bright, interesting, and engaging person, he was also a very good salesman for the college and it is ultimately to him that I attribute my decision to accept the Williams offer when finally it came. It did so during the spring break and, when I told him about it, George Pierson invited me over to his house to talk about it. He had, I think, my best interests at heart. He assured me, on the one hand, that I would be welcome to stay on at Yale and that, if I did so, I could expect other job offers to come my way. On the other hand, he spoke highly of Williams. It was, he said, a fine old college which had always been home to some scholars of distinction. An offer from Williams was something to be taken seriously. It was, of course, he added, a “Protestant college,” and he wondered, solicitously, if I would be comfortable in such a setting. That, in turn, led me to wonder where he thought I had been as an undergraduate, as also how well he actually knew Williams. Even I knew that it had been a very long time since the characterization of the place as “a Protestant college” had been accurately descriptive of the realities on the ground. But of that I said nothing, simply indicating instead that I anticipated no difficulty in settling in to pursue a career at such a place. And that, in the end, is what I chose to do.
I find it hard now to reconstruct the full range of reasons that led me to make that life-changing decision. Part of it was familial. We were not particularly enamored of New Haven. We already had two children and expected to have more. We realized that, though we lacked deep pockets, we would soon have to face up somehow to moving out from the center of campus to one or another of the outer suburbs. In comparison with the grubbiness of the city, the beauty and calm of the Berkshires had great appeal; so, too, did the fact that Williams maintained a considerable stock of its own rental housing, reserved for those in the junior ranks and situated more or less on campus. It was clearly a great place for young children and seemed, in fact, to be swarming with them. I also liked the idea of being the fellow who could shape the way in which medieval history was to be taught, and I found that there was something very appealing about the “feel” of the college in general, which somehow stirred up memories about my own student days at Corpus. The Yale History Department was a truly distinguished one to which I was proud to belong. But, at about sixty in size, it was also quite impersonal and it wasn’t easy to get to know one’s departmental colleagues, let alone colleagues in the university at large. In comparison, partly because of its size and intimacy of scale, Williams conveyed the sense of being a real intellectual community, and it was to prove to be precisely that. Finally, of course, and sadly, I had begun to find the experience at Yale of having a senior departmental colleague in my own field who wouldn’t even speak to me to be, in the end, dispiriting, discouraging, and demoralizing. Whatever the case, and however the pros and cons lined up, our decision to leave Yale for Williams was not, in the end, a particularly fraught one. Nor have we ever regretted it.
During the summer of 1961 I had planned to embark upon the revision and rewriting of my thesis in order to turn it into a book. For that task I needed ready access to a research library and, that being so, we sweltered on into August amid the oppressive coastal humidity of New Haven. But then it was time to take our leave. Having shipped off our furniture and packed our belongings, we vacated the apartment into which we had put so much work, shook off from our feet the dust of New Haven, and set out for an overnight stay with Claire-Ann’s family in Manchester. The next day we made our way via Springfield to the Massachusetts Turnpike which we followed westward to the higher ground and cooler reaches of the heavily forested Berkshires. Leaving the turnpike at Lee, we drove north on Route 7 through Pittsfield, then retracing in reverse the route I had traversed with the Breslin girls in 1954 when we drove down from Toronto for Christmas. We made our way through Lanesboro up to New Ashford, at the northern end of which the road begins to twist its way through a fairly narrow defile flanked on either side by steepish, heavily timbered slopes. Catching a momentary glimpse, at about eleven o’clock to the left and at about two hundred feet or so up the slopes, of a lovely upland meadow, a cleared island of light green grass floating in a dark green sea of trees, we entered upon a rather pronounced set of S-bends which, in turn, led us out into a straightish stretch bordered to the east by generously welcoming meadowland. That stretch was heralded by a prominent sign which said: ENTERING WILLIAMSTOWN, INC[ORPORATED] 1765. We entered, to be drawn for good into the embrace of its powerful magnetic field.